Life lessons on prayer

Okay so I just want to share something. I've said this before and I'll say it again now. Prayer works. God can definitely handle the biggest things-nothing is TOO big for God. He already knows what you are going through, what weight you are carrying, what seems impossible to you is no surprise to God. He made you, of course, so naturally He knows your innermost struggles and desires. He knows your deepest, darkest secrets and loves you more than you could ever comprehend. I am feeling overwhelmed by His presence and goodness this morning.

If you are a Christ follower, this is something you've experienced. The true feeling of being overwhelmed by His attributes-His Grace (giving you something good you didn't earn), Mercy (sparing you from punishment what you earned), Love, comfort, peace of knowing even when things seem insurmountable that He's got this! If not, I get that you don't get it. The Bible says the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing-and that is what will happen. It's hard to wrap your brain around, but it is one of those things that you just don't get till you get it. LIGHT BULB!!

I can see the light at the end of the tunnel!!!

So we are, believe it or not, wrapping up the end of our FOURTH year homeschooling. Seems like just yesterday we were dipping our toes in the shallow end of the homeschool waters, trying to figure out if we could do this or not. I won't say it has always been super fun and super easy--if you know me, you know we have good days and bad days, just like any parent. All I know is as we reflect on this official school year ending, I am nothing if not grateful for the opportunity. Some days are perfectly routine; everything goes as planned and "normal" for us.  Other days are what I call "fly by the seat of my pants days". Some weeks we get everything planned accomplished with recess time to spare. Most days though, we have to go with the flow. Someone (or everyone) gets sick. Our spur of the moment plans take precedence sometimes. Sometimes it's our extra-curriculars, or errand running that cause us to mix it up and shuffle things around. Sometimes I even had to extend our school year dates or move planned breaks around because I didn't want the kids having makeup work from days (or a week) of sickness ON top of school work. Yes, that's a real life skill that needs to be learned. But while they are very young, I understand that there's only so much work they can actually complete in one day, and if they are doing school work from 6 am until 7pm which few breaks, they have no time to be just kids. On the other hand, if they choose to waste their time or not to focus on the task at hand, they end up eliminating free play time.

Happy Easter! He is risen!

Check out Under the Radar's Easter episode. Click the link for some great indie music.


Hope everyone had a great Easter holiday, and I hope today you don't go back to normal and loving complacency. How's that for putting it bluntly!? Because He's risen, we have this hope so that we shouldn't to live like He's still dead. We don't have to live like we're dead! I really believe, based on all that's happening today in the world, that He's coming back soon. If you have chosen, at any point in your life, to become a Christ follower and accept His forgiveness of your sins, He took care of that for all time. There's so much freedom in that, knowing He came just for you, and you alone were worth it. He knew every wrong thing you'd ever do and thought you worth saving anyways, so why do we hang on to our past like we are still in bondage to it?

Spring has spring part 2: We have chickens!!

 It's official! We finally have chicks! We have been wanting to get them for a couple years, and knew this would be a great learning experience for the kids. When we went to pick them out, we each ended up picking out a completely different breed, which is kinda neat! When we looked at buying slightly smaller chicks at Tractor Supply, we were going to have to get at least six chicks all at once, and if we wanted a female chick that was a good layer, we'd have to buy 6 of the same kind that they had that week. This way ended up being much better, and especially much more fun after months of research and getting ready for them, we got to get all the ones we had decided we liked over the last few months!

So without further ado, here are the girls.

Spring has sprung!! Part 1!

Sooo, we've been home for almost a month that has flown by faster than just about any of the other months recently.

Here's what we've been up to as of 3/12/14

We finished (finally!) Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis. Yay!!!
We've been sick quite a bit for the last month. In fact, every week, at least two people were suffering from sickness at any given time. This resulted in us missing many of our weekly activities, rescheduling playdates and visits with friends multiple times, 2 trips to the doctor and 1 to the emergency room, since we've been back from Haiti alone!
We've been working on our backyard and garden area. It's a work in progress, but we put a fence up to keep the dog out of the garden area which we are expanding. FYI: It didn't work well, so we are going to have to reinforce it. We started our chicken coop, and there's been a pretty large learning curve, but we hope to have baby chicks here by the end of the month!

This was us laying the fencing down.

Trip blog #5

So Friday was our R&R day. We hadn't gotten to see much of the area except the drive to and from HOA, so Friday after a week of hard work, Fenel rewarded us by taking us to not 1 but 2 beautiful beaches.

The first beach, "the cove" is where we got to dip our toes in for a few minutes earlier in the week. We came back again for a few minutes to do a little souvenir shopping for family and friends. They had pretty bracelets, hand carved boxes, figures, wooden machetes, and even (albeit extremely inaccurate) hand made wooden globes. It was funny because the places on the globe were distorted at best, but it was still really cool. I know I could never do that any better!

Trip Blog #3

In continuing to recap our recent Haiti mission trip, I wanted to talk about what we did last week a little bit more each post. It's still hard for me to believe we've almost been back a week already. It feels like we were gone much longer than just a week, and it also feels like it was so much longer than just one week ago. It's a strange feeling that I can't really explain except that I'm sure other people who travel out of the country for something like that do feel out of sorts for a little bit.

Back to the trip, though!

Day 3 found us getting ready Monday morning for the first work day. We headed to the work site and the kids ran out to catch the action any time they had a brief break from their schoolwork.