Waiting

At the top is Bob and Trevor with Bill Forbes, the man we bought the farm from. The bottom picture is the Hughes and us waiting for our Hobo meals to cook in the coals of our fire. It is also the spot we had laid out to build the workshop/apartment we would live in indefinitely until we are able to build a house. Some of you already know that when we bought this farm, the couple selling it needed to sell because the wife's cancer had caused them financial trouble. Since their house was pretty small anyway and we knew we wanted to build, we bought with something called a "Remaining Life Estate". This meant that they could live in the house for the rest of their lives or until they chose to move for any reason. Well, she passed away almost two years ago, I think, and he has been living in the house alone. We arrived here on Friday, April 17 and that next Tuesday Bill had a stroke while at a meeting down the road. He has been in the hospital since then and had seemed to be improving at one point, but yesterday morning he passed away too. His children had told us that he was more than likely not coming back to this house anyway, so they would get it cleaned out as soon as possible for us. While we are sad for how it happened, it does take a lot of pressure off of us as far as needing to build the workshop/apartment.

I guess I should back up a little and say that when we first purchased this property we anticipated Bob's last few years in the Navy being different than they turned out and we would have been building our house on the weekends and moving right in when he retired. This is not how things happened, so we were going to have to build something small to live in until we could afford to build the house. So, living in Bill's house would save us a lot of money. However, to get back to the first part of the story, Bill didn't have a will, so we may have to wait for the estate to go through probate before they can remove the things from the house. We have no idea how long this will take. Living in the camper with seven children hasn't been too bad so far, but today, for instance, it is raining and we will have to stay inside most of the day. This gets old quite fast. Especially with Tanner, Tim, and Titus who are so young and ACTIVE...and LOUD! We might take a trip to town today to get Bob a suit for Bill's funeral. This will help.

We plan to change our focus to farming now. We will get the garden ready and start planting, and get chickens and a milk cow. We aren't sure what God is doing through all of this change of plans, but we are confident that He does have a plan that is good for us. We trust in that. He is so faithful!