What We... (Roman Month of April 2014)

I've got a lot of catching up to do.  We all caught whooping cough somehow.  It is realized in retrospect that Nathan was first, though he only had three nights of bad coughing.  The oldest three kids and he had caught a cold not long before that, and so at that time we though it was that.

When I started having problems, it was so much like when I had asthma that Nathan suspected we had another mold problem (which we did have a minor one, and he replaced part of the kitchen counter because of it), and when I started improving immediately after, it was almost confirmation.  William started coughing at that time, but he'd been around the mold when it was removed.

I started taking oregano oil, but at that time it was too late to change anything for me, since we learned that antibiotics don't change the course of the illness by the time it's realized what a person has, though it can prevent you spreading the illness to others.

Eventually all the kids got sick, Elizabeth being the last one, and it was scary and exhausting when she got it.  Many sleep-deprived nights and stressful days.  The kids are still coughing a bit, and Elizabeth still has usually just two bad fits at night, but everything has improved a lot.  I'm still keeping the kids away from everyone.  I don't think they're contagious, anymore, but they are vulnerable to secondary infection until their lungs have healed. 

This post contains pictures from the Roman month of April:

What Kids Did for Fun...

So much fun in the rain puddles!  Poor William has outgrown his puddle pants.  I don't think those particular ones are made in a size for him.

Trusten often is found jumping on the rebounder, but here he's playing on his iPod with Baby Love snuggling beside him with her stuffed seal (one of the stuffed animals she inherited from me that I loved as a child).  I took this beloved shots before getting Trusten to sit up.  I don't like when they lie down like that with such devices over their hearts.  

Elizabeth enjoys pushing Sister's dump truck:

I love when my sweet babies all play nicely together, like they did here in the sandbox:

What Loving Gestures We Shared...

Olivia putting Baby Sister's shoes on her feet:

 Aren't they so cute with their ponytails?

I walked into Olivia's room one day to find the following picture on her wall.  It is very much Olivia's signature person.  I immediately felt a mix of frustration and amusement.  I couldn't help but smile.  When I saw Olivia shortly thereafter I asked her about the drawing on her wall.  She said, "I wanted to make it bootiful."  That she did.  It's quite beautiful.  LOL  I explained to her she needed from then on to draw only on paper, and then we can hang her pictures on her wall or mirror with tape.  She has not drawn on the wall since but has requested a few different pictures to be hung in her room.  :-)

We got pizza to go one night, and Nathan went in.  While I waited, I drew him the following picture with my finger on an app on my iPhone.  He's my Love Bug, and I always use a lady bug to symbolize that. 

Jaden William picked some phlox/sweet Williams and surprised us by sneaking them and a note into our bathroom.

Nathan has intended on redoing all our counters in due time, as finances allow, but when he thought I had asthma again, he came home with wood and got started right away.  

Baby Love covering her ears while a saw was going:

Can you believe it's just plywood??  It turned out looking very nice, I think.  Pictured below before installation of more knobs/handles.

My Livi-Pie helping me get groceries:

What We Ate...

This first one is from when we ate out at Red Lobster:

Some yummy stuff I fixed:

 My fruit, grain, and seed bars with cream cheese frosting.  Kids always get excited when I make these.

 Last stew of the season, used rice for only the second or third time, and it's so good that way!

 Chicken, salad and wild rice with carrots and onions; Nathan's birthday dinner of steak, asparagus, wild rice, and some store-bough white garlic-butter bread that he'd bought at some point (a rare thing around here but tasty).

Cheesy broccoli and rice casserole; lasagna with beef

What We Did for Special Times...

I Partook of the New Covenant Passover:

We enjoyed the memorial of creation on the Sabbath day by exploring and playing in our top/back pasture:

 

We had good times together and learned plenty.

Until next time...

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...

Unleavened Bread, Gardening, Nature, and More

Well, I got behind again, because our computer was in the repair store for over two weeks!  This post will have a lot of pictures.  It's hard to narrow them down, and even so there are still quite a few.

We observed Passover and the Feast Week of Unleavened Bread.  That's been a month ago now.  The kids usually like the different foods we eat during that week, because we do not eat yeasted/fermented foods (with the exception of wine).  I go a step further and do not use baking powder in my foods, as we eat more quick breads than yeasted ones, anyway, so leaving the baking powder out of the quick breads (like muffins) reminds us of the theme of the week, which is that we're meditating on our sin weaknesses and working to rid them out of our lives (leaven representing sin).  I took a few pictures of some of the foods we ate:

Baking powder-free muffins, tortilla sandwich, tortilla pizza

We had to catch up on reading our periodicals.  We didn't really read anything from January through March, which is strange for us, but so much else was going on.  By the middle of March we had 22 magazines and other periodicals to read (pictured below), but we are now caught up:

Ranger Rick; Your Big Backyard; Weeky Reader; WR News; WR Science Spin; Arbor Day

We learned so much, which we always do, but we crammed a lot into a short space of time. Here is how the kids looked one day while waiting for me to sit down with them for our reading time (with Liz on the floor getting her tummy time):

Yeah, the "twins" Trust and Liv are real characters

We also planted a garden.  I only took pictures of the cucumber plants I transplanted.  I need to take new pictures of everything that is growing now.  This is experimental.  Nathan used his tractor and dumped a lot of loose soil into a bed, but it's our soil, so though it's loose, it's full of rocks.  We're curious to see how well it does.

Young cucumber plants

Some pictures during one of our walks:

Some sort of growths on the leaves, not yet determined

Wildflowers!

Scenery on our walk, including neighbor's horses

Eastern tent caterpillars

Nathan and Jade found an interesting flower during a walk they took in the woods:

Not yet identified...does anyone know what it is?

Jaden completed a mosaics class.  I love his art.  He was trying to make a butterfly in part of one of his creations, though, and I guess he miscalculated the number of pieces he had.  I still wonder whether he couldn't have rearranged some pieces.  I love that he chose some red tile in the mix, though!  I love that color! The larger mosaic has a chalkboard included, and he added the green paint to the wooden edges after he got home with it.

Jaden also reorganized his tool bag.  It was a disastrous mess!

Happy boy and his tool bag

The old A/C's that Nathan replaces are stored back on our property again (after a few years of Casey doing it, before he moved), and Jaden scrapped all the ones so far, all by himself.  Nathan paid him $100. Though it's a small fraction of what the metal will bring, that's good money for a boy his age.  He is doing quite well on his goal to save up $1000 (and then do I'm-not-sure-what).

Jade with A/Cs and scrap metal

Jade with coils

Copper

Jade also recently planted some wheat:

Wheat grass

He started it in the pot, and I guess it may stay there until it seeds, if it will do so in the pot.  It's much taller now.  Grass grows so quickly!

Jade found a stone that looks like a grounding stone, about two years ago, but he recently found another rock with which he decided to do some grinding.  He actually did this during the week of Unleavened Bread.  No, he didn't grind enough flour to make any bread.  But it was a learning experience.  He learned how difficult it would have been for people in more ancient times.

Jade's grinding stones with some wheat berries

It was after that when he decided to plant some of the wheat seeds.  I guess it's the first time any of us have actually tried.  Like Nathan said, it's good to know our grain stores are truly made of viable seed.  Not only does that mean we're eating the best, but if we needed to plant some, we could. I grind all my grains with my Wolfgang electric grain mill, but I also have a manual mill.  Trust and Liv get out the latter quite often, but they don't really know anything about it.  I've decided I'll put some grain in it and let them mill it into flour.  Jade did so at that age.  It's a good time to bring out The Little Red Hen book again, one of our favorites.  I think they will all enjoy seeing the wheat grass come to fruition.  Moving on...

We got to enjoy a cool wolf spider and her babies on the front porch:

Check out the eyes on this wolf spider

Can you see the baby spider who fell off its mother's back?

Earthworms are always exciting.  He found one that was especially swollen-looking, so we reviewed how an earthworm reproduces, the function of the clitellum, etc.

Here are a couple pics of Jade, one showing his taking apart contactors (from A/Cs), and another of him enjoying his chow mein (yum!) after we read about early Chinese civilation:

A snail:

My daddy bought the kids some new books:

Usborne has some good books

My momma gave me some wildflower seeds to plant:

A nice variety of wildflower seeds!

Jade took off with my camera to photograph some sort of caterpillar. I just remembered we didn't try to identify it.

Trusten and I started making a potholder.  My mother bought the kit for Trusten.

He's deeply concentrating

His progress

After we started the cross-weaving, it wasn't long before he wanted to quit for the day.  I had to help him do that part, whereas the first part was pretty easy for him.  We're finished with the cross-weaving now, but I'm not understanding how to finish it.  The picture isn't helpful, and when it comes to putting threads, yarns, or other such things together to make a finished product, I'm pretty useless!  I'll get it figured out, and we'll finish it once I do.  I think I need to ask Nathan, because he's actually better at doing stuff like that than I am.  Yeah, I know, this is one of those easy-to-do kits, but I'm still pretty clueless!

As far as other things go:

Jaden is going along fine in his Grade 4 grammar book, he's doing well on his spelling, he's always reading something (one of the latest things he's reading is a big illustrated Q&A book on USA history, and he took off with my book about the Titanic, but I'm not sure he's reading it.  It could be boring to him; I thought it was interesting, but I was 15 or 16 when I bought it), and he just finished practicing the cursive alphabet.  He's still doing Grade 3 math and going slowly through that.

Trusten has started the Rocket Readers Learn-to-Read Bible that I used for Jaden.  I'm teaching him to read, starting with that.  He understands phonics pretty well and can recognize many sight words.  He's working on writing.

That's it for now.  Until next time...