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...

Another Round of What We've Done in Pictures

Maybe after this week I can get somewhat back to normal and then go back to updating the blog weekly in a more organized fashion.  But for now, here is another quick round of what we've done in pictures with a quick update. It's SPRING, and we've been enjoying it.

Animal Wildlife...

Red-bellied woodpecker

Liv with a ladybug

Another ladybug at the edge of our driveway

Nuthatch

Another shot of the nuthatch

Gray squirrel (toward left, in front of tree)

The squirrel in the flowes

Squirrel after climbing in the redbud tree with its prize

The lovely red-bellied woodpecker on a different day and a different tree

Cardinal

To hear this cardinal sing (from another tree), visit this Youtube video.

Vulture in flight

 
Flowers...

Dandelion!

We love dandelions!  Look at these gorgeous yellow jewels!

Petals from henbit and/or dead nettle.  These are a new flower snack for the kids.  They have a sweet nectar (just not as good as honeysuckle). 

Feast of Unleavened Bread...

Unleavened peach muffins...not as puffy and light, but good nonetheless and a good reminder of our need to constantly work on purging sin from our lives

I fixed chocolate mousse as our dessert on one of the two holy days during the UB week.  We had a good Passover and UB week. 

Physical and spiritual food with friends (listened to a sermon on spiritual deleavening)

Jaden's Doings...

During a walk one day, Jaden spotted something down in the valley, so I let him go down to investigate.  He'd just so happened to ride his bike that day, so I suggested he ride back to the house to get a bag so that he could gather the entire remaining skeleton of the deer.  He then worked on reassembling it.

He got clay from our property, shaped it, baked it, and painted it, and then he gave it to his Daddy as a birthday gift.

Jade using my mini food chopper for grass to make green ink, following a recipe he found using his iPod

Assembling the deer skeleton while Trusten watches

Trusten...

Trusten, after catching me taking the below pictures of him playing Mario on the Wii (please overlook the mess...one of those days I did NOT CARE)

This boy ACTIVELY plays...when I say ACTIVELY, that's what I mean.  Whenever Mario is going in a pipe or something, he takes off running, skipping, jumping on the couch, whatever.  He jumps along with Mario, kicks, etc. 

Sweet boy in my redbud tree (get out of my redbud tree!!!!)  LOL

Drawing Art...

We all drew a rhino.  I hurried mine so that I could then help Trust and Liv.  Nathan used sense from the beginning and flipped the page landscape.  His is the one at the lower right with no name...AND it's the best (but he denies it being good).  Uh...not sure what Jade scribbled out the bottom.  I'm thinking he was putting his name in different languages...knowing him, probably.  LOL

History...

Lesson on Hosea from Mystery of History. The story of Hosea is an amazing one.  God taught through Hosea's personal marital circumstances his love for Israel who broke their covenant with him by fornicating with other gods.

Israel (and Judah) will be punished yet again...soon...but God still loves Israel and will show his mercy in the end. 

If Hosea's story is amazing, Manasseh's is astonishing.  One of the most evil kings of Judah, Manasseh delved deeply into the dark side with sorcery, witchcraft, and even sacrifice of his son in the fire.  Yet when punished and dragged away to prison by the enemy, he humbled himself greatly, was released, and then dedicated the remainder of his life ridding the land of the idols and worshiping God in truth.  YES!  There is hope for even those with evil deeds as bad as Manasseh (who may have also been the one who had Isaiah the prophet killed [body sawed in half]).

Miscellaneous...

Enjoying the outdoors on Sabbath (rock-throwing at its finest)

My lilac budding!

Do you see the tiny fuzzy caterpillar at the bottom of that cocoon thing (sorry, don't know the technical term in this case)?  On a previous day I happened to see a bunch hatch/crawl out of another one, which is something I've wanted to see for a couple years, after seeing such things on trees.

Another Sabbath afternoon of enjoying creation

A morning where Trusten dove right into his workbook work (which is a common occurence), and Liz decided to "help" after visiting her looking window and hanging out with Sister.  She likes to let go while standing, but she hasn't taken steps alone, yet.

Daddy and Livi washing dishes

Yeah, we had a bit of snow again.  Had quite a bit of back and forth 70s weather and then cold and snowy.  We never had a lot of snow the winter just past, though.

We are seriously considering moving out of the U.S.  YES, we've discussed this off and on for over seven years or more now.  NO, we've never [yet] gone through with it.  BUT, we're more serious now as we've ever been.  Actually, it's clear that every time we've gone back to considering it, we get more serious, so I guess it's only been a matter of time.  We've always focused mostly on somewhere in South America, like Uruguay, Ecuador, Peru, or Belize.  We were planning to go to Ecuador a few weeks from now, but so many things hindered our plans, making it obvious that was not the answer (we prayed it would play out exactly that way, with lots of hindrances, if it was not in God's will).  At first I considered it might be the enemy trying to hinder things, but then the way things were stacking and stacking, we think that's not the answer.

Nathan is also looking at changing professions, possibly doing school again for something else, selling his business, etc.  We'll see.

Jaden is constantly researching on his iPod about a wide variety of things: geography and languages, metals and other minerals, parrots and other animals, how-to's, technology news, things the idiotic wealthy people waste all their wealth on (which he agrees is absolutely idiotic and sad), etc.  When he's not researching (and sometimes writing about what he's learned), he's usually outside working or exploring.

Trusten is enthusiastic about his ever-improving reading abilities, and he's often up and working on his school work before any of the rest of us is up.  He loves the Wii (see above), and that's all the motivation he needs to do his work (he is limited to his playtime, and I make sure he goes outside, even when he doesn't want).

Liv is very big into imaginative play.  She's now got several imaginary friends.

Elizabeth is still not walking but is doing fine overall.

That's it for now.

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...