Family Reunion

We are having a family reunion here and over the next few days we are having guests from tomorrow until next monday or so! It will be fun and hopefully go really smoothly!<p> I have had alot of stuff going on so I am really praying I can relax.  <p> i have been trying to make more lists to keep track of things , but  alot of times I cannot find a pen (I just bought a bunch more so hopefully that changes), but the lists help. Instead of trying to remember in my head, did I call social security, oh yes, I did, but they did not answer and transferred me to the national service which could not help me, and how am I going to take care of this nasty bee nest in our yard (I was warned by a man at Walmart in lawn and garden that sounds like I need some more info before I go and spray it), I got  some of the cupboards cleaned out, but still have a few that got missed, hopefully  there is nothing there that cannot wait, baking to do and the list goes on and on, and did I remember to eat lunch? <p> Anyhow, I may not be posting for awhile, but I am hoping to take pictures so then I will post some of those! Have a wonderful week!

Butter and Honey General Store

This is a really neat little general store that is run by a christian lady. They have all sorts of neat stuff and it is really reasonable prices.  Butter and Honey General Store
They have some  books that I have been looking at getting for the boys as I have heard them recommended.
Growing Up books
I also was really admiring their tiered skirts,  they looked really pretty and yet are not too expensive. Tiered Skirts<p> She also does sewing for you for $8.50 an hour on your own fabric and pattern if you ask her, with a 2 hour minimum, which is very reasonable. <p> they have the cutest cookies cutters, which  to find nice metal cookie cutter around here anyhow, is pretty hard. You can find a couple in Walmart around Christmas time, but  here they have more selection for about the same price as Walmart. <p> There is much more in this store, including, soap, aprons, toys, patterns, sewing kits and other stuff! It is a fun site to browse and it is so nice to support a christian family at the same time.

Frugal Friday- Putting by for the winter

I enjoy storing food that I get for the winter! It really helps with our food budget year round.

Today we picked cherries! It was super easy to pick, we paid .75 a pound and they are beautiful cherries! I cannot believe how nice they are! They are much nicer than what you would get in the store. Since we live in a area surrounded by cherry orchards, it is so neat we were able to do this! I am planning on canning a bunch to save for winter fruit! We live in a colder region and cannot afford fruit inthe winter usually.

I also was given the opprotunity to pick raspberries for free and got 2 gallons which I froze some and we ate a bunch! I have peppers growing and pretty soon I will be making pickles! I have so much dill that my mother in law sends me, and even if I buy the pickling cucumbers, it ends up cheap for great pickles!

I wish I would have taken a picture of the cherry trees. They are almost dripping with fruit. The more cherries you buy, the cheaper they were.<p> It seems sometimes hard to spend money to save money. i sort of winced as I spent $19.50 on cherries. But you know,  when it is spread out and  helps me so I do not need to buy anything like that in the winter, it is good.  Plus, it gives us our fruit for the next week and  other bonuses.  What  vitamin are cherries high in? They are sun ripened so they have to have some good things!

Another thing is the fruit that we have gotten for free adds alot of taste to our daily diet. Today of course we had cherries which we bought, but also I have rhubarb, which was given to me, lettuce which was grown in a friends garden, huckleberries which my husband picked and the raspberries.

We already had Raspberry lemonade, I am making raspberry Rhubarb crisp, and huckleberry muffins and planning huckleberry pancakes in the morning. Besides all that, it helps keep the boys busy getting the food ready to eat. They picked through the huckleberries to get out stems, helped pick the cherries, and now are cutting rhubarb.

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Storm?? Microburst? Well, whatever it was….

My life has been anything, but quiet the past day and night have been
 exciting to say the least!!!<p>

 Where do I start? I am really tired so I guess if this sounds funny, blame
 it on that!<p>

 Yesterday morning we woke up and drove to a nearby town for me to observe a
 childbirth education class as well as meet a potential doula client. The
 lady that has been planning on being her doula/assistant will probably be
 gone. So, that went well, I spent all day at the birth center with pregnant
 or moms who had just had babies and talking about that kind of stuff all
 day. It was nice!<p>
 We had dinner and my husband gathered up a few things that were still at mom’s in
 our little storage area, which surprisingly, I did not see any spiders, just
 some weird beetle thingys. There was a stroller I thought I had gotten rid
 of and I had wondered why I did, but hey, guess what? I didn’t get rid of
 it! Then it was a bunch of  my husband’s stuff like his air boat, tools, fishing
 poles etc.<p>

 While I am there a midwife that works near me calls and asks my mom if she would
 mind being her assistant on a birth. She said it is a 4th time mom, but had longer labors,
 Mom is very tired as she delivered a baby the
 night before and did class, prenatals all day, so she asks if the lady wants
 me to come. I am in a hurry now as I agree, so we eat and head home.<p>

 As we leave town, we are driving into a very dark cloud and it is very warm
 still and the wind starts turning cold. I see lightening etc and then rain
 starts coming and the wind and the thought occurs to me that perhaps we
 could have a tornado because of the cold and heat! Especially while the wind
 almost blows us off the road and we stop in the middle of the road.
 After a short while it subsides and we continue only to stop by trees laying
 across the road!  It was interesting as there is line of cars, and the people from MT are exclaiming about how they forgot their chainsaws at home, in fact one  sturdy woman says "I even forgot my boots!!" with sort of a mountain accent!  A semi – truck with a chain works to pull, push and prod the tree off the road, somehow at one point snapping it in half. We are able to go after 30 -45 minutes or so and go forward carefully. <p>
 We make it home and as I get to
 cell service there is all sorts of missed calls! There is tornado warnings
 in our area and watch out they say. We drive carefully home as pretty
 much the entire town is in a blackout. Every store black, no stop lights,
 lots of cars, it was a little weird feeling! We had no electricity until
 about 2-3 am. It was nice sort of because it reminded me of how much I
 liked that, and yet I still have toilets and running water! I was thinking how much I missed this and maybe I should shut off the electricity, I would miss my washing machine, dishwasher and fridge though now that I am dependent on them! <p>

 The woman in labor  was in a  area that for some reason did not lose power. that did not lose their power and
 was fine. I went over there at about 4 am and she had her baby at 5:17 in
 the water with pretty much one or 2 pushes.

 This morning driving around town looking around was a little interesting. I
 got a car wash and there was a large piece of tin blocking the way out. It
 was hard getting out! There were trees down, there is one on our landlords
 house which showed me how much God protected us! It was a large healthy tree
 and was torn up by the roots and leaning on their house! We have trees
 all around us and there were branches that could have landed on the roof as well.  Down the street there was a large metal building that was picked up and thrown over a fence into a parking lot! <p> So, now my car is in the repair shop,  I got alot done before  8 am, including my exercise!

Yay!!! It is raining!

I know this seems like a silly post, but I have been praying for rain! It is so wonderful that God blessed us with rain! It is cooling everything off, watering the ground and hopefully getting rid of some of the smoke.

It is amazing what kind of things we can take for granted and I know rain is one of them at times! Yes, there was some lightening with it, but I am not going to even think about that, but am so glad for the rain!

Global Warming???

I have heard all kinds of stuff on this lately, maybe because it is so hot here lately when it is not usually, makes me shake my head and wonder "What on earth is true?" <p> I heard a  short talk on PrimeTime America  today about  this subject and it was really interesting. There was a scientist who was also a believer who was speaking on how the thought that  man produced global warming is pretty much  non-existent. <p> I do not usually post things like this, but I found this interesting! <p> He recommended this site in his talk, Junk Science<p> It was interesting……. it made me think about how God has things under control, not that I thought He did not.<p> On that thought, I bought a enviromentally friendly  laundry soap today at Costco. It  was supposed to do 125 loads in a regular washing machine, but it is also HE soap and uses about half of the amount  (which was small to begin with)  for a HE washing machine. It was  about $11 for the tub and if it is true, it may do over 200 loads, which makes it good value as well.  We’ll see what a good job it does on some stinky laundry of the boys. <p> I am freezing raspberries, and made french toast for dinner with the abundance of bread we ended up with. We have been eating alot of eggs this past week as  bread and eggs were on sale this week.  T. is finishing off the end of the homemade raspberry vanilla ice cream and the other boys are off to Keepers of the Faith boys club with their father, so it is sort of quiet..<p>

Do you ever have discouraging days?

Sometimes it just seems like everything goes wrong, doesn’t it?

It is really hot and dry here, it is not really normal for here to be like this, but it seems like each summer it is is getting a little worse. It is only July and already our governor has declared a state of emergency for the fire season. Usually if that happens, it is August. Rain would be welcome, but often lightening comes with it and that just means more fires everywhere! I am trying to think of what to do before the smoke reasches us as my youngest had trouble breathing last year, but is so far doing great! I just don’t want it to get bad!

Anyhow, last week, I found some ants in my bathroom and bedroom, thankfully I got rid of them fairly quickly, but discovered them coming in a day or 2 later in a different spot in the living room. Thankfully they are not in the kitchen as that sort of grosses me out, I have a hard time with bugs in the kitchen. I put out the poison last night which they were gleefully eating all night, so maybe they will be gone soon. It is so dry outside, which is the only thing I can think of as it seems like there are ants everywhere outside! Everything is like a giant anthill! My three oldest have all been stung this last 2 weeks, not by bothering a bee, but by being attacked by one.

Then last night I found a little wormy bug in my laundry room, I got freaked out as I had wheat and oatmeal over there, and I hate those things as we had some horrible experiences with them, so scrubbed the area with Dawn dishsoap to kill any eggs and bugs, got them into buckets after examining them carefully, but thankfully found none. I froze the oats overnight and may leave it in there 2 nights to make sure and the wheat is in a bucket. It probably means it is time to clean out the cupboards again…..

So, on top of just feeling overly tired and having to wash the kitchen floor pretty much every day to make it look decent this summer with bare feet and dust, everything feels sticky and gross!

On more pleasant topics, I got to go to lunch with my sister and cousin which was nice. It cheered me up alot, and helped to keep going with the rest of the day.

Dentist appt. today for my oldest son, taking care of grandma, 3 showers down today, and 2 more to go, plus meals to plan and somehow I am hoping it will cool down before I have to start baking a whole bunch of cookies etc. for guests we are having. I got a bunch of rhubarb so tonight when it starts to cool down, I will probably be baking. Tomorrow, I have to go to my mom’s as there is a possible doula client I need to meet as well as attend a birth class as a requirement I still need. It will just be for the day as on Thursday, our van is getting a repair on that morning.

Do you think I have enough going on? How on earth do I stop when it seems like life does not let you?

Well, back to cleaning and vacuuming, showering etc. At least I can say that I am not bored……

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Community of Suffering

I am sitting here here pondering some thoughts and the one thought I was thinking was about suffering. There are so many verses  in the bible that speak about  the many people in the bible who suffered.<p> Sometimes I think though, we show sympathy to those who suffer, but only to a point.  We do not want them to be spoiled by attention, they talk too much about it,  they are not the most fun people to be around,  etc. etc. We could go on  and on, yet it says in Isaiah 53, Jesus was a "man of sorrows" and "He had no form nor comliness  that when we should see them, there was no beauty that we should desire Him."  It says Jesus  was not someone we would want to be with because He did not look nice  and was sorrowful, not just a happy go lucky  kind of person. <p> I think though there is a community of suffering among all of us.  For women, it is  the sorrow of birth, we all feel a  sense of community  with other women who have suffered  through this experience.  What about  the little sufferings many of us feel  every month? We all  can feel sympathy  for each other then! <p>
So, why are we cold to long term suffering?  At first  we want to help, we are sorry, but then after a bit, we sort of tire of it. We easily forget about what they are going through and when we hear them ask for prayer again, we  sort of shrug our shoulders  and roll our eyes at their  same request Again!! <p> Is this right?  Can you think of a way that you have ignored someones suffering?  Do you get tired of hearing how so and so  went through so much and  that is why they have trouble?  What do you think  you can do to reach out to someone who is suffering?   <p>   Think of the simple things you can do to show you  care, it does not have to be  something big.  It can be something as simple as inviting someone over to your house.<p> On a different subject, but sort of the same,  I was reading about Paul and his persecution of the christians. It was awful what he did to them? I suddenly had the thought for the first time that maybe perhaps some of the christians he beat up had to work with and listen to him preach later.   Have you ever thought about that?