As many of you know, our family relocated from Wisconsin to Norther Minnesota a little over two months ago (it’s so Northern that people joke we live in Southern Canada, which isn’t too far from the truth!) and we’ve been busy settling into our new digs.

After being homeless for seven weeks, we now find ourselves in a tiny, tiny little house (as in, 1,290 square feet) and the rugrats and I are busy trying to find space for everything and everyone while a couple awesome contractors get to work building us a garage. Because in case you didn’t know, it’s cold here. And the house didn’t come with a garage (which several neighbors pointed out to us the day we were moving in and I felt like exclaiming, “WHAT? Get out! Are you serious? We got cheated!” I mean, because, really, as if we didn’t make a note of that fact before buying.the.house.)

The truth is, not only are we surviving, but we are really thriving here. Our small abode is less than a block from the school which is rad. And lest you think that’s just too good to be true, I guess I should alert you that our town is so small (less than 2,500 people) that really, everything is about a block away. It takes me less than 25 minutes to do all of our grocery shopping. I’m not 100% sure, but that could mostly be due to the lack of options rather than the close proximity to the store. Of course, I do have to factor a monthly trip into the big city two hours away to stock up on the stuff that costs an arm and a leg here. The whole mantra of buying local and sustainable food has a different meaning when you live where I do and access to things is really, really limited, but even still, things are close and comfy here and I think small town life could really grow on me.

While it has been a bit of an adjustment to buy parsley packaged like this (and about quadruple the price of what I was paying before):

I definitely didn’t have this sweet decor above the butter and sour cream in Wisconsin (don’t even pretend like you are not jealous):

It’s a quaint, close-knit community. Everyone knows everyone (which can be good and bad as you can probably imagine), but overall, we are settling in and really enjoying our time here so far.

I guess what I’d really like to point out is that although my grocery shopping situation and overall access to “things” is severely limited here, I’ve still been able to make wholesome meals from scratch for my family which makes me want to shout from the rooftops, “If I can do it, you can do it!” You’ll probably be seeing a lot more simplified meals with easy-to-find ingredients coming up but that doesn’t mean I’m going to budge on my food philosophy. Just in the last week, I’ve made our own Greek yogurt and a new whole wheat pancake recipe that will knock your socks off. In the meantime, if you find any great ways to score deals online for food items, send the info my way! Amazon Prime and I are BFF’s already but I’m open to any new options for online shopping.

Thanks for all of your support over these last few weeks during this huge adjustment for me and my family! Love your guts as always.

I couldn’t resist throwing this last picture in here – the local movie theater shows one movie at a time and only Friday through Monday. One showing a day at 7 p.m. So don’t be late or you could miss the blockbuster hit everyone’s been talking about!