Finally!

 JD and I decided that the pool in the front/side yard has to go. Now that the pasture fence is going up and we are hoping to grow decent grass (I will, I will, no matter what it takes....) we just can't take the hideous eye-sore that it is sitting there. If you've ever wondered why we stuck a pool up in our front yard, I thought I'd do a quick review.

From 2001 to 2004, we lived in a normal house in a normal neighborhood, but since we decided to retire from the Navy here, we started looking for land to build on. We bought and purchased the 25 acres we now live on in hopes of building on it several years down the road. In 2004, we had some issues with birth parents of a child we were adopting. In fact, we got scared enough that we didn't consider it safe for any of our children to even play outside. We started looking at homes to rent, just to move to safety. This was rather sad for us, as we had just put in our little pool and JD had built a screened in porch and deck up to it.

After not really finding anything to rent, I got the brilliant idea of purchasing a trailer to move into on the land we were already making payments on, until we built our house. We ended up purchasing the largest double-wide they made and moving to a small clearing in the middle of the woods. Let me just say, it was ugly. The mud was so bad for so long that we literally couldn't even let the children out without them being stuck in it.

View from the front of the trailor - yes, I got goats with zero fencing.

We moved our pool as well and slapped it up in the backyard of the trailer. We also put in the swing set that still sits by the pool. Once we built our current house, the trailer was moved down the road and is currently a rental.

2007

This summer will make five years that we have lived in the "new" house. There is still tons undone, but we have never wanted to move the pool to the back because it really isn't big enough to be worth the effort. It was good with four and five kids, but isn't cutting it with almost 12 and all their friends. So, today, the pool went on Craigslist and we are going to invest in the largest above-ground pool on the market. We had original plans for an in-ground, but that money went to Ethiopia last year.

An above ground will be fine, just as long as it's in the backyard!