Country Life

For many of you reading this you probably don't know what life in the country is really like. Consider our blog an opportunity to learn. First, you have to travel to go anywhere. This is certainly a cause of stress when the gas prices are as high as they are. The benefit of this, however, is that whenever you return home it really is like taking a retreat from the rest of the world. Living in the country often means owning lots of land and, while caring for land is very time consuming and demanding, when virtually none of our 'tended fields' are visible from the road we find that it's okay to mow only once a week or week and a half. We also have animals everywhere. Good thing (I think!) that Dave and I are such animal lovers, because we are surrounded by mice, cats, raccoons, deer, turkey, geese, fox, turtles, hawks, frogs, INSECTS, and yes, we are known to have the occasional black bear roam around here (although we have not yet had one). This, of course, is only the icing on the cake for wildlife.

People who say living in the country is peaceful have obviously never lived out here. This is a brutal place! Between watching mice being mulled and gazing at the circling hawk eyeing the goslings on the land below, to the incredible amount of noise that frogs and insects make during the night, this place is an active and often violent place to live! Of course, we rarely hear sirens and traffic noise is at an absolute bare minimum. I no longer hear Nextel noises at 2:00 a.m. or the neighbors getting into quite the argument in the middle of the night. We no longer have a loud party with tons of smoke going on in our basement, and when I look out my window I see trees and not the arches of McDonald's. At night I see stars and not smog, and during the day I am attacked by insects and not beggars.

And our neighbors are no longer often annoying students but this family of deer:

Yes, life "out here" is quite different!

And, for all of you readers who are constantly asking for more pregnancy pics, here you go! This is another "natural shot" of me: Straight from the shower, no makeup, etc. (It seems country appropriate, don't you think?) I am beginning to get uncomfortably large. I can't really bend over at all anymore, my back aches, and getting out of certain chairs or off from the floor often requires the assistance of my husband. I also have begun to tire easily. On the whole, however, I have been so blessed this pregnancy. My aches and pains are manageable and for the most part it has been a positive experience. The pregnancy itself has been great and for this I am so very thankful.