That Tiny Life Love
Journey through our story from dream to reality!
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Calving Season, Four Years In: What We Thought It Would Be…and What It Actually Is
Calving Season, Four Years In: What We Thought It Would Be… and What It Actually Is If you had asked us a few years ago what calving season would look like, we probably would have pictured quiet mornings, fluffy calves in the grass, and mamas doing all the work while we stood back and watched. That’s not what it looks like. Not here anyway. Our First Calving Season — May 2025 Our first real introduction to calving season didn’t start with a calf hitting the ground. It started months earlier… with loss. We had AI’d both Jade and Jane successfully,…
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Why We Chose Highland Cattle (And Why It Didn’t Go the Way We Thought)
If we’re being completely honest… we didn’t set out to build a Highland cattle breeding program. It started with a picture on Facebook. One of those cute, fluffy “mini cows” that stops your scroll and makes you think, “We need one of those.” At the time, we were coming out of 2020 — the “toilet paper crisis” season — and like a lot of people, we were thinking more about sustainability. Growing our own food. Being a little less dependent on systems that suddenly didn’t feel so dependable. So naturally, we thought… let’s get a couple cows. Simple enough, right?…
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From a Toilet Paper Crisis to a WorkingFarm
The story behind Highland & Co. Acres If you had told us years ago that we would be raising Highland cattle, preparing for calving season, welcoming guests to stay on our property, and building a life around this farm, we probably would have smiled and said you had the wrong family. Because this life did not start with a grand farming plan. It started with a shipping container home and a desire to live simply. Back in 2016, we built a permitted, on-grid shipping container home so we could live mortgage-free. At the time, it was about creating a simpler…
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Choosing Forever on the Deck of Our Shipping Container Home
The brain is a difficult thing to understand. Your life and health may seem fine one day, and completely skewed the next. The procedure on Dave’s brain did that to him, to us and for a brief season, it seemed that everything that we had worked together for was going to be gone. Choosing joy was my only option. The reality of my life without Dave was to much to handle, and so I CHOSE JOY, again and again.
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The Home Stretch – Transforming a Shipping Container into a Home
The foundation was poured, the containers were placed, the welding was done, the walls were framed, plumbing and electrical were in, insulation was sprayed, sheet rock was hung. It was time for the final transformation of 2 metal boxes into our home.
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That Time ‘Living Big In a Tiny House’ Came to Visit Our Shipping Containers
God gifted us with angels. Angels that were wanted to share our story. Dave and I told Bryce & Rasa, that while we were so honored that they wanted to film our home, it was our story of love and perseverance, even when all seems impossible that we wanted to share. Our prayer was that if by sharing, we could touch just one person’s life, then it was all worth it.
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Would an ICH Stop Us From Building our Shipping Container Home?
The ICU is a busy place in the middle of the night. The nurses in and out of the room every 10 minutes, sometimes more often if Dave’s alarm started to go off. There was a constant sound of paging, alarms, and more than once that long night, the sound of someone coding. I tried to make myself shut my eyes and rest while Dave was resting, but the minute Dave’s alarm, or an alarm in the hall or a code sounded, my eyes flew open to make sure that Dave’s chest was still moving up and down.
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The Brain Bleed That Re-Routed Our Shipping Container Home Adventure
I am not going to lie; seeing the size of the blood pool in Dave’s brain was terrifying. Hearing the doctor say that he shouldn’t even be alive, much less awake and coherent, was nothing he could explain. He was hopefully optimistic that Dave would continue to stabilize and that the bleed would not progress beyond it’s current borders. It was currently almost 2” x 2” and laying deep in the left side of his brain.
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‘The Rebar Is Cut Wrong’ – Part #8
Those are the words my best friend whispered to me as they prepared him to be life flighted for emergency brain surgery. The doctors told us he was dying, and his chances of surviving were very small. But, the moment he whispered those words to me, I knew that my Dave wasn’t going to die that day or the next, if he had anything to say about it. He had a house to build, and I obviously couldn’t be trusted to cut the rebar correctly 😉 .
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The Goal = Turn Two 8’ Wide Metal Boxes Into A Shipping Container Home, Part #1
In the beginning, we talked and dreamed of the possibilities as far as design and stacking them together like Legos – everyone’s initial thought of building with shipping containers 🙂 We discovered quickly, it isn’t quite that simple or cheap to start stacking them willy-nilly.
