Hello everyone! This is my first time blogging so be patient with me if my blogging seems a bit scattered. With family far from us and learning to become so thankful for my daughter's blogsite that allows me to see my granddaughter anytime I feel I need that "Fix", I decided to begin blogging myself. Christmas this year was spent here at home in TN with my Parents, grandmother (age 92) and two of my children, Justin and Lynsey and of course my husband. We had a really good day, it was quite cold and with the fireplace going our house was nice and warm and as I look around I realize that my husband and I have everything that we hoped to have, animals, lots of dogs, property to stretch out on and an old house that we are slowly renovating. The only thing that we don't have and always took for granted, is family. I have my parents here but my husbands family are still in Florida and my husband continues to pressure them to move close, my daughters which are in NC but also are being very heavily pressured to move closer. Its funny when your goal and life dream is to move and obtain property in a state that offers seasons, you don't prepare yourself for the emptiness of life long friends and family that you will leave behind. I guess because you are so used to having them close that you don't know what it will feel like when they are not here. I have recently lost my brother which we were not prepared for, it has changed my life. I don't know if I will ever recover from it, I think about him every day and my heart hurts so bad it scares me. Going through this has caused me to understand how important family is, I don't want to lose even a day from the people that we love in fear that tomorrow we may not have a day with them. Soooo, I will be blogging often, We have experience many changes here in TN. It takes an hour to run to the store, and at Christmas, people cut trees off their own property, there are no Christmas Tree Stands in the Walmart parking lot. There's no animal control here and I sometimes think we have become an animal shelter. We have just found homes for 19 puppies that were born in our basement from strays that have decided that our home is theirs and being that my mine and my husband's hearts hurt for homeless animals, became the owners of all their puppies. By the way, we still have a female boxer mix, a female white and black mix and a male coon dog mix if anyone is interested. I walk out on our property with my son to cut down our Christmas Tree and all of our adults dogs (7 in all) dart in and out of the woods with their tails wagging and it warms my heart. I am posting some pics and I will post again later. I hope that everyone had a good Christmas and I hope to see everyone soon.