Sorry, this was suppose to go live two weeks ago, but I found it in my drafts folder……
See, I told you he was a new addition! But he is not a human addition, but the pet variety.
……And this went live this morning without a photo because I still have not found my camera cord, so I nabbed a photo of Robert that we emailed to Blaze’s owner. Sorry to those visiting earlier today and saw nothing! Surprise!
More of this story later….;-) Nothing like spiking your interest and curiosity, eh?
I don’t know about you, but I am always sad when the end of summer arrives. It is always refreshing to have the cool mornings and nights that comes with this time of year, however, it also means winter is just around the corner….which is my least favorite season.
It was a very busy summer traveling back and forth two days a week to Mrs. A’s farm, but full of learning and memories. By the time we had moved in early August, the children (and me too, admittedly) were tiring of being gone from home, traveling and…..weeding. All of that came to an end on Friday, September 16th. We are officially done at Mrs. A’s. Our last farmers market was the 10th. (Oh and by the way, we were in the Glenview news for a feature for the farmers market over Labor Day weekend. You can view it here: http://glenview.patch.com/articles/bringing-the-garden-to-your-plate Sorry forgot the link earlier!)
Now, it’s time to make plans for our own farm. We have our garlic to plant, our 2 fields to till and manure. We are still deliberating over ordering baby chicks for laying hens. Not sure I want to start a batch in cool weather and over-winter them. That’s the disadvantage. The advantage is that we will get eggs in the spring some time – a huge plus if we want them for our family, farmers markets or a CSA (Consumer Supported Agriculture definition here.) My husband had wanted to wait on the animals but he seems to be more open to the chickens now that we are done at Mrs. A’s. We did just get used feeders and a nesting box off of Craigslist – can you say smelly and dirty?! A definite disadvantage to buying used. We will clean them up before using them to safe guard against any possible contamination occurring. We still need fencing and housing for chickens…and time…lots and lots of decisions.
It still seems a bit surreal that we have our own place to farm. I feel like I have to pinch myself sometimes.
We are thoroughly enjoying our extra space and are praying for guidance for our future farming enterprise.
We have settled into our new home quite nicely. We have even gone back to being hospitable and have had friends and family over at least four times with more to be scheduled. Yes, we are enjoying sharing our new home with others! I use to love having folks over until we really outgrew our townhouse. It is good to be back into playing hostess again.
We had our lefse party with family two weeks ago, which was a great hit. We hope to plan a quarterly lefse party into our family tradition. We are playing around with the idea of inviting a different family over for each one. Just thought that it would be fun to share this Norwegian potato bread and tradition with others.
We had our old neighbors over in August so they could see our new home before school started back up and all the chaos going back to school brings. We had a blast with them.
Another friend dropped over to pick up somethings/drop things off, so we gave her a quick tour.
Then yesterday old friends from our college days came over for the afternoon bringing some of their cast offs, which is like Christmas to the children – new (to them) clothes, toys, games (we did two new puzzles this morning since it was raining 100 piece each) and even some canning jars (we canned tomatoes last week with friends and then did some applesauce and jam on our own, so very satisfying!)
There is something special in having people over, don’t you think? Our children love it and have missed it, thus the reason for planning more get-togethers because they keep asking, “Can we have so and so over?” 😉 Plus we love it too.
How often do you entertain? Are you planning any fall parties at your home? Would love to hear how you all entertain guests in your home! That is this week’s motivation. Being hospitable is actually biblical, what better way to show the love of Christ to strangers and brothers and sisters in the Lord.
We all know what separation anxiety is, it’s when a small child is fearful and full of anxiety when separated from his/her mother, right? Or is that all it is? What about moms, can we have separation anxiety? I believe we can and to be honest, I am suffering from it this week. Actually it just sort of happened overnight as our house takes on that hollow sound…..hollow sound, you ask…..
We are moving! This is a huge move for us, in more ways than one.
We have lived where we are for the past 16 years. Our current home has served us well, but we have really outgrown it. I think we have been at that point since child number six. We love our current town. It is a great little town. We love our neighborhood. It’s quiet. We have had the same neighbors around us for all of that time or over half of that time. We’ve had the same phone number…and all of that is about to change.
It is a mixed bag of feelings. Truly it is. I mean who would have thought that I would be sad to lose my phone number? Until we ran out of space, I really liked our house and will miss it. There are many memories here. We moved here as newlyweds. We became parents to eight children here. Our last three children were born in this house. It’s been my only home since moving to the U.S. 17 years ago.
The catch is, I have always dreamed of living in the country. I have longed for my children to enjoy the pleasures of country living and for the past three years we have been doing that by driving to the country during the summer. But it is getting tiring driving back and forth and being away from home so many days. Therefore, we decided to forgo our plans to farm at the farm incubator when we came across two homes each on 10 acres or more…..of course we looked at them!
By the time we decided on one and got back to the owners, it was no longer available. 🙁 Disappointing to say the least. It was a lovely piece of property. So we decided we did not want to lose out on the other.
This all happened within a short period of time in June-July. It still seems a bit unreal since we are still in between homes. If pinching didn’t hurt, I’d be asking folks to pinch me to be sure it was all real and not a dream.
We are moving to a more rural area, but still within the Chicago suburbs. We will have access to land, a larger house with LOTS of storage AND 3 potties. We are very excited!
Cartoon by yours truly (inspired by June Cleaver Nirvana) because I did not want to pay to use a comic strip! Please note: The order of children is not typical. Our younger children usually get first dibs on bathroom rights due to obvious reasons! 😉 Also note, my oldest does not find the humor in this silly drawing.
This week has not only been filled with physically moving but moving electronically. It was frustrating to find out our current phone/internet provider does not service our new home for internet, which led to more phone calls. But I think we are all set to go.
Now we just need to get everything moved to the new house. Let’s just say that being between two homes is not ideal! We are grateful to a new acquaintance/fellow farmer for their generous offer to help us by providing their 3/4 ton truck and trailer to get us all moved this weekend. We are amazed who the Lord uses sometimes, truly amazing. We have not even met this couple, I inquired about their farm as they farm using horses, something I have always been intrigued about and they live within minutes of our new home. A few emails later their offer came. The generosity of strangers, plus they are open to us coming to their farm to learn about what they are doing. No, I am not saying we’ll be farming with horses, but it is a compelling idea. My husband prefers machines, there’s something more macho and manly about tractors than horses….I think.
Here’s to separation anxiety, it will pass and a the start of a new chapter in our lives….
I’m still playing catch up this week so excuse the mixed up posts! Here’s my wordless Friday post….
This is Blondie’s new sister, Anna David. 😉 Yes and she named him, oops, I mean her.
My Motivation
I am not sure what is motivating me this week, except that I am looking forward to going to a Jane Austen tea with friends, my husband has the opportunity to attend a screening for an upcoming movie and I am excited to work in the greenhouse again for a few hours. Not to mention the rest of my family is excited about attending Liberty Day for a fun-filled history conference. No, I will not be going, I will remain at home with the three younger ones where they will be more content.
My Passion
My passion use to be to live for Christ and to raise godly children. Somewhere along the way both of those passions have waned and my passion has become to stay out of debt. Guess this happened when Robert got laid off three years ago for 20 months. It has been a long, tiring three years and I wonder if it will ever end – the vicious cycle of living paycheck to paycheck. My desire to live for Christ and raise godly children is still there, just in the background of working to survive. So in a way, my children are my motivation because I want to provide them with not only food, shelter and clothing but lots of enjoyable memories before they grow up and face the world on their own. Working all the time just does not allow for much memory making, unfortunately.
So my goal this spring/summer is to get most of my work done while they do their school work and morning chores so we can have the afternoons to make memories.
Anyone care to share your motivation or passion?
I know, I know, I have not been posting this week. I did not get to Monday Motivation or even a Wordless Wednesday! And I have plenty of photos to share. So I thought I would try to catch you up on the happenings around here with a quick little Saturday “rewind” post this morning.
Family/Work
We have been incredibly busy. On Monday we went on a maple syrup tour with friends and had a lovely time learning about maple syrup. The tour was very hands on for the children, who were able to help find a hole to drill in the maple tree, do some of the actual drilling and taste maple sugar. It was a beautiful sunny day. Then I had to work for a couple of hours by attending a meeting with area farmers. I could have even gone out that night to a nutrition meeting, but thought it would have been a bit much to say the least.
Then the past couple of days I have worked a couple of hours at my colleague/friend’s greenhouse helping get her caught up on her seed planting. Onions, kohlrabi, lettuce, broccoli are all sprouted! It is so exciting. Can’t wait to munch on some of those fresh organic veggies! Yummy!
My husband was able to attend yet another farmers meeting last night and learned some new things about what our county is doing to preserve farm land in our area. Do you know that there is a farmer who is 93 who is still driving his tractor and farming? He is the last farmer in his family. Quite amazing. I bet he has some stories to tell.
The children have been enjoying getting to play outside more now that it not only warmer, but DRYER. Yes, we are getting rid of the mud pit out back (out back, what am I Australian? Just kidding! Would love to visit Australia, so I am not implying being Aussie is a bad thing).
Baby boy is on the move, crawling, walking along furniture and wouldn’t you know it, he donks his eyebrow square with a corner two nights ago. I couldn’t sleep last night for fear he’d break his wound open again. It is bad, but not bad enough for stitches. I need to hurry so I can relieve the girls from “holding” duty. Yes, I am “holding” him captive by cradling him in our arms to keep him safe while his owie heals.
Here he is, but he’s quite happy despite the “check mark” owie. The children think it looks like a check mark, what do you think?
Techie Problems
My laptop had to be sent to be repaired, again. My dear husband and three year old were playing beside me while I was typing away and dear son did one of his somersaults and smacking his head against my screen cracking it pretty much from top to bottom. 🙁 Thankfully, the accidental warranty/insurance covers it. I was worried it wouldn’t. Oh and Nookie’s head is just fine. Obviously he hit it hard, but I don’t remember him even crying much. He’s a tough little cookie….has to be with two big brothers.
My faithful Green Drive is not working properly either, so I have been trying to get the company’s help on figuring out what is wrong. So far they have not asked me to send it back, if only it could be resolved easily without sending it back or risking losing all my data and photos.
Our printer is also on the blitz, I just think I need all new office equipment, what do you think? Maybe I should enter one of those business grants/contests and see if I can win. The thing is I have tried and usually give up because it seems that no one votes for me when I try to promote it. Maybe I give up too soon though and an entrepreneur should not give up easily. (Can you hear me pouting here….believe me I am pouting!)
So that about sums up the rollercoaster week we have had, how about you, what is new in your neck of the woods?
