Let’s have a Re-Introduction!

Hello! One of my blog intentions this year is to do better with joining link-ups and interacting with other bloggers. So today I am joining up with the Not Just a Mom link-up…and they have the perfect prompt for the beginning of the year…an introduction post!

So, many of you long-time readers won’t need all this information, but if you are just stumbling across this blog for the first time, it may help you make sense of who is the person doing the writing and what makes them who they are!

I’m Suzanne and I have been blogging here for about 10 years. I started blogging in college when I felt like I needed an outlet to process things and I just kept right on going through early marriage, early motherhood, being foster parents, being a stay at home Mom, and all the way up until now when I’m a more “experienced” Mom and working part time outside the home again.

My husband Theo is a police officer in our local big city. Since he’s in the city, this means he never has a boring day at work (and he never has time to sit on the highway and do speed checks ha). He deals with a lot of robbery, mental health, substance abuse, and domestic violence calls as well as the typical 911 medical and car accident emergencies. He is really good at his job, but the past three years have been TOUGH on our law enforcement officers and the struggle to not be burnt out is real. His shifts (usually evenings and weekends) are not always ideal for family life, but we try to adjust and make it work as creatively as we can!

We have 3 kids currently- Tera is 8, Kiah is 6, and Ezra is 4. We are due with our fourth little one in March- just about 9 weeks left! My pregnancies are ZERO fun and we are all ready for the baby to born so we can have Mama back to a functional level.

I teach 1st grade at our homeschool hybrid school. This means that I am only teaching in the classroom two days a week, but I am still putting together and providing all the curriculum and work for the other three days that my students are at home with their parents. Of course, as a Mom, that means that on my not teaching days, I am homeschooling my own kids at home! I don’t think hybrid education is for everyone, but we love it and we absolutely LOVE our school. I don’t make hardly any money in my job, but I am happy to work a job that I love so that my kids can have this incredible community and wonderful Christian private school education.

In May 2022, we bought 5 acres and moved out to the country to start a little homestead. We told everyone we were going to go slow and get one animal a year. Well, we are 7 months in and have 20 chickens, 3 adult pigs, a Great Pyrenees livestock guardian dog puppy, a bunny, a house cat, 2 barn cats that were abandoned and we had to bottle feed and that now somehow live in my house 80% of the time, and 3 brand new week old piglets whose Mama rejected them, so they are also living in my house while we bottle feed them and try to keep them alive. Yes, it’s too much. Yes, we love it. We are learning all about homesteading as we go, but sometimes it feels like we just dove into the deep end and are just figuring out how to tread water as we go. But we do not AT ALL regret having the land and the animals. Our family was made for this lifestyle!

For the last several years, Theo has worked really hard to build a passive income and future financial security through buying rental properties. So we also own and manage five rental homes. Thankfully, even though they don’t bring in a huge income currently, they are pretty passive (meaning they don’t take a ton of boots on the ground work on a weekly basis) and we have fabulous renters in all five houses. One of the homes sometimes operates as an Airbnb, and the rest of the time operates as a fully furnished home for missionaries while they are home assignment.

I think that is all the main points as an introduction to me! I tend to write about ALL of those things on this blog, as well as book reviews, Christian life and thought posts, and encouragements to others about living life simply and not having to keep up with the Jones’. I am pretty passionate about not influencing others into buying tons of things, but instead to step back and enjoy the little things in life.

Just for fun, here are a few extra fun facts about me and my family:

1. I am a missionary kid who lived all my childhood in West Africa. This unique experience still affects a lot of my adulting and my parenting as well as the outlook that I have on life.
2. My name is actually pronounced Suz-on instead of Suz-ann, and obviously most people don’t know this just from reading my name. It’s constantly an awkward dance of correcting someone without coming across as rude, or not correcting someone and then going way too long with them continually mispronouncing my name.
3. I have my degree in Early Childhood Education and absolutely LOVE teaching those littles.
4. I self published a book on foster care called Fostering Love. It’s available on Amazon and is basically an introduction/crash course into what foster care is like. We were foster parents for three years and had two precious girls placed with us. We ultimately decided to close our home 4 years ago.
5. My husband is one of 7 boys. No girls 🙂 I have only one brother.
6. I love to read books. Sometimes I think I read too much and neglect my household duties
7. Our first three children we picked their name for various reasons. It turns out that their initials spell out THE and so it is only logical that our fourth baby’s name has to start with an O, so that our kids initials can spell out THEO (my husbands name). The only problem is that O names are HARD! Let me know if you have any ideas or suggestions, although I think we have it narrowed down to two or three top contenders at this point. It is a boy, by the way 🙂
8. Theo and I have been married for 10.5 years. We got married at the ripe old age of 21. Now that I’m 31 I can’t believe that 21 year olds are even allowed to get married, but I guess when you know, you know!

And that’s me! I hope that you stick around to follow along with this life that God has given us, and that somewhere along the line you can learn something, be encouraged, or gain some inspiration. Tomorrow I am publishing the post all about our pig giving birth so stick around if you want some of THAT hahaha!