Continuing

It's been 7 years since I really updated this but I am back to it. We got out of active duty Marine Corps, moved to California, moved to Sweden, and are currently back in the US. We have purchased a 26-acre lot in Montana off grid using solar, wind, and a generator when we need it. We got it to raise our boys and Rowe. Yes, we had a good baby girl.

I have also finished the academic portion of a marriage and family therapy masters degree. What is left is to accrue clinical hours and obtain licensure. That is ongoing.

But there is something people have been asking Janet and me for some time: How do we raise such wild, helpful, resilient, natural kids? As I understand it, some kids float about like they have a lobotomy, or are so soft that the slightest mishap distresses them to pieces. 

Our kids are physically hard, pretty nice, helpful like a pants full of flaming crap (as I suppose most kids are), but unfiltered when it comes to their wild impulses. And people like it. They wash dishes, dig ditches, split firewood, and aim to please the tribe.

We are building a house, using primarily Ryobi tools, which I have been impressed with so far!

Social Democracy

The Freeman family is back in the US as of April 27 or so.  Swedish Social Services made a hard push to seize our kids. Atlas told stories in school about his super awesome Marine Corps Dad and the socialists within social services determined that having a deployed parent created an "unstable home". They came to his school with police and took him an hour away and interrogated him (in their words) as to his home life. I got a call from the police that they were going to charge me with child endangerment and neglect but were unclear why but indicated it was due to my deployments and the guns I had around the kids back in the US. We met with Swedish Social Services that day and explained everything about my background, degrees, job with Amazon, and where we are now. They told us that they would "allow our children to come home.... today". Janet and I both got the sense they were up to something.  

Janet had made some friends in town and when she met them, they saw she was afraid and upset. They inquired and she explained what was going on. They happened to work in foster care and they both freaked out and told us that because of how the social services had snatched Atlas up and the things they said, we needed to get out of the country NOW. 

That was a Friday. We bought tickets from Stockholm to Copenhagen and flights from there so we could avoid being captured by the Swedes (they have a history of stopping planes in Arlanda (Stockholm). We flew out and Monday morning my phone blew up with Swedish Social Services demanding to know why our kids were not in school, They had gone to grab our kids.  They demanded we come in and see them and I told them "We're in America, baby. We are not coming back!"
When we left, we lost everything we owned. Our landlord messaged us and warned us to stay away because state authorities were knocking doors and interviewing our friends to find out where we were.

In any case, we bought some land in Montana and are rebuilding from scratch. We did really well saving our money (In US accounts, because Sweden taxed me at 90%) and those financial resources are what allowed us to flee.

Don't take your freedoms for granted. I have seen democratic socialism first hand and it takes much more than it claims to give.