Loving Life

We are having out of town guests here this weekend. It is a pastor and his wife that we are just getting to know. They will be staying at our house this weekend. So I have entered into "panic mode" in regards to cleaning my house. I wish I could say that having people stay over does not bother me because my house is always spotless, all the time. But that is not the case. In fact, I enjoy having people over because it gets me to clean my house up. There are days when I wonder why I even bother to clean since my work gets undone about 20 minutes after it is done. But I know if I didn't even try, the house would look just that much worse. So that brings me to this week. Having started school last week, I haven't gotten back into figuring out how to get everything done in the time I need to get it done now that much of my day is taken up with school. So things didn't get done so much last week. And I won't even begin to talk about the produce that is

Well, I did indeed have an excellent birthday. I started my day with a long run. I was hoping to get 12-15 miles in and was able to run 14 miles and walk the last one to make 15 miles. I was very happy about that and my foot felt great throughout the whole time. Woo hoo! When I got home, Ana had made a little treasure hunt for me with my present at the end of it - a handmade white clay ring complete with holder. It was cute. She was so excited to give that to me. Then she also got some of her money out and went to Casey's next door (convenience store), and bought a donut for me. It was super sweet of her. She certainly loves to give gifts. Unfortunately, at that moment, the thought of putting a donut in my stomach didn't feel very good, but I told her how excited I was to eat it that I was going to save it for a little bit later (which I did and made sure to exclaim how delicious it was as I ate it a few hours later). Then my good friend and running partner Julie di

Today is my 32nd birthday. I like being 32 so far. I am going to celebrate by going out for an early morning run! My goal is to get from 12-15 miles in depending on the health of my foot. I hope we can do that. My dear friend and running partner Julie will run with me and take me out for ice cream later on in the day to celebrate another long run done and another birthday come. We did the same for her nearly a month ago when it was her birthday. Once my birthday run is completed, I will sit in a stupor for awhile and hopefully eat something yummy followed by a shower. I think Ana has a small treasure hunt planned for me with a homemade treasure at the end of it for me. All I know is that it's made out of oven baked clay. And then we'll probably spend the evening at my parents house eating tasty food and visiting with my brother and his wife and little girls who are visiting from VA. Maybe a birthday cake or treat or something will have to be made as well to celebrate. I hope to

Yesterday, we continued our learnings on prehistoric man by venturing forth into the wilds at my in-laws. Our goals were to forage for food and build a shelter with the things we had around us. The kids each took along their hunting bags and went looking for food. They found plenty of hickory nuts and some good smashing rocks to open them up. Here is David working on our nut supply. Here is Ana also trying to open up some nuts - she had more trouble with the technique and kept shooting the nuts out and hitting people with them. Abby didn't care to try to crack open any nuts. She spent her time watching and eating the raspberries we "discovered" and picked. Yes, they are in a very non-prehistoric container. We gathered a bunch of branches and large leaves and made a small shelter. We made our shelter near a water source (small pond), but decided to drink our non-prehistoric water from our plastic water bottles instead of the pond water. Finished product. Ana wondered

Yesterday in school we got creative with the sewing machine. The previous day we made cave paintings for art. Yesterday, we made hunting bags to take around as they hunt/gather food. We made them out of tiger-skin material which pleased the kids. Aaron likes to tell them a story he made up that is very circular/repetitive involving a tiger skinned rug. The the kids adore that story and still find it hilarious after several years of re-telling. So our tiger-skinned hunting bags were perfect. They went outside after making them and went hunting for food. Here's a picture of the things they found and snacked on from the garden. Here is a picture of Ana eating part of her food find - beets! Abby and her beet. On running news, got six miles in this morning. It was quite chilly - in the 50s - until I warmed up. But I felt chilled again once I stopped running - still haven't warmed up completely despite putting on dry socks, sweatshirt and drinking warm coffee. Just my out of wh

Our hamster is sick. There is something wrong with his eyeball - it's very swollen, nasty, and really gross looking. I will spare your stomachs and not post a picture of it. For a hamster, he is getting old - he's over 2 years old. I think I read somewhere that they usually live only 2-3 years. My problem is that I used up all of his food when I last cleaned his cage. I really don't want to buy another bag of food to extend his life for one more week or two. They do not sell small bags of food that I have ever seen - just the ginormous-last-a-lifetime-all-you-can-possibly-eat size. I really wish he would die. I've warned and prepared the kids for the fact that he is getting old and may die soon. They are taking it well. Abby declared yesterday, "I hope our hamster dies really soon. Then we can get fish." Yes, I have promised to set up the fishtank once hamster dies. Abby is excited about that because she will get to name the fish. The kids also p

Well, today is a big day! First day of school for this school year. David starts 5th grade, Ana starts 2nd, and Abby REALLY wants to do pre-school. I'm always super nervous for the first day as each year brings new changes and new ideas I want to try out. Changes for this year: + Pre-school for Abby. I'm not planning on doing much. Just a few basic things when she's interested. If she's not interested, I'd rather have her happily playing somewhere instead of trying to force her to learn something when she's only 4. + No babysitting kids. I'm still not used to that idea yet. It will be nice in many ways to only have my own kids for school days - though I will definitely miss the readily available playmate for Abby during school hours. Perhaps we'll have to borrow Grace occasionally when Abby starts to feel too lonely. + Longer days. Due to not having babysitting kids, I am working hard at adding more fun things to our day that I have neglected the past fe

Today was a workday out at the in-laws. We are having a baptism there tomorrow after church so we thought it would be nice to clear out some of the pond scum and weeds around sand area to make it a little nicer. My dearest husband of all times said he would help me with this chore. Here he is. Isn't he sweet? Doesn't he look thrilled? After that was accomplished, I needed to show off my big muh-sools (said with a German accent). Aaron and the kids went home after the pond was cleaned out. I stayed on to do some more work at the house. Part of that involved mopping up the water in the basement that came in during yesterday's big rainstorm. This is the third time it's happened since June. I think we need a little less rain. Anyway, with this time's leakage, a fair amount of fine silt came in with the water, so the floor was covered with a nice layer of dirt. I had a great idea while I was mopping it up with my much too small rag, that if I didn't ever clean it up

As stated yesterday, I had a lot to try to get done. Of course it didn't get all the way done, but I did get my tomato canning done for the day. Anyway, I was busy doing something around lunchtime, so Ana volunteered to make lunch for us. I said she could. So here is what she came up with for lunch. She opened up a can of pears and we each got two halves, made each of us a saltine peanut butter cracker sandwich, made us each a graham cracker with peanut butter and chocolate spread, some fresh raspberries and dried cranberries and dried grapes (Abby does not like raisins, but likes dried grapes a lot). It was very nice, but we were all hungry about an hour later, so we had a bigger snack soon after lunch was over. :) Here is Ana snacking on her raspberries - a daily occurance. In my compost pile, I have a very prolific squash plant growing. This picture does not do it justice. It is seriously taking over a lot of the garden and yard area beside the garden. I wasn't sure

I was running an errand at the hardware store here in town with the kids. Abby saw this on the shelf and asked if we could get it for our hamster. He might like the new toy for a little bit. Hehe.

Well, there are more tomatoes to deal with today. I like the end result of canning, but I can't say I necessarily enjoy the process of it. I went running for the third time this week. Today didn't feel quite as good on my foot. I'm hoping it will be okay for Saturday when I try to get in a bit of a longer run. My marathon hopes haven't completely died, but they are being strained at the moment. I'm trying to stay positive and hopeful and keep praying for complete healing. I would really like to run this thing. There's lots of things to do today, so I won't post much at the moment. Hope you all have a great day!

Today, David starts his Wednesday afternoon class at Township. This class meets weekly for kids in Jr. High and a little younger. David did it last year and really enjoyed it. I think it helped him tremendously in his social skills too - learning to deal with frustrating situations, working with partners, learning larger assignment skills. So though we won't officially start school until next week, David gets a head start. Abby would really like to start school now. Actually she has been wanting to start about three weeks ago. So David and Ana spend a little time every day with her making sure she knows the letters of the alphabet and doing a few other projects together, like all working on a coloring page together. I love it. I wonder if I'll have to teach Abby anything at all this year! And here are a couple of pictures that just crack me up. When we were on vacation this summer, we found a waterpark that we decided to go to. The kids were super happy when we told them that&#

I occasionally bring home the offering basket from church. Joey, as the first born cat in our family, showed great leadership by offering his whole self to the Lord. What a servant. Not to be outdone by his big brother, Stanley not only is wholly devoted to God, but is showing a form of penitence for his sins by offering himself in a most painful looking way. He has many sins to repent from. And on other notes, if I had to choose anywhere in the world to sleep, it would definitely be in a box of peaches. And when I was kicked out of the box of peaches, I would choose this pot for my resting place. I think I need to stop leaving things on the ground.

Here's my garden pickings of the morning. Lots of tomatoes (some were from Saturday), a melon, piles of onions (only showed a few), and yes, that is a full container of ripe red raspberries. Yummy! Not sure why our cats think they must get in on all pictures if possible. Alright, here we get personal. This is my office nastiness two weeks ago. These pictures do not begin to do justice to how nasty it was getting. With school starting next week, I HAD to have the office clean so I could function in it. David's school desk is in the office and when it was messy, we couldn't find it. And here are pictures taken last week after spending a few hours a day on the office organizing, sorting, purging clutter. It was finally clean and presentable. I MUST keep it clean. It feels so much nicer to have it clean. Makes school days a little less cluttered too. These pictures do not show everything - like the office closet I sorted through and the piano top I cleaned and decluttered. Bu

Today is tomato day here at my house. Here's a picture of the last batch of tomatoes I canned. Joey did not end up in the canning process, but he apparently wanted to be in the picture. With that batch of tomatoes, I made about 9 pints, of salsa, 10 pints of plain chunks and 2 qts. of juice. Not sure what I'm going to make with my batch of tomatoes today. Might do another batch of salsa - you can never have too much of that, right? And here was my latest melon picking batch. They were sooooo delicious! I've never grown any melons before and decided to try it out this year for fun. They were amazingly sweet. We gobbled them down quite quickly. I think I have one or two more to pick, then there will be no more. : ( But, I also have watermelons growing too - about 6 of those. Does anyone know how to tell when to pick watermelon? I don't know when they are ripe and I don't want to pick it too early, or it will be yucky. Every time I go and see my garden out at my in-l

I had a very lovely day today full of many good things. The first thing was getting together with my dear mother to have an early celebration for my birthday. The first we did was to go to the farmer's market and stock up on produce there. Yum! After that, we wandered the aisles of Target. I got a few necessities for the house and got my very delightful birthday present of a food processor. I was very excited to get that. I just recently started to covet one, so it was time to own one of my own. Once our purchases were stored away in the car, we wandered over to Panera Bread for lunch. I often choose to go there when I'm with my mom because Aaron turned into a restaurant snob when he was driving truck and ate out all the time and now snubs his nose at Panera. I love it. I ordered this (minus the sandwich). It was yumminess in a bowl. After lunch, we then went to Coldstone Creamery and I splurged on a very delicious signature dish of oatmeal cookie ice cream with plenty of choco

About a month ago, it was date night for Aaron and me. We were tired of doing the same old thing of eating out and then maybe watching a movie if we didn't feel too tired. So we decided to break our rut and do something completely different - go fishing! Aaron's parents have a pond that is stocked with bluegill and catfish and a few bass. So we made some foil packets full of vegetables and hoped to catch some fish to add to that later. Here's my nicely sized packet. And here's Aarons very large pile for his packet - about double the size of mine. So we got to his folks and almost immediately it began to downpour. But it looked like it would pass over quickly, so we sat on the back screened in porch eating chocolate and practicing our fishing technique. After a small delay, the rain stopped and off we went to fish. We caught four fish, however our line was pretty old and brittle and three of them snapped our line. I maganaged to haul in a catfish which we were going t

Finally got my computer fixed so I can upload those pictures as promised. So here they are without further ado. David had wanted a cake made into a "lego guy" for his birthday. I was going to try - the cakes I make usually look pretty amateurish, but I try to make what they want. But as I was getting this cake out of the pan to start creating, it completely fell apart. I "glued" it back together with frosting and told David what happened. So then he decided he would like to decorate his cake. Fine by me! He got out sprinkles, colored sugar and jelly beans and happily set to work. I had to give the girls clear instructions that they COULD NOT HELP, unless David asked them. Here is his finished creation of his own lego guy. David also wanted a mystery lunch for his celebration. Very simply put, a mystery meal is where you order from a menu, but you don't really know what you are getting until it is placed in front of you. Some people come up with clever, fancy nam