Some more pictures

Hey all! Nothing too new here. We went to the annual Responsible Dog Ownership day. We've gone the past three years now. The girls brought home lots of goodies for the dogs- treats, toys and a new water bowl and dish. They always love going. Saoirse had to stay in the stroller the whole time as she thought her shoes were in the van, but didn't actually look, so she had no shoes! Ahhhhh four year olds. We are dog sitting a friends dog. She is very well behaved. The girls though have broken every rule that I have set in regards to the dog. So I told them that they couldn't do this again anytime soon. It would be good training for them if I was up to the task. But I've been too busy with just trying to do the normal stuff around here. I uploaded a bunch of pictures and a short little video of Jed running. Most of the pics are of him and Saoirse. They just happen to be the ones out on the porch with me at the time. The girls were inside doing school work. Although Moira has once again "lost" her school books. Can anyone tell me HOW that happens? I mean they are in the house SOMEWHERE! And I have the feeling she hasn't looked as hard as say if she lost a 10 dollar bill. Ok, on to some pictures. We have baths/showers to be had, dinner made, house picked up, and family worship, all in the next three and a half hours.

Have a blessed day.


My Montage 9/27/08

For Henley

Henely I responded to your comment in the "eventful day" post. I think that was the one. Just go down two posts and I think you'll find it!

Some this and thats

Good day to you all! Wow, it's been a few days since I last wrote! I've been busy....but I'm sure you all knew that :-) Mostly with the normal stuff. We had a busy weekend. We went to dinner at our friends house. Lots of fun and wonderful fellowship had by all. Then Saturday was mostly quiet. Trying to catch up with stuff here. We spent time outside. Jeremiah decided to tramp through the woods with the girls and Jed. In my mommy's mind I thought, surely that can not be a good idea......woods are fine....but not without bug spray. OH YEAH! Maybe you can all see where this is going. So as soon as we came in I did a tick check. I found nothing, nada, zilch. That can't be I thought, usually the ticks don't go into hiding till late October. So being cautious I decided to check them again before they went to bed. And its a very good thing I did. All the girls had about two to four ticks, except Moira. Poor, poor Moira. The child has been a tick magnet all season long. But even knowing that did not prepare me for the fact that I pulled off 20 ticks!!!! Twenty, people!! Granted they were the very, very, very small ones. Does anyone have a good idea of why God made those "things"? Gross. Ok, so onto Sunday. Sunday was interesting. We were in church, and I had heard there were visitors. I was out in the nursing room, and when I came in and saw the visitors I thought, "Hey, I know those people!" But for a second I didn't know why I knew them. Then it dawned on me that I have been reading their family blog for the past two years! Ha, ha. I introduced myself afterwards. I hope they didn't think it was too weird :-) Sunday was peaceful. Monday, just the usual. Throughout the weekend I have been reading a new blog. It is JUST what the Lord ordered :-) Really though my friend Angie told me about it. I started reading the archives first. Wow, it is so encouraging. It is all about the Lord. I have been learning so much, or have been convicted. She also takes the most beautiful photos. I was thinking, boy, what kind of camera does she have???? But she later posted about the camera and saying that it is the photographer and not the camera that matters most. The camera does help some, but then proceeded to show the pictures she got from a disposable camera. WOW! I had no idea you could get such nice pictures from a disposable!!! It really is the photographer and not the camera!!! Ok, so do check her blog out, I don't think you will be disappointed. Her story on her baby girl was what I believe the Lord led me to her blog for. I do believe between her story and a story I have read in Nancy Campbell's " The Power of Motherhood" have to do with the missing puzzle piece that I spoke of in regards to Jedidiah. More to come on that later as I work that out.

Ok, sorry for the not so exciting post. Sometimes life is like that...and I can be happy with that :-) Today we have the privilege of pulling all the cold weather clothing down from the attic and sorting it. Oh Joyful day! I hope you can hear the sarcasm in that! Besides that we have our normal cleaning, and schooling to do. I have to run and get some milk for Jed. And I need to really get to boxing up some more stuff.

Here is Daddy and Jedidiah. I don;t know why my pictures didn't load to the middle of my blog. I just love computers, really, I do ;-) Jed isn't too happy here. He just had his diaper changed and his g-tube cleaned, all of which means it is bed time. He was none too pleased to be heading off to bed. You can see his hand up to his throat. He is doing his "throat digging" as I call it. He has been doing a lot of that as of late. He keeps scratching at his throat. I can't wait till he can acutally talk and tell us WHY he does that. Does his throat hurt, itch, what?

Here Flannery decided to join in. More throat digging. Poor guy! I think I originally decided to take some pics because Jeremiah had Jed smiling, but by the time the camera came out he was unhappy.

Saoirse and Me. Hey, this is the first time I see some of me in her. She is such a girly girl! I love it.

Flannery decided to join Saoirse and me. If Flannery's adult teeth don't decide to come in soon she is going to be completely toothless up front!!! Poor thing. She'll be asking for a lot more than two teeth for Christmas!

The picture at the top of the post is right before they all came out of the woods on said tick day! For some reason Isa thought it would be a good idea to make bunny ears. Unfortunately Jeremiah was going for a "nice" family photo, and instead we have silly kiddos doing bunny ears. Ahhhh, that's life :-) Baby is crying, must go. Little man has the hiccups.

An eventful day

We had a very full day yesterday. It started as usual. I have been following the advice of a friend and instead of having the girls get out ALL the cleaning supplies to clean the bathroom everyday, they just use a baby wipe. Then at the end of the week they will use the cleaners. That has been working wonders! I can't believe their bathroom has been clean ALL week long. Miracles of miracles :-) So after our morning reading we went to our friends house to get some milk. The girls ran around chasing chickens, and Jedidiah got to sit on the riding mower. Fun for all. We kept the evenings activities a secret. Although they didn't stay secret all day, the cat was let out of the bag. But they didn't mind! Before leaving for the evening I had the girls do their school work and clean up the usual mess. And as a side note I am seriously, SERIOUSLY thinking of putting EVERYone of their things under lock and key. I am NOT joking! I spend all my day telling them to clean up. And I am not talking about them taking something out and me saying put it away, then they get the next thing out, etc. I am talking I am feeding the baby while they take everything they own out, then I have to ride them all day to get it put away, ALL day. ALL day EVERY day. Yeah, I'm a bit fed up with this system. I do have to say my putting up all the dishes has done wonders to keeping my kitchen in a decent order. So I am going to attack all their stuff next. OK, sorry to have gone off on that tangent. Anyhoo, I see that Moira isn't doing her school work so I tell her to go and get it done. This also is an ongoing everyday issue with her. So imagine my surprise when she tells me, I can't do my school because of the bees. Um, Yeah, Right!!!! Like that's right up there with the dog ate my homework. She and Isabella had been doing their school work out on the porch earlier and she had left hers outside. So seeing as how I only see these little baby type bees on our driveway I tell her she better go out there and get her work as I am not buying her excuse. Although I will say I was surprised to see a honey bee up there that morning when we went to our friends house. I took mental note at how odd that was. So she tells me again she can't because of the bees. I'm thinking she must be talking about two bees, and tell her they won't bother her if she doesn't bother them. Then I hear Isabella ......"GOLLY!!! Look at ALL those bees!!!!!" So I get up (I was nursing Jonah man) and come to the window and lo and behold we had a SWARM of bees on our hummingbird feeder. I had noticed that the hummingbird solution went faster than normal this week and I took a mental note to inspect it for leaks. Well apparently the bees found the leak before I did. I have never ever seen so many bees in one place in my life!! On TV yes, in real life NO!! My poor sister would have fainted dead away had she seen it!

Ok onto the rest of our day. We went into Raleigh for dinner and went to the girls favorite park. Fun, fun, fun. Then we went to the National Police Dog Field Trials. I was expecting to see some of the same things we have seen at other events over the years. I couldn't have been more wrong!!! They had the dogs demonstrate their agility and obedience to their handlers. Then they did some bite work. What total fun! They set up a few situations, like a cop searching a suspect, or the silliest being this cop dressed up as a women, and they had his dog in a baby stroller. He had this big purse and was walking along. Along comes a bad guy who steals his purse and the dog took after him faster than you can say, GO! It was really funny. Then the grand finale. We were a bit bummed that we had gotten there just a few minutes before they began as all the bleachers next to the agility equipment were taken. Well it turns out we had the best seats in the house for the grand finale. The announcer says that he was sorry that we would have to wait a few minutes for the program to continue as it seemed that a few of the officers were called away for some reason. The whole program was to demonstrate the dogs abilities and to have some fun. So he had already "tricked" us with a few other situations and we knew this was no exception. So a minute later he tells us that he had been informed that the officers were called away to a chase. Well no sooner than he says that I see a helicopter not far away. I thought, NO WAY they have a copter coming in here! But then we hear a bunch of police car sirens. They get louder and louder. In comes a car onto the track (we were at a high school football/track field) being "chased" by the police. So our attention was averted to the scene in front of us, when out of the corner I see and hear something....the helicopter!!! OH! If you could have all seen Jedidiah's look on his face!!!PRICELESS. But the poor little guy was not only shocked in amazement but fear as well. He was actually shaking! The helicopter landed about 100 feet away from us! Our bleacher was the closest! Jedidiah's eyes just stayed bugged out for the longest time. Afterwards Jeremiah took him up to it but he wouldn't touch it! Although as we were leaving he did wave goodbye to the helicopter. We got home at their bedtime and it was nighty night for all.

We have another long evening tonight as we were invited over to some friends house for dinner. They live a ways off (almost an hour). So we'll be home late again. We are planning for next week to be a bit more on the quiet side. Poor Jonah breaks down at 7 pm. He is ready for bed at that time and makes no bones about telling EVERYONE in a miles radius about it!! :-) I am going to go now to make a montage of all our pictures I took today (chickens, park, police dogs....). I hope everyone has a blessed day!

My Montage 9/19/08

My scrapblog

I've been working bits and pieces on more scrap pages. I know that the player does not work here so I was able to get a URL that I will put up over in my links sidebar. Then if I have any significant updates I will mention it and you can then click on the link to go to the site itself and page through the scrap book. Right now we have three books, on of which is not published. You can choose to have your book accessible to the public or not. So try to see if you can view our pages now by going to my scrapblog.

A neat homeschool site

I have been laying low here. Not that I have been inactive, just quiet online. I have been doing more praying and more cleaning/organizing. On top of that I and a few others have been hit by the cold that is going around. I have really, really been seeking the Lord in regards to the children and my priorities. I find that necessary, especially when I have what seems to be a gazillion ideas going through my head. Right now I have narrowed my priorities in what I need to be teaching them. But for some reason other things, like debt reduction, have been heavy on my mind. I have the tendency to be a bit radically in my thoughts. I can't help it as it has been 6 years when we were in financial dire straights. Although we are not in straights right now, we are definitely knee deep! And I have crazy, irrational ideas, no really I do! So here is my "get out of debt as quickly as possible plan" (and don't say I didn't warn ya!). So we find some really great friend who will rent us a smidge of their land, while we rent out our house. We build a straw bale one room home. Have a wood burning stove, a solar device to run a small fridge, Jed's feeding pump, and maybe a fan. Our vehicles are paid for, so we would just make is so I don't go anywhere but once a month (outside of family church activities). We have a huge garden, learn to can and maybe utilize space in someones garage for a freezer to freeze some harvest. The draw backs....um, well I'm sure there are too many to count! Ha ha ha! I mean life with no Internet? I suppose I would use my once a month outing to go to the library to use the Internet there. Hey, it would give us a lot more mula (not sure how they spell that) to put towards our debt. I know Jeremiah would like to start taking short term missions trips. There are a lot of things that I would like to see the girls be able to do, but our past financial mistakes continue to haunt us. Although our most recent issues are from Jedidiah's health problems. But hey, how hard could it be to keep one, ONE, room clean? Ok, we doooooo have to factor in 6 kids to the equation, but I mean, really now, how hard could it be to keep one room clean?

Ok, enough of my craziness. I am sure if you didn't think I was batty before, you do now!!!! I wanted to share with you this really wonderful homeschooling site. It is Massive! I mean think of a topic and they have a group devoted to it! You must check it out. Even seasoned homeschoolers would have something there that would interest them. Almost every state is represented there as well, with their own group. It's called The Homeschool Lounge. A wonderful gathering on women. Check them out.

We received our shipment

Our shipment of supplements for Jedidiah came in yesterday! I took a picture of our goodies:





I figured out what I want to give when. The Bee Immune, Rosehip C and the Super Kids vitamins I give in the AM. I used the Bee Immune this morning and it does NOT dissolve easily in his formula. Which just means more work for me :-P So I will have to try to crush it up a bit more in a little water, then put it through his medicine port, that way it won't clog the workings of his pump. Then in the evening I give him the Bee Strong and the cod liver oil. The Berrywell is for when/if he starts coming down with something to head it off at the start! Speaking of sick, little Jonah man has his first cold. Not too odd seeing as how I had been praying more this week. It never, NEVER fails that when I really open up to the Lord, asking Him to change my heart, EVERY, EVERY single time within 72 hours one of my children (or many of them) get sick. I. MEAN. EVERY. TIME. There has never been an exception to that. I suppose I was a bit perplexed by it as I had assumed it would have been one of the older children, not the wee babe. Weird thing is that two years ago, this week in September Jedidiah got his first cold and fever, he was 10 weeks old at the time. Sort of feels like the Twilight Zone....hee, hee.

We had intentions of going to a barbecue today. But with wee babe sick and with a certain group of four girls who wouldn't get to cleaning up....well....we decided to stay put. I have been trying to get the house in order, as per the post "Take a permanent vacation" over at Living Sacrifice. This idea that I am going with will all play a part in my first give a way. Details to follow in a week or so. You will have to bare with me as I try to get to it. There are a lot of things I am trying to deal with here. I am sure most of you understand :-)

Here is a cute picture of the eldest two girlies.



Moira has decided to grow her bangs out now. Isabella's bangs finally stay behind her ears, so they are chin length. I noticed Moira's bangs getting a bit long and asked if she wanted me to cut them, but she said no. Thankfully we know how to make those neat-o headbands. They will help in the growing out process. Ok, I am off to do a few more things around here. We are hoping to have a bit of family fun time later this evening.

if you are having problems....

viewing the scrap book pages just click on "life with full hands" in the black box. THat will take you to my scrap page. The first two pages I used a template. The last one with Saoirse i did myself using their backgrounds and stickers. Jeremiah prefers the montages and was afraid I wouldn't be doing any more of them. But that will not be the case. I prefer all the color!!! But I love the montages with the motion and music. Let me know if any of you try some scrapping of your own.

Summer fun

Boys

How totally neat!!!!

Oh wow!! Anyone who loves scrap booking, or wants to love it but never had the time, or the know how you HAVE to check out this site!!! Wayyyyyy coooooollll! Shannon shared it with us over on her blog. I am in love :-) I had tried other digital scrap booking tools in the past but they were always too complicated. So go to Scrapblog.com and click on the explore button. Scroll a little down the page and you will see some "crafty episodes" explaining how things work. It is EASY! If I am not getting all my work done here at home I am going to blame Shannon for luring me into a new addiction. (I am teasing!) So go, have fun!

How we feed Jed and another montage

This will be a different sort of post. This is a "how-to" of sorts. Not the kind of info you want to find yourself in need of though. Anyways this is how we feed Jed. There may be images that may make one queasy, if plastic tubing in/out of a body makes one queasy that is. If not, please continue. At the bottom (at least that is where I am hoping it loads up to) you will find some non-queasy pictures :-) I made another montage of our outside time yesterday, of Jonah and of the porch play time that the kiddos had today. They made a nice big mess.....err I mean tent out there.





This is what goes into Jedidiah's new homemade formula. From left to right...we have the first three bottles being the different oils I put in seperately through his medicine port. The oils seperate from the rest of the formula so they have to be given seperately. I only use one of the at each of his feeding. The AM I use coconut oil, the lunch time feed I give hemp oil, and the PM I give him flax seed oil. The other ingredients are liquid magnesium/calcium, liquid vitamins, blackstrap molasses, rice milk, wheat germ oil, and goats milk.

Here is the formula made up. I make two bottles at a time. It only takes a moment longer than making one bottle. And he goes through it too quickly.

Here is his feeding pump. The bag we put the formula in is hanging from the top. The blue box is where we set the timing and volume.

Here I am priming the pump. You have to get the formula from the bag down to the opening of the tubing, otherwise your poor kiddo will be filled with a lot of air!

Here I am filling the feeding bag. He currently gets 300mls.

Here is Jed sitting in his seat, ready to be hooked up. He was eating some yogurt amd apple sauce.



This is his g-tube. The white stuff you see on his shirt and the skin around his tube is the Desitin diaper cream. The cream helps with the irritation from any leakage.

Now we hook up the tubing from the pump to his g-tube.

Next we put the oil in. Jedidiah has taken to helping me push it in.

Last, we push the run button to start the feeding. When he is done we have to unhook him and then clean out the bag and tubing.

Make video montages at www.OneTrueMedia.com

Our Sunday Afternoon

It was a rough start to our day today. Jonah decided to wake up EVERY one and a half hours all last night! He's been sleeping a 6 to 7 hour stretch, then goes back to bed until 5 or 5:30, then gets up for the day at 7 or 7:30. Not last night! I am really hoping that tonight he will be back to his normal schedule. We had a wonderful Sunday morning with our brothers and sisters in Christ. We couldn't stay too long afterwards for fellowship as Jeremiah had to meet someone this afternoon. He had to take our ferret to meet its new owner :-( With three people being allergic to him it was a bit too much. He was the absolutely most sweetest ferret I ever met. He never bit! He was so much fun to watch romp around. The girls were sad to see him go. He is going to a great home. He instantly fell in love with his new owner (maybe it was the ferret smell, as she already has two ferrets). He should be happy to have some new playmates.

Our afternoon consisted of some outside time. Jedidiah got to watch our neighbor "scrape" our road with his small tractor. A big hit for the little man. Jedidiah hit 21 pounds!! We are very happy, and very excited to see this great gain in weight. Please pray that it keeps up! We were supposed to have baked potatoes for dinner. Let's just say that there is a reason we generally do not buy produce at Walmart. We just bought the potatoes and they were bad already. Ugh! So I threw together a very easy peasy dinner. We had baked beans, corn bread and left over salad. Then the girls went off to bible study with Jeremiah. As they were getting into the van we heard the dogs freaking out. At first I thought another animal had gotten in the back fencing with them. Isabella was about to go check it out, I yelled for her not to as I didn't want her to get in between our dogs and another animal. She was about to turn back to the van when she went wide eyed and started pointing to the sky say, "Oh, my goodness!!! Look!! Look!!" I was almost afraid to look, ha,ha. Woah! What a sight, a big red hot air balloon that was just above the trees!!! Because of the heavy foliage I couldn't see the person in the basket, but they were close enough to have seen them!! They started pumping more hot air into the balloon and rose up higher. I was able to get a picture of it when it came to the back of the house. Although the picture really doesn't show how close it was to us. By the time I had taken the picture they rose considerably higher than when we first saw them. It was a real treat to see. Everyone thought is was really neat. So enjoy the pictures of our afternoon.

Make video montages at www.OneTrueMedia.com

Just stopping in

Just wanted to send a note out to say that Isabella has a new post...or two on her blog. One is about our dog, which she is asking prayer for, so please do check it out (and if you feel led to pray, please leave her a little note). She also posted about the treasure hunt.

Other than that, not much is new here. I am thinking of doing a give-a-way.....maybe :-) I'll obviously let you all know when I do. I need to think of how I want to set it up. I already know what I'll give away.

Have a great day!

Treasure Hunt

To those who were wondering, yes, this was a treasure hunt :-) My computer's internet connection went out before I could write captions! We had a good day yesterday. A lot of cleaning was done, although you can't tell! Isabella put together a picnic lunch and we went to their favorite park. We ate, and then took the dogs over to the dog park. Which happens to not be my favorite place :-) Off to home to get a meal sent to a family in church. Then we ate ourselves. My girls love to do treasure hunts. Most of our hunts are very simple. Just some written notes they have to figure out. The treasure is simple too. What ever snacky food we have on hand, like marshmallows, graham crackers or the like. But yesterdays hunt took the cake. I made up a few puzzles for them to do. And their treasure was much more substantial. Come along with us on our hunt!



The girls were armed with their enthusiasm and a flashlight. It was late out, past their bed time by the time I was done with the clues. It didn't help that the baby wouldn't settle down to sleep. But alas, the fun was about to begin. Jeremiah gave them their first clue. Which sent them to the microwave. It took them a while to figure out his clue!

Here is their first puzzle to solve. And it was a PUZZLE. This led them here:

The next clue was under Flannery's pillow (on the top bunk). And for those people who notice such things, please note that the beds have sheets on them :-) This clue was met by mixed emotions. Ha, ha. Being Labor day we had the day off of school....sort of. This clue had to be solved by finding the answers to the addition, subtraction and multiplication problems. Each number stood for a letter. Then they were able to read the clue. Hey have fun and count it as school ;-)
The flash was a bit too bright for the white paper. If you are able to click on the picture to make it bigger you can see their math work.


The next clue was in the dryer. It sent them to the computer to find this jibberish. Some of the clues had the tools that they would need for their next clue. So the clue in the dryer had this little red plastic square with it. The girls were most perplexed. More so when they saw this red squibbly mess of a clue.

With a little prompting they were able to use the square as it was intended. I had used a light blue colored pencil to write the message. Then we used a red colored pencil to make squibbles all over the letters to block out the message. But by placing a translucent red square over it they were able to read the message! Totally cool! This message sent them to Jed's tractor.

Saoirse got to open this one. This was the first clue to send them outside in the dark! Saoirse didn't care for the night time hunt scene. So she stayed inside, only venturing out for a moment.

Ahh, they found it under the cat food bowl. It is hard to see these puzzles, but this is a word puzzle they had to solve to find the next clue. The next clue led them to....

....dog house! Hey, watch out, you better behave or you'll be sleeping in it :-) Just joking. They got the next clue which was in their dad's truck. But hey, check out what the dog house clue contained....

....some handy dandy secret decoders!! Ohhh, aren't you jealous? Printed them from online.

Here are the girls using their handy dandy secret decoders. Too bad mommy wasn't as smart as the decoders as I messed up the messages a bit. Not too bad, but a pretty silly mistake on my part. I broke the message up in half so that the girls could work in teams. That way each girl was involved in the process. We do have problems of certain older children taking over. So I made sure each puzzle clue had something they could all do. This clue sent them to their last clue destination. It was outside on the big rock. I don't have any fancy pictures of that, so just use your imagination. The rock clue led them to the treasure....at last!

Here they are "digging" out the treasure. See, there is the fussy, fussy baby who didn't want to go to sleep.

And here they are holding up their loot. A truck book for Jed (who was sleeping as it was waaaayyyy past his bed time). Two reading books for the olders to read to the youngers or for our learning reader to start doing some more reading. And a fancy dancy computer thingie to make up house plans. I know that last one sounds odd, but Isabella is totally into making up house and barn plans. Arranging the furniture and stalls and water spigots and all sorts of things. She made this HUGE plan that she taped to the wall. It was amazing to say the least. So I am sure she will be spending lots of time with this!

So there you have it, our treasure hunt. Today will be more cleaning. I really don't know how this happens...the mess that is. The baby is now sleeping so I am going to tackle my kitchen. The girls will do school and then maybe we'll go outside later. I am really, really, REALLY seriously thinking of paring down like in the post I linked you all to the other day. I am sure my lack of being able to stay on top of things does have something to do with having a wee babe. But still, I really can't stand how quick things spiral into chaos over here. So I may pull a few boxes down and just start pitching things in. I do have the advantage of putting things up in the unfinished space to deal with later, which is what I really want to do for now. Get this STUFF up there out of our way! Then deal with it all later when we have control of things.

By the way, Moira would like you all to stop by her blog to check out her new post :-)