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

Lots of activity around here!

Well,

  I haven't posted in a few days because we've been away on a family field trip to Charleston, SC.
We've studied the Civil War a bit this year and we promised to take the kids to Fort Sumter in Charleston so they could stand where the Civil War officially started. 

We took a really nice boat tour over to the island and the National Park Ranger at the Fort really knew his stuff so it was really enjoyable. 

While we were in Charleston, we hit the SC Aquarium...

I have LOTS more pictures to eventually post about this little homeschooling trip but I've finally been given the "official" go-ahead from Dan to post something pretty important...

Drum roll, please.........................

Dan has been given a job offer and has accepted the new position!  He went to work today and handed in his two week notice!  Dan has a new job, folks!

We are pretty excited around here!  We are so incredibly thankful to Our Lord for His abundant blessings on our family.  And I am very blessed to have a hard-working and incredibly talented husband :)

More pictures of our field trip as well as more job info. to come :)

Happy Monday!

Kimberly

Checking things off our list...

Dan unexpectedly took off a few days this week to try to get a bunch of stuff off our "To Do" list as well as go on a family History Field trip for our Civil War studies.  I'll post more about that later. 


Dan, aka Mr. Homesteader, went and got himself a great used trailer so now he can cart all the wood, farm supplies, landscaping stuff, aquaponics setup supplies and even our trash to the dump!  We all went and got some lumber for the long-awaiting "older boy tree fort" that has been long coming for the big boys in our family :)  There are plans in the works for building to start tomorrow!

We have some rasberry bushes that are sitting in my entryway begging to be planted :) 

I went to our local homestudy agency office to drop off our big payment for our homestudy, backround check stuff and some more paperwork...they are SO NICE there...it is such a blessing to have somebody in person that is kind and helpful.  It was nice to be able to get something else done towards our adoption.

I wrote this post last night and got side-tracked on posting it...Today is actually Ash Wednesday so we need to get to Church this morning.  Hopefully I'll get back here and post a little about our family plans for Lent.  We are definitely keeping it simple this year and focusing on a real conversion of heart.  Stay tuned!

Blessings,
Kimberly

Great Backyard Bird Count!

 Taking a break today from our adoption posting...we are doing some nature study at our house.

Things have been busy around here...but its nice to post about one of our favorite little nature things that we try to do each school year...The Great Backyard Bird Count!  The Cornell Lab of Ornithology puts this together a couple times a year.  The kids are able to print lists of birds for our area and then do a "bird watch" for 15 min.  We identify what birds and how many of each species and then turn our tally sheets in to Cornell.  We can actually do this several times at different locations for the next few days and send them  all our results.  It helps them to watch the health and habits of the birds in our area.  

 This is the site:

http://www.birdsource.org/gbbc
Or you can just look up "Great Backyard Bird Count 2012"

The kids love it...we end up learning a lot of species that we didn't know or noticing birds that come through that we hadn't identified yet.  Our new house definitely has different birds to count than our old house. 

This has been an awesome way for the kids to study nature as well as become more attentive to what is around them. 

We are sick here at our house today...so its going to be a lot of hot tea, a lot of naps, and a lot of bird counting & field guides :)

P.S.  >>>>  If you happen to read this today, please say a little prayer for Dan today...he has a very special prayer request that could use some added prayer- thanks!

Blessings,
Kimberly

Love is a decision

Well, we're really trying to keep the ball rolling with our future adoption...been communicating back and forth quite a bit today trying to get accurate information about our options.  Its not easy...you'll just have to trust me on that.

Pray for us...that we can get some decisions made and move forward to deciding who God is calling to join our family.  We were really sad about this past weekend, but God has been so good to us and especially lately...just making it really clear that we can handle this.  He will work it out.  Just pray for discernment for us that we make the right choices.

Blessings,
Kimberly

a hard time...

Well, we knew adoption was not for the faint of heart...
Its been a hard few days...Dan and I thought we were going to be "committing" to two little girls that would come home and be a part of our family.  This is not so...

There is so much more...the adoption world is a crazy place...so many variables, so many unknowns.  

I am learning that they don't call it a "ransom" for nothing...

I've had moments when I've thought about not doing this...not adopting.  Then our Lord shows me these things...

 These are not my words...but they have spoken to me over the past few days of difficulty.
May God continue to break my heart for the things that break His...



From www.obedienttogodscalladoption.blogspot.com/2012/01/i-came-across-this-today-while-running.html

 May God Bless You...with Tears and Anger, Discomfort and Foolishness

May God bless you with discomfort at easy answers, half truths, and superficial relationships, so that you may live deep within your heart.

May God bless you with anger at injustice, oppression, and exploitation of people, so that you may work for justice, freedom and peace.


May God bless you with tears to shed for those who suffer from pain, rejection, starvation, and war, so that you may reach out your hand to comfort them and to turn their pain in to joy.


And may God bless you with enough foolishness to believe that you can make a difference in this world, so that you can do what others claim cannot be done.
-Franciscan prayer

 "How often do we think a blessing should look like anger or discomfort or tears?  What a perfect reminder that we are never promised an easy road, or a carefree experience here on Earth.  What we are promised is to be saved by Christ if we ask and follow through with faith, to be transformed by Him so that we can be more like Him.  We are promised to be indwelt with the Holy Spirit to guide us.  While reading this, I thought about how we always view blessings as a comfortable experience, but to be blessed like this, blessed with a heart that breaks for the things God's heart breaks for, that is truly a blessing to beg Abba for.  If we love as He has commanded, and we reach out as He has asked, and we stand up and fight when it is needed, we are truly shining His light this world.  If we never experience this kind of blessing, we may forget the orphan and the widow, we may ignore the poor and the hurting, the lost and the broken.  So tonight, I cry out to Abba please, bless me in these ways!"  
From www.obedienttogodscalladoption.blogspot.com/2012/01/i-came-across-this-today-while-running.html

  
 And yet another quote that has spoken to me this week...
 
 "Excellence is the result of caring more than others think is wise,
risking more than others think is safe,
dreaming more than others think is practical,
 and expecting more than others think is possible." ~Stephen Covey