Wisdom of Proverbs

Steve sent me this proverb this morning - Proverbs 29:1 - "He who is often rebuked, and hardens his neck will suddenly be destroyed and that without remedy." I sent him a message back asking "which child are you speaking about" since that readily applies to 4 at this moment. One has left the house and decided to live the life of a partying drug addict it appears. One begins the process of counseling/church discipline today for defiance/disrespect issues but his answer instead is to enlist in the military so he doesn't have to obey rules (yes, that is funny to the rest of the world). Another's mantra is "Its too hard" no matter what is asked of him - the world is a place to play. And one more assumes the world should revolve around her and gives us all the daily pleasure of a raging temper tantrum (she is a teenager not a toddler). On a more positive note, a different adult child on her own told us the other day that she would give anything to go back to cooking and gardening and being in the home, even longs to wear skirts again. In light of this, I was able to have a discussion with my children about a couple of things. First, what's in your heart will come out when you are on your own, as is evidenced by our one who very quickly adopted her bio family's legend of intense drug usage and law breaking. Another thing I told them is you have to choose how to live your life and being on your own isnt always as fun as you think it will be. You can choose to follow the path of the culture for self gratification or you can follow the path of Jesus and have a more difficult but ultimately rewarding life.

We attempt to shelter our children from some of the damaging things in our culture and we expect them to follow the "narrow road" with us while they are at home. That means they cannot do everything their contemporaries in society can do but we do try to prepare them for life on their own, knowing they will have to face the temptations of the "never going to grow up" culture we live in - life is about entertaining ourselves it seems. We want them to learn to work hard since hard work is a blessing. We want them to be self sufficient. We want them to love learning. Most of all, we want them to be able to stick to and defend what they believe, even if it disagrees with what we have taught. We have told them that if they choose to follow the life we have chosen or a life in similar fashion, it will be hard, they will be ridiculed and questioned. In the end, at the Judgment seat, I would much rather Jesus say to me, "Well done, thy good and faithful servant" than have the approval of the culture around me and be accepted for "fitting in" - we certainly want to see our children in that same category and so we pray for their hearts and continue plodding along on our daily path of training, even in the midst of some big obstacles... and with that note - a new day begins...:-)

Sunday BBQs

We had a great day of fellowship with the folks from our parish yesterday. Our church has a wide geographical spread of people and so to encourage community we have broken into parishes in order to fellowship and have small group bible studies. One such BBQ was yesterday where the women got together and of course talked about kids, birth stories, marriages, grand kids, home learning, etc... Most everyone else played volleyball, wiffle ball and chatted and ate lots of good food.

We will be hosting everyone in August Lord willing, hopefully we will at least have clean bathrooms and working appliances at that time..:-)

A great way to grown squash...apparently

One of the good things about raising pigs is that no food goes to waste (other than our leftover pork which we do not feed to our pigs). Last year we bought lots of squash from a local farm here and of course, scooped out the seeds and stringy stuff and put it in the pig dish for them to eat. Much of this occurred while the pigs were just starting out in their winter pen. At the beginning of Spring, we took down that pen, moved them to fresh ground and either raked up or out all of the manure.

Yesterday, my 11 year old son came in excitedly, telling me he needed to show me something by the old pig pen. You probably guessed it by now, but there are probably 100+ squash plants of different varieties growing now where that old pig pen was. We are hoping we will be here long enough to reap some of the harvest, but if not, it will be a great experiment to watch it continue over the growing season to see how it does.

Are we home yet??

The farm we looked at yesterday is just what we hoped for. House is set up great for us and also has a huge green house with a planted orchard, including probably a hundred strawberry plants, huge raspberry bushes, grapes, etc... It also has a planted alfalfa field for hay, lots more pasture then we have now, woods for timber harvesting and a generally beautiful setting on top of a small mountain. It also has a chicken house, underground 2 room root cellar, large pantry/keeping room, large insulated, heated workshop - again, everything we wanted in a farm is here. It does have finish work to be done (siding, some walls to finish, etc...) but we had wanted to learn to do some of that work anyway. We have to wait a week or so to put an offer in until what looks to be the purchase to own of our house in AL to be firmed up. God has been testing our faith to see if we will worry and fret or just wait on Him and His timing. Since I want to plan everything out so much this is especially hard for me, but we have seen God work out so many amazing things in this move/potential retirement situation that I should be like Abraham and just know that God will provide.

We still appreciate prayers for Steve's retirement to go through and for a new job to open up. We have some good possibilities and the even better possibility of the job he wants to take being available a year from this Fall.

Today is Ricky's 18th birthday so we will celebrate with him and this milestone in his life.

Have a great Saturday!!

New Farm

We are going to look at yet another farm this morning for the second time. This one is my favorite by far with so much already done it would be easy for us to step in and start our business. The farm now has an organic seed business that is pretty successful but we would focus on raising pastured meats.

I can say that I will be so glad to be moved and done. We thought that was the case when we moved here but God had other plans... hopefully the next house will be the final one, at least for a really long time!!

IMAC is back!!

Our IMAC computer is back in business with a new external hard drive attached since we lost all of our information over the last two months.

To post an update - we closed on our house here this week, I will rent it for the next two months or so. We will be re-looking at a house again tomorrow that is my dream property - having some financing issues because of the deal on the house here but hopefully that will be worked out soon.

In addition, it appears we have someone interested in buying our house in Alabama but they will need to sell a house first - they want to rent to own our property, which would be great as it would bring in additional income.

No word on Steve's retirement yet but we know its being worked because they have asked for additional information.

Finished reading "An Unburdened Life" by Richard Morris. Good on the whole, I like his point about it being hard for most people to exercise because other than fitness it serves no purpose. Back in our agrarian forefathers day they got a great workout and a great harvest to prove it.

Weather finally warmed up here but we have had amazing amounts of rain.

That's it for now - will post pictures of where we buy a house, once we figure that out.

Quick check in

Didnt think I could post anything while our IMAC was in the shop recovering from its hard drive implosion because the lap top has cookies and such enabled but apparently I was able to fix that. House closing here on Wednesday, think we have found our new farm and plan to make an offer this week. Working on lots of sewing projects, going to start packing, etc... no news on Steve as of yet, hoping to hear something this week... seeds I planted last year in the garden are coming up - I guess the moisture and temperature are just right this year.

Heirloom nightgown

Pictured below is a new summer nightgown for Emma using Martha Pullen's Fancy Slip pattern. The nightgown needs to be washed and shrunk a bit but all in all it went well. I am enjoying improving heirloom sewing techniques using my specific sewing machines.

Testing a few things

I wanted to test this new blog site, including inserting pictures. Here are my sweet Emma and Elizabeth...

Exhausted

When Steve found out he was going to be deployed for a signifigant period of time, we filed a hardship retirement waiver because we knew it would be very difficult for our children to handle.  We didnt realize how quickly things would start to go bad.  Unfortunately this past week, one of our more challenging sons started bullying and hurting his sisters and then when confronted with the fact that if he didnt stop he would be speaking with men from our church, he ran away into the woods for two days.  The woods behind our house consist of thousands of acres and so it was a very scary/exhausting couple of days for all of us, not knowing if he was truly lost, hurt or just being belligerent.  Turns out it was the last and he finally came back because he was very hungry.  Right now he is staying with some single men from church until we figure out the best place for him to be (or Steve comes home if the waiver is approved).

On another note, one of our adult daughters is visiting with her biological family for the next two weeks (family she hasnt seen for over ten years and from what we have been told haven't changed much since their children were removed).  She has gotten no sleep since she has been there, she said they were finally going to eat dinner sometime after ten p.m. last night (getting ice and beer was more important).  We are thankful during this time for technology as we can text back and forth to keep her spirits up and her strength in convictions renewed.  Her family has complained to her that she is too "white" and they have to bring back the "brown" in her, whatever that means.  Of course she is going to act like us, she has lived with us for 7 years.

Finally, my littlest girls are sick again, stress I believe is contributing some, so most of the crew will be heading to church this morning while I care for little ones.  Hope everyone out there in blogdom has a wonderful Lord's Day!

Dogs vs Porcupine

Unfortunately, the dogs lost and we ended up having to take them to the vet yesterday morning to be sedated as this was the only way to pull out the massive amount of quills, especially on our dog Frostbite (all 3 dogs are Great Pyrenees).  They all came through great - we go pick them up this morning before church.  More importantly, it appears our house here has sold, so we begin looking for our new farm.  At this point we think we will find a farm with small farm house and build a 2 story log addition, using the skills Steve received at the Log Home Builders Association 2 day class.  If we do, I would like to pictorial the process along the way.

Steve, Lucas and Eric have had a wonderful time at the Veritas Press End of the Year Gathering and Steve actually interviewed to teach there  (Calculus to start).  He said the interview went well and is hopeful.  He has also met some folks we used to attend church with in North Carolina and also the Mother (a teacher a Veritas Press) of a woman we were friends with when we lived in Florida.

A young man from church here was able to fix the rototiller we inherited when we bought this property so Gina, Shawn and James tilled up our garden area to see how it works.  That garden area looks great and is a wonderful combination of cow, pig, goat and chicken manures and spent alfalfa hay (which I have read is phenomenal for the soil).  Hopefully the new owners can get a good crop of veggies from it.  I plan to haul the rest of the manured hay with us (we will rent a tractor to scoop it up) so we can get some garden beds going when we get there.  Our earthboxes with lettuce, radishes, tomatoes and peppers are all thriving with the massive amount of rain- we are looking forward to salad soon!

Lots going on

I haven't been posting much lately because so much is going on in our lives.  We found out a few weeks ago that my husband is supposed to deploy to Afghanistan in the fall, preluded by several months of training, all in all he would be gone around 15 months.  We have been fighting the deployment because it would be very rough on the children, especially those of our children who are more challenging.  We have one more fight to make, the results would be early retirement for S