On the road to recovery

The Full Hands house is finally in recovery mode from the horrid Norovirus.  Let's just leave it at:  it wasn't pretty...the end.  Yup, pretty much sums it up.  We have some pretty exciting things starting to shape up around here as far as our family vision is concerned.  I'll share those things in another post.  For now, I thought I would just share a bunch of pictures that go back all the way to the beginning of this month. 

I'm happy to know that a healthy amount of dirt is good for you!  Helps with that immune system.  Flannery and Saoirse were making cupcakes, or buns, or bread, or something :-)

Don't worry, I make them wash their hands when they come inside!

So this is where Flannery gets some of her practice at becoming a good cook.

Aubrey was checking in on the baked goods cooking.

Nope, not done.

Flannery decided that she outgrew her previous oven, and set up a new one.  Here she is moving over her backed (I guess it should be 'baking') goods.

This oven didn't have a door, but that didn't seem to hinder the baking process.

This was Saoirse's baking area.  You can see where my missing dishes end up.

Creek time.

Jonah is getting brave enough to venture on to the tree limb.  He doesn't get far.

Lots of exploring.

Hanging out on the 'sand bar'.

Aubrey decided to get into the action this time around.  He will usually wail if you try to dip his feet into the water.

He lasted about 10 minutes :-)  He then wanted to get out and get his cold, wet shoes off.

Jonah found some greenage.

Oops...

where did it go?

Jed was insistent that I take his picture of him swirling the water.

Jonah decided it was time to pour out the water from his boots.

I like the effect of focusing on something up close, but your subject is really the blurr in the background.  Obviously I don't want all my pictures like that :-)  Ha, ha. 

I had my big cleaning spree a couple of months ago.  Now I am trying to find better ways to keep things organized.  As I am working around the house I will get ideas of ways to keep things in their places.  I'm trying to use what we have here at home.  I've had the squared glass jars hanging out for a while.  Their tops are just about impossible to get on, making daily use impractical.  Filling them with our math manipulatives works much better.

Well, it works as long as little boys don't dump out the contents!!

Our magnetic wall is turning into a word wall.

Aubrey is starting to eat on his own.  He loves to have a utensil. 

Using the utensil seems to be an option though.

Isabella made this cute scarf.  I am very excited that they are able to make 'real' things with their new skills.  It can be discouraging to be stuck in practice mode with no actual product at the end.

All smiles.

We bought a new fan for our family room.  Our old fan hung down too low, which has been problematic.

How many children does it take to put a fan together?  :-)

We found a new way to curl the girls' hair.  This is by far the quickest way to curl their hair.  I'm not sure if you can see the head band in the picture (up at her forehead).  Their hair gets wrapped around the head band, left over night and in the morning...

Curls!!

Moira was quite pleased with her curls.  They went to church like this and everyone was asking if they had gotten perms.

Aubrey LOVES bath time.  A lot.  A whole lot.  He gets giddy if you start getting him undressed in the bathroom.  He tries to climb into the tub on his own, which he is unable to do.

See, all smiles.  Although he wasn't smiling much when he got a face full of water the other day.  Poor guy.  But that didn't stop him from turning back into all smiles a minute later.  Quick recovery :-)

For Valentines day the kiddos got a few small things.  These coloring/painting pages were one fun thing.

I hung up these beaded necklaces for decoration for Valentines.  I put some up in the door way of both the girls' and boys' bedrooms.

These remind me of the plastic necklaces I used to play with when we went to my grandparents house.  My aunt had bag fulls of them.

While the boys were sick, Saoirse happened to be healthy.  She made a sweet display for them to cheer them up.

Flannery...sick :-(  At one point eight of the nine of us were sick at the same time.  Not fun, not fun.

I knew we were on the mend when I heard hammers and laughter and shouting.  Moira up to something.

Hmmm, there seems to be a lot of swing building that goes on around here.

Aubrey found it fascinating that he could pull off the bark of this tree.

I found it fascinating that a large tree had this for a trunk!  The whole bottom is hollow, with this hole one side.

Aubrey won't be able to do this for long.  None of us will be able to hang out in the woods in another two weeks.  Why?  Ticks.  They come out in the thousands around the second week of March.  And until our chickens can bring down the population (about two to four weeks) we need to stay out of our beloved woodland.

Flannery and Aubrey trying out Moira's swing.

Aubrey loves to swing.After this I took him out back to swing in the real swing.  I think he could swing all day.

What does one do when they don't get snow for the winter, so you can't go sledding?  Why you sail down a dirt bare hill on a plastic rocking horse.  Actually, he wasn't sailing.  He could only 'sled' a few inches before giving another push to 'sled' another few inches.  But I have to give him credit for thinking this up on his own and trying it out.

He didn't get too far before Jonah distracted him.

Jed decided to give the swing a try too.

I guess this picture doesn't show it too well, but there is a stick on the left hand side of the rocking horse.  It really looked like the horse was tied to a pole, like in the old west.  Except there isn't any rope.  I guess you will have to use your imagination :-)

Giveaway

Here's the link:
http://mamato3blessings.blogspot.com/2012/02/taboo-hasboro-game-review-giveaway.html

Here is another link:
http://theredeemedgardener.blogspot.com/2012/02/veggie-seed-give-away.html

Changing Hearts Series #3 and #4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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