Just making cookies...

Got some happy time making some big buttery chocolate chip cookies and I really wish I could share the way the scent just fills up the kitchen!!!

Things are getting better and as much as it can hurt to say this things are also getting back to normal.

Love to you all and I hope you all have a fabulous Fall!

It's Fall Again

The Fall season has arrived and it looks like Winter will be here tomorrow.

Christie would have loved it! She loved cozying up when it was cold outside and her favorite robe and slippers are ready for her on her chair.

We had a memorial service at the ranch back in August. It was mostly people from the church but some of Christie's friends and business partners attended and paid their respects. She knew a lot of nice people.

She didn't want a stone so we respected her wishes and put her ashes in with a new aspen tree near the house. This was we'll always see something living to remind us of her life.

Her kids are doing fine. Amy is taking care of Lizzy who was born back in February and the other kids get to have love from five parents.

Losing Christie was like losing my anchor in the world and in the middle of trying to mourn her loss I also had to step up and start trying to be the leader that she was and I know I will never be able to do that like she did. You never really appreciate everything that someone does until they're not doing it anymore and then it still has to be done.

There was someone great who said that he didn't achieve much in life because he stood on the shoulders of giants and I feel the same way.

I know that we will all get used to our new normal but right now it's still very hard and it's even harder to think of the holidays ahead where we will miss Christie being our everything.

Please forgive me for not writing more on here or on email it's just that every time I try I just end up crying and not able to get anything done.

You are all deeply appreciated and I still covet your prayers for our family.

God bless you all!

Megan

Christie has gone home

This morning Christie went home to be with the Lord.

She was a very private person and I am struggling to honor her wishes by not telling you everything I know. I will say that her birth name was Christiana Maria Snowden White and that she was born in Moscow, Idaho on May 27, 1980.

Christie was the devoted wife of Steven and the beloved mother of Eric, Emily, Renee, Samuel, and Elizabeth.

She was also my closest and best friend in the world and she will be deeply missed.

I loved her and she loved everyone.

Megan

We really need your prayers

I'm sorry to not post anything for so long and then just ask for prayer.

Christie started getting sick earlier this year and then last week she ended up in the hospital in SLC. They found out that she has stage four pancreatic cancer and it got caught very late. They kept her in the hospital and she started chemo and radiation and we really, really are asking for a miracle!

We really covet your prayers and ask for God's healing!

Thank you!!!

Megan

January 2019

Wow, a lot has happened since the last time I posted anything on here!!!

I'll start with my good news that Matthew David joined our family on January 20th! He's gorgeous and healthy and he's probably the loudest of all of my babies!

The other baby news to share is Amy had Colette Suzanne back in September and Cydne had Aubree Renee in October.

Christie is due late next month but she's so big she looks like she's due sooner. The pregnancy is going good for her and I can't even begin to say what a blessing that is!!!

Our really unexpected news that I will share is that Macy came back to us last August. We're really happy to have Macy and her kids home again and she's committed to staying this time and is expecting a baby in April. Things did not work out for her at home so she reached out to us and after a lot of prayer and discussion we welcomed her home.

Yes, that means five wives in the house and I cannot even begin to say how there will NEVER be a sixth!!!

I really missed Macy so I'm happy she's home.

Steve is doing well and he's got a lot of work going on and that's a good thing. I know a lot of people don't like President Trump but we're doing much better since he became President. We had a number of problems with regulations about water on the ranch that are now gone and that's huge for us.

Chinese tourists are a problem along the road. They see the bison and then come over the fence to get close and take pictures and we've had to chase them off a few times. We even had a bus come the whole two miles up our road to the house! Crazy!!! I know it doesn't get in the news a lot but these people are getting hurt up this way quite a lot. They don't understand that not all of the West is a national park. I'm hoping there will be fewer of them this summer.

We're looking at adding to the house and that's going to be a big project to make a log home bigger. Steve is saying maybe next year (2020) we'll get started on that. I know we need the space but I really hate all the noise and dirt and dust that you get when you tear up a house.

I haven't been on email or much of anything else for a while. We had problems with our internet and then it's just been so busy with so many things. It's hard to get time to do things like write on here and then write to everyone. I am sorry to all of you who are overdue for emails from me!!!

Our orchard is doing great and we're getting a lot of apples and stonefruits every year. Our few peach trees are doing okay even though this really isn't peach country. The cherries are doing great.

I'm looking forward to spring and getting the garden going again. Our garden for the house is four acres now and that seems a lot but we sell the excess and then the culls go to feeding the animals. Can't even tell you all how much I am looking forward to a salad!!!

I had to add moderation to the comments on here because I had a lot of spam messages getting posted in Arabic. Things like pest control and gay pornography. So sorry I had to do that but it does make me get on here more often!

I have a huge bison stew going right now and need to get back to it. I hope you all have a wonderful 2019!

Megan

Is eight really enough?

Yes, it's true! Around the end of January I'll be welcoming my eighth baby! Crazy!!!

It'll be just in time for my tenth anniversary, too!

Just to answer a question I've already been asked a few times: No, we were not trying for another baby but we weren't doing anything to stop it!

Christie is definitely trying for her fifth and we're all praying for her!

Life is good around here. The winter seems to be over and we've had warm days and warm-enough nights that I'm leaving my window open a crack now! I LOVE the fresh air! Shoes are now optional around here and that's a good sign for summer!

The garden plot is in and we're hoping for some wonderful carrots, potatoes, turnips, beets, and onions!

I will try to post on here a bit more in the future.

Just had to get on here and share some good news!

- Megan

It's time for an update!

Happy New Year to everyone! Isn't it crazy that 2018 is 10% over already? I hope the new year is everything you all wanted from it!

There have been a few requests for me to do an update and I get them in email and not just on here. I guess it is time and here I go...

Steve is working a lot and that's a wonderful thing! The oil business isn't so busy right now and he's been in Texas mostly helping to rebuild from the flooding last year. He's also bought some houses that were uninsured and he's fixing them up to sell them again. I feel bad for the families that had to sell their homes but at least the homes will be fixed and someone else can live in them.

In the last year Steve has been hunting again and he's done a couple trips to Arkansas to hunt wild hogs and he's always really happy when he gets home from one of these trips and I hope he can get away again this summer.
Steve's first wife Shari started a new life in Seattle and she's got a boyfriend and they're doing pretty good from what we hear.

Steve and Shari have three daughters and they're Stephanie (who goes by Stevie), Lauren, and Hannah. Stevie and Lauren are both married, they have children, and they're both poly. They both live not far from here and we see them all the time.

Hannah went to a college in Michigan, graduated, and now has a job in the wine business in California. At Christmas she came home with her boyfriend and it sounds pretty serious like they'll be engaged soon. They will not be a poly family but Hannah's boy seems okay with the whole thing.

Christie is doing pretty good and so are her four kids. Her oldest boy turned ten this last year! It's so crazy to think he was just a toddler when I first met him and now he's like this little serious cowboy/rancher/man! Her two girls and her youngest boy are doing well. Christie has had challenges this last year with trying for another baby and she's just letting things go and if it happens it happens is what she says.

We do not hear from Macy anymore. The last we heard she and her two kids were fine, living in Ohio with her parents. And then that was it. The phone numbers for her don't work anymore and she doesn't return email so we don't hear from her. We're going to respect her decision but we still miss her and if you're reading this Macy, we love you!

Cydne and her three kids are doing great! She isn't avoiding getting pregnant but is also enjoying a little break after having her son last year.

Amy and her baby are doing great and we're pretty sure she got pregnant over Christmas and is now due with her second baby around the end of September and we're all very happy for her!

My kids are all doing pretty good. My one girl had eye problems when she was born and is wearing really thick glasses now but she's healthy. The eye doctor wants her to have cornea transplants when she gets older (like 16) to maybe get her eyesight to 20/20 and we'll see what happens.

Myself I had the flu pretty bad. I was actually in the hospital for three days last month it got so bad. I had a fever that got to 104 and that was when I went to the hospital. I seriously don't remember much from the day I went in other than my hands felt like they were all swollen up but they looked just fine. It was the strangest thing I think I've ever felt and I know it was a hallucination but it seemed so real!

Other people in the house had the flu too but I was the only one who got the whole stomach flu version of it. I lost a LOT of weight and I feel exhausted all the time right now but it's getting better. I am really blessed that we have so much help in the house because I can't imagine being as sick as I was and having Steve 1,000 miles away and seven kids at home!

With the end of the big oil boom the demand for construction crews cut off and we lost some families in the church that had to move away to find work. We also had some non-church neighbors move away for work.

Around the ranch things are what you'd expect. We've seen more wolves this year but so long as they just pass through we don't bother them. It's when they stop and stare at the children is when we get concerned and if they approach the house during the day they end up as feed for the hogs. I don't know why people worship these things! They're not just big dogs! Ugh. In any case we've only taken two of them in the last year and both of them were not tagged. Still have to report taking them but it's less hassle when they're not tagged and the two we took were not tagged.

This one ranger we see once in a while says the tagged wolves avoid people because they don't want to get captured again. If that's true then I wish they'd tag more of them!

We're still running bison and they're still the best kind of herd for the ranch! They're easy to take care of and they dig in the snow for forage when they have to so it saves on feed. We still managed to put out a lot of bromegrass mixed with hay and alfalfa for them. We put molasses on the feed so they eat it up or else we get pronghorn coming in to eat what the bison don't eat.

We have a herd of elk that come through and we've put out a few bales of feed for them, too.

I still have about a hundred chickens and we eat the eggs and I sell the rest to friends and neighbors. Not making much money from them but they're nice to have around and the eggs are pretty good.

We keep a few hogs around to eat up leftovers from the house and the dead things we find around here. They don't even care if it's a dead bird, they'll eat it! Right now we have eight of them and in a month or two we'll slaughter two of them and put up the pork and smoke the bacon.

This summer we'll have almost two acres for the garden and I am so looking forward to fresh veggies! Swiss chard, turnips, cabbage, cauliflower, beets, and we'll be putting up wires for the peas too! We have an orchard in what used to be about an acre of swampy land (mushy but not like a wetland area). Steve added a bunch of soil to the area and then we planted apricots, apples, pears, and cherries and this year we expect to get at least a decent crop of cherries. What we don't eat fresh I'll put up in pies and low-sugar preserves.

Steve has a hobby of a home distillery and he's got bourbon aging in what used to be four port barrels. It was a lot of work to make 200+ gallons of bourbon and I'm seriously glad he doesn't plan on drinking it all himself! He says the port should make for an interesting bourbon. I don't care much for strong liquor but I will try it when it's ready in a few years.

I still make the occasional quilt. It's relaxing to just work on something and not think about everything going on.

Church is nice and I attend women's Bible study on Wednesday nights. We're studying Isaiah right now and it's interesting, We'll be doing Corinthians next and I am really looking forward to it because it's a lot more challenging and we have much better discussions about that kind of thing.

That's about it for an update! I'm always good for questions but I hope this answered most of them!

Hope you all have a loving Valentine's Day!

- Megan