eat sleep and farm

Remember that song? "Christmas time is coming, the goose is getting fat... please put a penny in the old man's hat. If you haven't got a penny a hay penny will do, if you haven't got a hay penny, God bless you!"  My Mom would probably laugh so hard if she knew I walk around my house singing the silly songs she taught us when we were little. I know so many more like that one. My kids think I'm super cool at this point and I'm hanging on to that opinion as long as I can. Christmas is a few days away and since I'm still in "healing" mode, it doesn't fully feel like Christmas. The other day I found myself saying "I miss NORMAL!" and as I said it, I asked myself, "but what IS normal?" Like, isn't normal where we are right now? Why do we always think normal was the last time we were happy or stress free? Before I was married I was single. Single at one point was the norm for me. So why didn't I freak out after I ...

This has been an interesting year. It started with me telling Jason in mid January, "this isn't going to be a good year." and I hated that I said it the minute the words came out of my mouth. I hate being the pessimist, but I was admitting what I felt deep inside. The truth is, I typically don't like the odd numbered years. I can go all the way back to 1983 when my Grandma died so suddenly of Ovarian Cancer and that kind of started all of it. Some odd numbered years haven't have anything terrible or tragically significant happen in them (that I can remember) but 1989 was full of deaths and a very bad earthquake, 2001 was September 11th, 2011 is when we lost 2 babies, etc... There are more in-between but I didn't want to completely depress you :) This year seemed to be going fine. I was actually shocked, especially when we found out we were pregnant! September greeted us with that exciting news and boy, were we excited. It was going to be the biggest age gap...

I'm not even going to apologize anymore for the lack of posts - mostly because I think I gave fair warning that I wouldn't be posting on here *that* much and because, I don't even think anyone reads this, haha! I'm pretty sure this has become more of a journal for me and less of an actual blog for readers, which is cool. September has been good, fast paced and exciting! We started the month off with a week long trip to a beach house on the Washington Coast and it was SO much fun! I got hit with an icky head cold while we were there, which put a damper on the trip for me, but it was still pretty amazing. We went back to Seabrook Cottages, about 16 miles from Ocean Shores. {I realize if you don't live around here these names mean nothing to you, but in case anyone is interested, its a great place to rent any size beach house and a really fun way to spend time as a family.} There's no Internet service which we love, there's a fully stocked kitchen in each h...

Summer has been delightful. I want to blame it all on the fact that we've stayed local and have already soaked up so much relaxing family time, but who knows. We have a pool and hot tub, so we swim a lot. That's kind of an understatement. We swim all the time. And the other night, my husband got home from work and I thought it would be romantic to surprise him by pulling him in the pool with me. Thankfully due to the 95 degree weather, he thought it was funny and refreshing. I'm not feeling as wordy these days so I'm going to do more of a run-down of our life the past month. *We've enjoyed using our fire pit and making all kinds of sugary deliciousness. *kids have lost teeth and the tooth fairy is going broke. Rachel likes to pull her own teeth out and this impresses her Dad, so she tends to get quite a hefty amount of moola ;-) *If anyone's wondering... mosquitos still adore me. Burts Bees and Honest Company make amazing bug sprays THAT WORK! (yes,...

Some months seem to take forever to go by and some fly by so fast I have to remind myself they were here! May was that way for us. Lots of wrapping up the school year, end of the year field trips, testing, filing paperwork, holidays and Spring cleaning in our yards. So, June arrived and I had hoped it would go by slower, but here we are, June 12th and I'm feeling like June 1st was literally yesterday. This year we chose to stay local for Jason's vacation. We've always gone to CA to see our families and while we love our families, we've really felt like we needed to have a STAY-cation. So that's what we did. And it was amazing! We decided we'd do at least 90% of things we've never done since moving here. Things we've always said, "oh, that would be fun to do that!" So we made a list and picked what was on the top of that list. We did things that included Ride the Ducks tour in Seattle (a must do!), we walked most of the city, including Kerr...

Easter 2015 will be a day we won't ever forget. Our daughter, Rachel, was baptized and gave a public profession of her faith in Jesus! It was a day filled with so much joy and thankfulness to God for all he's done and is doing in her life. Here are the video clips alone with amazing photos our good friend Jason took. Her words in the video are 100% hers. She wrote out what she wanted to say and memorized it so she could speak boldly in front of everyone and she asked us if she could do it on her own :) Also, she has been corrected and knows that her favorite verse is in Romans chapter SIX and not chapter three  ;-)  {this link will take you to the video where she spoke- this video comes before the actual baptism just FYI}  https://www.dropbox.com/s/ ozun95sus5j2wex/rachel- baptism.mov?dl=0 Galatians 2:20 "I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son o...

I have the urge to write these days, but very little motivation. I'm not sure if that's an oxy moron but it makes total sense in my head. {also, side note: spell check just suggested I wanted to say "oxy Mormon" -- bahahaha!}  This year in school we've been doing more reading and writing than we've ever done. I suppose its normal when there's a 4th grader around. Ethan has shocked us with his writing abilities. He reads A LOT so I should've known he'd be a good writer, but I guess because getting the words ON paper takes him f o r e v e r -and-a-day, I just figured he didn't have much to say. We use the Excellence in Writing program at home and for his Essentials class at Classical Conversations. Its a program I can't recommend enough . I love it. And I love the way Andrew Pudewa teaches parents/teachers how to guide children. Its totally changed the way I view homeschooling, for the better, I hope ;-) So we ordered the books for Rachel ...