Oh The Places We Have Lived!

I wanted to do a bit of a flashback today, to some of the places we have lived.  It seemed like when we were first married, in fact the first 15 years or so we were constantly moving houses, switching jobs, trying to follow inspiration on where we should be, never really knowing why we needed to move somewhere, until all of a sudden it was time to leave and we finally figured it out.

Matt and Taryn in Coaldale

Our first few years were spent in between Coaldale and Lethbridge.  We would house sit a house in Lethbridge for the winter while some friends went South, and t

hen we moved to Coaldale when they were home.  We only did this for a couple of years, and honestly our most memorable times at this point were made in Coaldale.  We had some great friendships

Matt and Talia in Coaldale

developed, and we really loved living here.  Our houses were something to be desired, small, cold, spiders, mice, and even a gopher or two in them.  I must admit I do not miss that part.  You know many of these memories are kind of all blurred all together because we were married and had three kids within a very short period of time and life was really busy!

Shortly after this we moved to Magrath, thought we might take up Strawberry farming like my dad, but that was a huge mistake and learning experience.  We bought a house in Magrath, sad leaving somewhere because even though it is really easy to keep in touch, life goes on and others fill those holes of loneliness and we don't keep in touch except on special occasions.  We moved on from Magrath, all the way to Abbotsford, B.C.

Talia, Nicki, Matt and Dano in Magrath

another small house, memories of Logan crawling under the house into the extremely small crawl space to fix things, yuck! Many memories started being made because our kids were finally getting big enough to be social, and we had many family and friends there that we were close to.  It always made me

That was a journey.  I remember clearly how we came to the decision of moving out there.  We knew we didn't want to be in Magrath anymore and that we were needed elsewhere in the world.  We needed to make a break, start over and figure things out.  Good memories in Magrath, but also some hard times and feelings we needed to get away from.  We sat down with a map one day after Logan got home from work, and pretty much this was our thought process - we can't go south, we don't want to go east, we could go north but don't really want to because of the cold, let's go west!  I shudder to think we just did that, but that was the process.  We packed up the kiddos in the car that weekend and didn't tell anyone

Matt went to a BC Lions football game

where we were going - because really we didn't know ourselves - and headed west down the highway, feeling like we would know it when we came to it.  Whatever the heck IT was!

We literally drove into and around every town we came upon.  We would stop for a picnic sometimes in a nice park, or occasionally a certain town felt so dark and wrong for us that we would just drive on out of the town and keep going.  We did this all the way from Magrath out to Abbotsford, and when we drove into Abbotsford, we knew we had found where we needed to be.  We had no doubt we needed to move there.

We pulled into town and got a hotel and the first thing we did was call up the LDS church to see if anyone

we had tons of picnics in B.C. all the time!

was around that would be willing to come and talk to us about living there.  Sure enough there was an amazing couple that came over and let our kids climb all over them and took us under their wings.  They were amazing.  The next day they showed us around the city and told us all kinds of things.  Helped us find some rental possibilities, introduced us to some people, and we were hooked.  We paid the damage deposit on the upper half of a house, drove back to Magrath, packed up our things and headed west.

Kyre and Santa Blair in Abbotsford

What a journey, my fabulous brother drove his truck and pulled our borrowed horse trailer full of our stuff.  What a trip that was.  We pulled into our rental house and moved in our meager belongings.  We didn't bring any beds or much of anything with us, just what we needed.  It wasn't long before we were overwhelmed with donated things from many people who became our dear friends.

We lived in our peach house, as the kids called it for a couple of years and then moved to the green house. 
Oh those were fun times.  Tough times, but fun.  We were dirt poor broke, struggling to make ends meet, but we made memories, and created friendships that I miss dearly today.  Good times.  We spent lots of time at the ocean, the lakes, hiking in the woods, playing with friends, camping and man they were great times. 

Our front porch in Magrath

After five years of struggling, and playing in B.C. we were strongly prompted we needed to move back to Magrath.  To this day I still am not sure why, was it another trial?  I don't know, but we did live in Magrath for another five years after that.  More financially tough times, but somehow we managed to buy a home in all of that.  Struggles with some of our kids at this time, struggles with some family, but yet most of those struggles we choose to forget and try to remember the memories made and the close friendships created at this time.

Five years later, unemployment had hit us again, and honestly I had lost count of it at this time, and was really struggling to care any more.  Yes that bad boy depression was a tough one, but I was hanging in there.  Logan started reaching out to find jobs elsewhere and landed a job in good old Medicine Hat.  We had just been fixing up our house to get it to where we absolutely loved it, so I guess that meant it was time to sell.  He commuted for almost a year and would only come home on weekends because I was stubborn and wanted to make darn sure the job was going to last before we sold our home and uprooted again.  Well the job lasted, and we sold, and spent the summer living at my dad's farm in Brooks, in a motorhome.  Yuppers that was a summer to remember!  Haha.  The kids remember it well.  In fact we didn't

summer in Brooks on the Farm ready for church!

even have enough room in the motor home so we had our old "one buck" truck with an old camper on it and the boys stayed in it, while the girls and us stayed in the other.  What memories!

We were not sure where we wanted to make our home, and Logan was still commuting to Medicine Hat each day, and in the mean time looking at houses and all over the place.  The house we are still in today is the one he came home and said he had put an offer on a house pending my approval.  So we got a house, moved to Medicine Hat and still live here fourteen years later.  My kids all tease us that Medicine Hat is a black hole, it sucks you in and you can never get out.  But in reality, it is a pretty nice place to live.  We still have had our ups and downs with jobs, I think that was just one of

Our front walk in Medicine Hat

our trials in life, but we love it here and now our kids are settling here too.  I really have no desire to leave again unless I am moving to the mountains, or six feet under.

Oh the places we have gone in life - and oh the places you may go.  You never know why you might be led somewhere, but trust your feelings.  Friends we have made along the way have been eternal friendships and without a doubt we will be building our mansions close together in the Heavens!