As I promised yesterday, today's post is on the cabin. My father and husband built it (and hopes that someday it will be a tack room for my dad's stuff) but for now it is our home. It is 10 x 15 feet and it sits on cement blocks. We bought our bed before the cabin was built, after we got married, with the hope that we would have a apartment to put it in before too long and knowing that we'd need a bed someday (the air mattress we were on in those days was horrible on our backs!). Lots of plans have changed since then and it now takes up most of the space in the cabin. The crib at the end of the bed, which our daughter steadily refuses to sleep in, but likes to play in, takes up almost all the rest of the space.
It's very cozy with all three of us, but it's hard to imagine us anyplace else now. I put a lot of time into decorating it with pictures from our wedding and pictures of our families. The biggest decorations though, came when one of the churches in the area closed down. It was a small church out in the middle of nowhere and our county would send a priest out there once a month. The church sold the land this year and at one of the daily masses they brought in a bunch of paintings that they needed to get rid of because our church is already full of stuff. I went over to work in the office while my husband was looking at them and told him he could pick out whatever he wanted. I was very surprised when he showed up with a giant painting of the Last Supper, along with some smaller paintings he thought we could use. I was a bit skeptical as to how it would look at first.... now I can't imagine it any other way. Our house is like a little chapel.
If I could change one thing I would add a bathroom. But if we had added a bathroom we would have had to add a septic tank and that would have been much too expensive! It's hard to see in the pictures but we did pick up a wash basin (below the blue baby pictures next to the book shelf) that we can use if we need it. Usually we just borrow the bathroom at my parents house when we need one. The best part of the cabin has to be the garden. When we first moved back to the country I planted a garden. The first year it was small. The second year it was so big that I was able to supply our church's soup kitchen with vegetables and stuff still ended up going bad (that's what happens when you plant an entire bag of tomatoes from seed and they all live). Last year I was so pregnant I couldn't bend over to plant anything and then the fires hit and nothing grew in the gardens that were planted because there was so much smoke (we were evacuated for a while). This year the garden is small, in raised beds. I can't wait to teach Sadie about gardening and help her grow her own plants as she gets older.
I know that many families think that they should wait to have kids for financial reasons, or that the mother should work so that they can live a certain lifestyle. While this may be true in many cases I think that often times people don't realize how little they can survive (and thrive) on. It's nice to have nice things, but the family should come first and I definitely think that time is the most important gift (after love) that I can give my family.
And I wonder if I will someday look back on our little cabin and reminisce about how simple our lives were when we lived in a tiny cabin in the middle of nowhere!
Such a dear home! And I was looking at the second photo and thinking: "Why does that terrain look so familiar?" Ah, that's right, you're in the north of the state! I've spent a lot of time up there.
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