Eight Weeks Without a Blog Post: What Happened When Idaho Finally Delivered

I went eight weeks without posting to my blog.

For a blogger, that's a long silence. And when I finally sat down to write, the explanation was simple: we'd been too busy enjoying life to document it.

Idaho had finally delivered. Everything we'd been building toward, everything we'd studied and prepared for and moved our family 750 miles to find — it was happening. And it was better than I'd imagined.

Let me tell you what that summer actually looked like.

Sis at 18: The Idaho Transformation

Our oldest daughter — I called her Sis on the blog — turned 18 that August, and the person she had become in our first year and a half in Idaho was someone I genuinely could not have predicted.

She was a cheerleader for her high school. She was finishing up her first 4-H project — a pig named Hercules that she'd raised from a piglet in May. She'd been elected Honor Queen of her Job's Daughters Bethel. She was in the school choir and drama club. She had her first father-approved boyfriend.

And on her 18th birthday, before the celebrations, she did two acts of service. From 8 to 10am she served at the LDS temple. From 10 to noon she cleaned the fairgrounds with her 4-H club.

I wrote #ProudDad in my blog and meant every character of it.

This is what Idaho did for my kids. Not Idaho specifically — the community, the values, the 4-H program, the church connections, the small-town environment where people know each other and hold each other accountable in the best possible way. The move gave my daughter an environment where who she was becoming had room to become visible.

Macky's 4-H Season and the Short Story

Our next daughter — Macky — was finishing her own 4-H swine project that summer. She was also discovering that she had a gift for throwing discus and shot put. And she'd submitted a short story to Deseret Publishing.

They turned it down. She tweaked the book and kept going.

That's what I want you to hear in that sentence: she kept going. A teenager who gets a rejection from a publisher and revises and resubmits is a teenager who is building something. Idaho and the environment we'd created there gave her the space and the stability to try.

The Homestead That Summer

Around 27 chickens at that point — we'd lost five to Lucky in one of those homestead incidents that teaches you to be more careful — and the 4-H pigs were growing toward fair weight.

The garden was producing. The orchard trees we'd planted in March were establishing their roots. The canal was maintained. The property was functioning the way we'd always imagined a property could function.

I was too busy living it to write about it. That's a good problem to have.

What "Idaho Finally Delivered" Actually Means

I want to explain what I meant when I wrote that Idaho had turned out to be everything we'd been looking for in an American Redoubt community.

I didn't mean that everything was perfect or easy. The first year had been hard in real ways. We'd made expensive mistakes. We'd had setbacks.

I meant that the community was what we'd hoped for. The people around us — at church, at school, at 4-H, at the fairgrounds — shared our values and showed up for each other. The land was doing what Idaho land does when you show up for it. And my kids were becoming the people I'd hoped they'd become, in an environment that made it possible.

That's what southern Idaho delivers when you do the work to find it and commit to it.

📞 Dr. Ron Jones | 208-712-8386 — I found what I was looking for in Magic Valley. Let me help your family find it too.

This post reflects Dr. Ron Jones' personal account of his family's first full summer on their Filer, Idaho homestead, 2015.

Dr. Ron Jones | Rim & River Real Estate | rimandriver.com | 208-712-8386