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Hometown Living At Its Best 39 A day at the daycare for these kids might include creating crafts, learning to make snacks, going on a picnic or feeding the animals. Little Folks Farm and Childcare has a mission to incorporate a hands-on outdoor learning experience with their daily activities. in, I took my husband to the ER. It was a Sunday.” For two years, Lisa’s husband, Jeff Morgan, had been seeing a doctor with abdominal pain. He’d undergone an endoscopy and a colonoscopy a year and half earlier, and neither one revealed a source for his pain. But that night in the ER, a CT scan showed a large cancerous mass in his stomach. Jeff was admitted to the hospital that evening, and 34 days later, he was gone at the age of 47. “We had been married for 17 years. Our daughter, Amery was 16, and Ashlynn was 15. It hit us all like a train wreck.” The tragedy became something from which Lisa could not recover. She filled her days with work and sleep. Her daughter Amery realized her mother had fallen into a dark depression and without intervention, might never recover. “My daughter thought that it might help if I connected with some of my old friends from high school,” said Lisa. Amery created a Facebook account for her mother to help her search for her former classmates, which is how she met Mark. “I was putting in names of people who had been in the band with me, and Mark Williams from Toombs County came up,” said Lisa. “I don’t know how it happened. I was just getting used to how Facebook worked, and somehow ‘poked’ him. I didn’t even realize what I’d done.” “My sister got me on Facebook,” said Mark. “I didn’t know what it meant either, but figured, what could it hurt?” and he poked her back. The accidental poke turned into a conversation. After a while, the two began to talk on the phone, and Mark asked if they could meet. “I was scared to death,” said Lisa, “so I took Ashlynn with me. We agreed to meet at the Pizza Hut in Alma. That was halfway between us both.” At first, Lisa let Ashlynn do the talking, and she grilled him with questions. After Mark passed Ashlynn’s interrogation, a friendship slowly turned into a romance. “When we started talking about marriage,” said Lisa, “he asked me, ‘What do we do? You just built a house and have family and a business in Waycross. My place has been in my family for over a hundred years.’” Lisa decided to leave Waycross and sold her daycare to her brother and sister-inlaw. She and Mark married in December 2011. About a year later, “We were in my workshop,” said Mark, “and Lisa said, ‘You know, this would be about the right size for a daycare.’” Before they married, Lisa shared with Mark that her “dream daycare” would be a place where she could integrate learning with nature. Until that moment, neither had imagined that the 48 acres that had been in Mark’s family since 1898 might just be the opportunity for the fulfillment of that dream with its pear trees, fig trees,


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