Our Family Daybook

Our Family Daybook

Around the Homestead...

Still working on the garden bed.  Adding good organic matter to the soil.  My seeds are sprouting!

Our adoption process...

Honestly, I hit a bit of a breaking point last Friday.  I am an introvert.  I am also a relatively sensitive person.  I am passionate and feels things pretty deeply.  It has been exactly one year since I found Reece's Rainbow and knew God had placed it before us TO DO SOMETHING.  We were not in the place to do it then.  We have moved now and it was a green light to start the process.  But I had gotten so entrenched in other adoption blogs, stories, experiences that it was getting hard for me to function...the need is SO GREAT.  14 yr. olds that weigh 14 pounds and are the size of 3 month olds because caretakers in Eastern Europe thought their Down Syndrome made them not worth feeding or caring for...older kids watching parents adopt a child from their orphanage and begging for families and wanting parents of their own.  Kids waiting for years.   Its been a lot.  I took a break.  Didn't read a single thing, Dan and I stopped talking about it for a bit.  We prayed.  We waited.  I think I might be in a better place to move forward now.  We're talking about it again and looking to God to lead us.

Learning at home...

This was supposed to be a very light week because of the season and the need to garden and prepare for the chicks coming.  The boys did a bit of Math, read lots of library books and helped make compostable planting cups from newspaper as well as help me in the garden a bit.
Elijah was awesome and planted tulips for me :)  We will definitely read some history today. We'll get back to the books more next week.

What we've been reading...

"The Backyard Homestead Guide to Raising Farm Animals" and "Backyard Livestock"  Both of these books are from the library.  We really like Guide to raising farm animals one.  We are reading about the proper care of chicks from 1 day to 6 weeks right now the the boys so they will know how to properly care for them. 

I will also be reading a organic gardening book from the library.

What we've been thinking about...

"We have lost the theology of risk. There is an inner confidence that we've lost. We've lost zeal. We've lost guts. Unless you are willing to do the ridiculous, God will not do the miraculous." (Mother Angelica)

Thanks to http://bringinghenryhome.blogspot.com/ for the quote!

I'm thankful for...

My husband.  Its St. Joseph's Day today and I am truly thankful for the hard worker that my husband is.  He is a great supporter of his family.  And he never gives up trying to do his best to balance all that life throws at him.  I love you, Hon.

I'm praying for...

The Archer Family and their soon-to-be adopted children, For the children at Pleven, for Michelle to raise the funds to bring Alyssa and Anya home where they belong and for peace and holiness in our home.

Something I'm pondering during Lent...

"I think the world today is upside down. Everybody seems to be in such a terrible rush, anxious for greater development and greater riches and so on. There is much suffering because there is so very little love in homes and in family life. We have no time for our children, we have no time for each other; there is no time to enjoy each other. In the home begins the disruption of the peace of the world."

-Mother Teresa


"In the home begins the disruption of the peace of the world." 
This last line has stuck with me these past days...everything our Blessed Mother Teresa has ever said resonates with me but this line really struck me during this Lenten Season.  

So very grateful for the reminder...

Blessings,
Kimberly

Out of doors

People who live in the country know the value of fresh air very well,

and their children live out of doors,

with intervals within for sleeping and eating.

~Charlotte Mason, Home Education, Vol 1, p.42

My kids spend a lot of time outside...playing, pretending and creating.  We really need to work on the garden and do some spring cleaning this week, too, so we're cutting our school time down a bit and taking advantage of some spring fever to clean and garden.
 

(Thanks to http://bugsknightsandturkeysintheyard.blogspot.com/ for the great quote from Miss Mason.)

Blesssings,
Kimberly

Current Tree Fort Progress

So like Kim mentioned, I'm working on the tree fort and it's going to be great when it's done...  I did a bit of research and found the best way to attach stuff to trees with minimal damage to them.  The main thing is to minimize the number of connections to the tree and Garnier Limbs help in that.  These massive bolts mimic how a tree branch connects to a tree to create a strong mounting point in which to connect stuff to.


Given how this tree is shaped I couldn't really wrap around the trunk; though I didn't like the idea of having a hole in the roof for the trunk anyway.  So I decided to build the fort off to one side and have a deck off the other.


I bought two GL's, as they're called, to hold up the two 4x6 beams you can see horizontal in the picture on the left.  I then used two 4x4 posts to create diagonal braces to hold up the fort side of structure.  It was a challenge to connect the diagonal beams but I thing I arrived a reasonable solution with some advice from a friend.


The next step is to finish laying out the jousts and putting the decking and floor down so that I can start having the boys help in the construction.  I'll post more progress as I find time.


Dan

Gardens & Tree Forts

Quick post... Finally got this back from the repair shop-

So we started tilling up the garden bed this evening before dinner!  Tilling a large garden bed is hard work!   Hoping to spend a lot of time tomorrrow getting it all tilled up.  It will be the biggest garden we've ever managed so we're pretty exited!  So much space!  I'm trying not to get too over-zealous and till up the entire side of our yard!
I got some heirloom seeds from a local nursery and we've planted some seeds indoors while we wait to get a little closer to the last frost date.  I'm really anxious to start planting :)

Dan's weekend will probably look more like this-

He's got the boys' tree fort that he really wants to make more progress on.   Once he gets the floor down then the boys can be up on the fort helping put up the rest of it.   Pretty soon he'll need to switch over to the chicken tractors.

I've got some adoption posts in the works and I hope to get some adoption related things up and running on this blog in the near future.  We finally got a "Chip-In" button and we will be explaining that as well as all the steps in the adoption process soon.


Blessings,
Kimberly

Our Family Daybook

I'm going to try posting "Our Family Daybook" posts to give an overview of some of the big things covered on our blog- our homesteading, our adoption process and our homeschooling.  Hopefully this will be a clearer way for me to cover all these things :)  It is definitely is a lot to squeeze into one blog, but I really don't want to start a separate blog for each...I think I might go crazy if I had to keep up with all that!

So....in a nutshelll....

Our Family Daybook

Around the Homestead...

Ordered our chickens.  Working on plans to build our chicken tractors. Planting lettuce, broccoli and carrots, hopefully today.  Getting our tiller fixed so we can till up the soil in the garden bed and get it ready for planting!

Our adoption process...

  putting in our application to our chosen international agency & facilitator. Working on homestudy paperwork.

Learning at home...

kind of all over the place!  The weather is beautiful and we're all itching to get our chickens and start planting....but we're always reading and always learning so its all good!  Found some animal bones that we're researching as well as learning about our turkey vultures....oh my, I've learned much more about them than I ever wanted to know!  Interesting but gross! Thinking we might need to be buying a Rosetta Stone language program for our whole family.

What we've been reading...

Gabriel and the Hour book (Middle Ages History) loving this book! Among the Pond People (Nature Reading) also quite enjoyable. What did we ever do before our kindle?

What we've been thinking about...

Eastern Europe.  Countries, Regions, facilitators... How food is produced, "Fresh" the documentary...

I'm thankful for...

that Tyler has a family committed to him!  Oh my, I haven't felt that happy in a
long time!  I was smitten with him after reading some very long posts about him
from a family adopting a little girl from his orphanage.   This boy is amazing.  I wish we were adopting him.  But I am so thankful he will have a family.

I'm praying for..

.

Laurel who has very little time left to find a family.  I am praying for  Cooper, the children of Pleven as well as the child that God is preparing for us to adopt.

Blessings,
Kimberly

Our chicken order is in!

Putting in our very first order of 25 of these beauties....

We will be getting our 1 or 2 day old chicks around Mid-April...we are planning to split them into two groups....half for egg laying and the other half for meat birds.  The kids are doing a 4-H project attached to these chickens where they will need to return a couple birds for auction as well as keep a record book and "show" a chicken at a chicken show.

So now Dan has some more building to do with the boys.  This is most likely what our two chicken tractors will look like:

We are very new to all this....so we're doing our best to read up as much as we can and I guess we'll be learning a lot by trial and error! 

We are very excited to be making our homestead more official by adding some farm animals to the mix.  So far we have 8 fruit trees, 3 blueberry bushes and recently we put in 8 little raspberry bushes as well.  Adding the chickens is definitely a big step towards our own family farm :)

Now that the chickens are ordered, I need to start figuring out the garden.

Blessings,
Kimberly