The beginning of this month was pretty slow to start.  We began our Weaver again and Satan quickly got involved in our lessons.  I had to pray, pray, pray for him to leave us alone.  Pray is a wonderful, underused tool we have to stay connected with our Lord and Saviour.  I find that starting my day in pray helps and does praying with the boys each morning.  I really believe this is key to a great day.

Our first unit involves learning about the many different early explorers of the western world.  One of the difficulties lay in beginning the supplement for my older son.  I still haven't used it.  What we ended up doing instead of heavy duty research on all these people, is I bought from Little Homeschool in the Woods their New World Explorers CD unit study.  This gave us lots of projects and lapbooking and notebooking things to do to spice this unit up.  I do not hesitate to bring in other curriculum if I feel led to do so to enhance what we are doing in Weaver.  I feel Weaver can get to heavy in writing, when something like this can be way more fun if you get into it more, especially if you have boys.  This is a boy unit, in my opinion, and I felt we needed to DO this unit, not research and write about it.  Learning about why and how and when these guys were out there is very interesting stuff.  But it's also information that is not overly necessary either.   Some of the projects have been making a quadrant, dehydrating meat, creating an Explorers Newspaper, making a captain's log which is to be journaled in and lots more to come.

The Bible to go along with this is Joshua, chapter one.  He is entering into a new land with the tribe of Isreal.  Going in to conquer the land and the people there according to God's will.  So with that we've been discussing the call of God in our lives and that we are to go when called.  Being a child is training for adulthood and the calling of God.  Obeying your parents gives you an advantage of obeying God when you are grown.  Also to supplement this we are using Precept Homeschool curriculum on Joshua.  I'm also training the boys to study the Bible inductively.

Farm News:

Ben bought a tom turkey to go with the hen we hatched out in the spring.  He seems very happy, but I dont' think she's too impressed yet.  He basically saved her life.

We've aquired a new goat named Lita which is short for Rosalita.  She came from the same place as Peaches.  So far she's getting pushed around a lot and I feel I need to keep my eye on her closely to make sure she is getting food to eat in the barn since the other older ones try to keep her away.  She has a wonderful personality and I love her.  Can't wait for breeding season in January.  Peaches is still milking away and we have fresh milk everyday.  What a gift.  On the down side, our chickens are not laying right now.  Not happy about that at all.  We've also bred our Jersery girl adn hopefully our beef cow Stella.  I guess we'll see over the next few months if we were successful or not.  Blossom was A.I'd and Stella was bred the old fashioned way.  We also had to deal with conjunctivitis on her which was a pain.  Trying to stay organic can be difficult when you have sick animals.  We used anitbiotic eye stuff instead of going with an injection.

The garden is mostly done right now.  I just finished digging up carrots and onions and cut off the tops of the sunflowers.  I left the small carrots and onions in the garden to see how they fair over the winter.  It sure is wet around here and I feel they may rot before we get a good frost.  I lost lots of onions due to all the rain we've had and there's more on the way.  I can't even get the garden turned over because it's so wet.  I'll have to look at the mess until spring I'm afraid.  I hope to be able to at least get most of it cleaned up and burned.

Today the boys have been raking our leaves before this next rain moves in.  The goats love the dried leaves in the winter.  We bag them up and store them in the barn.  It gives them variety during the winter with their hay.  I would put them in the garden during the day to help clean up some of the stuff, but it's too muddy for that.

We have a busy November coming up and I'm very excited about it all.  My dear friends from Mississippi are coming for a visit in a couple of weeks and on that Saturday they are here, we're having a party with some friends from our church here at the house.  My daughter will be here today  until Saturday and hopefully again for a longer stay over Thanksgiving.  Our neighbors from our old house will be coming for Thanksgiving also so we'll have a houseful.  I think that's all the company for November.

I'm always a bit sad that summer is over and the garden is being put to rest for the long winter season, but this is actually a good thing for me right now since my hips have not been cooperating with what my ambitions have been and want to be.  I've been down more than up and having to rely on the boys to help with most of the outside work this past summer and fall.  I pray that over the winter I can get a handle on my situation and hopefully start the new season good as new.  Keep me in your prays regarding this.