Brand New

Welcome to my blog! I am new at at this, so please bear with me as I make mistakes and changes.
My main goal in doing this blog is to share my family's experiences with not only finding a more simple way of life, but our ongoing adjustments to my husband's PTSD and mild TBI that he acquired during his tour in Iraq. I know that there are many many families out there dealing with these issues,and I hope in my blog you will find that you are not alone in your thoughts,feelings, or problems.
Like it says in "About Me," I am a 41 year old wife and mother. My husband,Rick, is 46 and is my knight in shining armor. Our son,Zachary, is 11 and keeps us on our toes!
Like my blog title suggests, we live in a small ( 918 sq ft) house in the country. We live in a small town with no streetlights,a lumber mill,and a small truck dealership.That is it for industry,with the exception of many small home businesses. We do have a town hall,police dept and volunteer fire dept,which Rick belonged to until he got back from Iraq. We live in the southern part of NH's Lake Region.
We moved up here because we were tired of spending money on rent. Why spend the money on something you can never own,when you can spend the same amount ( more or less) and get something that is yours? Well, we looked around my hometown of Somersworth,and the houses had gone through the roof! ( That and the fact that our gas grill had been stolen out of the backyard sealed the deal for us moving out) I had stopped working when Rick went on Homeland Security and Zach was in Kindergarten,so we were on one income.We went to a mortgage company,clueless. While they worked on a loan for us, we started checking places out on the Internet,and we saw our current property. It was cute-2 bedroom,1 bath,detached garage-so we drove up to look in the windows and check out the property. The real estate agent happened to be there,so he let us in and we looked around. A deck! And a nice corner lot with .63 acres of land. Enough for Zach to run around in. Rick loved it right away,but I was still unsure. It seemed a bit small, but after seeing more houses, I realized that we really didn't need anything bigger. Our mortgage guy didn't see it that way,however. He kept trying to get us to buy a bigger house for over $300,000. He was flabbergasted that we would even consider a house for only $134,000. You can get the loan, he said, no problem,go for it! We firmly informed him that we did not want to live to pay our mortgage,we also had to eat. Well, you can imagine when the whole housing crisis hit. Looking back,we realized that we,too,were part of the sub prime mortgage scheme. We had no clue! We were extremely fortunate that we were able to refinance to a fixed 30 year mortgage and that we did not buy over our heads. We see all these stories about people buying homes they couldn't afford,losing their homes,and having no where to go,and I am so thankful that we did not go there. We knew what we could afford,and even that seemed like too much to us. That was probably one of the best decisions we ever made.( Aside from getting married and having Zach!)