Life With Full Hands

Changing Hearts Series #3 and #4

2012-02-11T10:37:00.000-08:00

I'm combining videos 3 and 4 today as I don't have a lot to say on video #3. Video 3 is titled, "Knowing When to Let Go". As the title suggests, it's to know when you need to let the child go, to suffer the full consequences of their sin. This is more for the family with an older child who is set on moving out. Although it does apply to letting a child bear the full brunt of their consequences from wrong or sinful decisions/actions. It was made clear that the letting go was only AFTER EVERYTHING was done to turn the child's heart. For that reason alone there isn't a lot I took away, only because we are no where near needing to think of letting go. My energies and focus need to be on what we need to do to help change our childrens' hearts.

Video 4, " Parenting with a Diligent Hand", proved to be much more applicable than the previous video. It had four points to it:
1. Start Early
2. Diligently work to teach a child good habits
3. Determine the path FOR the child
4. Do NOT let the child get off the right path for any reason

I want to focus on point three, determining the path for the child. I think, for us, this is one area that we had really messed up in. Our weakest area over all is our anger, then I would say our lack of diligence, but this point number 3 comes pretty close to third spot for our going wayward. We had already figured out, long ago, that we needed to determine the path for our children. By path, he is talking about their spiritual path foremost. But along with that are the other areas of life like music, friends, etc. that have a huge influence on your child's life. He summed up where we went wrong when he shared: It is not a matter of restraining the child, but *actively* putting them on the right path. We were pretty much pros at restraining our children (at least when we were not violating weak point number two, lack of diligence). But I can assure you that stopping at restraining your child will only cause bitterness and resentment in their hearts. I had come up with this imagery when I meditated on this idea of 'restraining' verses 'actively putting'...

Imagine a path cut through the woods. On either side of the path are thick woods, very hard to navigate and filled with dangers (wild animals, snakes, poison ivy, etc,). Determined to be a good parent you go along putting up barricades along the path. You work so hard on the barricades that you have no energy to enjoy your children, and often become angry when your work is questioned. You become even more upset when, due to their nature, you find your child trying to scale the barricades to see what's on the other side! How dare they! So you resolve to make the barricades higher and thicker as you go along. Meanwhile, your children only see these tall, thick, concrete barricades. You have neglected to tend to the path itself, which is now over grown with weeds, or maybe in the sunny areas it has turned all dusty and dry. Regardless, there isn't much *on* the path, and so your children make bolder attempts to scale the barricades. This is where Jeremiah and I found ourselves. A sad state for all involved. And if you have read the Michael Pearl article, Jumping Ship, you can see it has the same concept. Eventually they will jump the barricades, or the ship. I think he did a better job at an analogy, but this happened to be the imagery that came to me as I meditated on this concept.

If you look back in my Big Changes posts you will see that to remedy this situation we had to stop trying to build the barricades. We decided first of all, that the path was so over grown, that we were not even sure where we were going. After making up our goals, we went to work on clearing the path of any unusable material (my decluttering post). And then we focused on putting wonderful things on our path. Cultivating what was there that was good, the flowers and beauty of the woodland actually on our path. We are also making sure that our pathway crosses over other people's pathways. In doing so we evaluate how long we should stay, or if we will return. This pulls our children's attention to our path, and off of the deep dark woods. They can see that we are working towards their future, which includes mingling with other path-goers. Our children are now enjoying themselves, and so are we!

Dr. Davis' last point ties in here, make sure they do not go off the path for any reason. Diligence is a must. But a heavy hand will not keep your children on the path. The 'carrot' of the world is all too enticing for the alternative to be your stern voice, heavy hand, and lack of joy.

Just the other day, while we were doing our daily devotional during school time the older girls started to ask questions and just wanted to talk about some spiritual and family value issues! Not to mention that they both asked for forgiveness on things I said nothing about!! This has never happened before! Ever. Like, not even once. I can assure you this isn't because we are amazing parents, Oh, NO, not even close, BUT this is the evidence that God's ways do work. We continue to praise Him for the work he is doing, and pray for it to continue. We still have our bad days, mostly brought on by all the sickness. We are all realizing that we need to continue to work hard on cultivating the good things, they don't seem to grow on their own accord very well.

Changing Hearts Series #2

2012-02-08T05:44:00.000-08:00

The second dvd in the series is called, "Changing the Heart of a Rebel". This is the core dvd, that you are supposed to watch multiple times and used as a reference when needed. It contains the 14 steps to change the heart of a rebel and it was made clear that you need to do ALL 14 steps. You can not pick and choose. I have to say, from experience, he is absolutely right. We were living some of the steps as outlined in the series, but we were just going down hill month after month.

I think the biggest idea to take away from this dvd was the fact that anger kills a relationship. I am not talking about someone who lives in anger on a daily basis either. If you only have occasional outbursts you are in the same danger of losing your children. There are things in life that you know you can not do...like murder, or steal. The bottom line is you need to add 'anger' to the list of absolute no-no's. You just DON'T do it. Period. At all. Even a little bit. I think you get the idea :-) To take it even further I have listened to one of his sermons on getting rid of the *spirit* of anger. Even if you keep an even tone, but have anger in your eyes it will be harmful. One thing our children are very good at is "reading" us. Kind of scary actually. This just brings me to my knees with the magnitude of it all.

A great lesson can be learned from how David dealt with Absalom, which I think can be found in first or second Kings. David lost Absalom's heart. The scriptures then show how Absalom won over the men of Israel and led a rebellion. Those same actions can be used to win over you child. They are:
1. Listen
2. Say nice things
3. Touch

By listening he wasn't just talking about hearing what your child has to say, but to understand what your child is saying. If it is important to your child, it needs to be important to you. I have definitely seen this to be true. Our children know when we are just giving an ear, but not *really* listening to their heart. There are things that I really don't deem all too important in the scheme of things, but my children see those same things as almost life giving! That's an extreme, but I hope you see what I mean. I will give a real example. I have a daughter who loves animals. Dogs in particular. Me? Not so much. Not much at all really. To me, our dogs are just noisy, stinky, dollar draining mutts. I seriously am hoping they are earning their keep by keeping predators away! If I didn't have that hope I would have seriously gotten rid of them long ago. But my daughter doesn't see them that way. I realized a few months ago that my disdain of them was causing an issue with my relationship with my daughter. Not because we can't hold different views, but because whenever she wanted to talk about them I was shooting down her ideas/feelings about the dogs. I was always threatening to give them away. This just led my daughter to feel like it was me against her, we were always at odds. I've made it a point to stop complaining about the dogs (I know I haven't been perfect in this, but it has been a purposeful goal of mine). This daughter also wants to have her own dog sitting service, or dog kennel one day. So, instead of saying things like, "Well, you can do that whenever you want when you have your own house..." I have instead encouraged her to learn all she can with books, and then 'practice' on our dogs. Jeremiah has also told her we would make a small kennel in the back for her to try her hand a it. I can't tell you how much this alone has changed things. Taking care of animals in not a sin, so there isn't any reason why we should deny her this desire. There are many things she can learn from it as well. But my own disdain for the creatures was ruining our relationship. I assure you that wasn't the only issue we were having, but this was a big one. Just like in our efforts to expand our garden this year. It was our girls' desire to grow more things. They want to save up food, and they want to try their hand at having a little farm market stand to sell any extras. We kept shooting them down with that idea. Why? I don't even remember now. But why shouldn't they give it a try? Yes, it will cost us some money, and some time, but it is SAVING our relationship.

The 'say nice things' point can be hard to do when you find yourself in a pit with your children. It's a vicious catch 22. I have had to be very mindful of finding and picking out good things to say to my children. Not that I never said good things about them to them, but it was more common than not that I didn't. When you factor in that every time you say something negative, you need to say 10 good things to make up for it...well we were certainly in the negative. By praising the even the smallest things we have seen big improvements. Now I am trying to get them to see that they need to think about praising their siblings. This will take constant encouragement and training, but I'm working on it

The last point was touch. You need to be hugging, giving a pat on the back, stroking their hair, etc, even for your teens. It is easy for me to love on my littles. But as they got bigger, there was less cuddling going on. I really had to pray on how to implement this. Yes, silly I know, but it just seemed odd to go up and start hugging my 14 year old when it wasn't the norm. But God is *great* and not two or three days after praying all of my children started to want to sit next to me, or hug me, or put their head on my lap, or give me a kiss, or...well you get the idea. I have even my big kids holding my hand when we are out and about. This has been easy to reciprocate and to initiate now that it has become more common. It really has been amazing.

I know that some of these things can seem so overwhelming. I think I started praying in earnest that we would reach our childrens's hearts this past summer. The very next day I broke my knee. From there it seemed just more and more bad things kept piling on top of us. But I can look at those things and realize that they helped to set us up to seek Him more. When a bunch of our bad habits just got 10 times worse with me being layed up, it was a wake up moment. This led us to start questioning what we were doing. We kept living life the same way, but expecting a different result. It proved time to change the way we were living!

Pay it forward 2012

2012-02-06T18:48:00.000-08:00

What a neat idea! I visited a newer to me blog tonight, and she had what is called:
Hand-Made Pay It Forward! Pass It On! Don't Pass It Up!!

You know I like to be crafty, even if they are small trifles :-) I'm not one for deadlines, I keep threatening my kids that they won't be allowed to enter any more homeschooling functions because I hate making sure they are on target for the deadline. I know, pretty silly. But, having a deadline this far out makes it seem very doable. I can't promise anyone who signs up an amazing item, but I will make sure to send something! If you are one of the top five commentors please email me your physical mailing addy to my email:
kerri.junk at yahoo dot com. Yes, there is a "dot" between "kerri" and "junk". Here are the rules for playing:

Two rules:

1. I promise to make something and send it (before the end of 2012) to the first five people who comment on this post.

2. If you are one of the first five, you must promise to re-post the rules on your blog (or even Facbook) and send something to the first five people who comment on your post. The item must be hand made by you and the recipient must receive the gift before the end of 2012. The item may be as simple or as complicated as you would like. You just have to promise to follow through.

I'm sharing this on Simple Lives Thursday

A new series

2012-02-06T07:44:00.000-08:00

I thought about starting a new series. I mentioned in my last "Big Changes" post about buying a set of DVD's. I thought I would talk more about them. The content is something I want to remember, and writing about it will help with that. Writing is a written form of narration. See, even the big folk around here do "school" :-) Due to the nature of the content I can't write about everything the DVD's have to say, but I thought I would pick out one or two points to share with you. We are trying to watch one dvd a day. There are 49 dvd's and cd's...just in the first half of the series!! I suppose that will give me a lot to share :-) The second half has 42 or 43 dvd's and cd's as well.

The dvd series that I am talking about is the S.M. Davis' "Help for Rebels". It is important to note that I am only going to share small pieces, just one or two points from each dvd. He makes it very clear that you can not take a few points to try out. You have to do all of them to change a rebel around. Hopefully you do not have a rebel that needs turning around! We do. Thankfully we've seen great changes in the time we've made the changes that we have. We have currently watched the first 4 dvd's and I can say that we have a lot more work ahead of us. That work will mostly be needed from Jeremiah and myself. Davis explains that changing the heart of a rebel is the easy part, it's changing the parents (which is a must) that's the hard part. Even the worst of rebels can be changed in a matter or 2 weeks time! But parents, with their deep seated bad habits and sins, well....that takes longer.

The first dvd was an introduction to the whole series. The biggest idea to take away from it was the question, "Are you willing to pay the price?". Are we willing to do *what ever* it takes to win back the hearts of our children. Before we started these videos we were already changing things around in our family so that we could focus on reaching our children's hearts.

I look forward to sharing what I am learning as we go along. This most certainly will be a process. Learning, tweaking, learning, making mistakes, tweaking...and above all PERSEVERING!

Making yogurt

2012-02-05T10:33:00.000-08:00

There are a ton of tutorials online for how to make yogurt. So this will be nothing new. As a matter of fact my latest yogurt making inspiration came from HERE (btw, you just have to love her blog title!). So basically you won't find anything new here :-) I will tell you how I *was* making yogurt, and have a wee tutorial on how I make it now...although the above link is much more in-depth, with price comparisons as well.

In the past I had tried to cooking on the stove top and cooler method. It just wasn't working out...especially since I was told you had to put a heating pad in there to keep it at the proper temperature. If you have a heating pad then you know it will automatically shut off in about an hour or so. Trying to remember to turn it back on was stressing me out. Hey, two years ago things were a wee bit stressful (Jed was still tube fed), so it didn't take much to stress me out. Oh...wait...it still doesn't! Oh well! Let's move on, shall we?

So my currently past method was the crock pot method. Stress free. I like that. Our yogurt, however, was on the runny side. Kind of like buttermilk. I had adjusted the time to accommodate using one gallon of milk, instead of the 1/2 gallon used in the written recipe. I figured it was time to buy a thermometer to see what temperature my milk was getting to in the crock pot. You are supposed to heat it on the low setting for 2.5 hours. Mine took at least 5 to 6 hours to get to the 180. You then are supposed to turn off the heat and let the milk cool for 3 hours. Again, this took another 5 hours to accomplish. After all that time you were then to put in the starter and let it incubate. For GAPS that's 24 hours. This was taking WAY toooooo long for my wee folk! So I decided to take the plunge and try the stove top method again. And this is how I whip up creamy, thick yogurt:

This will not be a detailed tutorial, as far as pictures go. All the steps will be here, but I don't have pictures of every step. To start I put 1 gallon of milk, minus two cups, into a large pot. I then add two cups of heavy whipping cream to the pot. I put the temp on 7 (out of 10). I can then gather a few of my needed supplies, before the stove top heats up. Above you see the pot of milk, the yogurt starter (Brown Cow brand...I needed to buy another starter as my other one 'wore' off, more on that later), my thermometer and a bowl to mix a bit of warmed milk and starter together in a later stage.

Currently I am using store bought milk. Once our goats start producing I will be using their milk.

As I wait for my stove top to warm up I also fill my soon to be yogurt jars with hot water. This will help keep the incubating yogurt at the proper temperature.

Here is my yogurt culture in the glass bowl. By now I am constantly stirring the milk. You don't want it to burn on the bottom, unless you like yucky tasting yogurt. You could keep the milk on a lower temp, but it takes much longer to reach the needed 180 degrees. If you are using raw milk and want to keep your yogurt raw, make sure your temps do not go above 120 degrees. With store bought milk you will want to heat it up to 180 to kill of any odd bacteria floating about.

Yeah! It finally reached the proper temp. I haven't timed it yet, but I do know on a lower temp you are looking at a 30 minute wait. I don't have 30 minutes, nor will I remember in that time should I walk away that I am supposed to be tending heating milk! So I keep my stove top temps on the med-high mode and stir constantly to avoid burning.

Once it reaches proper temperature I move the pot over to my sink. I fill one side with cold water, and put the pan in the water. No ice needed. The cold water will bring the temperature down very quickly. I don't think you need more than 5 minutes to bring it down to a workable temperature. I wait till it reaches 118 degrees. Some people wait till 110, I've even read of someone bringing it down to 80 degrees. So I am not sure what the real 'proper' temp should be, but I know this is working for me, waiting till it gets to 118.

I was having difficulty getting my camera to focus on the thermometer, and you can see here that by the time I did the temp went from 120 (when I first tried to take a pic) to 115. I pull the pot of milk out and set aside. I then drain the sink, and also pour out the hot water from the above two glass jars (soon to be holding my incubating yogurt).

When all the water stuff is drained off I then scoop some of the warm milk into the bowl that held the starter. I stir gently until it thickens. By doing this step you will be able to get rid of any lumps, making it easier for the starter to incorporate into the whole batch. Once, this bowl of starter and a bit of milk thickens (30 seconds or so) I then pour the mixture into the pot of warmed milk. Again, stir gently, but thoroughly. I then pour the yogurt mix into my two glass jars, and transfer them to my incubating chamber :-)

Meet my incubating chamber. Just a simple cooler. You may be wondering why there are three jars in there when I only poured my yogurt into two jars. The third jar (with the white lid) is a gallon glass jar filled with hot tap water. This will help keep your yogurt at a proper incubating temperature, eliminating the need for a heating pad that you have to keep remembering to turn on.

I then place a towel or blanket on top of the jars, and then close the lid. Then we wait...which can be very hard on my yogurt loving crew :-) Under normal circumstances you only need to wait 8 to 12 hours. For us, being on GAPS, we need to let it incubate for 24 hours. You will want it to chill for a good 8 hours to thicken it up. When in haste you can fill a bowl with ice water and take one of the jars of yogurt and place the whole jar into the ice water. This will help it to cool off more quickly...you know, for the impatient folk :-)

A word on starters. There are starters that you can purchase online, which will last pretty much indefinitely. I just haven't gotten around to purchasing one. Instead I use the plain, full fat Brown Cow yogurt from Whole Foods. I've used Walmart's brand as well, when in need. The Brown Cow does seem to yield a nicer texture. With a store bought 'starter' you will only be able to use it for consecutive batches only so long before your yogurt no longer gets a nice thick texture. It will still be yogurt, but will be of a buttermilk texture. For us, we seem to need to buy a new starter every two weeks. We make a LOT of yogurt! I'm talking like 8 to 10 gallons of yogurt in a two week period. That would be like buying 32 to 40 of the large store bought containers! Wow, that's kind of scary after typing that out! But you can imagine the savings by making your own with that kind of volume! On top of yogurt being our number one probiotic on GAPS we also consume kefir. I'll share that tutorial with you soon. I am amazed by what this diet has accomplished. Either that, or we got one of the best kefir grain batches out there. I'll explain more about all of that in another post.

Sharing this on Simple Lives Thursday

Big Changes #8**The Next Step

2012-02-04T04:33:00.000-08:00

This will be the last post in my Big Changes series. We've seen some great success with the changes we have made. We changed a lot of things all at once, which can be overwhelming. But it was hard to continue on in our path, all the while knowing we were heading the wrong way. If one was driving down a highway and realized they were going West, when they were supposed to go East, they would get off at the nearest exit and turn around. Continuing to go West would have wasted time and resources. The longer you continue going the wrong way the longer it will take to get to where you are going.

So where do we go from here? Well we need to be in continued prayer that we don't get side tracked. We still have work to do. There is a lot of work to be done with the projects we have going on around here. Just last night we moved a desk from our bedroom into the family room to put the girls' sewing machine on. We are committed to putting our time and money into the things that will help us live out our family goals. I was able to get some free fabric last week. With 4 girls we will need more, but it's a start! Another purchase I would like to make will be for some yarn. They are really into crocheting at the moment. Just yesterday I "splurged" on a $0.92 spatula for Flannery. She insisted we needed it. With all the cooking she has been doing we felt it was important to equip her with the tools she needs.

I have read about the concept of giving your child quality 'tools' from various sources in the past. Be it from blogs or books like "Teaching the Trivium", or most recently from Charlotte Mason's second book. Giving your child inferior tools will not inspire them. I know this even for myself. I can not bare to use Crayola colored pencils. They are hard leaded, do not blend and are lacking in their ability to transfer their pigment to the paper. I do, however, loooovvvveee my Prisma colored pencils. They are soft leaded, transfer to the paper effortlessly, and are bold in color. It really is a night and day experience when drawing with those two brands. This does not mean you have to get the 'best' of everything, but there is a difference between the cheapest of cheap and a higher quality product. Our children are happy to use what free and found items we have on hand, but they really get excited when they get to pick out nice fabric, with patterns they love. They want to dive in and make something with it right away.

One of my goals is to gather, bit by bit, quality 'tools'. No, this doesn't mean fabric that goes for $20 a yard, but it does mean maybe spending more than $1 per yard...if needed. We can't break the bank either! Ha, ha! There is balance to be had in all of this. Just like my ideas on toys. I would much rather they had a few well made, open ended toys than a box full of the plastic noise makers that do all the thinking for them.

We've also decided to spend money on DVD's and books that will help us to build our relationship with each other as husband/wife and as parent/child. We just purchased one such series recently. We are rearranging our schedules to make the time for these videos. We are committed to making the needed changes in our attitudes to continue getting our ship going and staying on the right course.

I am sure we will continue to examine where we are. I am sure there will be other changes or at least tweaks that will need to happen in the future. Our girls all want/desire/covet (read...obsessed) a big farm. Well, there is only so much money to go around :-) So for now we tell them, we need to be content with what God has given us, and we need to take care of what He has given us to the best of our abilities. If He so chooses to give us more, then we will be thankful, and if He doesn't....we will be thankful!

Swimming upstream, against what every one else is doing, can be hard. It has been crucial for Jeremiah and I to be of one mind and to have the people around us supporting our decisions as well. It makes the road that much easier to travel. Our oldest isn't questioning everything we do now. She sees we are NOT crazy...or at least we are not alone in our craziness ;-) She sees that we are committed to her well being. She used to think we were out to ruin her life. We were too half hearted about our life in the past, and I can see how hard that was on her. The changes were not easy. There have been days I just wanted to throw in the towel. We are about to bring this up a notch as we work on our attitudes (I'm talking about Jeremiah and myself!). I can see many more days of towel throwing wishes! But every time that feeling comes sooner or later one of my children will do or say something that reminds me that all of these changes has been sooooooo worth it.

Thank you for reading about our journey of change. I am hoping to give another update in another few months after we've worked on our attitudes and made any tweaks. Stay tuned!

Getting a group shot

2012-02-03T06:35:00.000-08:00

Getting a group shot of all the kiddos has proven difficult. We were at the creek yesterday and I decided to give it yet another try. I decided to put up all the pics I took, just so that you can see what I have to 'work' with :-) I chose one to edit, and put that one at the end. It does appear that I will be making another attempt in the future. Ha!

Things working against me...The sun went down behind the trees, goats out of sight from the camera were distracting Aubrey, Jed would NOT look at the camera, then Jed got upset about a stick, and girls who decided they had enough and started acting silly. Oy.

Not sure if this is really the best one. I kind of like the ones with their arms around each other. I hope this gets posted without the blur. For some reason while in editor mode my pics look all blurry. They do not look blurry on Window's Explorer. Go figure.

Big Changes #7**Setting Family Goals

2012-02-03T06:00:00.000-08:00

This seems like it should have been the first post in my series. My intentions though were trying to share the principles, rather than the specifics. If I failed to do that, please accept my apology, writing is not my strong point!!

Each family needs to figure out for themselves what is important to them. What is their mission in life? I had a wonderful friend share with me how they went through all their things and made that decision to keep or reject based on their family's beliefs. It was such a huge help to have that encouragement. I just remember thinking, ok, if they can do it, so can we....but *HOW* do I go about doing this? Ah, that is where prayer comes in :-) Thankfully God does not leave us to our own selves. I wanted soooo badly for things to turn around for our family, and I wanted it yesterday! But I knew that that was not a possibility. I knew I needed to step back and pray, listen and observe. I needed to gain council and mull over and brain storm. This wasn't an "I" thing, it was a "WE" thing, my husband and I doing all of this together. We had many late nights talking about these things. We made lists. We hemmed and hawed. We took two steps forward and one back. We had to battle opposition, which in the long run was a blessing as it really made us ponder where our convictions stood. In the end we made that plan...for *OUR* family.

There's a saying that goes something like this:
Those who fail to plan, plan to fail.

We have lived that life of failure. We lived day to day not knowing where we were going. Does that mean we have everything figured out now? NO WAY! But we do have a plan, that we know is subject to change should God lead us to do so. We don't know what the exact end product will be, but we are on a course now, heading towards what we feel God leading us. We have some actual steps that we are taking with purpose.

I'll say it again, it wasn't easy. Change is never easy (whether it's good or bad). But it has been very well worth our efforts. There are still adjustments that need to be made. We have made a huge step in capturing the hearts of our children...something we unfortunately lost. We still have bad attitudes. Some people will say we should have started with our childrens' attitudes and obedience. If they were only 2 and 4 years old, yes, I would agree. But we had already lost our older girls hearts. Obedience and attitude training would have been in vain should we have left the rest of our life as it were. We know this to be a fact as we already tried that...many, many times before, with the same results...failure. This time the focus was on our whole family. Our children needed to know that we really had their best interests at heart. By getting them back on our boat, we can now work together to change those other things like attitude and obedience. And I dare say it should be easier. Not easy...just easier!

Jeremiah and I made many lists. Below I am just going to share a bit with you what our family goals are, and some of the ideas we had to make a game plan.

Family goals

All that we do must glorify God.

We will do things as a family. The girls thought that we were doing soccer as a family, but that wasn't the case. They all played soccer, but not as a family. We believe in individuality, but for this season we needed to pull together as a family. When Flannery gets a notion to cook up a new recipe that does not mean we all go into the kitchen together :-) Soccer, though, was a huge time commitment. It took 4 evenings and our Saturday away from us. Jeremiah is running and biking for exercise. The girls and I will join in with running once I am able. For now the oldest two girls and I are doing T-Tapp. The time commitment to sports has been greatly reduced, but does count towards our family goal to be healthy.

What is our family to "DO"? We decided we should start with what the Lord has given us. We have some land, we have some animals. We decided we should start to be the best keepers that we could of what God has given us. That means learning more about goats and chickens. It means learning about cultivating our land.

We kept it simple. Those are the three goals we set. We didn't want to over do it :-) As far as the particulars, I've laid some of that out in past posts. But to skim back over some of them...

We started by asking ourselves a few questions. What skills or supplies were we going to need to meet the above goals? What things were we doing that might be interfering with obtaining our goals? What were we going to make a priority, to help us know what things to change first? What did we have to work with at the present moment that we could start using right away? We made up a list of possibilities and then prioritized it.

Getting the bad stuff out was our first priority. Starting a diet while keeping the chips, cake and cookies in your pantry is not going to lend itself to success. :-) So we went through the differing medias and toys and belongings to see what was going to hinder our success. The hardest part was figuring out what was the junk food.

Then we needed to figure out what we wanted to fill up those holes we made. Between the girls' ideas and desires and ours we made a list of things or activities to replace what we took away.

sewing
family night games
crochet/knitting/yarn
gardening
animal care
cooking
soap making
learning to be frugal
making our own everyday items
reading
supplies for them to build things outside (forts and such)
art supplies galore
field trips
camping
emergency preparedness
first aid/herbs/homeopathy
pen pals (at some point)
weekly fellowship with other families
involvement with our local homeschool group

I am sure there was more, but I don't have my list in front of me. After making our lists, again we prioritized. Then we started to put things into action! This is where our girls saw that we meant business. In the past, it was too much talk and not enough action. This time we made action a priority. As a matter of fact today will be an action planning day. We saw a building site on the way home yesterday and we want to go by there to see if they have mulch or dirt we can take off their hands. We have an outside work day planned and will be deciding which garden area to tackle next. All for this weekend.

I can see where we have weak spots. It's so easy to just fall back into what used to be the norm. We are trying to establish new norms, and that means it's an all up hill battle. That battle has mostly to do with a mind set, than anything else. Which is why we are constantly reading, talking and praying about these changes. If we stop doing those things we will end up back where we were. None of us wants to be in that place anymore. I am thankful we are all working on this together.

Gardening plans

2012-02-01T04:00:00.000-08:00

Taking a wee break from the last two posts in my Big Changes Series. I thought I would put up our plans for our garden expansion. I am sure we could do so much more, but for now this will have to do. We made some great headway in the herb garden, but looking at these pictures, and the abundance of warm weather we are having I think we had better get to work!!! Pronto!! You will have to excuse the wobbly lines. Our mouse is on the fritz and I was having a hard time getting it to move more than a cm at a time :-)

Above is our current garden beds. The red outline behind the beds is where we would like to expand. Without moving the laundry line we can get two more beds in that space.

I would like to put a bunch of strawberry plants here.

This spot is in the dog area. The back of our house faces south, so most of our planting needs to be done back there. With the front of the house up high on a foundation it casts a long shadow on our front yard, making at least half of it unusable. Our back yard is not as large, and most of it is full of trees. The above spot would make a great blueberry area.

This area is further along the back of the house, on the other side of the back stairs that you see in the previous picture. You can see that we need to cut back a bunch of brush. Not sure what to plant here. Maybe one or two elderberry bushes and some other veggies.

You can see we've made progress on this area up front. This is the area that I took a picture of with the rocks bordering it the other day. This will be the herb garden.

This area is furthest from the house in our front yard. We want to put a bunch of dwarf fruit trees here. Again we have more brush to remove. We have a gentleman who will be dropping off the chipped trees and brush that he gets come spring. That will hang out along our woods line. We are hoping to get some free windows to make a makeshift green house/ cold frame. We saw a stack on craigslist the other day. We'll have to keep our eyes out for some more.

Along with this we will be putting up more fencing for our goats so we can rotate their living area. It does no good to keep goats when they are too sick to drink their milk. Along with rotating them we will also use the chipped wood to help dry up the soggy areas around the barn. We also need to give the barn a thorough cleaning. We think at least one of our goats is pregnant. We think she is due around the end of April. Plus we've been thinking about our chicken situation. We have many chickens, but few eggs. Our egg production has gone up since giving them the oyster supplement, but not enough compared to the number of chickens we have. We've talked to the girls about 'retiring' the older chickens and bringing in some new ones. There is a very good reason why many people get a new batch of chick every two years. After two years the egg production of a chicken goes way down.

Shared on Simple Lives Thursday and Homestead Barn Hop

Big Changes #6**Clutter Control

2012-01-31T11:42:00.000-08:00

This was another step in our big changes. I've mentioned small bits of it here and there already. But seeing as how it was a much needed focus for our family I thought I would put the spot light on it. Clutter is never a good thing. It can be dangerous, wastes your time taking care of it, and devalues what you do have that is worth keeping.

The dangerous one is easy to figure out. I've been thinking we should have a fire escape plan, and was thinking how there would be no way we would get out of a fire in the middle of the night with all the clutter we had. I mean, 7 children with toys, books, games, clothes, 'stuff'. Enough said :-) Before we touched anything we first made a plan. I think you may be catching on to a growing theme...making plans! How many pairs of pants does one child need? How many shoes, how many toys, how many....? It was obvious that we needed to get rid of a bunch of 'stuff'. If for safety reasons alone.

But safety wasn't our only goal. We were wasting a lot of time trying to manage all of our 'stuff'. The girls room chores were taking longer and longer as the months went on. We needed to pare back, then make a place for everything, and put everything in its place. That meant a wee bit of rearranging. It meant going through closets, under beds, on top of beds, in drawers, etc. This was what I was doing in my Great Purge Expedition I wrote on a month or so ago. It took longer than I anticipated. Now that it is done I can see where we can make some improvements. I personally would have liked to take all but the very essential furniture out of each room and then only add back in what we felt was really and truly necessary. I could have done that if my kids were 1 and 3 years old. It's a bit of a different story when they are 12 and 14 :-) Bit by bit. I am happy with the wave of purging we did accomplish and have resolved in my mind that we will have another round in the near future.

Along with the safety and time management issues of our clutter came the very reality that when kids have too many things they don't seem to really care about any of it. I've read this many times in the past. I loved a blog, no longer available, that talked about her family's journey to simplicity. They really, really took a bunch of things away. But the mom said that the more they had taken away the more her kids actually used and played with what they had left! So very true.

This is also an issue, the idea of simplicity, that is close to my heart. It is always something I have wanted as a lifestyle. I've written in the past about that desire, so I won't go too deep here. Before I had children my desire for them was not to have many toys, but a few, well chosen *open ended* toys. Less clutter, more imagination required. I didn't want the blinking lights, and fancy sounding toys. By taking things away my kids are now being more creative. They are using their hands to make things, and using their minds to create. They are playing and working together more. Please do not read that as they actually get ALONG while doing things together...but they are together more often now :-)

Keeping control of our clutter has also helped us stay on target with our schooling. None of us can think very well when we are surrounded by clutter (I'm speaking of my own family). Not to mention it's a lot easier to want to go into the kitchen to whip up a recipe when the counters are cleared. It's easier to lay out fabric on the floor to explore and create when you have open floor space available. In short, having less has been our success to doing more.

Homestead give-away:

2012-01-30T11:28:00.001-08:00

Hey everybody there's a free give-away at:

This place

Hope you all love it as much as we did!

Big Changes #5**Twaddle patrol

2012-01-30T06:09:00.000-08:00

After outside activities it was time to examine our inside activities. This too was difficult. When I broke my knee this past summer, movies and computer games (Internet usage) increased exponentially! Although I would say it wasn't out of control before the summer, it was certainly a big time waster.

Movies

Movie time was supposed to be reserved for Friday nights. But it is very, very, let me repeat....very clear that our family can not handle movie time. It has always, always, always gotten out of control. Always. Being laid up over the summer just made things worse. A lot worse. It always starts the same way. They are only watching 'godly movies', that then move on to morally acceptable movies, that then go to not blatantly sinful movies, to movies that are not in line with our family values.

So the movies got pulled. Netflix was cancelled. The only movies that they can watch now are the homesteading movies. We have some Christian movies, but I am not allowing those for now. They were too much in the habit of shutting off their brains to be lulled by the pictures on the screen. They didn't want to have to think. I am very serious when I say it was painful for many days/weeks. Literally painful. Think about it. They went from their brains passively taking in moving pictures and sound to having to physically move their bodies and actively thinking when it came to play time. Ouch. It was painful for me, in that there was a LOT of whining going on over here! Let me repeat....lots-o-whining. Thinking along the lines of addiction would do well here :-)

Now we've done the movie pulling thing before in the past. This time the difference is two fold. Number one, I have been put in charge of all movie viewing. This is good because I despise the waste of time that movies are. So this works for our family. Number two, we actually replaced movie time with other things. In the past we would tell them they needed to find something else to do. I can assure you that does not work. You have to actively replace that time. That does not mean you need to schedule their time or create all their play time, but it does mean you need to have a 'feast of ideas' set before them. For us, this meant we bought their Christmas presents early. We bought them a whole bunch of board games. We also made sure we had a healthy supply of books.

Books

Books are nothing new to our family. We frequent the library often. Very often! But again, we needed to hold up those books and compare them to our family's goals. Did the content fit our goals, our beliefs? If not we needed to get rid of it. After getting rid of the movies, we went through our bookshelves. Not only were we rating a book compared to our convictions/morals/beliefs and goals, but also rating it against our educational philosophy. We love Charlotte Mason's word for junk food books, 'twaddle'. You know you have a problem with a book when your 14 year old will read 150+ pages *after* she's gone to bed. There is obviously not a whole lot of thinking going on with that book! Don't get me wrong, if you have a struggling reader you may want to slip in a few of the easier to digest books for free reading time, BUT it can all too easily become a crutch. Just like movies were turning off their brains, having a comic book or other easy read does nothing to stretch those brain muscles. Please don't misunderstand me, there isn't anything wrong with a silly book here or there, just like there isn't anything wrong with a piece of cake. But at some point too much cake is a bad thing.

To help us curb our former library habits we had to change things up. Our library has a website where we can go and reserve/put on hold any book in their system. We designate the branch we will be picking it up from. Then, when the book is ready, we get an email to say we can come pick up our book. This has been such a huge help to curb the poor reading choices we were facing. Every once in a while they are aloud to go look around the library when I have to go in, but I don't let them take any books out. Or I have them put the books in a pile. I then load everyone up in the van, I go back in the library by myself and sort through the books.

This too was a hard transition. I made up a list of acceptable books or types of books from the Ambleside lists. I was starting to doubt if we were making the right move, but before too long they started picking up the good books and reading them. And they have been pleasantly surprised at how good of a story it was :-) It's taking a bit longer for one of my reluctant readers, but I know she will come around.

Computer Time

This was hard on everyone, but especially Jedidiah. Oh, talk about withdrawls!! I thought he would never, never, NEVER get over it. It was that bad!! Every day, all day long he asked for his computer turn. But now, two months later, it's not an issue. The girls were, again at first, very upset to give up computer time. They each had a Webkinz, and favorite horses on their favorite horse game site that they didn't want to see 'die'. Well, it was either a slow death for their spiritual lives, and continued crumbling of our family or the death of a pretend virtual animal. Hmmm, that one wasn't too hard to think about. But making this a reality isn't as easy as it sounds. Between the afore mentioned movie time, twaddle books and computer games my kids didn't know what to do with themselves half the time! All these twaddle issues have the same root problem, and were remedied by the same solution. Redirecting their focus, or as the Maxwell's would put it, creating new appetites. This involved brain storming and really listening to what the girls interests are. This also means possibly moving furniture around and making those new appetites the focus in our house. For example, sewing is a big hit around here. We would like to set up a table out in the family room for the girls to be able to sew throughout the day. Moira expressed an interest in creating her own sewing patterns. So we looked up some books on how to do that. The girls have always been into arts and crafts. That means we will be looking for ways to increase our art supplies and fabric and yarn supplies.

We are two months into this and I can't tell you how wonderful it is to see my children being productive, learning new skills and trying new things!! Seriously. Flannery has become chef extraordinaire over here. She also took off with sewing. Isabella has been sewing and crocheting up a storm. Moira has made many paintings, crocheted items and made a recipe from a cookbook for the first time on her own the other day. Saoirse is in the learning stages of all these things. Basically trying out each thing in small snippets as her abilities allow. The boys have been doing a ton of pretend play. This is a newer skill for Jedidiah, and it's great to see how it's growing each week. Lots more reading going on, with good books.

There are still some days when I will hear, "I'm bored." But that doesn't last long. It took a while for them all to 'wake up' their brains and start using them :-) It took sticking to our guns, going back to our goals and holding on with both hands! It can get rough, but the results are sooooo worth the fight. I dare say we are not done with the fight, but things are so much better now than they were.

Lazy Sunday

2012-01-29T15:22:00.000-08:00

Today we had church at home. I'm still sick, as is Saoirse and seemingly Aubrey now (he just woke from a nap about an hour ago and hasn't stopped whining and crying. Ugh. So I decided to sit and polish up a few photos. Some really odds and ends in the "stack".

One of the children's buckets left in the front yard.

The girls and boys have been gathering an assortment of goat treats from around the yard.

Jonah plucked this tid bit with scissors, all by himself :-)

Aubrey had just woken from a nap. The whole time outside he was chewing on his left hand. Very odd.

See? Still chewing. I have about 5 other pictures, taken at various time during our outside playtime with his hand in his mouth.

Attic 24 is our online source of crochet inspiration. This little cover was made by Moira.

Saoirse is just starting to get the hang of the single crochet. She rocks at making chains! This is a bracelet she made for me.

Doesn't everyone take pictures of their glass jars? No? This is one of my shelves that hold most, but not all of my large glass jars. We've been discussing buying more. The debate was between a local source, which we can not find replacement caps for, or to go with getting an order for a box of Ball jars shipped to Ace Hardware. All the wide mouth Ball jars have the same size lid, making lid replacement a snap. Can you guess which we chose to do?

Another Isabella read. This is the compilation of all the Tightwad Gazettes put in one book. My daughters want us to buy it for them (the copy above is from the library). I swear I'm not making this stuff up!!! I feel blessed when I think how instead of ipods, cell phones or CD's being asked for my girls are asking for books like the one above, buying a jersey cow or obtaining free finds for fencing or a makeshift green house.

Jed looking particularly cute today with this hat.

We have lots of rocks on our property. We are finally putting some of them to good use. See below...

Here they are neatly layed out for our garden border. Moira dug up a bunch of brush, Jeremiah hacked up a bunch of the small bushes/trees, and all the kids helped carry rocks over to make the border. Now we just need some soil and covering. Oh, and some seeds :-) This will be our herb garden.

Big Changes #4**Outside Activities

2012-01-28T06:39:00.000-08:00

Along with our church change, this was the second biggest change we made. By outside activities I mean things like sports, meetings and the like, not outside play time. Jeremiah and the girls, minus Moira, were involved in soccer. Between Jeremiah playing soccer on his own team, and him coaching two of the girls teams, soccer took up 5 days a week. One of those days happened to be half of our Saturday. That time on Saturday was just game and travel time, not the time it took for everyone to rest from all the activity. That left our Saturdays totally unproductive.

After we made a family goal plan we were able to talk with the girls about how our outside activities were not helping us to achieve our family goals. Not only was soccer not helping to meet our goals, but it was hindering our goals. We determined that we needed that Saturday time to work on our outside projects (animal care and gardening). So, even though they only played half the year, we made the hard decision to pull them out of soccer. Not only for the girls, but for Jeremiah as well. Although there were tears shed, I think they got over it faster than I anticipated because we were not asking only them to give it up, but Daddy was giving it up as well. They saw that the sacrifice was being made by all.

In soccer's place we were adding in the gardening and animal work, which the girls wanted to do. We were also committed to adding in fellowship time with the saints. This was definitely lacking in our lives. We made sure to get that fellowship time up and running. The girls are very much enjoying this fellowship time. They are also enjoying all the planning and dreaming of making our slice of land as productive as it can be. Just take a look at that picture of Isabella in my last post. All the girls have been getting homesteading/gardening/animal care books out of the library. Isabella, in particular, has been taking notes from them. All on their own! Isabella and Moira are also keeping a record book of everything we produce. Currently that amounts to how many eggs a day we get. When we start milking and gardening we will be weighing what we collect. They keep notes off to the side about any supplements or changes we make. This way we can look back and see what worked and what didn't. They had seen this record keeping on a blog and they decided *on their own* to keep a record for our family.

In the past we have made, or attempted to make, changes to our family. But as the word 'to' implies, it wasn't a collaborative exercise. It was forced. As parents, that is sometimes what we are called to do, but when making changes it is never a good idea to just take things away without adding something in it's place. It is also not a good idea to leave the rest of your crew upset about the changes, feeling helpless and a victim. There is a balance to be had. We didn't have that balance in the past, and that is why I feel our past changes did not last, or were not accepted. This doesn't mean you have to have your children's permission to make changes, that is not what I am talking about. But to make this work, they do need to 'get on board' with your new ideas. For example, the girls were not happy about giving up soccer. But they were excited about making our place into a small homestead. When they saw that by giving up soccer we would have more time to make our place into that dreamed of homestead they were willing to let soccer go. It was *very* important for us to make real, concrete plans for them to see we were serious about making the homestead one of our family goals. We made sure to come to the pow-wow table with ideas before hand so that they knew we were already thinking of these things. And we made sure to write down all their ideas and discuss ways in which we could implement them into a workable plan. We then started to do simple things like go online in search of books to educate ourselves to make our dreams a reality. We also talked about what we needed to buy, and put a time table together of when we could obtain the needed items. We are having the girls help us search for free items on freecycle and craigslist (with us watching over them). We also ordered gardening catalogs to look over seeds and fruit trees/bushes.

We talked about how we could save money to purchase the things we were going to need. Again, by putting it in their hands, and giving them ideas as needed, they have come up with lots of ways to save money. Not only that, but they want to do them, as they see we are being serious about our goals. In the past, when we took things away (and they needed to be taken away), we either left a hole there, or gave a token idea of what we could/might/should/would put in it's place. But then that was as far as we got. Nothing ever materialized from those scattered thoughts. This time we put it on paper, they see us rearranging our budget, they see us giving up things ourselves, and they see we are serious in wanting their ideas as well. We are talking about these things almost daily. We rearrange plans when needed. We are working out times/schedules and the like to make the time available to reach our goals. We are reading books and watching videos that all have to do with our goals. And our children are, for the first time ever, EXCITED about what our family is doing. It truly is a *FAMILY* affair. It's not every man for himself, which was how we were living before.

Now, before I sign off, lest you think we are perfect...we are NOT. We are making mistakes, we fumble, we have to pick ourselves up and dust ourselves off. Our children will try to read a homesteading book when they should be reading about Archimedes, or they are looking at the prices of Jersey cows when they should be doing their math :-) The children have squabbled about who's idea was better or should be implemented first. We are learning how to work together and love each other, which is one of our biggest family goals, besides the number one: Glorifying God and enjoying Him forever.

Sick today :-(

2012-01-27T06:17:00.000-08:00

No Big Changes post today. Not feeling well, sinus infection. I went with a friend to get some fabric that was at her mom's house. The house was old, and I could tell there was mold there. Soon after I arrived I could feel my sinuses and ears reacting to the mold. And sure enough, a few days later I have a sinus infection. Bummer. I've started some immune tea and a goldenseal/echinacea tincture. So for today, there will be no thought provoking post :-) I will just leave you with a bunch of pictures I took yesterday.

Isabella was kind enough to go into the attic to find some shoes for Aubrey. He has been shoeless till now.

Trying to figure out how to walk in 'new' shoes.

Aubrey has taken to waving at the airplanes that fly over head!

Sometimes he needed a bit of help getting back up again. I am sure this was fall number 742, just from today.

When we walked to get the mail, he found it easier to hold a hand.

Little babes with shoes are so cute!

Jonah was itching to get some digging in. We will have to direct his digging efforts in the future, when we are ready to garden. Here he is digging up our driveway.

At least he's willing to help.

Isabella was very happy to have received a letter from a pen pal.

Isabella hard at work, studying.

She's been taking a LOT of notes on this subject.

Hard at thought.

What she's been studying... :-) Take note of the picture in the book.

Below I put a bunch of pictures of Jed and Aubrey playing. I am thinking that Jed had different intentions than Aubrey. But non the less they both were having fun. Note the amount of dirt *on* Aubrey.

After a quick brush off, Aubrey was having a blast being pushed around on the trike. It was time to 'pack up' and go inside.

Big Changes #3 **Church

2012-01-26T10:09:00.000-08:00

This has been one of the most contested of our changes, but not by us. We most certainly do not believe that people have to agree with us, but they don't have to be rude either (the criticism was from outside our church). We've had people, who were lovingly concerned with our change, and some that were trying to shake a finger at us. I just want to reiterate, if you don't agree with us, that's totally fine, but just be nice about it in the comments :-) This was not a decision that was made lightly. This took a long time of mulling over, prayer and conversation before we made our final decision.

There are certainly many reasons we chose to attend this church in the first place. It would most certainly be too long to go into here. I will say that it was a bit of a swing in the opposite direction of where we were attending. That was a difficult time, trying to find out what were really our convictions. This last church had Sunday school, something we had not been in agreement with for many years. But we decided to give it a try. They also had a youth group. That was 'tried' with Dad in tow, to see what they did, and the teaching they were getting. It was decided that it was not beneficial. So our oldest just helped out in the nursery during that hour (her choice). The preaching was wonderful, and very Biblical. So there wasn't anything wrong with that. The church was varied in their convictions on non essentials. And, being non essentials, there was nothing wrong with that. Convictions are personal, and we have a few of them, convictions that we are not willing to give up/change. It was our unwillingness to give them up that people thought was a concern. I would argue that it wouldn't be much of a conviction if you were willing to easily let it go :-)

Any homeschooling parent will know what I am talking about when I say that homeschooling isn't the easy road! As such, it is hard to go it alone, although it can be done. There was only one other family, with older children, that were homeschooling. Any other homeschooled older children were sent to public school once they got to high school age. This left our oldest child the odd 'man' out. As was stated in the past two Changes posts, our family was on shaky ground. As such it was proving difficult for Isabella to fend off the peer pressure. Whether it was homeschooling, lack of cell phone, or the fact that she hadn't seen the latest movie, she was always the oddball. I witnessed first hand the ridicule that she received. At first we thought it was Isabella that had a problem with making friends. It is now evident that it wasn't her, but that no one wanted to be her friend because she wasn't "one of them". For that, I can be VERY thankful!!!! But it was still heart breaking that she felt alone in the world. Anyone who has read Michael Pearl's article, "Jumping Ship" will know that feeling can lead to jumping ship. And we really saw that happening! Granted, the bigger problem was that our ship wasn't something she wanted to stay on, but it didn't help to have the other influences around her.

So we began to consider what should be done. Our first focus, as it should be, was to change things in our family to make our ship more pleasant and livable. But during this time it would prove one step forward, two back if we kept dangling that carrot before her eyes. And a sinful carrot at that. The deciding factor? We happened to sit behind the youth group in service. Someone was taking over as the youth leader and decided to have the youth group sit through service. We came in late, and the only place to sit was behind them. There isn't any other way to say this...I was appalled. Plain and simple. And NO, my children are not perfect in the least, but the behavior I saw was totally unwarranted. And the whole while my daughters were taking this in.

The following week we decided to try another church that friends of ours attended that we knew to be a family integrated church (though they don't call themselves that). I was not able to attend because one of the boys was sick. I was a bit nervous since the girls were very upset about leaving our then current church. They came home and Jeremiah said that they loved it, especially Isabella. Now, do understand my children are not theologically minded, they base their decisions on how many playmates they have :-) But what a relief to hear Isabella tell me all about her time there. How everyone talked to her. It was very telling, that just on that one visit, she said, "It was wonderful to not feel like an oddball!"

People there are living most of our convictions. The great thing is that there is freedom there, but that is not taken out of context. Each family is following what they see the Scriptures speaking, and they want everyone there to live that freedom as well. Our children have other homeschoolers to hang around with. Modesty is upheld, but there are no rules as to girls must wear dresses only or anything like that. They are very big into families being a close unit, and as such do not schedule a lot of church activities.

There you have it. The simple reasons. Seemingly not so simple to all though. We've been told we are being selfish. Yes, really. We have been told we should stay to be a light to those around us. That does indeed sound Godly, but at what cost? We have been willing to be honest and assess our family's strengths and weaknesses. We are not strong enough to be that light. Not yet, anyway. It makes no sense to lose our children to the world to save others. What we feel would be the right thing? For those parents of those teens to be the light to their own children. We've been accused of being isolationists. We shouldn't be a part of a group that thinks like us. I would dare say that pretty much everyone does so, without thinking of it. We were just more mindful of it when making our decisions.

No church is perfect. Our family isn't perfect. We shouldn't choose a church on the sole basis of what can it do for me. We are to be servants. But that doesn't mean you throw your family's needs to the wind either. We are glad there are other families out there that can be a light to those around them. We pray we can be such a family one day. For now, we have entered the greenhouse to tend closely to our tender a battered plants. One day, Lord willing, we will be strong and ready to venture out into God's big garden!

Big Changes #2 ** Building Foundations

2012-01-25T06:14:00.000-08:00

I couldn't find a picture to go with this post, so I just stuck this one in. If you look really hard you can see our house. And since I am going to write on 'foundations'...well, there's a slight correlation :-)

I think we are all aware of what would happen if you started to build a house on a faulty foundation. When we had our Family Pow-Wow, this is the analogy we used to explain to the girls why we needed to make the changes we felt needed making. With a bit of explanation, they all understood the idea. We explained that, for our family, we had already been building on a faulty foundation. That meant we needed to undo parts of our house (get rid of things or activities), and rebuild (add in appropriate things and activities). Now, this sounds easy, but, as I told the girls, having to 'knock' out walls is hard work, time consuming and takes money. It's a lot easier if you build it right the first time around. So I explained that there was indeed going to be 'pain' involved, but that the end product would be *better* than what we had now.

It was definitely painful for them when they realized all we were taking away. There was no way to get around that. Pulling down the walls, was the easy part, it is the rebuilding that is hard work. But that hard work is now getting easier as we are all on board the family's goal wagon.

So that was the pep talk we gave to our kids. We gave them the illustration of the house foundation for them to understand better why we were doing what we were doing. After that explanation we explained that our true foundation needed to be on Christ. It goes much better to keep any spiritual talk on the positive. I've noticed that it doesn't go well to make this *huge* connection from taking everything they know as life away from them to God's word. I'm sure I am not explaining myself well here. Basically it's kind of like making your child write out scriptures for an hour every time they were being punished. They start to associate God's word with punishment. So for this part of things we kept it simple. A few verses were used to illustrate our point. Some were:

“It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.”

– Matthew 4:3-4

But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.
-Matt. 6:33

And we talked about the idea of seeds and how they grow. The concept of what you sow, is what you reap. We talked about how we realized that we were sowing the wrong seed. We don't know if we'll have time to put in a new crop (before our oldest two reach adulthood), but we certainly have to try, leaving the harvest in the Lord's hands.

Along with the Pow-Wow meeting, Jeremiah and I have had other times where we have discussed our marriage. I don't think there is a marriage out there that doesn't have problems at one time or another. Some have more or bigger problems I suppose than others, but I am certain everyone has problems. We are not the exception. Our true foundation needs to start with Christ, then the next level would be a firm marriage. This will be a work in progress, but for now we've made changes that we can live and work within. Jeremiah just downloaded a bunch of sermons on marriage and family. We plan on listening to one each night, or there abouts.

There is still much work to be done, but with our "Plan" and "Foundation" stages being addressed we are seeing a wonderful change in how we are addressing life. It has been wonderful to have something to hold up to help make future decisions. Is this activity going to help our family goals? Is this movie going to promote our family goals/values? Etc. The world has an agenda (known or not) and it is NOT for marriage, or for family. Our children, and dare I say we adults, are being taught something by everything we do. Everything. We are always learning. If we weren't then people wouldn't have to go to school to learn advertisement. But they do, so they can learn how to affect the rest of us. What we set before our eyes, WILL make a difference. What we listen to, WILL affect us. Maybe not today, or tomorrow, but it will eventually.

Ok, enough of my rambling :-) Flannery just made an awesome kefir smoothie for us. I need to go make up some peanut butter pancakes for them now. A real treat as we are gradually coming off gaps intro!!

Sharing this on Simple Lives Thursday

Big Changes #1**Evaluating the State of Our Family

2012-01-24T06:14:00.000-08:00

It was decided that the state of our family was indeed....messy!

The changes we made were by no means a fly by the seat of our pants reaction to things going on around us. Jeremiah and I sat down on multiple occasions to access where we've been, what has been the results of what we've been doing and making plans to change things to get where we want to go. One of the biggest problems we had was that we didn't know where we were going! We pretty much felt that we were living life in survival mode. Just like running on a treadmill, running, running, running, but getting NOwhere. Not a fun thing. We needed a plan, even if it was a basic plan. We are confident that God will show us the next clarifying step, but we needed to make up an overall map, based on prayer and His word. We talked at length as the reality of what needed to be done was becoming evident, and it wasn't going to be easy. Some people think we are trying to play the Holy Spirit by 'containing' our children. Others have thought we are taking this homeschooling thing too far. But I dare say that a lot of people thought Noah was off his rocker for building an ark, but that didn't stop him :-)

So, what was the state of our family? We were pretty close to shambles. The easiest way to sum it up would be to say we all had big time heart issues. This is where anyone's problems start to be sure. For the specifics though...

Chaos, anger, laziness, bitterness, and more bad stuff seriously filled our home. To be honest we are still dealing with those, but there has definitely been changes for the good. It was pretty much each man for himself. In a large family that doesn't bode well. In any family that doesn't bode well! It just makes for more chaos the larger your family is. Anyways we realized that we needed to set our priorities straight. We decided to get an idea of where we wanted to go and then work back from there. Evaluating everything we were doing and asking if it was going to help us reach our goal.

We had lots of fighting going on between all of us. Laziness reigned. Getting the kids to do anything was like pulling teeth. They were all more concerned about their friends or computer games than each other. They were not thinking for themselves. Some were being influenced by the children around them (this was from church). Our family values were continually being challenged. We have no problem with talking about our values, why we believe the way we do, but this was not what was going on. We are talking about challenged as going behind our backs. And this is with just the children!

Jeremiah and I were on shaking ground for various reasons. For privacy we won't discuss those here, but suffice it to say things had come to a head and something needed to give. With an unstable relationship our family was on wobbly ground. Our time with the Lord was reduced to obligation. I still have a long way to go here, but at least I see the problem now. It's just the logistics now to set things straight.

Our home was a mess. Literally. We were being overtaken by our stuff! We weren't taking care of the things we had. The inside was a mess, and the outside was a mess. This was causing our animals to be sick. Some of the problem had to do more with our layout than an actual mess. For example goats really need to be rotated in different 'padlocks' as they are so prone to worms. We most certainly did not make out ahead with our goat milk last year with them being so sick for half the milking season. This caused us more work, more money and more time.

Everyone (including yours truly) wanted to just hang out in a world of their own. This was either computer time, games, videos, or walking around with an I-Pod in their ears. Some of us, not many I can assure you, had enough past training to get work done, so we didn't fall into an abyss. But we certainly were not being productive.

As you can see, it was not a pretty picture. Thankfully I had some good friends who gave wonderful Godly advice. They were patient with my questions. We have also read books in the past that addressed this very issue, and we had that information at our disposal as well. With this in hand, we started to carve out a plan. We knew that we needed to start with what God had already given us. We needed to focus our attention on the things were already doing, that would contribute to the well being of our family. We decided that we needed to do everything as a family. For us that included our wee little homestead. We thought that we should learn all we could to best care for the animals we had, and how we could best use the space of our land. This would give us something to work on as a family. Now, what did we have going on in our family that might interfere with that goal? Oh, boy. There was a bunch! Movies, games, computer, 'junk food' books and more. We realized that we needed to change our spending habits to facilitate these goals. There isn't a lot of wiggle room there to work with, so we are needing to get creative. As we were going over these things we knew that it was going to be important that we just didn't rip the rug out from under the girls. We needed to make sure we had a plan and options to work with. In the past our downfall was that we took things out of their life, but weren't putting anything in it's place. That was a recipe for disaster.

Once we were ready with our plan we called a Family Pow-Wow Meeting. We told the girls our plan. There were many an objection to be sure. But once they saw that we seriously wanted their input, and that we ourselves came to the table with options, the dust started to settle. In the next handful of posts I'll address each area one by one. Why we made a change, how we went about it, and how it's working for us now.

Shared on Simple Lives Thursday and Homestead Barn Hop

"The Big Changes" post

2012-01-23T06:12:00.000-08:00

It's been a few months now that we've made our "big changes". I have to say that it went smoother than I anticipated. We had about 48 hours of crying on and off about some of our changes. But once the girls saw that we were serious about what we planned on "adding" to our family they seemed to accept the changes. As a matter of fact, the other day when I was writing my last post Moira was reading over my shoulder. When I wrote about the things my girls are now doing since our changes, she chimed in with, "I'm so glad we made all those changes. We have so much time now to do the things we really want to do." I would count that as a thumbs up :-) I was going to go item by item in this post, but got caught up with saying things like, 'well there is a lot more to that that I won't go into...', and I realized that I should take each point by itself, in it's own post.
Before I begin I just want to add that we made these changes for many varied reasons. We have already come against some opposition about these changes. I would just ask that those reading will respect that we are doing what we feel is right for our family. Our choices have not be the most popular. Which is why it was important for us to find a group of people that accepted our decisions. This was for the peace of our family and so as not to dangle the proverbial carrot before our childrens' eyes. The changes in a list:

:: evaluating the state of our family
:: building a foundation
:: church
:: outside activities
:: twaddle patrol
:: clutter control
:: setting family goals
:: the next step

These will all have some over lapping similarities as to our reasons for change. But some have a different motive or a different way we decided to make the changes. We are in no way 'finished' with some of the changes, but for now it has more to do with consistency and fine tuning.

Getting out before the rain

2012-01-21T10:26:00.000-08:00

I've got a bunch of stuff I need to get done today. So this will be quick. I did finally assemble all of Saoirse's needed remedies, and we put an order in for the couple of things we didn't have on hand. When we get them in I may post them. But for now, here was our day yesterday.

One thing this diet has done, is seemingly eradicated Flannery's allergic response to cats. There would have been NO way for her to cuddle up with this kitty as she is doing above without her whole lower face swelling up with hives. She's been carrying this kitty around as much as she can and not one hive to be seen!!

Everyone, including the baby it seems, wanted to walk up to get the mail. Not me, I have been way too tired with this intro stuff and a baby who is NOT sleeping.

The girls are pretty obsessed with saving as much money as possible. Here is Saoirse rounding up any possible plastics and metals. Too funny.

I hope to always remember Jonah's taste in clothing :-) Strips, plaid, shorts with socks and 'dress' shoes.

Why do we have a bucket hanging from a tree you ask? I don't know. Maybe the girls are 'practicing' should they ever come across a maple tree that they wish to tap for maple sap (I love the ideas they get from our homesteading videos!). And as for the pinkness of this bucket...besides brightening the overall photo since it was so over cast this is the real deal color! I think I might need some sunglasses!

With all of the lack of sleep this guy has been giving me, all I can say is....thank goodness he's so CUTE!

Although at 3 AM he doesn't seem *as* cute :-)

He had climbed up,all by himself, into the stroller. He's getting so big!

Aubrey found some other fun stuff to play with.

The whole time he was playing with the straw he had this funny face going on.

Now that is one purple rope!

I really, really have to get on the ball to write up that post about us 'giving up' a bunch of stuff around here. It truly has made huge changes in how our children spend their time. Here is Flannery making a bird feeder.

Some of the supplies Flannery was using. We have all sorts of stuff around here to tinker with.

Alright! Time to get up and work. Have a blessed weekend.

Natural remedies galore!

2012-01-20T07:11:00.000-08:00

Alrighty, here are the supplements/remedies that I need to give to Saoirse. At the end I list some supp./rem. for some of the rest of us.

For Overall Health:

:: To get to the root of the problem we need to test for mold. I know that even if we still have mold it has to have decreased significantly as I am not getting back to back sinus infections.

:: Alkalizing drink. This will help with her sinus and bladder infections. To be taken 2 times a day.

1/4 tsp baking soda

1/2 cup of water

:: Health tonic. Or ACV shot :-) To be taken twice a day. (Recommended for all of us.)

1 TBS of apple cider vinegar

pinch of baking soda

wait till fizzing stops, then add:

honey to taste (I'm thinking lots!)

For the Sinus Infection:

:: Create a steam tent (boiling pot of water under a towel) with lavender essential oil and eucalyptus essential oil. Saoirse needs to breathe this in *every* hour the first two days, then go down to every two hours, then every 3 hours, etc. This alone is going to be very taxing as she is not old enough to do this herself, or even to be left alone to breathe it in herself.

:: Vitamin D3, 4,000 IUs daily to be broken up into 2 or 3 doses

:: Vitamin C powder with a pinch of baking soda in water. This helps to buffer the vit. C, making it easy on your stomach. Take to bowel tolerance.
:: Powdered magnesium citrate (do NOT use magnesium oxide), with potassium. Put in water. Take to bowel tolerance.

:: The 3 Musketeers (a natural antibacterial combo). Take this for 7 to 10 days:

colloidal silver 2 times a day

In a "0" size capsule put--

1/2 capsule of grapefruit seed extract

1/2 capsule of oregano oil

:: At bedtime fill humidifier with 3% hydrogen peroxide. Using food grade peroxide and diluting it is cheaper. Make sure to cover any nearby surfaces as it can 'bleach' them.

For Ear Infection:

:: Fill ear canal with hydrogen peroxide. Can use food grade to increase to 5 or 6 percent peroxide. Wait till fizzing stops, let peroxide drain out. She must do this multiple times a day till we observe no more fizzing. Fizzing signifies an infection.

For Bladder Infection:

:: We need to get some pH strips to check her overall alkalinity and for the UTI. (must be between 7.0 and 8.0, definitely not below that range.

:: Cranberry juice, 100% kind. This will be hard to take, maybe honey will help the medicine go down?

:: Urva Ursi, 1 pill 2 times a day, for 10 days only. Do not exceed 10 days.

So that is all for Saoirse's acute infections. As a maintenance she should take the following drink.

1/2 cup lemon juice (straight from the lemons), make sure to get some pulp in there

cap full of Fulvic Mineral Complex

pinch of baking soda

pinch of sea salt

Fill up a glass or water bottle the rest of the way with water.

The above drink can be used during times of dehydration, or used as a sports drink. If you have a child with a fever you put them in the bath tub with the following additives, and then give them this drink to sip while they soak.

For Bath:

1 cup baking soda

1 cup borax

2 cups Epsom salt

Then for me, our practitioner was able to see that I was having joint issues. It has been much better since being on GAPS. I used to wake up and all my joints were in a lot of pain. It would take me an hour to loosen up and be able to move without pain. With GAPS the pain is gone, but I do still have some stiffness. So I am supposed to take the following concoction:

1 TBS apple cider vinegar

cap full of Fulvic Mineral Complex

pinch of baking soda

pinch of sea salt

I am also to look into taking MSM, which is a sulfur supplement.

Our practitioner was very happy to see Jedidiah's progress. One of the most notable was that he is growing into his head. He is finally looking more proportional. This is a good thing. I was lamenting the fact that, although we have seen great progress with Jed, we haven't seen the weight gain like we would like. I was reminded that one of the first things our practitioner found when Jed was first tested, was that his heart was weak. As a safety mechanism a person's body will not outgrow its heart's ability to function properly. So it was suggested that we get Jed on the following:

:: Krill oil. Number one! Must get! Not sure how we are going to get him to take it. I'll come up with something.

:: An omega supplement

:: Magnesium citrate. I can probably put it in his smoothies

:: Possibly look into CoQ 10

:: Cyenne pepper would be helpful, but both of us couldn't think of how to get that into him.

For Flannery, since she is still having some pinching sensations, although MUCH, much improved. She needs to be on the magnesium as well. It looks to me like we will be investing in a bulk order of magnesium :-)

And finally some help with female cramping. One of our girls has been having very painful cycles and it looks more like a hormone issue. So for maintenance she needs to take kelp. You could use a good iodine liquid, but kelp is safer I guess. Also for pain, until the kelp corrects any issues:

Turmeric pills

Boswalia pills

MSM pill

Magnesium oil spray on skin over affected area

I do not know the dosages, you would have to read the bottles.

Well just looking over this list is exhausting! I guess I better get to work!!!

AS ALWAYS do your own research!! I am only sharing things that we plan on doing, this is not to be taken as medical advice. Please see your own health practitioner.

The poor thing!

2012-01-19T07:24:00.000-08:00

Must start school, but thought I would write quick. I am hoping to remind myself to write a full post on this as I need a safe way to store my information. Trying to keep three small papers safe and sound is a hard task around these parts. But those papers have all the information I need to help Saoirse get well.

We finally were able to see our holistic practitioner. Some may recall that Saoirse has been complaining of headaches, dizziness and stomach pain. On top of that I noticed her cystitis getting 'worse'. Well come to find out the poor thing has a sinus infection, an ear infection and a bladder infection!! The sinus infection explains her headaches and stomach pain (from the post nasal drip). And her seemingly worsening of her cystitis was just a bladder infection thrown on top. Needless to say this also explains her emotional breakdowns in the past couple of weeks. Basically she was at the end of her rope of feeling poorly. I would have taken her in sooner had she told me how badly she felt. She never had a fever, and pretty much lived a normal life :-)

The funny thing was that towards the end of her testing I was thinking to myself, "What in the world???? Is this diet helping us at all? Where am I going wrong?..." Soon after those thoughts entered my mind our practitioner says, "I know you may find this hard to believe, but Saoirse is actually very healthy. There's only been a few people I can say that are 'clean', but she's one of them. So you are doing a great job with this diet." Really? wow! Ok, deep breath in, deep breath out. The bottom line is that it appears we have not eradicated the mold like we thought as this is the underlying issue that Saoirse is facing. I have a long list of supplements and natural remedies that she has to start taking. Make no doubt about it, it's going to be labor intensive. I have to say that is one draw back with this holistic practitioner(h.p.) compared to homeopathy. With our h.p., you get her remedy and on top of it you have to take a bunch of supplements and natural remedies. With homeopathy you only need to take a single remedy a few times a day for only a few days. But, the homeopathy is a lot more expensive. Especially since they would see this as a constitutional case and not an acute situation. Oh well. At least I know what we are facing and that we have a means to beat it.

Alrighty, off to gather my girls to start our lessons. I'll be back later to write out all the info for what she has to take.

Replacing twaddle

2012-01-17T13:23:00.000-08:00

I've mentioned about ridding our home of twaddle. I think a post of all the changes we have made is in order, but for now here is one snippet of our changes.

Reading materials. It can be a tricky road to cover sometimes. Especially if you don't have the funding to buy books. We make it more of a practice to look for books that we would like for our children to read or use and then go to the library's online search to see if our library system carry any of the ones we deem fit. We 'request' it online, and it is on the hold shelf for us in a few days. This has drastically cut down on the twaddle coming in. My children were very fond of going to the library and searching for books. However, more likely than not, they came back with comics, or other twaddle books. They definitely had art books, or animal books that were fine, but too many poor choices were being brought in. There are only so many hours in the day and the thought of "did I want my child to spend their precious hours with junk food for the mind", made me stop and reconsider our ways. So this way isn't as fun for the kids, but has most certainly helped us to work towards our family goals.

That being said, there are days, like science class days, when it is too cold or wet that we need to pass one and a half hours...with 5 children. Not a fun time. So today I took them to the library. However when it came time to leave I put the children in the van and then went back for the books. I took this time to weed out unwanted books. Below you will see the choices we came home with. Because the girls' schooling is filled with living books, I use library books to fill in their interests. They were pretty excited about the new reads. Isabella LOVES (yes, with all caps!) The Self Sufficient Life by Seymour. She really wants to buy it, but it's a pricey book. So for now we just have to renew it. Hmmm, maybe that would make a good birthday present.

We got a few more that are not pictured, but the themes are all the same (homesteading, cooking, animals, or crafting).

Aubrey wants to get in on the fun! He's holding a book that the girls are going goo-goo over, called In*Jean*Uity. It's taking jeans and either embellishing them ( you can use the ideas for jean skirts as well), or repourposing them. We just got a bag of clothing off of freecycle, or the homeschool loop (can't remember), and it had two pairs of jeans that we couldn't wear. One had huge holes in the knees, and the other was a men's size that didn't fit anyone. We were going to get rid of them when I came across this book today. The girls have been hard at work cutting, measuring and sewing. Fun stuff.

Some snippets

2012-01-16T11:15:00.000-08:00

Flannery took this picture hte other day of two eggs. Both came from our chickens. The one on the left is a normal sized egg. The one on the right? What's up with that? Silly chickens.

Getting that creative feeling again. I already have two blankets I am working on. But this little project should be completed quickly and easily. Sometimes I just need a little something to make that won't take me months to complete. This is a crochet market (or produce) bag. We may use it to bring in our BJ's stuff. Not sure if that will work or not. BJ's is like a Sam's or Costco, so they don't have bags to put your stuff in. Not that some of it will fit in bags anyways. But when we get peanut butter, shampoo or almonds it can get tiring to go back and forth to the van when we come home with a van full of groceries...all without bags.

Jonah during school time today. Don't let these pictures fool you. I think taking a video would be much better to convey how a schooling day goes for us. It's pretty much half mangaged chaos. Let me assure you if it happens to be the bad half of the managed chaos, it's not a pretty sight. My children do not sit perfectly still all seated in straight backed chairs...all attentive. Ok, wait till I stop laughing.....Ok, now I can continue. But there are certainly our good days, and when I have those it's a nice break from the regularly scheduled chaos.

This would be the resulting mess of Jonah's "school time". I don't actually do school with Jonah, he just tags along and plays along with what ever we happen to be working on.

He is trying to learn to count...all on his own free will. Plus these cubes help with fine motor skills, right? Good thing he is only 3, and I don't have to worry about schooling him. I just get to be his mom :-)

Saoirse only needed a couple of these blocks to learn the concept of "even" numbers today. But like a lot of my children, once they get going it's hard to stop them. Now if only we could harness that energy towards their chores...hmmmm...

Jeremiah took this picture. He thought it was a wonderful sight to see all of our "funky" stuff on the counter. Let's see we have the two ferments I showed you all yesterday, then the two quarts of salsa, two quarts of the pepper/onions, two bowls of squash seeds soaking (only one showing right now), a pot of almonds soaking and a bowl of freshly 'harvested' eggs. We are really trying to work on getting our chickens to lay more eggs. We changed their feed and added some oyster shells. That really started to make a difference. Until we got a new wave of cold weather. The breed of chickens we have now don't do well with swinging weather changes. We heard of a breed that does, and are thinking of getting a few to see if it's true. I'm not sure how to spell the breed's name, but it's something like 'astrolop'.

Ok, off to finish cleaning my room. Jeremiah took the kids out to the store. I took a break to eat some yummy squash.

Loooonnnnngggg day in the kitchen

2012-01-14T18:23:00.000-08:00

It's been a long productive day! And it's not over yet! I still have three chicken roasters to debone and bag before I head to bed. Currently they are cooling so that I can handle them. So, while I wait, I thought I would recap our day. I was able to get everything I could get done, done. There are a couple of more things on my list that need doing, but I can't do yet as they need defrosting, or some other step to be complete. Hopefully this means we can start the intro diet tomorrow. I decided that spending an extra day prepping would be worth waiting an extra day.

All the girls helped out in the kitchen today. They were VERY helpful. There would be no way that we would have gotten everything done if they hadn't helped. Here is Flannery chopping some apples for applesauce. Applesauce doesn't come until stage four or five. But Jed may have issues with his blood sugar, like the last time, and I want to have this on hand. I have a couple of things lined up for him should he need it. I was trying to make sure it was closer to being gaps legal, and closer to stage 1 to get the most healing in.

She was pretty proud of all her work. I was too!

Saoirse helped me with the carrots. I made up a batch of fermented ginger carrots, and we peeled and chopped the rest for the freezer.

She was wanting to cut the carrots, and I let her cut a couple. I hate this stage where they really, really want to help by cutting, but they are just riding that fine line of ability to do so!

Moira joined in the peeling, chopping fun!

I've said it before, I really love the sunlight streaming into my kitchen. I tried to capture it, but wasn't exactly successful. This was the closest I could get.

There was some serious multi tasking going on today!! If not for myself, but with all my 'servents' running at once. You can see some of the works in progress above. By tonight I will have cooked 6 roaster chickens, bottle about 4 gallons or more of broth, have yogurt fermenting over night, 2 bags of yellow onions chopped and put in the freezer, 1/2 gallon of fermenting ginger carrots, 8 pounds of carrots peeled, cut and put in the freezer, 10 pounds of apples turned applesauce, 1/2 gallon of fermenting cucumbers, 2 quarts of fermenting salsa, 2 quarts of fermenting green bell peppers with onions, almost 2 quarts of ghee made, a few bunches of bananas put in the freezer, and a 3 pound bag of almonds soaking to be dehydrated tomorrow. PHEW!!!

Now this is a beautiful site. I can only hope they taste as good as they look :-)

You can see some of the dill floating in the cucumbers, and the yummy ginger and garlic in the carrots (there is garlic in with the cukes as well).

There you have it, my day in a nutshell. I am worn out! The girls are still going strong. Flannery is currently cooking some banana pancakes. After I debone the chicken I am contemplating making a hot cocoa as it will be a long time before I can have it again.

Jumping in again

2012-01-13T19:52:00.000-08:00

Sometime this weekend we will be jumping back into the GAPS intro diet. I've felt it necessary to do so since we have all stalled in our improvements. I can look at everyone and say, "Well this and this are better, but we still have that going on.." It may just be our bodies way of taking a breather before continuing on in their healing mode. Not sure. I do know that we have backslidden. No, we are not eating off of GAPS, but we are not fully eating *all* the really healthy foods we need to. For example it is suggested that you drink at least one cup of broth each day. We haven't been doing that. We only have broth when we have soup, which has only been about 2 meals per week. You are supposed to be eating a lot of fermented foods. Again, we are not. We have been eating yogurt at least 3 to 4 days a week, but that's pretty much it. I just feel we are not getting enough of the good stuff in that we need. My goal of re doing intro is to get back in the habit of eating those power houses. Jed has not gained any more weight in the last two months. Granted we've seen a LOT of other improvements in the past two months with him, just not in his weight gain. I know it is important for his brain to heal, and I know that it is, it is just hard to see him at a stand still with his weight.

So this weekend I have a long, long list of food prep we need to tackle to make things run more smoothly. Here is what I have so far:

ferment cucumbers (to make into pickles)
make and ferment salsa
make and ferment guacamole
boil up a bunch of chickens, freeze meat
cook a bunch of ground beef, then freeze
make beef stock (roast bones first)
make a batch of yogurt
cut and freeze carrots
peel, cook apples and freeze
make ghee
cut and freeze onions (two bags)
freeze bananas (for Jed if he starts to crash)
keep the broths going, pouring off 1/2 gallon each day and renewing water
order kefir grains and piima culture

Phew! We've got work to do! This will be on top of trying to get some other things done around the house, plus some yard work. We had our shopping day today and it went well. I only had 1/2 of it to do as Jeremiah did the other half. I was hoping to get the kids out to the park while we were running around town, but that didn't happen. I'll have to be mindful to get them out to play this weekend.

Tonight the girls were very excited that Jeremiah brought home some mung beans for them to sprout. Moira asked if they could get some. They have been watching the homesteading DVD's we have and decided they wanted to give that a try. They even video taped themselves preparing for the first step. I am really over joyed at seeing them work on such a project. Things really are changing around here, and it is fascinating to see. Just the other night we were hanging out with some friends. Isabella and her friend got on the topic of movies and computer time. Isabella said that she had neither (only the homesteading and gardening videos). Her friend, who gets little of either of those them self, was aghast...WHAT? What do you do all day? Well, I have to say that in the beginning, not a lot, as they wondered around here aimlessly. They knew not to complain that they were bored :-) Mommy has plenty of boredom busters!!! There's vacuuming, dishes, window washing, bathroom cleaning, laundry....the possibilities are endless really :-) To be honest I was wondering if they would ever find something to do. But giving them a 'banquet of ideas' to ponder, the time and resources (when we can), mixed with patience has really paid off. Don't get me wrong, we haven't "arrived", but how wonderful to see progress being made.

Alrighty off to bed with me. I had to skip out on posting my picture for the day on project365. Waaayyy too busy today to grab the camera. I did think of it, just couldn't grab it. Oh well. The perfectionist in me is dying slowly but surely.

project365

2012-01-10T12:41:00.000-08:00

Yes, I am crazy...why do you ask? Crazy about what? Another project. It is my ultimate goal and focus during my days to care and guide my children. I've heard many takes on a mom needing her 'own' time, to the opposite, that a mom doesn't, she just needs to wait till God provides her with a breather. I suppose I can swing both ways! But I try....note the word try...not to do so. I do have some interests of my own. Most of my interests are in the well being of my family...gardening, natural health, home education, sewing, crochet, etc...but a couple of them are more my own. The study of homeopathy falls into natural health, although I am the only one studying it. Photography falls in between my own and for my family. I started up so that we could have nice pictures of our family. But it is also an outlet for my creativity. Painting is out of the question as the set up and take down time is too involved. Not to mention too messy with little hands all around. Though I may try my hand at some water color pencils. Not to mention it takes some time to create a painting. And in my state of being, with little time on my hands I need to see some sort of results in reasonable amount of time or I get discouraged. Photography fit the bill to create and get results :-)

I try to get out with my camera to capture our life in the everyday, not waiting for a special occasion or moment. Now there are those that have an eye for things, and those of us who need some practice. Project365 is a site to upload one picture that you took that day. I like it because there isn't a theme, just a place to put your pictures. I suppose there will definitely be overlap between there and here, but for anyone who wants to really see just the ordinary...you can check my project365 page.

Just taking a quick break. I put the baby to nap. The girls only have dictation left for schooling. And we have a new kitten. Yeah, definitely crazy. Long story. I have to say it is pretty darn cute :-)

2012-01-07T17:26:00.000-08:00

We watched a wonderful movie last night! I think anyone who has even an inkling that they might want to take up gardening, or for those who already have a garden this is a must see. Everyone over here is fired up to make up a bunch more garden areas! Plans, plans, plans. Seed catalogs, diagrams, talking, thinking. Isabella signed up to receive some more catalogs. Because of the lay of our land we will have to get creative as to where these garden spaces will go. We have to have space for the goats to rotate living areas (still yet to be created), and we have to keep the goats out of the garden areas (read...we need fencing). Some plans are taking shape that will incorporate what we have available to us and what we can do in the here and now. Some plans may need to be done in stages as they involve money (like cutting down some of our trees). I was ~~drooling~~ eyeing some lovely fruit and nut trees. I would love to see some apple, cherry, elderberry, pecan, walnut and almond trees in our yard. Not to mention some blueberry bushes and raspberry canes around. We even went out today gather some things to start this process. Along the way we stopped at the park, because little legs needed to run off some energy. I took some pictures while there. You'll see our park time below, along with some pictures from here a home over the past few days. Oh, I almost forgot to leave you all with the link to the gardening movie. The best part is that it is FREE! You gotta love that :-)
Let me know how you liked it.
Back to Eden

Very rarely do we see Aubrey crawl anymore. But I got proof that he still does every once in a great while.

This was too precious. Moira gathered some greens to feed to the goats. Aubrey was totally entranced watching them eat.

And giddy!

Jed has really 'jumped' into being a dare devil. I swear he's going to give me a heart attack one of these days. Yesterday we were walking down the porch steps, and about 4 or 5 steps from the bottom he says, "Mommy, watch this." And he proceeded to jump to the ground! Oy. Here he is jumping off a small hill. Much safer.

Aubrey is still a bit unsteady on his feet, especially outside where the terrain is uneven. You can see the dirt on his back from when he took a wee tumble.

Tumble or not he just keeps on plodding, he's got 6 siblings to run after!

The girls were playing a tag game at the park today. I was able to snap a couple of pictures before they would have to run off as they were being pursued by "it".

Aubrey still has the need to taste everything he comes in contact with!

"Did anyone see that?"

Running off to play.

I would still love to get a group shot with all the children, but I felt that today wasn't going to be the day. So I just called over the girls for an all girl picture.

Then I called the boys over. They were all wiggle worms!

Jonah, who is usually a ham, wasn't in the ham mood, Jed was trying to be silly, and Aubrey wanted to get down and run.

Before we went home we gathered up some supplies for our gardening plans. I can't wait to share our progress.

Aubrey's first birthday!!!

2012-01-06T06:10:00.000-08:00

HAPPY FIRST BIRTHDAY AUBREY

Yesterday was the big ONE! Our wee babe turned one year old. Wow! Seriously the time goes so fast! Aubrey was up early. Jonah woke up way too early as well. So I put Jonah back to bed, and took a little snooze time as well :-) Aubrey fell back to sleep for a bit as well. He took an amazing afternoon nap, which let me get a bunch of things done. Things like make his birthday dinner and cake :-) Isabella made the cake, and I made the frosting. The frosting was a new recipe for us. My first attempt was a failure. The second attempt came out perfect. We made a plain vanilla bean cake and I made one batch of vanilla frosting and one batch of chocolate frosting. You should have seen Aubrey's eyes light up with the first lick of the frosting! He wanted to dive right in! We let the cakes chill in the fridge a bit while we went outside to play. It was growing dark and we didn't have much time before coming in. I wanted to make sure to eat early so that Aubrey didn't crash before it was time to have cake or open his birthday present.

Everyone loved, LOVED the cake. And it seems like we hit the jackpot as far as the gift. Everyone wanted to play with it. It's only a set of wooden nesting boxes. It was a fun evening for all. Here are some pictures of our day and celebration:

Saoirse took this picture. Aubrey was much too interested in what his brothers were doing than looking at the camera.

Moira has done a lot of work in this front garden area! You can see there are some tall weeds at the end of this area. The whole area was covered in those weeds, but she pulled them out. I started to watch this great video on gardening last night. I decided to watch the rest with the family. Because we have done away with movies (all but educational ones) the girls get pretty excited about watching a homesteading movie! They really want to grow a big garden to store food and to sell some of the extras. So I think they will really enjoy this film.

Saoirse wanted me to take a bunch of pictures of her :-) She's our photogenic one.

Hanging with our cat. We were loving on him. He was kind enough to bring us a present today, his first. I was beginning to wonder if he was earning his keep :-)

Aubrey wanted to try on some boots, either that or it was Jeremiah who wanted him to try on some boots. Ha, ha! One way or the other it was pretty cute, and short lived. As soon as he took a step he stepped right out of them!

Jed wanted a picture of his cars.

A boy can't have too many pictures of his cars.

Aubrey was a whirl of activity! It was hard to get a picture of him that wasn't one big blur.

He's really into climbing now a days.

I'm bummed that I didn't get a clear picture of daddy and his boy. It was getting dark.

It was time to come in and have some cake! Oh, wait, first we needed to eat dinner. Chili was on the menu as that is one of the easier meals for Aubrey to eat.

The girls reminded me that we had to have Aubrey partake in the one year birthday tradition.

Most of our babies picked up two objects at the same time. Aubrey was very decisive and chose the tomato firm and square. That means he's supposed to be a farmer when he grows up ;-)

Finally it was cake time. Looks to me like Aubrey enjoyed himself.

Making sure to get every last lick!

After a quick bath it was time to open the birthday present, but not before a little dancing. Aubrey was dancing in a circle and clapping his hands.

Ooh, what's this?

It's mine to play with? (technically yes, but try telling that to all his siblings :-))

Trying to figure out how these things work.

All this celebrating is hard work...time to take a breather.

Back to the Books

2012-01-02T19:15:00.000-08:00

Today we had a very light school day. Very light. Jeremiah was home and I still had a bunch of things to do to get our house in shape before our next semester began. I would say that I am 90-95% done with the purging. I am in my bedroom and bathroom, making progress. It has been a juggling act of putting their second semester plans together, purging, regular cleaning, the holidays and cooking. Thankfully Jeremiah really jumped in with both feet to help! I would be totally overwhelmed by now if he hadn't. Phew! I'm glad that most of the work is done, but not so glad that it took me all two weeks of our break to get it done. I will still have to do some things come the weekend. Jeremiah suggested I do a bit each night. But I just got done putting together our schedule and I have no free time all week long. Well, maybe a wee bit before bed, but I already know from experience that I will be exhausted by then. Come late night it is time to read, blog or crochet. If I can even manage that.

Not sure what to make of some of the issues we've had going on here today. I am wondering if some of the children snuck illegal foods at church yesterday. Flannery has been a basket case. Big time!! A wee bit of her pinching sensations, having melt downs, and seems to need glasses (she has been holding her reading up to her face. Although it may be more of a tracking problem then a sight issue, time will tell.). Saoirse has been over reacting to everything and anything. I asked her to do something, but didn't hear a reply, so I repeated myself. Mind you I really thought she didn't hear me so my repeat request was just like my first, calm and normal. The child comes up to me crying and carrying on how she heard me, and why did I have to keep repeating myself, etc!! What? Total meltdown. Jonah was pretty touchy today as well. I have one word for all of this..."tiring". Yup, that pretty much sums it up. On the other hand Mr. Jedidiah seems to be our little comedian. Who would have thought. He will say or do something silly and then say, "I'm just kidding." He then goes on laughing about it. I should get it on video sometime because I know I'm not explaining it very clearly. He really just keeps growing mentally/emotionally. I would dare say physically as well, but haven't checked his numbers. Today I was cleaning out my closet and came across a box of tubing, syringes and even a sealed box of a new g-tube! I promptly threw them out!!! Wooo-hooo!! No more tubes, thank you very much :-)

I would like to put together another post of our school stuff soon. I first want to get a feel for how this is all going to work. I kept the skeleton of our first semester and added to it. Threw in a few organizational tools and am hoping for the best. Here is a wee snapshot of our schedule. I'll take pictures and links to any helps that I found to help us continue to improve our learning time.

Tomorrow we start back in full. Tuesdays are hard as we have science class. Not to mention that it will be very cold out tomorrow, making outside park time during class not an option. Hmm, we will have to get creative. Maybe go to the library for a bit. That's what we usually did, but I am trying to stay away from all the twaddle as my kids go nuts over it and I've seen a lot of positive things going on without it, so I want to keep it far from them.

We also need to prepare for Aubrey's birthday. He's going to be one years old this Thursday!!!! I can hardly believe it. We bought him some wooden nesting/stacking blocks. We wanted to get him a couple of small stuffed objects to 'hide' in the blocks, but couldn't find what we were looking for. I still have a ton of felt left over from before Christmas and may use that to make a few small critters to add to the birthday fun. We will just need to add a yummy birthday bean cake with chocolate frosting, a candle and we'll be set. We'll have to make it on the early side as he's been getting sleepy around 6 pm. Nobody likes to have a tired birthday boy.

Off to bed, hope you all had a wonderful start to the new year!

Happy New Year!

2012-01-01T20:57:00.001-08:00

Make a video - it's fun, easy and free!
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Total Odds and Ends

2011-12-20T07:10:00.000-08:00

Not a lot of time to post, but wanted to add these odds and ends. I've been talking about purging the house for some time now. We've done some work, but it has been taking WAY too long. So I had to lay down the law :-) No going anywhere, or having people over UNTIL ***ALL*** the purging is done, in every room of our house. So there :-P I know it is going to be a whirl wind couple of weeks until the new year. I have a lot of new things planned to be added into our school semester, one of which is not spending all day doing chores! I think the girls are excited about some of the new things. I am sure some of it won't be so exciting. Isabella told me last night she was excited to start a Book of Centuries, a Book of Firsts and for us to put on a play. The girls were talking last night which book (one of their literature books or a Shakespeare play) that they want to do. I told them they would make up the play, make costumes, and that we could get some white sheets from the thrift store for them to paint scenes on. Anyways, all of this will not be accomplished if we find ourselves having to constantly clean the mass messes around here. I told them that after the purging we will be instituting a schedule for school time so that one girls will be with the boys at all times. It's the little guys that make the most messes. Both those measures should help. Off to exercise (making progress!) and clean. Here are some odd placed pictures:

After we made our jars we set them out on our porch one night. We stood out there for a prayer time and then made some hot chocolate (half gaps legal...no cocoa is allowed, but we used almond milk and honey for the other ingredients). I've really enjoyed having these colorful jars around. We need to light them up again. We've just been so busy we haven't thought about it.

Another picture of jars. Are you all getting tired of seeing our jars yet :-) Hopefully not. There are more jars below...but with a different purpose.

Ahhh, now this would be some great jar content! Fermented salsa. I made 6 quarts, and all of it's gone. Granted this picture is older...maybe a month or more. That was a lot of chopping! I bought some more ingredients to make up a couple more quarts.

I was having a huge fermenting/whole foods cooking day that day. Along with the salsa I was making yogurt (in the green crock) and chicken stock in the black crock. I also was soaking beans and making a new fermented beverage....

Beet Kvass! I have one word for it...YUCK! Ha! However yucky it is it is supposed to be a huge liver purifier. I keep forgetting to drink it because it's so unpleasant. Maybe it's saltiness has subsided by now? One can hope.

And this my friends is what my kitchen looks like when I do a whole bunch of fermenting and cooking. Don't worry, it got all cleaned up....a few hours later :-)

Moira's Mouse

2011-12-14T06:40:00.000-08:00

Moira asked me to ask everybody to see her mouse which she wants everybody to go to her blog to see "Squeaky" which is a crocheted mouse that is very adorable. Here is a sneak peek


This is "Squeaky"

That's all for now.

Love,
Me

Play Time in the Cold

2011-12-11T16:38:00.000-08:00

Please note that "cold" is a relative term :-) It was a whopping 50 degrees out the other day. You'll see that in some ways our time is the same. Some things differ, like when Jonah catches on that it is much colder than the day before. Jeremiah helped to load the pictures and decided to add captions to them. I decided to leave his up (His will be in black) and to add mine as I had planned (in blue).

My new Danskin clogs

See, layers were in order. Hey, you Northerners....you know you can get hypothermia in 50 degree weather don't you?

Aubrey exploring... dirt.

This little boy's footsies had to be covered...no baby toes to admire.

Aubrey sharing his rock

Aubrey learning to share. I'm sure it is easier to do so with a rock, let's see if it transfers over to when he has some ice cream :-)

Flannery's left foot, painted nails

Sandals are still in use in these parts.

Carefully making hopscotch fun

Hopscotch in miniature.

A girl and her grid

This game of hopscotch was done in jackets and shoes!

Shoes definitely not required

Apparently the shoes didn't last long.

I'm, like, reading

We have a wide variety of activities we do when we are outside. Running, building, creek wading are popular, but every once in a while it's nice to be outside with a good book.

Uhhh, yeah, still reading

You can't see me!

Trying to keep warm as we wait for friends to arrive.

Peak-a-boo!

Unfortunately our friends were not able to make it. So instead we just took some pictures.

Austere pre-teen

Moira while waiting.

Jonah cuddling up

Jonah finally figured out that it was cold outside. He went in to grab some blankets. It was soon after this that we headed inside as everyone was chilled to the bone.

Yep, still reading... and Jonah is cuddling up

Jonah tried to share Bella's blanket first, but then he decided he needed his own (as seen above).

There you have it. Our weekend was rounded off with church and hanging out around here. I've gotten a ton of their school planning done so far, but more is needed to be done. The reason it is taking so long is that I am trying to incorporate two curriculums together. We are also putting in the other 'subjects' that we were not doing last semester. And because we hadn't been doing them it is taking me some time to figure out how to best approach them so that our days run smoothly. I'll show my new schedule when it gets done. We are taking a mini break from school for the rest of the year. The oldest two have one more science class (it resumes in January), and the girls will be doing one math lesson daily (as they are behind). Other than that my focus will be to get their schedule done and to finish our decluttering.

sub

The Christmas Pictures

2011-12-10T15:14:00.000-08:00

So we set up a little area in our bathroom (which has the brightest light in the house), to take some pictures. Isabella mentioned how we should get some professional pictures taken for Christmas. Well that just wasn't going to happen. So before I knew it the girls pulled out their makeup and dresses and asked to get their pictures taken here at home. We put up a white bed sheet and taped some Christmas lights to the sheet for some sparkly glow. I'm not sure if the glow effect worked as well as we hoped, but we did get some nice pictures. You may have already seen these on the girls' blogs, but if not, here they are:

Isabella

Moira

Flannery. For some reason she didn't want to give a big smile.

Saoirse, who is looking much older than her 7 years.

Jedidiah. Scrapes, bumps and all :-)

His pictures are on the dark side as I didn't edit them yet.

Jonah

It was impossible to keep this boy in one spot!

Aubrey

Cute as usual :-)

Christmas Pictures, trial run

2011-12-08T09:05:00.000-08:00

In photoshop my pics were looking digitized, so I am posting some here to see how they show up. Sometimes weird things happen in other programs, but work out fine on another venue.

And make sure to take a look at Isabella' blog to see a lot more pictures!

games

2011-12-07T12:28:00.000-08:00

Any guesses as to which outside game the girls decided to play? I think the first picture gives it away. It was supposed to rain this afternoon...we're still waiting for it to start. So we got outside earlier than normal. It was a balmy 70 degrees out. After the rain it's only going to be in the low 50's. Brrrr :-) We were supposed to run a couple of errands, but were locked out of our van. One errand will wait till tomorrow, the other, well they came to us. We had company over and they left behind something. It was a wonderful time of fellowship. Take a peek at our outside time.

Does this give our game away?

The making of the game. Since we don't have a hard surface and chalk we have to draw our game this way.

Someone's hop, hop, hopping.

Another hopper, with two very attentive siblings who are making sure the rules are adhered to.

Turn over.

Shoes are not required. Yes, it is December.

Flannery's turn.

Waiting.

Camo and butterflies. Hmmm.

This little guy is no longer content to stay in my arms when we are outside.

Look at him go!

Oh the faces :-)

Mmmm, dirt.

Must. Have. Baby. Feet.

Yet another attempt for a group shot. I only got this one picture as my camera battery gave out. Bummer. Try, try again.

Outside time

2011-12-03T16:42:00.000-08:00

A few days of pictures from the out of doors.

Just starting out. Bucket in hand.

Leaves are always a good thing to fill a bucket with.

Jed becomes apprehensive over the goats.

This picture and the next are out of order. This would be Jed after I have reassured him that the big goats are not in the middle area.

This is Jed worried that the big goats may come after him. They have a tendency to nibble on his ears, and he does NOT like that!

Moira decked out in a dress and work boots. Who says you can't have style when you are raking leaves?

Jed and Jonah love to push Aubrey on the swing. Jonah prefers to twist Aubrey around.

As you can see, Aubrey doesn't mind one bit.

Jed's turn to rake the leaves. He still prefers the two colored boot look.

Aubrey enjoys being on the ground now to explore. Unfortunately that involves test tasting! Yuck!

He was showing Saoirse his new found treasures, which dropped out of his hand right before I clicked the button.

Flannery's swing is up and running.

Trying for that sun flare look.

I had to ask Flannery to be still so I could take a picture. Getting a still picture of Flannery is hard to come by.

Contemplating life.

The sky looked really beautiful the other day, with the moon out.

One of our favorite rocks (the big one on the left).

Jonah was very upset that he missed out on helping Daddy fix the porch pickets. He had to make up for lost tool time :-)

He decided to dig up a bunch of dirt with the hammer. At least I didn't have to worry about a banged up finger!

These wood boards serve as a ladder for the girls to get over our back fence. Sometimes they have to catch a chicken, or an escaped goat, and with no back gate, this was the easiest set up.

I've really been into sky pictures lately.

Pippi. She's such a sweet goat. No, really. I never thought that goats had personalities....until we had some ourselves.

Our new addition to the farm. This my friends would be a male. That means we should have some baby goats in about five months, and that spells m.i.l.k. :-)

Some two handed photography going on. Ha! I just went around taking pictures of all sorts of odd things.

Trees, lower branch in focus.

Now that lower branch is out of focus, but you can see the rest of the tree. I love aperture :-)

Hammer. All alone. No boy in site!

Just some weeds up front. But I thought they looked nice. At least up close. They reach about 6 feet or so.

The gate that children MUST stop at when we go fetch the mail. They always run ahead and this is the designated stopping place. The road that we live off of is 55mph.

Walking, or running for some, back from the mail.

The majority of the trees around us are oak or pine.

Only two leaves were left of on this tree. I really loved the deep color.

The next couple of pics are of Aubrey and I had to desaturate them as the orange in Jeremiah's shirt was reflecting off of his face. With as round as cheeks as he has, he sort of resembled a pumpkin :-)

This sweet babe is getting his top teeth in. Ouch.

Ok, I'm melting now. I just want to eat him up.

Aubrey has learned a few handy skills, such as pointing.

And waving.

The sky above our house this evening.

I surrender.

Well, not before I find some more treasure.

Craft time

2011-12-02T04:50:00.000-08:00

This year I decided that we should make some decorative items for the Christmas season. Last year was taken up with the preparations of a baby coming (can you believe Aubrey will be a year old next month!!). Only the essentials got done. On top of that we have really been working on our goals to unify our family. That includes no movies, or computer games. We've already bought a bunch of board games for us to enjoy as a family. Next up the sleeve are some changes in our focus in homeschooling. Maybe putting on some plays, learning musical instruments, or starting a 'tea time'. On shopping day I bought some cheap supplies for us to make some crafts. Following the Charlotte Mason idea that handiwork should be productive (no pipe cleaner and paper crafts that do not serve a purpose) I came up with a couple of ideas for us to work on. We had a bunch of glass jars that I had saved, and I bought some tissue paper to make the 'stained glass jars' you see below. I also bought some felt and embroidery floss for us to make some ornaments. This was the first time in a LONG time we all did a craft together. Everyone enjoyed themselves, and everyone loved how they turned out. I took a few pictures of the decorating, and some of the finished jars.

Jed and Jonah really enjoyed making these. Jed's was quite unique in that he didn't want his papers to be glued flat to the jar.

I was surprised that he really stuck with this to the end. I thought the stickiness of the glue may have overwhelmed him (sensory issues), but he did great!

Each of the girls had an idea of what they wanted theirs to look like. Some wanted a color theme, some wanted their papers to be ripped as opposed to cut. Flannery wanted only one layer of the papers with little over lapping.

I thought my middle kitchen counter may never be the same again with all that glue :-) Thankfully we cleaned up right away and it was easy to clean. Jonah was a bit obsessed with the glue. He wanted to keep painting it on, and painting it on everyone else's jar. That did not go over well with the others.

Here they are all lined up. Jonah's is way in the background. He kept coming over and moving it out of the line up. Silly boy.

So from youngest to oldest, here are our creations. This is Jonah's. It has abut 50,000 layers of glue on it :-) But I have to say he really did a great job.

Jed's creation. I love the rough around the edges look.

Saoirse's. The girls have been working on making things for each other for Christmas, and so a lot of time they are off in different rooms of the house to make their things in secret. So this was a nice change for all of us to be working on something together.

Flannery's jar. It was neat to see them all really taking care in the making of these. It wasn't a case of just slapping on some paper and pouring some glue over it. They really had a plan in their head that they were following, even if their goal was just to have a different color touching each other.

Both Moira and Isabella decided to put some shapes in theirs. Hearts to be exact. Here you can see one of the hearts on Moira's jar. Her hearts were scattered over the jar.

Isabella's hearts were evenly spaced out. Unfortunately it was hard to see when the lights went out. She used a red background with yellow hearts on top. In the light they show up, but disappear when the lights are out.

Even I got into the decorating spirit. I decided to go with a rainbow theme.

I love how the lights reflect on the table! We all really enjoyed our evening of candle light.

A new family record broken!

2011-11-27T19:37:00.000-08:00

We have a new family record. We have a new earliest walker! Aubrey started standing on his own when he was 9 months old. It didn't look like he would take any steps soon though, so I thought we would have a tie of our earliest walker being 11 months old, which was held by Moira. However, it is official, Aubrey at 10 months old is now our earliest walker. He's pretty pleased with himself. He still crawls as fast as he can when he really wants to get somewhere. But if he's already standing he will try walking first. He only takes about 8 to 10 steps at this point. I'll have to get a picture of him walking.

Where does the time go?

Thanksgiving

2011-11-27T19:35:00.000-08:00

I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving! We did. It was just us :-) We were invited, last minute, to join another family's celebration, but decided to just stick to home. Things have been a bit stressful over here and the thought of keeping track of my children in a house not familiar to me just didn't seem very fun/relaxing. Not to mention all the food that would have been off limits to them. We learned after last Sunday that it IS important to keep to the diet. The children each had two meatballs at church fellowship. Two meatballs from a bag. That equals food coloring. That then equals to four children totally out of control. Big time! I certainly did not want a repeat. So we made our own feast right here at home, all GAPS legal. And a feast it was! We had roast chicken (we prefer chicken over turkey), "potatoes", "stuffing", cranberry sauce, squash casserole, deviled eggs and some amazing pumpkin pie. This was very, VERY filling food. Everyone took what they would normally take on their plate, but we filled up way before our plates were cleaned. I had made up a batch of vanilla yogurt to go over our pie. It was delicious.

Thankfully I made sure to get a head start the day before. This was good for a couple of reasons. One being that a lot of these recipes were new to me, and that makes things go slower. The other was that there was a lot to chop, cook, assemble. But it all got done, in a relaxed manner. All the kiddos helped out as well, making it go faster. Below you can see some of our spread. You'll also find some quick snapped pictures of us putting up our Christmas tree the following day. Putting a fake tree together when you have 6 people helping really does make quick work! When the kids were too little to help it would take Jeremiah and I forever to get it up. For some reason we were short a string of lights, so a run to the store was in order. Christmas music in the background, lights, ornaments and hot apple cider. Oh fun! The baby was amazed by all the sights. He did a great job just hanging out and not getting into everything. That's a plus :-) Jonah, on the other hand....oh that boy. Thankfully he's really cute :-) Ha, ha!

Our cranberry sauce. This was devoured. No left overs.

The marshmallows! Oh, yum! More will be in our future :-)

Unfortunately the marshmallows melted too much, we will take note of that for future use. In front is the stuffing.

Pumpkin pie. This was great!!! Just like the real deal.

Aubrey was loving the action of putting up the tree. So much to see and do.

Ooh, what's this?

Jed was a bystander, or sitter. He was keeping guard of his dinosaur stocking.

Christmas music playing in the background on Pandora.

Flannery unpacking the nativity scene.

Jonah checking out the angel, and Isa trying to get in the picture.

Flannery had the honors of putting the top of the tree on.

She needed a bit of a lift.

After the lights were hung it was time to hang up the ornaments. Lots of handmade ones. Thinking we need a new round of ornaments to put up. I may have the girls help make some felt ones. I like non breakable :-)

Aubrey taste tested all of the ornaments for us.

Each of the girls have a few ornaments that are theirs only. They made sure to get those up out of the way of little hands.

Everyone pitching in. Seriously, the tree trimming gets done faster each year!

Saoirse decided to use the box that houses our Christmas things to get a better spot.

Some dancing was in order.

And no need for holly when you have a cute cherub to kiss.

Our Purging Weekend

2011-11-12T17:04:00.000-08:00

So far so good. Although I wish we made a bit more headway. But every bit counts, right? My laundry room looks awesome. All the rooms got cleaned, and the girls say that they have all their things boxed up. I'll go in there later to take things up to the attic. Then we will have two rooms done, oh wait, no three, as they say their bedroom is done.

After doing a bunch of work, we took a break and went outside...ya know, for some vitamin D :-) I was thankful for a warm day. I've got another sinus infection in the works, so I'm trying to cut it off with some sunshine, garlic and some echinacea/goldenseal pills. Everyone has been, for the most part, feeling ok. A couple of minor issues. However, Saoirse is still having headaches, and feels dizzy, although not as often. I think a trip to our holistic practitioner is in order. I need to find out the root cause of it. Otherwise I'm not sure how to address it. The headaches started after we started the diet, and when she came down with croup. Not sure if those are coincidences or not, but I would like to find out.

When we went outside to day the baby was napping (Isa stayed in to listen out for him), and I took my camera. Most of the time, like 95% of the time when I am taking pictures I have a baby in my arms. It's a nice change to have two arms free to take pictures. Below are some of my two armed photos :-)

I love capturing the normal everyday things around here. I have been trying different styles of photography to see what fits me best. I love the photography style of SouleMama, and other 'real life' photographers. I have another favorite, but her link is on the other computer. The first thing Saoirse did was to gather up the eggs. She didn't want to take them inside, so she spent half her outside time making a special spot for them...you'll see where at the end of this post.

Jonah and Jed spent most of their time chasing chickens. Jonah was successful, Jed was not.

A chicken whisperer in the making?

Jonah found a seat to sit in to hang out with his catch.

I have a feeling that the good feelings are only one sided, especially when Jonah gets ideas....

...ideas like giving a chicken a ride.

I love the different colors of our Americanas. Some are dark, like the one above, and some are a cream/yellow coloring. Very pretty.

This is a Buff Orpington. I just liked the set up, with the chicken running in the foreground, and a peek of Jonah running in the background.

I decided to check on what the other girls were doing. You can see them in our woods.

They were goat sitting :-) We let the goats out to get some roughage.

Flannery was working on something.

Banging away.

Gathering up rope.

Ta-da...a swing. Now where to put it?

On a low lying limb. However, there was a large stone under the swing. We persuaded her that it wasn't the most wisest of spots.

Moira was working on something as well, but I never found out what.

Sometimes things come out a bit blurry, or 'off'. But I found that I still loved the 'captured moment', blur and all.

It's not about the perfect shot. It's being there. Hanging out with my kiddos and taking a snap every now and again.

I enjoy trying to capture different angles.

Capturing life. That's what it's about.

I really love this one.

Time to head back to the other kiddos. Saoirse, Jed and Jonah are afraid of the goats. So they stayed behind the fence. Jonah was hanging on the fence trying to see what we were up to.

This one is pretty cute.

So here are those eggs we saw in the beginning. Saoirse made a nest for them. Yes, a nest. But where was this nest?

Ah, yes, of course. In the jogging stroller. Thankfully this is a play stroller :-)

Organizing School

2011-11-11T16:20:00.000-08:00

I'm sure I mentioned in the beginning of our school year that I did things differently this time around. I really, REALLY love Charlotte Mason's educational philosophy. I wanted us to succeed at implementing her methods. We have a LONG way to go. I still need to delve into her books to get a better grasp of all aspects of the philosophy. Bit by bit! Last year we tried our hand at the Charlotte Mason method, and it was pretty much a flop. But it had nothing to do with the method, but with ME. It got to be too overwhelming to try to find our place in multiple books. Most were online, where a bookmark is not possible. And with our real books, we kept losing the bookmarks! Oy, what is an organizing mama wanabe to do? Well, keep thinking of a way to make it work, that's what :-) Over the summer I brainstormed. Yes, this actually took brain power to do, I'm not organized by nature, so I actually had to sit and think on it. I took my annual trip to McDonald's with my *huge* bag of books, pen, paper and other stuff. I like to get away to plan our next school year, but I can only do so come night time (when babe is asleep), so that leaves little options open to me as to where I go :-) Anyways, I sat and thought out what days we would read each book. Then I thought out how I was going to make it happen. And here is what I came up with.

For our online books:

I actually took screen shots to show you all, only because I am so computer illiterate that when people try to talk computers my mind spins. I like visual. So here is my visual tutorial on how I make this less painful to do during our school time:

Ok, above you see my screenshot into window's explorer on my laptop. Below is where I normally access my folders, right on my desktop:

Those 'graphics' documents are not normally there, they are the graphics I'm using for this post! Ha,ha. So just ignore them. Off on the right hand side you see our school folders. We are still in the first trimester (3 weeks left), but I just got done organizing our second semester stuff, so that is there too.
From the top down, we have: Term 2 together (the things we do all together, like art study, and composer study), Year 3 AO-2 (Year 3 Ambleside Online, semester 2)...and I think you can figure out the rest from here.

If I were to click on the Year 3 AO-2 folder this is what I get:

Above you see the books I will be reading to Flannery and Saoirse for the second semester. These are the books that are free online. We will get a couple from the library as well. If its time to read Children of the New Forest, I just give it a click and....

We come up with each week of the second semester. On a sheet of paper, in my school organizer binder (tour of that coming up) I have which days of the week that we read each book. If we are to read Children of the New Forest today, and we are in week 13, I just click on the week 13 folder. When I do that we get this:

We see we will be reading chapters 1 through 3. When I click on the above document it opens in Word. And off we go to read!

This does mean that I have to separate each online book into separate documents. Most of the books on our schedule tell you how many chapters you are to read each week. Some just tell you to read 1/12 of the book for the week, leaving the guess work up to me. It took me a couple of nights to do our first semesters planning. But I was able to do the second semester in a couple of hours, now that I know what I am doing.

What do I do with our real books? How do I keep track of what page we are on? Colored paper clips! And when I have two girls in the same book, but on different pages, I just use two different colors :-)

The yellow one is for Saoirse, and the orange one is for Flannery. This is their phonics book.

See? I just flip to the page with the paper clip, and the side of the clip that is more like an 'arrow' is the page we need to read. Something this simple makes my life so much easier!

Now for a look into my school binder. I have a simple 1" or 1/2" yellow floppy 3 ring binder. The first two pages are for the order in which we do things, and which days we read their books. Above is Year 6 (Isabella and Moira). The things in orange we do together (all four girls). Then the older girls go off to do the rest of the things on the list. I read to the younger two girls, and help them with the things they can't do on their own. We have not been doing spelling like we should, I plan on making sure to get that in there for the second semester. I really like the All About Spelling program, I just need it to work for our family. I don't do well when I have to go all around the house grabbing our school stuff. We plan on doing our big house purging this weekend, I am hoping that I can find a way to make some of our other schooling things work for us. I also need to work Jedidiah into the works. There is a year 0 I believe, that I may start Jed and Jonah off with. I think Jed would do well with regular phonics lessons.

After the daily schedule, are our attendance records. There is one for each girl. I blocked off the top that has private information :-)

After the attendance records I have a monthly calendar. I have a whole year, and when I'm done with one month I move it to the back of the pack.

After my monthly calendars I have this yearly one. I use it to plan out our vacation days. I make sure to do it in pencil as illnesses and other surprises come up and I need to rearrange things. Don't get me wrong though, I'm not strict with this! But I do try to make sure we get our required 180 days of schooling in.

All of the other above papers are in the first tab of my binder. Behind the second tab you will find the detailed reading schedule for Ambleside Online that I got off of the Yahoo Group. The one above is for Year 3, the first semester. There are some books, mostly history, that we do not read. Jeremiah has his own plans for history for the girls, so we go by a different reading plan.

I didn't take pictures of the other things in my binder as there are only some blank schedule sheets, some scripture encouragement, and the GAPS protocol outline (the different stages).

There you have it. Finally finding my way in the sea of homeschooling :-)

WOW!!!! Oh. My. Goodness.

2011-11-09T08:30:00.000-08:00

Ok, I know, two posts in one day. I just published my first post, then had to change Jed. Like I said below, he's really been eating a lot lately. His cheeks (before he got his fat lip) were looking more full. so I decided to go ahead and weigh him. Weighing Jed is still stressful to me for many reasons. I almost fell over with the numbers I saw!!! It might not seem huge to some, but for Jed, this is HUGE!! The last time I weighed him he was about 28.2 (or 28.4, I don't remember off the top of my head), but today he is 30.2!!!! That's two pounds, TWO pounds in one month. You have to understand that since we started this diet, only two months ago, he has now gained 4 pounds. This is AMAZING!!!! Jed gained all of 4 pounds for the WHOLE entire year (from August 2010-August 2011). He just gained that in two months. I have tears in my eyes. This is like the icing on the cake, with all the other improvements we've seen in his behavior, and speech in these past two months. There have been days when I really want to throw in the towel with this diet, but we've stayed the course. I'm a realist though :-) Jed has thrown us for so many loops that I don't hold my breath. But I've learned to celebrate any steps forward that we do have. And right now I'm celebrating. I might just whip up some Vanilla White Bean Cake to celebrate!! Yup, I just might.....got to go make some cake!!

Family Pow-Wow

2011-11-09T08:21:00.000-08:00

A quick update on Jed: He seems to be doing much better. His lip was noticeably less swollen this morning. When I asked if it was hurting him, he said, no. For the past few days (before this happened) he has really upped his food intake. Please pray that would continue. I would hate for the antibiotics to mess up any steps we've taken forward.

Ok, we had our Family Pow-Wow. It went well. Much better than I had anticipated. I think part of that was that the girls were able to deal with the blow that we were pulling them out of soccer, before we had our meeting. There are a few very hard decisions that we've had to make. This has been hard on all of us. We've even got some criticism from others about our decisions. Let me repeat what I've said before....Parenting is HARD! I don't pretend to know what I am doing. I am sure some of our decisions are right on, and maybe others are not. Either way, we are continually putting everything before the Lord. And we know that He will guide us. If we take a wrong turn, because we weren't listening, well He can help turn us around. So what went on in our pow-wow?

We told the girls that we've made many mistakes. We told them that we wanted our family to operate in love. We wanted to really focus on ALL of us changing our attitudes towards each other, and towards God. With our current activities we didn't see that working...it hasn't so far. So we explained that changes....lots of changes were going to need to happen. We also told them that all changes were so that we could move on to do *more*, but for now we had to be living with a lot *less*. We wanted them to know that what might seem as restrictive, was actually for our eventual growth and freedom. I had come to the meeting with a list of ideas to implement and things that needed to change. I wrote down everyone elses ideas that they had. I think overall the meeting was a success. Now Jeremiah and I need to sit down (this is going to take an on going commitment to our vision) and lay out the steps that we will take to reach our 'goal'. Some things we figured out right away, others will take time to implement, or money to save to make the needed changes. But we really wanted the girls to *see* for themselves that we do indeed have a plan and that we are working on it. I think in the past we just kind of sprung it on them that things were changing, and they had no input. Nor did we really stick to our plan, as we didn't have one! Plus, we took things away, but replace them with good things in its place. We made sure to take all of these past mistakes into account this time around.

So why the changes? Quite simply: Our childrens' hearts. We've already lost one of them, with a couple of more on the line. We totally take responsibility for the state of our house. It is our fault that we've let our children's hearts grow cold. The biggest changes are for US, as in Jeremiah and myself. We have not been loving our children as we should, nor encouraging them. On top of that we've let a lot of outside influences in. Some children can handle those things, IF they have been built up, and strong. This is not the case for ours. And as such, not only do we need to change, but we need to make a bunch of changes for the kids. Below I've kind of listed out what our Pow-wow idea sheet looked like.

A note though on some of the items. Some of them may seem a bit odd. But one thing we really have never worked in or towards is a family vision. We don't have a clear cut one for now, but there a certain things I know we are working on. I think a good model would be that the man and woman marry and they have a plan of sorts. Something they are working on together. Then the children come along and help them in that work. That does not mean that they can't have their own things they want to pursue or enjoy, it just means that there is a family togetherness that works towards a similar goal. For us, we never really had that, and the whole idea of each man (or kid) for themselves had moved in to our home. Maybe that is how a lot of people live, but that has proven to be unsuccessful for our family. Trust me, there are many days where I don't know which camp is correct. And it makes it all the more confusing to see our children failing, mostly because we've been trying to have one foot in each camp. So we are trying to pull the one foot out, and move it into the one camp. Anyways, when you see "dehydrating" on the list it may seem totally odd. But that dehydrating is a part of what I deem 'family preparedness', and it is a goal I would like to see us implement, and do *together*. So on to the list:

(These are not in any order!! Just our thoughts thrown on to paper.)

Allowances
Scripture memory
bean chairs--chairs for their bedroom for us to do one on one Bible study
Abortion clinic--witnessing
Bulk cooking--to make a lot of this happen
4-H classes--we will look into, but only if as a family
Camping
Running/exercise as family
expand garden--to preserve and sell
Really working on taking care of our animals
Schedule--loose, but make sleep and meals consistent
Bare bones house--taking all, but essentials, and putting it into the attic
Huge cut backs on computer--no games for now
No library books until house in order--girls keep trying to sneak off to read instead of doing their work
Tire or disk swing
Sand box
Practice frugality
Thrifting
Sewing/crochet, etc
Preparedness-dehydrating, planning, drills
Games--family night, board games, outside games
New rituals--ex: bonfire reading w/ hot cider, family read aloud
Home speech therapy
Art
Making books

That is the list. Although I am sure we will be adding to it, and prioritizing it. But at least we have something to work on. Must go. We've had a lazy morning. Jeremiah took Moira on a field trip. The rest of us kind of sat around :-) Sometimes these things happen. But off to work now!

Prayers for Jed...and Me...and...

2011-11-08T17:45:00.000-08:00

well, lets just make it for the whole family shall we?

So, what's up with Jed? It never is a dull moment around these parts. Yesterday proved that all the more. I was sitting in the family room, right outside the boys bedroom. I heard this "thunk", or maybe more of a "thud", but it was quiet. I was actually surprised to hear Jed start crying, as it didn't seem like whatever happened was that bad. After the first couple of seconds of crying I could tell, this was more serious than I first anticipated. I had the baby in my arms, I can't remember what I was doing with him, but I couldn't just plop him down. I called one of the girls over to grab the baby so I could go see what happened. As Moira was walking over to me, she could see into the boys room. She *exclaims*, "MOM, Jed's bleeding, and there's blood EVERYWHERE!!" Um, that can't be good. I asked her where he was bleeding, and then, "come take the baby!" She was able to tell me that he was bleeding from his mouth. I hate facial injuries. I'm not sure why, but they really freak me out. So I was able to get to him, and see that he was indeed bleeding, a lot. We got him ice, and applied pressure. After about 10 minutes I gave him some Motrin for any pain and swelling. I had him rinse with water so that I could have a look. Well, it certainly didn't look pretty, but I really wasn't sure if it was stitch worthy. We held some more ice, and rinsed some more. The cut (which was caused when his fell on his bed frame...that was the "thunk") was only about 3/8 of an inch wide. It was certainly jagged, but didn't seem very deep. Little did I know, that was just the edge of the gash. I had him rinse multiple times the rest of the day and would keep looking at it to see how it was doing. There was the obvious swelling, and some bruising, and the cut. It looked yucky over all, but again, not stitch worthy. Until....today.

This morning Jed's lip was more swollen then the day before, but I expected that as he hadn't had a round of Motrin in the over night hours. We needed to get out to get the girls to their science class. The rest of us hung out at the park, until their class was over. I was getting Jed strapped back into his car seat, to go pick the girls up, when I noticed his lip looked funny (on the inside, but seen from the angle I was at). I pulled his lip back a bit and I just about passed out from what I saw. Did I mention I don't do well with facial wounds? This 3/8 of an inch cut was more like a 2 inch gash!! The swelling that happened overnight had pushed what ever part of the gash that was holding together on it's own, totally wide open!! A longer story made shorter, Jed was seen in the ER. It had only been 24 hours, but the wound was *already* infected!! What!?! My sister told me that mouth wounds were *really* bad, but I was still surprised that it was already infected in such a short time. So Jed started a round of antibiotics this evening. But because mouth wounds are that bad I am asking for prayers for a quick healing. Let's just say I cried a river of tears over it all this afternoon. Due to one word....abscess. I really can't go there again. Please pray that the antibiotics cover his infection completely, and that no other complications will result.

As for me? Sinus issues again. Sigh. Cold? Yeast? Not sure right now. But what I do know is that whenever my sinuses get "wet", I 'catch' a bacterial infection. I just got done with a round of antibiotics last month. We are still adhering to the GAPS diet, and I am positive, that in the long run we will overcome all these issues, sinuses included. However, it's going to take time. In the mean time, I need to find some way to lessen the likelihood of getting 'wet' sinuses. Not sure if that is even possible. Either way, prayers are welcome. I was so very sick with my last sinus infection, I most certainly won't let that happen again, but non the less it's disturbing to think I'm heading down the sinus infection path so soon after the last infection.

As for the family? Well, just to cover our bases ;-) I will be writing about our family pow-wow that we had a few days ago. Good stuff, hard stuff. Right now I'm off to wash out Jed's mouth, then put the boys to bed. I think I will be hitting the hay myself after that. The baby has been waking up at 5:30 since the time change. Speaking of the time change, I think I want to sue who ever is in charge of this time change for loss of sleep :-) Can I do that? ha, ha!!!

The Sweet Babe

2011-11-04T19:36:00.000-07:00

Big sister and little brother

2011-11-03T07:07:00.000-07:00

Yummy breakfast

2011-10-31T07:33:00.000-07:00

Let's start with last night, first. We had a bon fire, as seems to be a custom of ours when the weather turns colder. We had a couple of families over and it turned out to be a wonderful night. The girls wanted to dress up, as we are not partaking in halloween. That was fine by us, as there is no harm in playing dress up. We made some healthy candy apples, some hot cider and a wee bit illegal hot cocoa drink (no cocoa is allowed on the GAPS, but we did make it with homemade almond milk :-)). The apples didn't turn out too great as we didn't allow enough time for the caramel to cool properly. They still tasted yummy.

This morning it was time to think what we would have for breakfast. Eggs? Ugh. Smoothie? That was a favorite choice, but no frozen bananas around. Hmmmm. An almond muffin creation? Nah. How about cake? Yes! There was a white bean vanilla cake recipe that I was hoping we could use for our birthday celebrations. I thought about waiting till Aubrey's birthday to use it. But then I thought, what happens if it tastes bad? So I made up one trial cake. It is not like a box cake, obviously, as it's made with white beans. But we've been on the GAPS diet now for two months, and this was a wonderful treat. I used less honey, as we were eating it for breakfast. But everyone thought that that it didn't need any more honey, they liked it just the way it was. Everyone wanted seconds! But we didn't have any. We only got one piece each. Go HERE for the recipe. I made up some strawberry topping, and we had a bit of our caramel sauce left over from last night that we drizzled on top. It was a winner.

Homeschooling. I had some thoughts on that today. Some good, some sad. I've been a bit consumed lately with other things on my mind, as so I haven't put much thought into our schooling. I really do need to read the whole Charlotte Mason series. I will make it apart of 'my curriculum' :-) Anyways, there are some wonderful blogs out there that others journal about their experiences with Mason's philosophy of education. Wow, I have so much to learn. And here was the sad part...I really wish I had come accross this philosophy before we started homeschooling. I know I can't turn back the hands of time. I just think about all there is to learn about this schooling philosophy, and how short our time is left with Isabella's home education. Only four more years! I need to dig in! Plus I realized that when I start teaching Aubrey the basics, Isabella will have graduated!!! Oh. My. Goodness. The good news is that I am glad I found this philosophy at all, and that we *all* will benefit us. I am praying that Isabella will be able to take what she has learned and apply it to all her life. Speaking of which we are needing to make some big changes in how we do life. Yes, I've talked about this before, and we have implemented a few things here and there. But every day it is more evident how far off the path we are.

Off to life. Errands to run, food to make, school to do, outside time to partake.

Isabella on the prairie.

Isabella better watch out for the Indians.

Cake time! Nothing like being able to eat cake for breakfast :-)

Pictures with captions...no time for a real post

2011-10-29T06:44:00.000-07:00

Some weeds right outstid our door.

I really want to try to get the hang of sun flares. This is my second attempt. I'm not really sure how other people do it. I'll have to look into it...you know...in my spare time :-)

Just practicing trying to take pics of different objects at different angles.

Probably some photography no-no, but I really liked how the sun was streaming down right no her face.

Saoirse is usually very willing to get her photo taken.

Our rooster.

The past few days were beautiful! In the upper 70's.

I made sure we got some outside play time in.

Lots of digging going on around here.

What is this goat up to?

Very silly indeed. Face masks are not for eating.

When I came over to her, she was acting all innocent.

A new friend we made as we were making our way inside.

Some new digs for me :-) The last time I bought a pair of everyday shoes was 8 years ago. I find it very hard to get a pair of shoes that look decent and are comfortable.

Clog style shoes. Dansko. Wonderful. But expensive!

Yesterday was going to be the last 'warm' day of the season (so it seems). So we made for the park with our lunch.

Children all abuzz over the food. They weren't the only ones. After about 10 minutes the bees were buzzing! So we finished our lunch in the van.

Chicken salad. A great way for us to use up left over chicken that isn't enough for another meal (by itself).

A sprinkle of parmesan cheese is a must.

After we ate the kids ran for the playground. I held back and had a photo shoot with my yarn.

My new work in progress. Saw this wonderful pattern on the Attic 24 site. I needed to get the colors out in the sun. I'm having a hard time seeing if the colors are working.

I'm not too fond of the yellow. I really wanted the darker yellow, but they don't sell it at the store. After using it I am getting used to it. However, I really wanted a couple extra colors in there. I'm not sure if they are going to work.

These are the original colors I was going with. On the left is the beginning of the blanket. After the red would be the blue you see on the left.

On the right, you can sort of make out the dark purple I started to add in. It seems to go with all the colors, but the yellow. After the purple would be the blue, then white, and then start over from the beginning. Just as I lined up the balls of yarn above. But it seems the purple just kind of doesn't belong. What do you all think?

While I was doing my yarn photo shoot, this is what the baby was doing. He was sitting right next to me playing with my camera bag.

All the kids enjoyed the new area of the playground.

Climbing the 'rock'.

Jonah up next.

Isabella had a bit of a problem with this part of the the playground :-)

Jonah giving Moira a spin.

Flannery showing off.

Jed having a fun time navigating things.

I attempted to get a group shot of all the kids. I'm looking to re-do my blog header. No such luck. It was *very* sunny out. So I could only find shade or full sun. Not the best. Here was one attempt.

I really liked the location, but way too sunny. On top of it I over exposed the picture. Alrighty, how about a third time?

No, too many shadows on the faces. But I thought it would look cute with them on the "pods". Oh, well, I'll have to try again later.

Isabella brought her journal along. It seems to be her constant companion.

Flannery begged me to take a picture of them on the swings.

Pirate Jonah.

Big sis with little bro.

Aubrey loves the swing.

Sweet, sweet, footy goodness :-) I love baby feet.

Today was totally different! This was what it looked like out back.

Sweaters, jackets, socks and blankets! (Oh, my)

Now that's the way to warm up!