Hello everyone! I'm baaaaaaaack :). Long time no hear for me, right?! It has definitely been an eventful few months. The big news is that we sold our home in Alberta and moved to Saskatchewan in July, and a lot of people have some questions on why! PS- That's us....SUPER EXHAUSTED but elated at how God orchestrated this whole move for us.
Our home in Lloydminster was amazing and we had put so much work into it, especially our backyard which we loved immensely. So let me give you a little bit of a background as to why we decided to make this move to our five acres property.
As many of you know and some of you don’t know that I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis in 2017 and this was shortly after I started my blog and my Instagram account. After I was diagnosed I tried to get that under control for about six months. I succeeded for about two years with some minor flareups. I was on a Paleo diet (this diet created other health issues which I will write about in another blog post), lost 50 lbs and never felt so good when I looked at my reflection in the mirror. I was still able to do a lot of my renovations in our house and DIY's.
But there came a point when I started to rely on my husband to do most of the renovations because I could no longer do them. I couldn't hold a paint brush sometimes. And then I was having issues with even just holding my phone to create content for Instagram and my blog. I would sit down and write a blog post and the next day not be able to move my shoulder or my hand just from typing for a few hours and doing edits on photos etc. It became very discouraging and I wasn’t sure what to do about it all. As you can see in these photos, the visible flare ups were disabling.
Remember the beautiful staircase in my open concept front entry? It was one of the reasons why we bought the home because we loved the look of that staircase. I could picture garlands and stockings and what I could do with the wall. I made that awesome basket wall feature and the wall became a signature of Wild Rose Country Home. You knew that navy wall was my home the minute you saw it. That staircase off and on throughout the five years that we lived in that home was a joy to look at, but a tremendous burden and to be frank, felt like an entrapment for me. If I was having a flareup in my knees or my hips I could not get downstairs to the kitchen to take care of my basic needs for food when Ken was gone to work. We tried to come up with different ideas to solve that issue. We put a mini fridge upstairs and a microwave. I had a coffee station etc. But that could only go so far.
Then the pandemic hit and things just went from bad to worse. The stress of the pandemic hit me hard as it did for many. My health declined, my mental health declined and I was getting multiple cortizone shots in multiple joints to be able to move them. I went on medication for anxiety and chronic trigeminal nerve pain. I had to have a surgery on my foot to remove a tumor that put me off my feet for quite a while. Plus I got shingles lol! One of the worst parts was all of the weight that I had lost on my Paleo diet came back on. I had major hair loss. And I just felt very discouraged with the way that the pandemic stress had taken over my mind. I will do a specific blog post on that now that we are a little bit more removed from it to specifically let you into how the pandemic affected me in detail. In any case I had gone back to using a cane, I even had to buy a walker in April because I could barely walk without it so after all of that we had decided that it would be wise to buy a one level living home. The other part of it would be to try and move closer to our kids so that they could help out when needed. But we couldn’t move all the way to Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan which is five hours away from Lloydminster because Ken still has to drive to work his three hour radius around Lloydminster. Therefore we decided that Saskatoon, which was just about three hours away from Lloydminster and only around two hours away from our kids in Moose Jaw would be a good compromise.
We also wanted to be more involved in our grandsons lives. They’re growing up so fast and we really wanted to see them more often than we were. They absolutely love the "Farm" and always ask to play in the playground backyard.
Let me show you a few photos that I took about two weeks after we moved into the house. We haven’t done anything to the home as of yet and to be honest we don’t know when and if we will get to do major renovations. The photos etc are hung to cover the holes the old owners left lol. The whole house is coloured in taupe and I actually don’t mind the cozy contrast. I've done some decorating for fall here and there and I’ll show you some of those photos now, too.
Overall, I get the questions about do I miss my home in Lloydminster. And to be honest my answer is ,not really. This acreage home has a hot tub which we enjoy just as much. And we have a nice balcony which overlooks the landscape outside.
Here are the fall decor photos:
Anytime I look outside there’s something beautiful to see whether it’s the sky or a deer or the trees or planes flying by. I love the fact that we are close to an airport in Saskatoon. It’s about a 20 minute drive from us. And hopefully that will open up more travel opportunities for us. Even though traveling is a little bit more challenging for me I still love doing it. There’s something about travel that brings out the best in me and I love to be away on vacation. We spent some time in Hawaii this summer while we were houseless between the sale and purchase :)
The sunrise on our overnight flight from Hawaii to Vancouver:
This website is going look a little bit different in the future. While I still do my decorating here and there when I can I also would love to start sharing my thoughts on living with chronic pain and what I have learned in the process in order to get through. I have been a fighter all along and I would love to share what I’ve learned so that you too will be encouraged to fight if you were suffering from chronic pain or mental illness. I also want to share different journeys like maybe share my thoughts on body image that I’m going through. I’m also going through a transition where I am going to be embracing my gray sparkles that are coming through in my hair and what I think about pulling away from the beauty industry a little bit.
So stay tuned! I feel like this is where I’m at right now in my stage of life and I think doing blog posts on the things that I'm going through will not only be cathartic for me but I’m sure will bring you alongside me in my journey and also help you get through yours. Or maybe you know somebody who is struggling or maybe you’re a supporter of somebody who is struggling with chronic illness and mental illness. I’d love to bring you into my world and we can do- it's a "help me help you" situation (I love the movie Jerry Macguire btw). Thanks for reading and I look forward to doing more blog posts.
PS I am now using a voice to text to do my blog so I don’t have to use my fingers as much which is awesome! So hopefully this all makes sense grammatically ha ha. Much love, Jenn
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