Living on a Dairy Farm

After we moved to the Lynden area, we moved quite a bit.  We lived in a rental house for about 2 years, then in a duplex for about the same amount of time.  Then our finances were getting worse and we needed to move to a more economical rental.  We then moved to an apartment converted from a storage shed/garage.  This was definitely a move down in quality, but we made the best of it.  Before moving in I spent days painting and cleaning, so we wouldn't have to pay a damage deposit (and to make it livable)

This apartment was located in a functioning dairy farm...the holding barns were just 40 feet from our windows.  It was nearly constant ewe de colonge.  We moved  just after Jason was born.  The only heat we had was a wood burning stove, and the only wood was wet and rotten.  We moved in January.

There wasn't a tub, so we stopped up the shower and had shallow baths for the boys.  While living there we were convicted that watching cable TV was not good for our marriage/family, so we got rid of our TV and spent the evening together in our 14 X 12 foot living room (half of which was taken up by the wood burning stove), reading.

A major milestone in our lives happened while we were there.  We took a realistic look at our situation and came to the conclusion that Daryl needed to step out of the drapery business and go back to school to learn a trade he had always wanted to learn - machining.  So he started school and I started working more hours, many more hours.

Jeremy's time in the hospital happened while we lived there, but there were several very scary incidents that happened while we lived there.   The first was when Daryl woke up one night and could not breath.  He felt like a Mac truck was sitting on his chest.  I rushed him to the ER, and we found out that he had an ulcer.  Very scary, but we were so thankful that it was nothing worse.

The second was that I came down with a bad cold, a bad headache and my neck went very stiff and sore.  I went to see my doctor and he was concerned that I had meningitis.  After a ton of tests, we found that I just had a sore neck and a cold.  Again, so thankful that it wasn't worse!

One morning Daryl had left for school and I was doing some housework before leaving for work.  I soon realized that Jeremy was no longer in the house, so I went outside to see if he was playing in our yard.  He was no where to be seen.  I looked all over the farm, leaving Jason to fend for himself inside (I believe he was napping).  After looking everywhere I could possibly think of, I began to believe that something awful had happened - that he had slipped into the manure pond.  I'd heard of that happening to children on farms.  I frantically called Daryl as school and he came right home.

As he got close to our place he started looking around.  He found Jeremy wandering around in the field across the street from us, soaking wet.  This was sometime in November...it was very cold outside.  He had decided that he wanted to go to that field and the ditch didn't look scary.  It had a lot of water going through that ditch though, and he remembers to this day how close he came to drowning that day.

Daryl arrived at our apartment with a very cold, wet boy.  We got him washed up and warmed up and began discussing plans to move.  It just wasn't worth it.  Jeremy did not suffer any consequences from his adventure, but it was forever etched in his memory and our too.

God's grace in our lives - it could have turned out so differently.  But God had other plans for Jeremy and nothing can thwart God's plan.  Jeremy has been given an allotted number of days on this earth, and that day was not destined to be his last day on earth, and for that we are so thankful!

By the end of the month, we were moving into another apartment, it was safer, but not necessarily an improvement - it was a converted potato shed ;)

But There's Nothing to Do There

When Daryl and I got married, he was in the Air Force and planning to get out when his stint was completed.  We only had 9 months until then.  We had no idea where we would go when that time was up.  We didn't even talk about it much!

We were both pretty "in the here and now" people at that stage of our lives, that is for sure.  Then an opportunity presented itself.  Daryl's aunt on his father's side had put her business up for sale, as she wanted to retire.  Daryl's parent told us about it and offered to be partners with us in the business - they would be the capital, and we'd be the labor.  We had no other offers or ideas, so we agreed to the offer.


When Daryl and I talked about where we would live as we ran the drapery business, we talked about how we could never live in such a small town as Lynden - there would be nothing to do there!  We had both grown up in Seattle and were used to having tons of things to do and see all around us.  Lynden didn't even have a movie theater or a fast food joint!  We decided we'd look around Bellingham for a place to rent, otherwise we'd probably go crazy living in such a tiny town.

Our first home...not exactly a beauty, but it served us well.

We'll, God had other ideas for us.  Every place we found in the want ads for rent in Bellingham, was too much for our budget!  So we ended up looking around Lynden and found a cozy (that means small in realtor language) little old house to rent for just $200/mo (I think?).  It had two bedrooms (one the size of a closet and the other not much bigger), a cozy living room and a kitchen/dining room that just fit a table for 2.  The bathroom had been an add-on/remodel as the house was built before there was indoor bathrooms!  It also had a porch for a washer and dryer, and later we were able to put a little chest freezer there too.  It wasn't perfect, but it suited out needs - cheap rent and not terribly far from work.

Our living room and dining room.
Love that paneling!

Our landlords lived just across the alleyway, and Daryl's grandmother lived in the apartment next door.  We ended up being friends with our landlords (they had two very cute and sweet little girls) and learned a lot from them - like running a successful business, crocheting baby booties and such.

Our plans for doing things like movies and recreational activities never really materialized.  I was a couple months pregnant when we moved, and running a business took most of our energy.  But that wasn't a bad thing as we really had no money for doing all the things we used to do before, and after Jeremy was born it didn't get any better!

Looking back through the years, God used that business to bring us to a place we would have never gone voluntarily.  But we have loved living up here.  We went from city kids aghast at the thought of living in a town without a movie theater, fast food joint (Lynden now has several fast food joints, but we don't live there anymore, it's too big of a town for us!) or decent shopping mall , to eventually living on wooded acreage, baking our own bread, dabbling in raising animals, and having more children than is socially acceptable. We even made friends almost right from the start that led us to consider homeschooling.

We saw living up here as a temporary situation to give us a leg up in the world, but God used it to draw us out of the big city, live like everybody else mentality.  He used it to bless us beyond our wildest dreams!