THE PRIZE:
The Winner of the ‘NETFLIX® & Nostalgia’ giveaway will receive a vintage prize package, including:
*A 6 month NETFLIX® subscription
*$25 Starbucks® gift card
*A box of See’s Famous Old Time Chocolates®
*A jar of homemade strawberry jam
*A Big Band music CD
*A Mini B-17 Model airplane
*Vintage stationery and pen
*British specialty tea
*WWII style playing cards
For more information just click on the icon above! Contest will run April 5th and run through April 25th!
I have several reviews to get posted, but am finding it hard to get them written up amidst everything else we are currently involved in! We have been having gorgeous weather – 70-80 degrees most of last week. This week we were expecting some of the same this week, but it’s been raining with thunderstorms most of the time.
We had an “episode” last week, our two year old son gave us a scare with DeCon. My husband had brought home his mom’s shop vac, which she keeps in her garage where she puts down DeCon to control the mice population. There happened to be some on the shop vac and my husband found the DeCon on our floor beside Noah after bringing the shop vac into the house. It was a scary few days, but we are thankful to report that he is just fine. Whew. My poor husband was kicking himself, but it is one of those things that happened…and put our hearts in our throats and our emotions on our sleeves just thinking about losing Noah.
Then we were fortunate to come across a free upright freezer, which my husband and his brother picked up and got set up in record time in our garage. Now we have two upright freezers to help store food for our growing family.
We also came across some farm property for rent. Just land for rent, no house as it is already rented out, but if we were to rent a couple of acres we’d be able to put up a huge family vegetable garden to help feed this crew of ours. We are going to see the property tomorrow, which is fairly close to our house. So I am in “farm mode” again as I try to finish up our online farminars with PracticalFarmers.org, set up our mentorship through our Farm Beginnings facilitator (for those of you unaware, this past winter we won a full scholarship to Stateline Farm Beginnings for beginning farmers and those interested in farming).
So, if I you are wondering why I haven’t posted, you now know why, as this is all in addition to what I do at home for our homeschool and for our clients! Plus, we began our deep cleaning of our garage which desperately needs finishing so we can make room for this new little person growing inside my womb – he or she has begun to make more movements that are more noticeable to me! It is such a wonderful feeling! The weather and my husband’s health has not been very cooperative this week to get the garage done. 🙁
Just received word that Mayu is hosting their first giveaway, so I thought I’d share it with all of you. Mayu is hosting their first giveaway! Remember that Mayu is a fair trade company that sells eco friendly, organic hand-knit alpaca products.
They are giving away a chocolate colored ruffled scarf. This is Mayu’s best seller and retails for $119 and could be yours for FREE! All you have to do is go to Mayu’s blog and check out the ways to enter this great giveaway. I even entered for the fun of it since I was going to write this up anyways to help them promote their giveaway.
See details on Mayu’s blog: www.shopmayu.com/blog.
Mayu would appreciate help in spreading the word about their giveway, so please feel free to pass this information along to others!
When Your Hut’s On Fire!
The only survivor of a shipwreck was washed up on a small, uninhabited island. He prayed feverishly for God to rescue him.
Every day he scanned the horizon for help, but none seemed forthcoming.
Exhausted, he eventually managed to build a little hut out of driftwood to protect himself from the elements, and to store his few possessions.
One day, after scavenging for food, he arrived home to find his little hut in flames, with smoke rolling up to the sky. The worst seemed to have happened, and everything was lost.
He was stunned with disbelief, grief, and anger. He cried out, ‘God! How could you do this to me?’
Early the next day, he was awakened by the sound of a ship approaching the island! It had come to rescue him!
‘How did you know I was here?’ asked the weary man of his rescuers.
‘We saw your smoke signal,’ they replied.
The Moral of This Story:
It’s easy to get discouraged when things are going bad, but we shouldn’t lose heart, because God is at work in our lives, even in the midst of our pain and suffering.
Remember that the next time your little hut seems to be burning to the ground, it just may be a smoke signal that summons the Grace of God.
Author Unknown
This was passed on to us via email from a friend.
Our girls love dresses, well, most of them do most of the time. This year with the help of friends and each other our two older girls made their own civil war dresses for an annual event that we have become a part of – Liberty Day. Liberty Day is usually held in February-March. This year it was on March 20th. It is usually a day long conference of learning history from a constitutional perspective, then in the evening there is an event called the Liberty Day celebration. The celebration includes skits, music, special performance of the 2nd Virginia Convention and an hour or so of dancing the Virginia Reel and other dances from that time period – all in costumes from many different eras, not just the civil war.
This annual affair has become a delight to our girls. They love picking out patterns, fabric and notions for their dresses. The past couple of years they have even purchased all their materials with their own money. It helps that both of them have Christmas and birthdays early in the year to put their gift money towards their coveted costumes.
In some ways, this is a rather extravagant affair since they really don’t wear their dresses anywhere else except when they act out their own plays at home. However, we have heard of friends wearing their dresses to places like Old World Wisconsin, Williamsburg and other places that are very historical. The thing is, I hate to squelch the desire they have to create, sew and be a part of the event itself. They have a blast making the dresses and then when they come home from Liberty Day talk of nothing else for several days! These are the things that make memories for them to treasure their whole lives.
Just wondering if anyone participated in Earth Hour on Saturday night? We did, but we were late starting because we were watching the movie, Far From Home: The Adventures of Yellow Dog, and with only 15 minutes left we opted to do our hour from 8:45pm-9:45pm. By the way, good movie!
I had grandoise plans for our family, but I guess I should have shared them with everyone before hand because while Earth Hour was spent in the dark, it wasn’t anything like I was expecting!
First, Robert was not feeling well. Second, I had pictured all of us crowded in our bedroom with perhaps the flashlight, (I considered candles but with so many bodies in one room decided for the safety reasons the flashlight was enough) and we’d get some discussions going.
Well, when you put a sick husband, seven children and a wife/mom who wants to talk in a dark room for an hour what do you get? Giddy children, grumpy husband and a disappointed wife/mom!
I am sure our children will have fond memories of our hour of darkness because they played and goofed around, while my husband asked them to tone it down because he had a headache and I bemoaned that this is just not what I pictured us doing.
Result? Happy children, tired, sick husband and disappointed wife/mom. But we did conserve energy.
How was your Earth Hour?
I am reading a new book, just started it actually. I cannot say anything yet, as it is for a book review for April, but I will say that I knew from the moment I got the book pitch that I was going to need to read it and enjoy it when did….and I was right. As the title of this post indicates, it is a book about life with boys – the wilder side.
Those of you with sons know that life takes an adventurous turn when they come into your life, especially if you weren’t an adventurous person to begin with. Or if you grew up in a family of all girls, like I did.
I thought my three girls were active, but they were truly nothing to what their two brothers are like when they came along! We went from having a neat organized house and yard to having a beat up house and yard the older the boys got. It doesn’t help that we now have seven children living in our house, trampling the grass, digging, pounding and exploring either.
The thing is boys gravitate towards dirt, trees, building something out of nothing a lot more than the girls. Not that our girls didn’t do some of that, they did and still do. However, more often than not, the girls were/are usually outside with a blanket and their baby dolls having picnics and playing house – anything family related. The boys on the other hand love anything to do with wars, fighting, protecting and all that goes with those things.
The wilder side of boys is precisely the reason we desire to get out of a suburban, townhouse community and into the country where our children, our boys especially, can run, explore, create ugly, but ingenious on ugly creations, patchy lawns and definitely don’t want children climbing their trees! In the suburbs, neighbors shake may their heads, avoid you and your projects and if they don’t complain about you, they are certainly tempted to! In the country, neighbors offer to help you make your ugly projects!
Life with boys can be exasperating if you don’t have a sense of humor or you are worried about finances -the cost of re-drywalling, repainting, or wallpapering walls just to hide the gouges in them from who knows what kind of play went on behind your backs, the cost of re-seeding or re-sodding the lawn, to replacing blinds, screens and doors because of rough use. This is especially true if you are hoping to sell your house sometime in the future! The author of this new book seems to have a balance perspective of life with boys – One that I hope to learn from since I tend to find life with boys more exasperating and worrisome than humorous. It has been a goal of mine to make our children’s hearts matter more than material goods…let’s just say it is a journey and I have yet to arrive at my destination.
Stay tuned for the real book review…
I received the following book in exchange for writing a review. While I consider it a privilege to receive free products to review, my review is my honest opinion and thoughts of the book.
The Promise of Morning
by Ann Shorey
The Promise of Morning is book 2 in the At Home in Beldon Grove series. This story was heart wrenching in some ways. In other ways it was a typical frontier story that showed the strength and endurance the pioneers are known for during such a tough time in our nation’s history. This story was set in Illinois and I haven’t read too many stories from the 1800s that were based in Illinois.
The pioneers faced many controversial issues just as we do today and the towns people of Beldon Grove were no different. Sometimes people are called to stand alone in certain issues/convictions which makes it a lonely road to travel. Our family can certainly understand what that’s like. Having seven children and another on the way in a time when 1.2 children per family is the norm, we definitely stand out in our townhouse community and when we go to public places. Plus the fact that we homeschool, but that isn’t so different anymore since homeschooling is becoming more well known. Most people are very accepting of that fact. It’s the amount of children we have that blows their minds.
I liked this story and the real life struggles the characters experienced, as well as how their faith was strengthened through their trials. So often during tough times it feels like we are at our weakest, but it is on the other side of the trial that life’s next hurdle of hardship show us how the tough times have made us stronger. The Promise of Morning characters endure hardships only to discover their marriages, their communities and families are stronger because of what they experienced during their trials. If only more people today had the endurance and strength of the early pioneers, how much better would individuals, marriages and families weather the storms of life.
“Available March 2010 at your favorite bookseller from Revell, a division of Baker Publishing Group.”
