Wishing you a blessed and happy 2007.

I thank you for your kindness and friendship in 2006.

~~~~~~Linda

New Year’s always begins me thinking about the past year and future years in our home.  I’ve been blessed this year with seeing my husband now fully supporting homeschooling.  I see him desiring our children to remain at home for all of their education.  This has me pondering our next season.  I must confess I entered homeschooling with a heart filled with desire to home-educate, but no solid plan.  I had desired and prayed to homeschool Jennifer since her first day of public school.  But in 2000 I was focusing on being a Proverbs 31 wife and mother.  Then in 2001 Elizabeth was born and for the first eighteen months of her life I was exhausated.  Working nights and taking care of her during the day while Jennifer went to public school.  Then I started an emotionally taxing job in August 2002.  We moved in April 2003.  Grace was conceived and her pregnancy was challenging physically and emotionally.  After Grace's birth I had a time of post-partum depression and fatigue.  By the spring of 2004 when it was the Lord's time to begin homeschooling, I had leaned heavily on HIm and developed a strong relationship with HIm.  But had not fully researched home educating my daughters. The Lord has been faithful, as He always is, to provide each day with good learning.  Learning that has provided spiritual growth, character training and academic growth.   But I sense Him guiding me to become to develop a more solid foundation for our home learning.  We will be entering a new season in three years, and I’m pray fully seeing that I must reinforce the foundation that we are building on.  I’m excited about a few, new to me, resources that I’ll be studying over the next few months.  Along with His guidance and my husbands discerning direction, I’m grateful for all that this new season will bring. 

I’ve read several of your recommendations for the Elijah Company’s Catalog. 

Although not available to order out of, it is a rich resource of wisdom for homeschooling families.  Chris and Ellyn Davis are seasoned home-school parents, rich in knowledge and wisdom.  Their website is filled with fabulous information.  View it here: 

I had patiently been awaiting the arrival of my copy of their catalog.  They do bulk-mailing and it can take awhile for your copy to arrive.  I began reading it this morning.  It is filled with great articles and ideas for every type of homeschooling family. 

The next resource is also widely known and used.  But pridefully I had checked it off of my list.  I finally decided I needed to open the wealth of information in this book.  It will be helpful as I plan for our future homeschooling.

Even with all of these resources our home-educating is still firmly built on the foundation of Jesus.  That our daughters grow-up desiring to love and serve Him all the days of their lives.

I have owned this next book since before we began homeschooling.   But it has sat untouched.  I'll begin reading this after I finish up Ruth Beechick's Homeschool Answer Book. 

~~~~~~~in humble gratitude for His lovingkindness, that is from everlasting to everlasting on those who fear Him, and His righteousness to children's children,

Linda

I lost my blog Friday December 15th.  I didn't have any idea what I had done to it.  But if you tried to come to my blog for that week, you got nothing.  Well what had done was banned all of you, and me too.  LOL...  About twice a month I do an advance Google search on my blog name.  Usually I come up with one or two websites that have my blog imbedded within their site.  So I thought I could ban their IP's.   Wrong....here is Jodi's explanation. 

"The problem was in your banned IP’s box.  First of all, you can’t ban sites like you had in there – it needs to be the IP address of somebody coming to visit your blog.  Putting web addresses in there doesn’t do anything.

The real problem was that after the last one you had a comma and then nothing.  That basically tells the system to ban EVERY IP address – so everybody, even yourself.  You have the benefit of my own awful experience to thank for me seeing that.  I once banned all users from all blogs that way.  I won’t be making THAT mistake again, LOL." 

So I give a huge {{{{{hug}}}} to Jodi the Technical Adminstrator of HSB community.  She was still under an enormous amount of work with the system upgrade.  But she got my blog revived.  I also appreciate all of you for coming back to check on me, or asking around about what happened to me.   I'm not leaving the HSB community.  When all of this happened, and I didn't have a blog for six days I did some thinking and praying.  I quickly came to the conclusion that I enjoy the community and all of you to much to leave.  Truly the only thing I miss is the ability to use LibraryThing. A few things will need to be redone on my blog as I remain here.  Some of the code is written in javascript, that is why you don't see the white frame around my title and the quotes.  But that can be fixed I'm sure. Lastly, I'm so thankful for my husband who encourages me to blog.  When my blog was gone, he tried to fix it, asked if we could call someone and helped out with some other chores so I could try and get it going.  What a dear!

~~~grateful for His continued blessings,

Linda

Wishing you a blessed Christmas,

filled with the miracle of Christ birth,

the gift of God's loving grace,

Linda

I don't do very well with change.  This new HomeschoolBlogger is going to take some getting used to.  Just logging in took me 1 hour.  It didn't like my password, or the first five new ones it sent me.  I'm sure with Firefox it would have been better.  But then figuring out how to navigate the new members area, geesh it is well different.  On the bright side it appears to be easier to upload pictures, once I got my AOL account to stop blocking the pop-up box.  And now I'll be interested to see if my entry will post.   The friends page takes a long time to load, I think I'll start with that area.  While it's loading I can go through my email, and hope and pray that AOL doesn't time-it out.   

I have went through many, many changes at my job over the last five years.  This seems to work best if I pray, give thanks for all things and take time to educate myself about the changes. 

Maybe they could provide a tutorial for us.  I didn't see one yet in the Forums. That would be so helpful.

Time for bed, looking forward to another busy week. 

~~~~In His Loving Arms,

Linda

Thank you all for you sweet comments.  They always encourage me!

We had a wonderful weekend.  My husband and I have been slowly and prayerfully easing into becoming more active in our church family.  Several weeks ago the missions director called and asked if we would consider providing accomodations for a visiting missionary.  I said sure.  He could have Jen's bedroom and she could share her sisters large room.  We had no plans for the weekend. 

I had several apprehensive moments while preparing for him to arrive.  I'm a pretty private person.  We enjoy being somewhat isolated within our little sanctuary.  But I kept praying about this, for I believed that the Lord wanted us to serve Him in this way.   Everyone was very helpful in getting the house cleaned up and the food preparations done.   My husband is GREAT help.  He can clean a shower like none other.  And he makes a mean spaghetti and meatballs. 

The missionary was a kind, gentle man with a heart for God.  He and his family are missionaries to the North African immigrants in France.  They are back on a year long furough.  He came to speak on persecution within the church.  The church service was centered on "Prayer for the Persecuted".   We within the United States live within such a bubble.  Our lives are easy and we can so easily express our religious choices.  The missionary talked about how we as the church must be prepared at anytime for this bubble to burst.  How would we respond?  Do we know within our hearts enough of the Word of God to stand firm?  It was a challenging service.  To have him in our home was encouraging.  He shared a lot about their lives in France.  The difficulities and the blessings.  He endured a lot of questions and attention from the girls, very graciously.  It was a blessing to all of us.  

He read from this book during the Sunday evening youth service;

I happen to have a copy of this book.  Jennifer has snatched on to it and is walking around reading it everywhere. 

I highly encourage you to spend a few moments praying for our brothers and sisters in Christ who face persecution every day.  To read more you can visit this link:  Voice of the Martyrs

~~~in humble gratitude for ALL of the faithful followers of Christ,

Linda