First things first, let me introduce myself: my name is Meg. I created this blog to bring together like-minded people to share our collective knowledge with one another and experiment together on everything from cooking, simplicity, recipes, healthier habits, organization, cleaning routines, personal challenges, travel, gardening, homesteading, saving money, book discussions, contentment, time management and anything that deals with daily life.
You may be wondering how I came up with the name. It has two meanings, actually.
Meaning #1: Exactly what the definitions state on the top of the blog in the literal sense of each word.
Meaning #2: A cute and punny (yes, I said it, punny: like “no pun intended” and funny) way of someone asking you to spare some change. Give freely, help openly, and love enormously.
Please, come join me on my never-ending, always evolving, quest of sparing change!
Now, lets get to the pictures (I love pictures!)
This is me with my husband, Todd. We were married May 3rd, 2007. This is one of the first pictures Todd and I have taken together taken at our campsite at Mohican State Park in Loudonville,Ohio. This was the one and only time we have tented it while camping, though we love nature and exploring!
This is Todd and I July 4th 2009. The little one in the picture is my niece, Annabelle.
This is our fixer-upper home. Of course, it may not look like a fixer-upper now, but believe me, when we bought it, it was! Todd has painted it, replaced windows, put in french doors, we tore out the front yard and started new, and that is only the outside. The inside has been a work-in-progress for the past 4 years we’ve owned the home.
This is a picture of our first “child” together. Squiggy was a surprise gift from my mother after being married only a few months. This was not something our marriage was ready for, but we got through it. Squiggy was a sore spot in our marriage the first couple of years, but in the end, he brought us so much closer together.
With intense counseling and a lot of communication, we realized what was important to us and that was staying together. Todd and I choose to work on our marriage daily and we do what the counselor told us to do: “Plan for the future - you haven’t screwed that up yet!”
How does Squiggy come into play here? Todd and I worked together to find a happy medium about the Squigster. After we learned to work together on raising a pot bellied pig, there was peace in our home. Of course, Squiggy wasn’t the only issue in our marriage, but once we came together on this topic, everything else seemed to fall into place.
We got Lana May to be Squiggy’s companion in July 2010. She is a black lab, brindle boxer mix known as a boxador. When you get her in the right light, you can see the reddish/brown hair. She is a sweetie, but a lot of work!
Unfortunately, we lost Squiggy February 25, 2011 after 3 weeks of him being sick. With two vet visits (they came to our house – there is no way to get a 200+ lb pig in a car), a lot of tears and desperately trying to nurse him back to life by feeding him through a turkey baster and keeping him warm, Squiggy passed away with Todd holding him and telling him how much he was loved. Me, I was at work. Life is not the same without the pigger, and I miss him tremendously.
We also have 1 cat, 3 new kittens, 3 hens we got back in 2011 and now 14 chicks that we got as fertilized eggs for our broody hen to lay on.
When we had Squiggy, we used to call our home a “mini-farm.” It doesn’t feel that way anymore, even though it feels like we run one some days with all the animals! There are no children yet, but maybe some day.
