Food For Thought

Back soon I promise. I have lots of news to share for the New Year and I really can't wait to share it all! LOL
We have dealt with so much sadness this year, but God has always been good and faithful and my trust in Him is ever growing.

Here is something I have been pondering lately:
Do you think that the people who lived through the real Depression laugh at us and our whining over this "depression"? I mean really?

Who I might have been Part 2

Please forgive my delay in posting part 2. We had another death in the family this week. I really do expect the house to come crashing down at any moment now. My husband's mother passed away suddenly and unexpectedly Monday morning. We have been down with his dad the past few days just spending time. Through everything I still say Blessed Be the Name. I am amazed at the amount of strength God has given me through this season. It just makes me want to serve Him and praise Him even more. Even on days when I just want to crawl into bed and pull the covers over my head until 2010. :)
When we left off Roy and I were beginning to look into fostercare as a way to start our family. We took the classes filled out all the paperwork and waited a year and a half for them to complete our file. Agency changes, new regulations, loss of fingerprints. Everyday there was another reason our file had not been approved yet. I was getting more and more frustrated. Especially because DCF choose at this time to start a campaign to get more foster parents. Every where I turned there were impassioned pleas for one to open their home for these children. I was fingerprinted five times because of errors and time lapses. I was pretty sure I was getting ready to be called into Secret Service to protect the President. I know I had the clearance for it. In December of 2003 Roy and I looked at each other and said that it was time for me to come home from work. It was a very difficult decision for him to make. We'd bought a house earlier that year using both our incomes. We were already living above our financial means. It meant a lot of sudden changes in both of our lives.

Those first few months, nay years, of my being home were rough. On paper it never should have worked. But we were able to pay most of our bills. Barely. Sometimes even on time. :) And when one of our creditors came after us with a lawsuit the money was provided for us to actually settle the debt owed. It was a bill we were sending money to, but not the minimum payment every month. We tried to communicate with the people over the phone a few times and were treated very rudely. It's not an excuse for not paying them, but the money was not all there to pay them and they refused to communicate with us. We sent them what we could. We were not very good money managers at the time. We are still learning, but I will say we have not been in that situation again. Lesson learned. :)

In May we finally got our foster care license. The next day I got a phone call for a 6 month old baby girl. OF course we would love to take her in. I naively began to prepare for a 6 month old baby girl.

Imagine my surprise when this guy showed up at my door. 13 months old and running around like a mad man. LOL Thus began our foster care experience. As the children came the money began to increase. Within about a year we were at a place where we could pay off our debt, keep up with payments due, and all around just live comfortably. In 2006 our fostercare journey was put on hold as we adopted our five beautiful blessings. All in all foster care was not the traumatic experience for us that it is for some. In my home I have nine children. I kept five and sent four home. Unfortunately all four came back into care within a year of being home. Had I had the room I would have taken them all back.

I dealt with the public school system for one year. On the day of our adoption we went from the courthouse to the school board and thus began our homeschooling journey.

I have learned so much in the past few years. I am so thankful for people on the Internet willing to put themselves out there and show Biblical Womanhood. I have been on the other side of this and I can safely say I am much happier being a wife, mommy, and homemaker, than at any other time in my life. I did the career thing. Too much drama and worldliness for me. I did the public school thing. Too much time away from my kids, too many bad influences I had to overcome at home, too much disinformation being fed to my littles. No thank you. I am grateful that God put women into my life mostly through the Internet, but also a few real lifers to show me a different way.

I am quiet content to stay right here in my own little home and raise my little children. If you'd of told me that at 18 I would have laughed at you.

Thank you Lord for making it different for me.

Be Blessed!

Who I might have been

In my Bible study this week I was asked to focus on Psalm 124.

This Psalm which I can't paste onto my blog for some reason talks about what would have happened if God had not been on our side. The author of the Bible study then asked us to think about what our lives could have been like. As I pictured the life I had mapped out I see God's hand in so many ways.

I always knew I wanted a big family with lots of children. I also knew I wanted to be a stay at home mom. There is where who I am today collided with who I could have been.

You see I never even thought about raising my kids in a different way. I had a vague idea of what my marriage would look like, but not what it could be. Home was not a huge priority for me.

I was raised in a Christian family. Surrounded by men and women of the faith. We went to church every Sunday, faithful attenders of Sunday school. My brother and I even spent time in a Christian school. We said grace like a good Christian family. We attended Wednesday night prayer meeting. I spent plenty of time on youth outings, even when I did not want to go.

My mom, bless her heart, was the Provider for our home because my dad was disabled.

I do not complain about my childhood. It is what it is and it was happy. I was loved and cared for. I was given many opportunities.

As I got older I started really paying attention to sermons on child raising, marriage and family. I started to understand more and more about marriage. I desired it on such a deep level that whenever our youth leader talked about God calling some to remain single he would quickly add, but of course not Julie.

When I graduated from highschool I took a few college classes, got the required job, spent my evenings and weekends going out with friends and searching for The One. I dated different guys. Looking at each one as a potential husband.

I never knew there could be a different way. All the years I wasted money and time. Money I could have saved up to start my married life. Time I could have spent learning useful skills.

But even then God was changing me. I was meeting homeschooled families. I was interacting with married couples, families who understood God's word calls us to come out from among the world and be different. Granted at the time I thought it was odd, but God was still using it.

Even in the midst of all my young adult years being wasted our church hosted an Institute for Basic Life Principles seminar. That was my first exposure to teaching such as this. I think I was one of the few who actually appreciated the new outlook. :) It was the first place I was ever given justification for my belief that a wife's place was in the home and the husband's place was to be Provider.

I don't follow IBLP like some, but like I said it was my first exposure to what I now believe.

In 2000 my dreams began to be realized beyong my imagination. I married Roy. Of course God was still working on me. Boy, did He have a lot of work to do. Still does. :) Of course being married I had to have a nice apartment. Not something we could afford on just my husband's salary. So I went to work about a month after we got married. I was also on the pill because of course no one wants to get pregnant that first year or so everyone I knew told me. Oh, the sorrow I have felt over both of those choices. Funny thing, while my husband supported those choices had I been willing to open my eyes and see what God was trying to show me Roy would have been open to those as well.

We did the whole DINK thing. (Double income no kids) Buying what we wanted. Going out to eat. Not saving one penny.

It was during this time God pointed me to some sites on the web. Sites that talked about keeping the home, welcoming children, following your husband, homeschooling. WOW! Everything I read spoke directly to my heart. Yes! This is what I had been made for.

I would like to say here that we began to save up money for me to come home. That I spent weekends learning new skills to better my homemaking abilities. That God's truth became real in my life. I would like to say all of those things, but I can't.

We bought a house. Yeah. It was a great money saver. Not just any house. Nope. A brand new house built from the ground up. Yeah. A mortgage that was stretching both of our salaries. But I just had to have it. We'd been unsuccessfully trying to have children up to this point as well. We both came to the realization that the pill was not for us and we were open to God planning our family. God was bringing us around. He'd already won the homeschool battle. We knew that's what we wanted to do if we were ever blessed with kids.

Since we did not have any yet we began to look at fostering.

To be continued..

Be Blessed.

A Good Day

Ahh, a good day. Those seem to be a bit far and in between lately. LOL
So much done and I even snuck in some homeschooling. I am hoping to sneak in a little more before dinner. I pulled everything out of my pantry to reorganize it and as soon as I finish my snack I am off to do that. We were just going to have yogurt and cheese cubes for lunch, but in cleaning out my pantry I found a box of noodles and some spaghetti sauce. I added some stewed tomatoes to bulk the sauce up because lets face it one jar is not gonna feed this family. LOL Lunch was served. It sure was a lot better than yogurt and cheese cubes. :)
I have planned and replanned my shopping list and will be heading to the store early, early, early tomorrow morning. It's the shortest list I have ever seen, but thanks to Costco I don't need a whole lot. Though DH is jonesing to go back to Costco for some reason. I'm trying to put it off until we go over to that side of town next week for Christmas shopping.


Today was a beautiful day here. Sunny and breezy. If FL was always like this I could live with it. :) We took time out from our chores and school work to just go for a walk. The kids had a good time. When we got home we flung open the windows. As the day wore on though it got colder and colder. So eventually the windows were closed but it sure smelled nice as the house was airing out.
I still have plenty to do between now and Saturday evening, but I just keep doing one thing at a time. One of the things that was really bugging me was the disorganization in the kitchen. It looked awful to me. So that has been what I have been working on the last few days. I am decluttering and shifting stuff around. It's starting to look better.
Another thing was our homeschool bookshelf. With just a little reorganizing it looks like a whole new bookshelf. LOL
In a Bible study I am doing the author asked you to imagine who you would be if Jesus had not transformed your life. She did not mean from when you got saved, but from when He yanked you out of who you thought you were going to be and made you who He wanted you to be. I don't know if that makes sense to you, but it really made sense to me.
I thought it was a neat exercise. It made me really grateful for who He has led me to be.
I will talk some more about that in my next post.
What did He "yank" you from? Who would you have been?

Be Blessed!

Reality

Lets start today's post off with a little game! Which living room is mine? Come on everyone can play along.

Is it this tastefully decorated room with the patterns? The beautiful arrangements? The coordination?

Is it this room decorated with Christmas junk, library books, and kids clothing?

Or this formal room decorated with all the style and finesse of a gifted decorator? Notice how the colors and patterns compliment one another.

Ok ready for the answer. I'm sure you will be shocked. Drum roll...

BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRBBBRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

It's the second one. Yep the Christmas, books, clothing designer threads. That's the one.

So many times we get caught up in thinking that we wished we had so and so's life. Their house is beautiful in all their pictures. Their kids so well behaved. Their husband a true modern day knight. *Sigh*

Reality is I am almost to the point I can't function. I look around and everywhere there is stuff.

I am literally moving stuff from one end of the room to the other. You know we all have days like that. I hope? Anyone?

I cried actual tears today as I thought of everything I have to get done between now and Saturday. I was already disappointed that my shopping trip got moved to next week. Then to realize that I don't even know where to begin to get the house clean and organized before Saturday. UGH!

But in the end we are going to have nice evening Saturday night. We will fellowship with friends and family and celebrate the woman who made all of this possible for me, by giving birth to her surprise boy in 1971. I will thank her and do my best to make her feel welcomed and comfortable. Just doing the best I can!

Be Blessed!