eat sleep and farm

You love bedtime, right?  That quiet part of the evening, where the house becomes quiet. The pitter-patter of little feet, the constant question asking, arguing over a toy, chasing each other through the home, asking for another story to be read, etc... it all stops. I can actually hear myself think during these nighttime hours! Its beautiful.  I love my kids. You guys know that. But I also love bedtime.   Kara isn't a 'fan' of bedtime. She never has been.  From infancy, she's been our "I'm going to try and stay awake as long as I can", baby.  She also hates to be alone and hates to be away from Jason and me.  Even when she's awake, she loves being near at least one of us.  I sympathize with her, because I was the same way.  I used to follow my Mom to the bathroom, chatting her ears off about who knows what.  I hated sleepovers until I was a teenager, because come bedtime,  I wanted to be in my home, tu...

We sang this song in church tonight. I was completely floored by the simplicity of the words and yet the very deep, beautiful truth in it. Couldn't keep from crying as I sang. Especially following a sermon on marriage and the fresh reminders that nothing is unfixable or undoable when Christ is at the center of your life. Found myself singing this out, while praying for a few couples we know who are struggling deeply. Knowing that nothing is impossible with Christ - He makes beautiful things out of the dust and He makes beautiful things out of us. Praise be to God! {for the next week or so, I'll have this playing as the first song on my playlist... so if you turn your speakers on you can hear it. However, the lyrics are beautiful and you only see those if you watch the video}

     this will give you a view of what happened to our trees  and why they were breaking everywhere.  every branch was covered in thick ice.  kind of weird to lay in bed at night and hear them falling down.      our power was out from Wednesday night till about 10:30 Friday night.  because we have a generator at this house {not a whole house one, but still}  we were able to plug in things like the pellet stove, the fridge and a tv if we wanted to watch something.  but we took advantage of the lack of power or ability to drive anywhere and built every  puzzle we own and played just about every board game we own.  in our jammies, no less.     at night we used a flood light to light up the living area of our house.  Uncle David and Aunt Emily lived with us during the outage.  made it seem more like a campout with family, which was fun.  ...

    I love how excited our kids get over getting the mail.  Today was Ethan's day.  He told me he was most excited because all the snow and black ice is gone and so  he can run as fast as he wants and not worry about "tripping and splitting a body part open."      and then there's the yells of excitement when a package or personal letter has arrived :)  Rachel was so excited to see we have a "creek" right outside  our driveway! I told her its run-off from the snow and she said,  "we'll wait for it to fill even higher and we can swimming in it,  in the summertime!"      so excited to finally be able to go see LadyBug!     they did their school work very diligently today, all because I promised a trip to LadyBug's stall :)     we brought our own veggies with us this time and also fed her something new:  Beets . She loves them.     I love...

This is an urgent prayer request from our good friends Doug and Brooke Sauder.  The request is for Doug's brother, Derek.  Read Brooke's Facebook note below for details and then for more details on Derek's journey, visit his website.  I've added his website to my blogroll, so as he updates you will find them there as well.  Please pray for my husband's brother, Derek. He just came through surgery on his ear and brain to remove a large, aggressive tumor and weeks of radiation. We just found out that only 6 mos. after surgery, tumors have been found in his spinal fluid and another part of his brain. He has 3 young children and expecting #4 this summer. Please pray for healing and wisdom & skill for the doctors. Thank you! You can follow his blog for updates & details --  http://lrsauder.blogspot.com/

... And I'm sure it might be super annoying to click on my blog and feel like, "oh, joy... she's complaining." But I want to be honest. That's all I'm doing. Just complaining. I know so many of you will totally understand this post and I need that right now;  The reminder that all moms go through these days and weeks. I had such a lovely trip to California. Enjoyed the time with my family, enjoyed seeing some friends in Brentwood {even though the visits were super short} and my friend in SF - enjoyed the random warmer weather {I hear I left some rain with you all!} and enjoyed the rest time away from the busyness of life here. Came home though to the snow storm, which, at first was awesome. Then lost power for two days - still, not that bad. We actually had some fun pretending to camp for two days. Then was hit with the stomach flu. Bad . Worst case I've had in my life. When I stopped counting how many trips I was making to the bathroom it was only 4p...

I'm officially in my 3rd trimester!  First trimester went insanely slow and was pretty miserable for me, health wise. I've never thrown up so many times or felt like it was hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel as much as I did during those 13 weeks. Amazing how it already feels so long ago to me.  Twenty-seven weeks feels like a huge milestone, mostly because it means we're so close to week thirty!  The second trimester went by at lightening speed. So much so that I've decided we need to get the baby stuff out now and start getting ready. This is the first pregnancy where I'm feeling totally unprepared and not ready at all. We're usually all set and ready to go by week 30, at the latest.  We still need to take our hospital tour, since we've never labored at this hospital. A fun fact that Ethan pointed out a few weeks back - this is our first family member to be born out of California and NOT at a Kaiser hospital. Pretty cool, right? We t...