Feast of Unleavened Bread (Roman Year 2014)

 Therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, neither with the leaven of malice and wickedness; but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth (1 Cor. 5:8).

We've been enjoying the week of Unleavened Bread so far.  On the first day—a holy day—I reviewed the meaning of the feasts, starting with questions to see how much they remember, as I always do, and then put particular focus on the meaning of Unleavened Bread.  I stressed the message I Corinthians 5:8 to the children and elaborated greatly, also reminding them of the fruits of the spirit.  Sure, removing literal leavened bread is a nice reminder of the need to remove sin from our lives, but the main point under the new spiritual covenant is that we should work hard on examining what we need to change in our lives to grow in righteousness and grace.  If we only were to participate in the removing literal yeast from our homes as instructed under the old carnal covenant, we'd be falling short of what is expected of us under the spiritual covenant.

Due to my severe trial at this time last year, I didn't even get out the children's repentance journals then, so this year is the first year that Trusten did his own writing.  I wrote down Olivia's list of things she wants to repent of and change, as she spoke them to me.  Jaden William made a big deal over how terrible his writing looked from past years.  LOL

We've been eating unleavened muffins, as we normally do, and I've been making tortillas to eat in various ways.

 Tortilla in the skillet

 Chocolate-chip muffins

Blueberry muffins

For Passover I made my dough in a heart shape before cooking it in the skillet, as seen on my other blog.  It reminded me all the more that what my Lord Salvation the Anointed did for me was out of his awesome love for me.  

I hope the children will truly work hard on their needed changes.  They know if they do well, they will be given rewards on the Feast of Trumpets and a wonderful note written by me in their Trumpets rewards journals.

To those of you who are also keeping the feast (with sincerity and truth, of course), we hope that you are being greatly fulfilled in spiritual growth, extra time of fellowship with fellow children of God, extra rest, and nourishing unleavened breads.

Until next time...

What We...(New Year)

Yes, I'm behind two weeks, but that's life.  I'm regularly late on these things, but thankfully there's not a penalty.

We're studying the moon and seas right now, the frog's life cycle, plus the regular this and that. It is also now the week of Unleavened Bread.  As for my monthly update:


What We Did for Inside Joy...

I love these little girls!  They started their day off on my bed with my iPhone to listen and sway to some Christian music.  I've got a wonderful video of them here "dancing."

 Olivia loves to be silly. 

 I'd just finished fixing Happy's hair, and the girls wanted to brush mine.

 Trust and Liv relaxing with their sweets and Elizabeth licking a beater. 

What We Did for Outside Fun...

 Trusten showed me some of the rocks he busted open with William's rock hammer.  One of them was literally full of fossils.

 Trust, Liv, and Happy in the sandbox...oh what fun! I love when they happily play together in peace.

 These are from the same day as the sandbox pictures, with the exception of the first one of the three blowing bubbles at the bottom of the steps.  When they play peacefully and joyfully, I'm able to enjoy meditation time.

 This was so funny!  I just happened to take pictures of Liv at the right time.  You can see in the first shot, she is grimacing with effort to yank up a handful of wild onions, and then, Boing, she went backward as the onions gave way.

I put an extra shirt on top of her dress, as it was a bit chilly.  I do know how to match!  I just love this beautiful (inside and out) baby girl.  I wish I'd have been able to take a picture of her when she was propped on her side, but I didn't have a camera until I asked Liv to go grab my iPhone.  She was eating henbit flowers. 

What the Boys Learned in Books...

 Trusten was working on his math lesson on the couch with me, and also on the couch on the other side of me, the girls sat while Liv practiced writing letters on my iPad.  In the other picture William is taking a break from reading his book about crystals to play with Lego blocks.

I bought these books for Trusten.  One series is Amish-based, the other series Mennonite-based.  They're for his reading level, and the stories encourage good traits in children, like helpfulness and kindness.  He will turn seven next in May.  I'd bought a series of books for Jaden William for his seventh birthday, but we have since given those away, and I think these books are much better.

What William Did as His Latest Animal Welfare Effort...

If you know William well, you know that he loves animals and has rescued many critters from certain death over the years.  This is a little bunny he heard screaming in the woods.  The first picture is right after rescue.  The other pictures were taken the day afterward, and Bunny was doing much better.  We cared for the bunny for a few days, and Jade was planning to soon let the little thing go shortly, but something terrible happened.  In short, Olivia killed the sweet baby rabbit as an act of revenge for Jaden William's hateful attitude toward her that day.  Nathan and I both talked to her in-depth as to why that was wrong, and it taught Jaden William a good lesson, too.  I just feel terrible that the innocent bunny had to die.  It was so precious!

What We Ate...

 We ate at a Mexican restaurant one day.  William ordered fish, which is not included in his rules of his vegetarian diet.

 Looking at this is making my mouth water.  Baked chicken with bbq sauce and greens and fried okra and raisin bread; garlic butter pasta with broccoli and carrot; roast with potatoes and carrots (Sabbath); chicken-fried steak and corn and green beans; a concoction that I call Mexican corn and rice (it's good); and beef fajita on homemade tortilla

Sprouted mung beans; another one of my new concoctions I call cheesy rice and lentil casserole (SOOO good, I could eat it every day); chocolate cheescake (Sabbath dessert); and bread (I've been trying to make all our own bread again, but I go back and forth).  

Now to update on Elizabeth.  She seems to be quite smart and understand anything you tell her, obeys instructions (like when asked to throw something away, go retrieve something you request, go somewhere you tell her, etc.), is doing a great job with potty training (later than my others but still not bad), seems to have some sort of musical gift or at least love, because even long ago she'd hum tunes she'd heard, and she since I've always made up little songs for all my babies and young children to match with various areas of their everyday life (Like "Gotta Get That Baby Clean" in the shower or bath that I've sung since JW was a baby, "Children, Children, Oh I Love My Children," at spontaneous times, "Milk and Cuddles for the Baby Girl" for nursing time, and the big hit, "Spider's Coming to Town" for tickle time), Elizabeth starts humming a song when she wants something or when I'm about to do the activity associated with whatever song.  She signs with more coordination now and does a great job with the signs she knows, so one of my upcoming priorities is to teach her more signs.  There have been a lot of signs that I knew before but can't remember exactly now.  I know I've got to get with the program. 

She knows she can go get something to stand on to help her reach places.  She knows how to navigate to different games on my phone.  

She doesn't speak the minimum number of words that the average child knows for his or her age per most guidelines, but I'm not sure whether to be concerned.  She was pretty close to the proper number of words around her second birthday.  Now the gap is bigger again.

I've gone back to watch videos and hear audios of William to help me get a better idea of where he was at this age, but I've got limited data from off which to go.  It appears that, even though he was somewhat delayed, it wasn't bad, and I guess stuttering for all those years was his main hindrance.  I can't compare Elizabeth to Trust or Liv or to her cousin Layla who is only five weeks older, because they all three are very advanced speakers.  It's hard to compare her to William, too, because he had the firstborn advantage, too, so I have no way of knowing how much better she'd be doing if she was the only child.  

I wish I knew more about myself at that age.  She looks and acts a lot like I do.  She looks about identical.  I also know I've struggled with speech issues.  I dealt with pronunciation problems and so had to take speech for what I think was two years in elementary school.  Even today, at the age of 31, I struggle in social situations.  In writing I can get my grammar perfect, and unless I'm texting from my phone my writing usually comes out pretty well.  I've always scored super high on writing skills.  But my speech can be embarrassing (and I usually scored pretty low on "listening skills," as audio learning is not my bag).  I get words mixed around, my tone can sound odd, and my processing speed is poor.  Really poor.  In order to get everything to come out fluidly, I must slow way down, and nobody wants to listen to someone who speaks so very slowly.  If I write a speech, then speaking is grand.  But if I'm having to go free-talk in conversations, it really matters not what I could contribute to the conversation.  It gets jumbled up on my hard drive, and it's difficult for my processor to actually pull that information and share it. 

But what was I like when I was Elizabeth's age?  Did I have delayed speech?  I was an early reader.  But what about my expressed speech and language development?  I asked my mother a while back, but she didn't respond to that part of our text conversation.  I'm sure she just accidentally missed responding to that part, or she may not remember well enough to give me an informed response.  

One of her favorite things has looong been animal sounds (and signs and some words).  I may have mentioned before that she's got an animal sounds app on my iPhone.  It's got a lot of different animals, and she frequently says, "Weeez," (please) when she sees me with the phone, because she wants to play.  It brings me great joy to hear her make a donkey sound or to take her toy frog and hop it around, saying, "Bo-bot, bo-bot" (ribbit, ribbit).  Maybe if animal sounds counted as words, she'd be close to the minimum. 

Again, I don't even know whether it should be a concern.  I know there have been a lot of kids through history that don't start talking much until they turn three (or sometimes around four).  And most of those kids ended up fine, and some were even geniuses of a sort.  It's just hard to know what I should do sometimes, whether to be concerned or not.  I don't want to spend money we really don't have right now on a speech therapist she doesn't need and a lot of time driving so far, if it's not necessary.  But I don't want to mess up by not doing so if she really needs it.  The bigger part of me thinks she'll be fine.  And most people seem to think she'll be fine.

Hopefully no one is getting super tired of hearing me "talk" this out.  It's probably good that I'm recording all this, though.  It will be fun for her to look back on and laugh at me.

She is always playing around with little things like the wooden block with the momma and baby polar bears shown in the upper left picture.  I frequently match videos of such things to show her and talk to her about it all.  The other pictures are screenshots of video footage from Planet Earth.  "See the polar bear.  See the babies?  See the baby bear get on top of the momma bear?  Just like on the block."

I think I'll just keep doing as I'm doing and keep praying.  We've all got weaknesses somewhere, but we've also got strengths.  I'm thinking she'll be fine, but I'll continue to carefully monitor her, of course.

I'll post soon about how our week of UB is going. 

Until next time...

China and Pandas

Our study on China and pandas dragged out, as there has been much going on, but these were good topics, I believe for many reasons, and I like how the two of them are so related, too, since pandas are inhabitants of China.

I believe China is an important topic, seeing as about one of out of five people on the planet live there, having the largest population.  It also happens to be where the U.S. imports a large number of its goods.  I remember William was just two or maybe younger when he recognized the "Made in China" stamp on things.

We love pandas, and I've always found them a very interesting animal upon which I've spent many hours of my life meditating.  I find it fascinating that they clearly chose—as a group in the distant past—to eat almost entirely vegetarian, despite belonging to the Carnivora order because of their flesh-eating digestive system, including their teeth.   Ninety-nine percent of their diet consists of bamboo.  I also find it interesting that they are black and white.  I spend a great deal of my free time meditating upon things in nature—animals, plants, minerals, and other—and gleaning spiritual lessons from them.

We spent time watching short documentaries on pandas and China, reading panda facts from the Internet, and reading books about China. 

A great link on quick panda facts is found on the OneKind.org website.

I downloaded two new books on China for Kindle:

These were both excellent books.  They're informative without being too lengthy and boring.  They also contain colorful pictures.  The DK Readers book also included a few Chinese words, including the word for panda.  These will be useful for years to come, and I'm glad I added them to our Kindle library. 

If you're a long-time reader, you may remember when William wrote his name in Chinese five years ago.  I got the kids to do that again.  I printed William's first name this time.  Trusten's name was not in the database, which is no surprise.  I've never known anyone else with his name.  So I printed his middle name Shiloh.  He got frustrated when he got to the last character, and he didn't even want me to help him some days later finish it.  He was that upset about it.  I did help Olivia with hers.

I used the website USDiner.com.

We enjoyed a song about pandas called "My Name is Panda."  I got the lyrics from Kids' Music Town.

We listened to the song and enjoyed panda pictures on Youtube.

I used Activity Village for printables on both China and pandas.  There are also plenty of craft ideas there for both topics.  I printed sheets for the boys to write what they learned after we read the panda facts, some stationary for William on which to write letters, "Learn to Draw a Panda," and some Chinese-themed coloring sheets.  I printed goldfish for Trust and Liv and a beautiful landscape scene for William.

 Stationery for letters to friends Kaia and Young

 Trusten doesn't "run-on" but rather runs together.  Still working on that. ;-)

I guided Liv to draw hers (but she wrote her name entirely by herself).  We did these directly on the floor, so the shaded part is streaked.

The kids' Aunt Meg (my beloved baby sister) bought William an origami manual and paper when Elizabeth was born, and we learned that such paper folding really originated in China and is there called zhezhi.  The zhezhi peace dove is not included in the origami manual, but this is what William created using a Youtube video for instructions.

I also used this opportunity as a first time to make my very own spring rolls!  I was absolutely thrilled at how well they turned out, and we all enjoyed them.  I made them twice!  I made a lot of Chinese food over a week's span.  I also found the perfect recipe for chow mein.  

Top left is Chinese fried rice with broccoli instead of peas with store-bought Annie Chun's chow mein; top right is homemade spring rolls and homemade sweet and sour sauce; bottom left is fried rice made by Nathan using some black "forbidden rice" that was grown in China; and bottom left is leftover fried rice, fresh spring rolls and sweet and sour sauce, and some very delicious homemade chow mein.

I managed to be able to surprise the kids with some Panda treats in both raspberry and licorice flavors.  They love those things, but it's not very often they get them.  Usually when they pick out their weekly special treat at the grocery store (daily treats are a different bag), they pick something from the deli.  

I have no earthly idea why the raspberry says "new," because they've been around for years.

William has learned a lot about Chinese history in his Mystery of History books, especially over the last few months, so these activities and more learning were great supplements.  Pandas are just fun and interesting, and they're the symbol for endangered species.  I'm glad we spent some special time talking about these two topics.  

Tonight is the new moon, so I am due for a new month post. 

Until next time...