Miracles do happen…

When hundreds & hundreds of people who you do not know, still say prayers every morning  & evening and keep having faith & hope when you might have lost it a little bit…

When hundreds & hundreds of people that we do not all, know sent cards, gifts & lovely surprises just to show their support and love…

When you are able to see your husband smiling at you each morning and say “Hello Honey”, and when family & friends come over often to just do, “fun things”… And look at our Alpaca's...

 
In the previous blog post I told you all about being admitted to the hospital and doing my “Poopie Dance”. And I have been dancing ever since, because I wake up in the morning! The doctors gave me about two weeks to two months to live…   Yes..      I know..

It is the eleventh of December now…!!!

For me that is one miracle every day. Not that it this is easy. Because you KNOW you could NOT wake up the next morning. But really that is not even the scariest part. Because I believe that (hopefully) somebody saved me a little spot up there in Heaven… so no reason to be scared about dying itself.

The more scary part is the how…

I am afraid that my family or Bastiaan will have bunches and bunches of trouble with me because I’m gonna go a little crazy on them, like talking like a crazy person, (Yeah I know, I already do that sometimes, haha) . But it worries me, to become somebody I do not know.

Or worse that they have to take care of me 24/7…

I am a very independent lady (yes, stubborn.. hehe), and I want to do things my way. It was sooooo hard to give up “control” of the farm because, for one I love it so much and for two, It was kinda my dream. Having had your dream and then having to give it up again is though… But I know it is in good hands with my family and Bastiaan.

And at least MY DREAM CAME TRUE…

How wonderful is that?!?

Last Year Emily Caldwell from Progressive Dairyman wrote a story about me and my Family. She did a wonderful job of writing it up and won an award! She also managed to get us to the number 1 spot on their most read articles!!! If you click on the link below you can find the updated article and the original article!

Progressive dairyman Article!

I don’t know how many more posts I can write. I would love too, but I just don’t know. My eyesight is not doing so well, and my “thinking cap” seems to be lost some days. But I will promise you, if something happens I will make sure you get an update. Please check Facebook, The Four Leaf Clover Dairy website and of course here at my blog.

Maybe the doctors are “wrong” again and I’m still typing away in a year from now! I love you all.

And miracles do happen, you know…

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Old Hands...

My hands look like the hands of an 80 year old lady

My hands hurt like the hands of an 80 year old lady

I sometimes feel like a lady who has lived 80 years, just by looking at my hands…

And yes, this might have to do with the fact that we were in the emergency room for over ten hours… Well… and the fact that they used my hands as a (several) pin cushion(s)… And, maybe, the fact that we had to stay in the hospital (again) for over 10 days because I had an unexplained fever… Oh… and the pneumonia that we didn't know I had…

Good thing I that I can open my own bottle of water again, with these old hands, it is kind of a bother to keep asking people to open up bottles of water when you are supposed to keep hydrated... (Thank You Mommy, Daddy, Hanneke, Jan Willem, Megan and of course my everything: Bastiaan!!).

It is also a good thing too that I am home. I like being home. Bastiaan and I have been throwing this idea around to rent a big camper and to go “see” places (you know, normally we would do this when we would be 70+), but plans have to be adjusted sometimes... I like to be home for now.

Besides opening water bottles it is also a nice thing to be able to “do” things again. Like (and this keeps repeating itself for some strange reason…) going to the bathroom by myself without falling of the “pot”, putting socks on (I like my socks and I have not one pair of toe slipper thingies so, I need socks…), playing with my new phone, getting in our lovely bathtub, and more important, getting out of the bathtub… and typing new blog posts and doing the “Facebook thing”, gosh, I hope they don’t drop the “timeline” disaster on me any time soon…

I can’t vacuum the house yet, but I’m not sure if that is a good thing or a “bad” thing. Hehe…

We are having a hard time (not that it was not hard before) but we got quite a shock from the horrible hospital experience two weeks ago, don’t get me wrong, the nurses and (most) of the doctors were really nice, it was just the overall experience of being a test bunny that got to me and Bastiaan & the family (and the pain). I do not mind being a test bunny if it will help other people with this grueling disease but… just don’t let me FEEL like a hurting test bunny…

And to be completely honest, I do not know how many times I can crawl out of a 10 meter deep hole (hmmm that would be 33 feet…) again…

Yes, we had to stop the Zelboraf treatment because of the pneumonia & fever (which they never really figured out after giving me 7 different antibiotics; "which one did the trick...?", and yes the docs really like me to start again as soon as possible, but… I just don’t feel ready yet…

Maybe if my hands look like my hands again instead of the hands of a 80 year old lady and more important they don’t hurt anymore, and I have seen me some cute looking girls (almost as good as seeing a beautiful black stallion ;-)) at the dairy, we’ll be ready to do round number four…

Maybe. 

I just love being home right now.

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Three times is the Charm... Getting Married # 1

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Some people get married once
Some people get married twice
Some people get married three times to THE SAME guy… and yes this would be me…

How do you get married three times, well, it isn’t because I really wanted too but sometimes life throws you a little curve ball and you just have to go with it…

Bastiaan proposed to me in November of 2007. In a really nice restaurant in Fort Wayne, we had been together for over 6 years and he figured it was time, and so did I, so I said “YES!” (And we got a free dessert from the people sitting next to us in the restaurant which made it extra nice).

We set our date to be on July 5th 2008 so our family and friends would have enough time to come over and book a flight from the Netherlands, Canada or Australia. At that date we would have the party and our church wedding. Of course we just started milking on the 20th of November and everything was still very hectic, exciting and stressful but also an immense adventure and we were loving every moment of it!

Because Bastiaan’s visa was going to expire in February we needed too make sure he would be "safe" and we decided to get married in the Courthouse in Bluffton, just to get the paperwork done. Go to Holland make sure the visa’s were in order and then get “really” married in July. For us this “wedding” was a necessity. We would of preferred to have done it on the same day as our church wedding but if you have so many people coming from abroad you need to give them proper time to make arrangements and plan flights. Telling them in November you are going to get married in February is not enough time, we figured.

I do, # 1...
We were already flabbergasted when we went to the courthouse to get a marriage license. Question one; ‘Have you been married before?’, ‘ No…’. Question two; ‘Do you have any children?’, ‘No…’ Question three; ‘Do you have mental problems?' ‘HU? NO!!!’. Those questions plus the actual license cost us $9.00 which was shocking (Yes, the price as well as the questions)! They told us now that we had the license we should get our witnesses and we would be ready to go…

On January 18th it was COLD!!! As in we (Dutchies) are not used to this kinda weather! But because I wanted to make sure this was at least a little special, it was our wedding after all, I wore a skirt (never mind the fact that an hour before I was still running around in coveralls on the farm trying to get things in order and Bastiaan was working on fixing a tractor!) and Bastiaan got a nice new shirt and my mom & dad and brother were coming, all dressed up too after running around on the farm all morning. Because of the dairy start up we hadn’t really had the opportunity to meet a lot of new people who could stand in as our witnesses and so my parents were going to be our witnesses.

We agreed with Bastiaan’s parents and my little sister that we would put them on speaker phone when it was time to do the ceremony so they would listen to us say our 'I do’s'. We did not want them to feel left out, but we also didn’t want them to travel two times, after all the June wedding was going to be our “official” wedding, and we rater had them there at that time!

So on this cold day we went to the Bluffton Courthouse and which was another SHOCKER where out of the courthouse and married for the very first time WITHIN 15 (if it lasted that long) MINUTES!

Before Bastiaan and I knew what was going on we were officially married! The only thing I really remember was the major saying those things that we only hear on TV or in the movies, now for real right in front of us which was pretty amazing! And naturally my new husband being very sweet and handsome!

After we got out off the courthouse we went to the Mexican restaurant to celebrate and got a great lunch, after that it was pretty much back to business as usual…

Soon after our “Court Wedding” Bastiaan and I picked the venue and the church and met with the priest, picked what we wanted to eat and who we would love to have at our special day and THAT was pretty much the extend of what he wanted and needed to do… (Being a boy and planning weddings apparently doesn’t go together…).

Me and a friend on the other hand decided on getting organized and we got a Marta Steward planning guide (haha, yep) and the next months we were extremely busy getting everything done and ready. In the beginning of April 2008 the first wedding invitations went to our 200 guests all over the world…

On April 15th I got a phone call.
‘Sorry, but you got cancer…’.
Within 5 minutes our whole world as we knew it changed.

Four weeks after getting “the news”, being true several surgeries and debating different types off chemo, we canceled the wedding...

Together we decided to fight this beast first, make sure we were healthy and yes then we would get married, for Real. But at that time we really did not know or realize how bad it was going to be...

Next Thursday I’ll tell you about us getting married for the second time, without us really realizing what exactly was happening!


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How to end up with my perfect guy...

There is no such thing as the perfect guy, right??? WRONG!

This past Monday I told you about our Bar in School (Bar 6-) and this cute guy that walked in while I was doing my weekly shift of bartending…. Yes, on a weeknight...

Bastiaan, was his name.

I figured this was a good, solid name and I quickly checked his hands (pretty important for a farmer) and checked his teeth (pretty important for a farm girl). They were both fine so we started chatting.

He just came back from Australia where he spent 8 months working at a cotton farm a sheep farm and doing some backpacking. That sounded like music to my ears because I already had traveled 3 times to The States, once to Canada, several times to Sicily (all by myself!) so I was pretty content with the fact that I found somebody who traveled (by himself) too and wasn't afraid to see the world.

We talked a hole in the night. Of course I was too busy talking to notice the time and D finally told me, “Hey Leo, shouldn’t you close the bar?” Oh yeah, close the bar... Bastiaan helped us close the bar (which included cleaning the whole place, clean the toilets and the outside so the next morning “normal” students could go to school) without finding left overs from the previous night and we did this same thing the next night and the next…

Although I told him the second night, “You have to know, when I grow up, I’m gonna live in The States!”, that didn’t scare him off. He just laughed and asked if maybe I wanted to come to Australia instead.

“NO WAY!” … Yes, yes determined stubborn is something that some people would label me with…

On our 4th night he walked me back to my car. We also had dorms on the school property and the first year they recommend you staying in the dorms (to get adjusted to the life, as in, don’t drink and drive but just crawl home...) but because I was already in my third year I “upgraded” my bottom into a real student house (in the suburbs of the town). Bastiaan had his room in the dorm (after all he was brand spanking new), but I had to drive to my house every evening. 

While walking "home"/to my car from the Bar listening to a Belgium band, Lasgo with their hit song Something, Bastiaan kissed me! And yes this was one of our OPENING SONGS at our wedding (our THIRD wedding, but I’ll tell you all about that later) and yes he is about 1.5 years younger but he also knew how to take charge... hehe…

The music was great, the weather was great, the evening went really well and I was in the best company a girl could wish for. When I got home I woke up all my roommates and told them we had kissed! Of course they were very happy for me and asked me what my plan was next. I hadn’t been in a serious relationship for a while and I told them, "we would see where it would lead us". To D I said, “I don’t know, he is awfully young, maybe it will last 3 months and then something else will come along for him”…

This year we are together 10 years with LOTS of ups and downs; as in: break up’s, get together’s, emigration to a different part of the world, battling cancer, starting a large dairy together with MY mom, dad and brother, leaving his family for me, leaving his friends for me and try to find new friends, putting his dreams away on a shelf so i can chase my crazy American Dream, going true a truly awful time financially and mentally with our dairy so soon after we started up, learning to love cows while actually he is a crop farmer and no, crop farmers are not dairy farmers..., hoping that one day he can become a daddy, that is if my body and mind  is ready to have little ones... and oh, did I mention BATTLING cancer with me…?

I really KNOW i found my perfect match. He’s quiet, I’m blabbing all the time, he’s understanding, I’m wondering AND worrying about everything everywhere, he thinks things true, I’m a spur of the moment kindda girl, he’s perfect , I’m far from….


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