We bought our storage containers. One was delivered Friday, and we're expecting the other three today and tomorrow. In the meantime, we've been laying the foundation. We did a pier foundation to save on costs. Shane measured, marked, and remeasured everything, then we spent a day using the tractor and post hole digger. I drove the tractor while he wrestled the hole digger (as soon as it hits the dirt, it kicks out of place and starts digging NEXT to where you want it 🙄).
After the holes were dug, we put in concrete forms, put rebar in them, and filled them with concrete. I wrote everyone's name in it while it was wet.
The crane company was a week out when we called to rent it, so in the meantime Shane built a chicken coop. The coop has two feet of fenced in area beneath it to act as a chicken run. We also set the roof up to collect rainwater and funnel into one of the water totes. We just got our first rain last night, and it filled the tote about a third of the way up. We now have 17 chickens, and 30 guinea, and the coop is plenty big enough. They're loving it.
We had to rent a huge crane and two employees to stack the shipping containers. It didn't take long, and now we have two on the bottom, two on top. Shane has been working hard getting the windows, doors, walls, etc cut out. He's bee using an angle grinder, and it's coming along. He's also been working on welding the containers all together. The weather has been so hot and humid, it makes for hard work.
I don't have the skills necessary to help and I've offered to learn, but right now I'm pulling my weight by cooking, and going to work.
Sorry this is such a reader's digest version of events. We've been so busy and I get such bad reception at our house that I don't update much. Soon hopefully we'll be getting our Wi-Fi going (👐) and want to do YouTube videos of everything.
We cannot wait to get the house done. The trailer really isn't meant to be lived in, and it's falling apart. Not to mention the lack of space, privacy, too much clutter, etc. It's been rough and we're excited things are going so well so far.
I've been ordering stuff for the functionality of the house: sheets, blankets, pots and pans, etc. We got rid of so much when we moved and now a lot needs replacing.

After a last minute runaround involving a notary, we closed on our house! Now we can really get started on our house and land.

We decided to buy a "new to us" car. We needed something with better gas mileage for my drive to work, and with two cars Shane and the kids aren't bound by my work schedule. We spent the day driving to a bunch of places until we finally found a car lot with cars in our price range. We ended up buying a Hyundai Sonata. I didn't have strong feelings about it when we bought it, but since then I've come to really like it. It's a pretty nice car.

Our second big purchase was a tractor. We need it to mow down the forest that has grown, and will need it for lots of things around the farm. So far it's been giving plenty of rides to the kids. I even learned how to drive it. Shane has been working his butt off every day, mowing and clearing the land.

When we lived in our old house, we had a pretty great backyard setup, and Winter was super upset when we sold the play equipment. We'd promised her a new slide and swing, so we bought a swing set. It took all day to set up, but it's pretty cool and the kids are loving it.

We've been getting packages like crazy. Tractor parts, tools, etc have all all been coming through the mail. One day, we waited until 630 for a package to arrive. I had taken the kids down to the creek for baths before bed, and THAT'S when fedex came. Shane got stuck for twenty minutes listening to the guy chat, and we hid in the creek the entire time. I had sent Winter up with the only towel to get me some clothes when the guy finally left.

I recently collected elder flowers and made a strawberry elderflower probiotic drink. It's pretty good, and Shane and the kids love it which is nice because they don't usually love the fermented stuff I make, especially Shane.

It's been pretty hot, and hadn't rained in a while so our creek is drying up. It's been our main source of non potable water, so the drying up has been concerning. We bought twenty IBC totes for rain water collection for the house, and we've been taking them in batches to the car wash so we can wash them out. Shane spent the day yesterday taking one of the totes to a local spring fed cow tank and using a pump to full the tote with water so we won't be dependent on the creek anymore. He'd filled it up on the truck trailer, but when he got home he used the tractor to lift it off. It involved a tie down and some jimmy rigging, and not a small amount of concern from me that something was about to go horribly wrong. I videoed it, so hopefully Shane will be getting it up on the YouTube channel (fizzypickles) soon. Once the totes are all plumbed together, we're going to have a local company come fill them with water, but in the future will be collecting rainwater as our main source of water.

Today we're heading into Oklahoma City to pick out the shipping containers for the house. We're also picking up some supplies to start doing the foundation. It's pretty exciting to be making such big strides on the house finally. We're going to be moving in once all the dry wall is up, and we have high hopes that we'll be in in the next month. Cross your fingers for us!

Black eyed susans

this guy was directly outside my car door when I went to get out. It took ten years off my life, despite it turning out to be non venomous, and dead. We suspect it got run over when I left. 

Elder flowers

found this cool guy while gathering elder flowers

 

The roots from black eyed Susans can be used as a medicinal tea for things like colds and uti

That's where the house is going 

Measuring for the foundation

We had to order a huge generator, and Shane had to use the tractor to get it off the truck

I took this picture a while ago, during a day at the lake. I've been saving it because it reminded me so much of my childhood. It instantly told me of hot summer days at the beach, and my dad taking me out into the deep water. I remember being so cold in the water, but my dad was warm and safe.

 I am so lucky to have a husband who is such a fantastic dad. I think about it a lot, while he wrestles them, swings them too high, and the million other fun (dangerous) things he does with them. All that rough play is giving them an amazing awareness of their bodies that in turn becomes bravery (which both of my kids have in spades). 

So many kids grow up without a dad, and it's too bad that we live in a culture full of broken families. I don't mean that people should stay in unhappy marriages or anything (after all, step dads are excellent dads, just ask mine), just that I wish things were different. In a perfect world, every kid would have their dad around. 

Unfortunately it's not a perfect world, which is why I feel so lucky to have all the wonderful men in my life that I do. I love you for all that you do.

And a special thank you to my husband who is not only rocking fatherhood, but also husbandom(?). He agreed to change our entire life, and move so he's been an extra amazing man this year, with more yet to come. 

Our house is in escrow. We've been dealing with all the back and forth with that. It feels a lot like the buyers are trying to nickel and dime us. Like we agreed to have some repairs done, and they'd like to do the work themselves, but they also want us to pay them for labor. It's been a pain, but we should be over all the hurdles now, and are just in the waiting period and we close June 8th. Thank goodness for that at least. We've been working on a solid plan for getting things going on building the house. We're so excited to get things moving finally. We've all got cabin fever from living in such tight quarters.

Our garden has been a major bust. The ground doesn't drain well, and it rains a LOT here (more on that later). Our potatoes started out growing well, but have since started rotting in the ground. We decided to harvest them all, and save them for seed potatoes next year. It was so much fun to harvest them! The kids love it, and we got a decent amount.  We also got lots of potato greens to add to the compost. We also have a couple snap peas growing, but not much else. The corn started out well, but hasn't grown any taller. We'll definitely be investing time and money in raised beds for next year.

We've found a bunch of snakes, which Shane is loving. He wanted to be a herpetologist when he was a kid, so it's basically paradise. The kids love getting to see them when he catches them and they do a pretty good job keeping watch for them. So far they've all been all been non venomous, thank goodness since we keep finding them in the creek right where the kids play. Thorin found a baby snapping turtle in the creek one day. He has a bunch of toy dinosaurs down there, and I think he didn't even realize this wasn't one of them. When I got down to him, he was bouncing it around making roaring sounds 😂. I had to take it from him (even though I didn't really want it either).

We've had a lot of tornado warnings recently. One night was also full of thunderstorms, and I had a treacherous drive home. I was literally two minutes from the house, when the road was flooded. I sat there for a few minutes trying to decide if I should chance driving through, but decided against it. I don't want to be one of those people you see on the news who tried to drive through a flooded road and instead floated downstream. I have new sympathy for those people though, because I badly wanted to just drive through and get get home. Instead, I turned around and drove 40 treacherous minutes around to the other side and a different road. By the time I got home, it was after midnight and I was shaking because my nerves were so shot. Lucky for me, my two year old had been awake for over a half hour, waiting for me... he was ready for cuddles though, and so was I.

We had a wonderful day recently. We spent the morning at the park, and when we got home, we noticed that there were some ripe blackberries. We spent the afternoon hunting blackberries, and after filling up our bellies, we went down to the creek to cool off. It felt amazing, and we had our evening baths in there too. Since then, we've been going blackberry picking every morning before breakfast, and having yogurt with fresh blackberries for breakfast. I am seriously loving having fresh fruit growing wild right outside the door.

Playing in the rain

baby snapping turtle

picking potatoes

the harvest

we picked the garlic for the same reasons

Winter found this bullet casing with a plant growing in it. Nature will always prevail 

big belly full of berries

fresh berries for breakfast

A picnic

Berry picking

Honeysuckle jelly

2c. Honeysuckle flowers
2c. Water
4c. Sugar
1 pkt of pectin (I used sure jell liquid)

Boil the water over the flowers, let it steep overnight. The next day, strain out the flowers, and pour the infusion into a pot. Heat it and add the sugar. When it's at a boil, add pectin and boil for about two minutes, stirring continuously. Pour into jars. It'll keep in the fridge, and you can waterbath can it.

I hate going to a blog and having to read their life's story before they get to the recipe. I understand it gets the page more views, but it drives me bananas. So there's the recipe, scroll down for my life's story ;)

I spent a lot of my childhood in a neighborhood with a large honeysuckle bush, and I've always adored eating the nectar from them. I was THRILLED to discover that our new property is covered in honeysuckle bushes. Of course I passed my love of the sweet flowers onto my kids. Shane was less enthusiastic about it, but whatever. I had recently had a conversation about making jelly from edible flowers, and I was dying to try it. I googled, and found a blog with a recipe, headed by a long story. As usual, I scrolled down to the recipe and ignored the rest. The recipe called for four cups of infusion, so I made a batch. It didn't set, and I couldn't figure out why. I went back to the same blog, and read the accompanying post and found that while she made 4c of infusion, she only used 2c and recommended not trying to double it since it wouldn't set properly for some reason. I don't know why she felt it made sense to say four cups in the recipe, when she only used two. I also learned my lesson about not reading the possibly important info in the post. Now I've got 8 cups of honeysuckle syrup, which is also very yummy, but I have no idea what to do with. I tried for jelly again, and it worked this time, so the recipe above should work for you as well. Enjoy, it's delicious and fairly easy. It tastes like sunshine, which is nice because it's been raining, a lot. Bonus of this whole project was that the kids had a great time helping pick the flowers.

We had a great Easter. We spent the day catching butterflies, flying kites, and mushroom hunting. It drizzled some but nothing too bad.
We found an awesome naturally occurring clearing on our land, and there were four different mushrooms types just in that one area. One we were able to confirm as wood ears, and I added them to the veggie soup we had for dinner, and it was YUMMY. The other three we weren't able to figure out the type, and discarded them. Mushrooms can be so dangerous, and I'd never feed anyone anything I wasn't sure about. Wood ears are super mild. They taste like regular mushrooms, but just barely. They're full of nutrients and they absorb the flavor of whatever you're cooking, so they're an excellent filler.
That night and the next morning, it POURED. Like torrential downpour, standing under a waterfall, the trailer might wash away downpour. It filled up the creek though, and I was able to rescue worms from the garden to add to the compost bin.

Later that day, the kids found a crawfish wandering around by the chicken coop (shows how much rain we got). She had a ton of babies on her belly, so now we're raising them up for dinner. "Mud bugs" are Shane's favorite.

We found quite a lot of the wood ear mushrooms

look at the size of this!

crawfish babies

We've been enjoying it here so much. The other day, two huge armadillos lumbered through the yard. I've never seen a live armadillo before. I've never seen fireflies either, and there's some pretty much every night. Shane and the kids caught a coach whip snake yesterday. Winter has been loving picking wildflowers and catching snails in the creek. Thorin loves pretty much everything his sister loves, and he usually is tailing behind, copying her every move. We've also gotten serious about potty training him, which I hate but really isn't so bad considering all the open air bathroom spots available.
There's a lake not far from our house where we've spent a couple days. One was spent mushroom hunting. It's morel season, but all I found was a few inedible ones. The kids were bummed they didn't get to swim that day, so we went again a few days later to let them swim. It was too cold though, so we spent the time at the playground and meeting the Canadian geese that were there. One was particularly curious about the kids, and kept swimming closer and closer to check them out.
We've gotten two packages this week from mine and Shane's moms. The kids were SO excited to get the big boxes full of goodies. We were excited that the mail even made it. We had some trouble with mail being returned, so in an effort to solve the problem, Shane spent an entire day calling EVERYONE. He spoke to the city, the USPS, even emailed the post master general. The issue was that because the area is so large and the roads are obscure, we needed the +4 for the zipcode, but literally no one could tell us what it was (except the postmaster general, finally). Hopefully we won't have any other issues, because it was an ordeal.
I've been working, and I enjoy it. It's a strange feeling though to go from the simple off grid setup we're currently living in, to the big fancy kitchen at work.
Both kids are very excited for Easter tomorrow. The Easter Bunny has some fun goodies for them, including butterfly nets, kites, and bug catching kits.

We sometimes still watch movies, when everyone needs a break

Shane made a "kite" on a particularly windy day

We found this while mushrooming. We were confused by the horns and meat teeth, but now I'm pretty sure it's a deer.

oak apples, caused by wasps

After about a week of no rain, we hauled water up from the creek to water the garden

They got matching colorable pajamas from Tavi

I've been reading a ton

That outfit though. Goodies from Gamma

Gamma also sent a hammock!

I love it here. Everything is beautiful and green. It rains. Things just grow, like everywhere. There's wildflowers for picking. Our garden is growing and we haven't watered it because the rain takes care of it. The kids and pets can just roam the property aimlessly. No one even misses the TV.
There's so many new plants and bugs to see. We've been making a nature box to send to my sister's family for them to identify. But pretty much everything we're sending is new to us as well.
I got a library card, and Winter is dying to go get her own. She's expressed an interest in learning to read.
Even though I work, my work hours are regular and much shorter than Shane's ever were. We're together more (which in such close quarters that's not always a good thing).
I'm so glad we moved. It's so much better for us.

The first days here have been dedicated to figuring out day to day survival. We've done so much research in recent months so we knew basically how we were going to do everything, but it had to be tailored to the land. The biggest thing has been having the creek running through the property. We've been able to use that water for dishes, laundry, and showers.
I wanted to make sure we didn't become dirty. We want to be off grid, not primitive. My dad was our saving grace in this regard. He's a Burning Man veteran, and general MacGuyver. He's known for fixing things in simple, genius ways. So in his Burning Man adventures, he'd rigged up a shower that uses a pull chain to turn on and off. He also recently moved to Japan to start his own adventure, and donated his shower and generator to us (thanks dad! Seriously, it's been a lifesaver). So after cooking dinner over the campfire, we put a huge pot of water on it to heat for showers. Everyone gets bathed nightly.
Laundry gets done with a bucket and a plunger, and hung up on a line to dry.
We've been cooking over a campfire, which isn't bad at all. Lots of chili and cornbread, quesadillas, and oatmeal.
Bedtime is sundown, and sometimes Shane and I will get up and chat in the dark. I'm convinced that our youngest is secretly a rooster because he's consistently awake 45 minutes before sunrise.

I found a job cooking at a bar in town, and although I have no experience, it turns out that all my canning/fermenting/cooking experience has made me perfect for it. I'm good at doing a ton of stuff at once, so getting orders out fast is fairly easy. The hours aren't bad either, for our family. I usually don't start work until after 3 so I get to spend the day with the kids and only miss a few hours before bedtime. It's nice because having me at work and daddy home is a total life change (just like everything else). We're all adjusting pretty well I think.

We recently met our neighbor. He came over to make sure we're not transients, and warn us that if he sees our dog on his property, he'll return her to us in a bag. He also argued with Shane about the property boundaries. Clearly we're off to a good start with him. He came back the next day, apparently to discuss the property lines some more. Turns out they actually agree on where the line is, what they disagreed on was how big a foot is. Bill (neighbor) said the boundary marker was 30-40ft past the creek, while Shane insisted it was more like 200ft. We went to double check, and the post Bill put in to mark it is about 200ft past the creek. We're very confused by this, but at least we don't have to have someone come out to survey. He's been very abrasive, and since he's very vocal about being a "Jesus man", I suggested we hold large satanist rituals on the property boundary but Shane doesn't seem overly enthusiastic.

We've been battling ticks and spiders like crazy, so we bought a dozen chickens, and they're already getting fat and happy. Unfortunately we lost one to the nighttime cuddle pile 😢. The kids predictably adore them.
We've planted our garden, and after a few days of crazy heavy rain, things are sprouting up like crazy. We planted everything: corn, beans (for drying, and snap), beets, potatoes, garlic, tomatoes, strawberries, etc. We also started asparagus and rhubarb, both of which can't be harvested the first year.

We found an awesome park in our town, and the kids ran all over, trying to decide what to do first. We've also been to the library for story time. We want to get a library card, but are still waiting on mail so we can prove our address.
I feel like everyone is adjusting well to our new life. The kids love having the freedom to roam, and are constantly wet from the creek. Now we're just waiting for our house to sell so we can get started building.

Daddies are forever a good examply

Building a chicken coop

Laundry

Special tea party lunch

So many fun things to see