Nathan beside me-- he's been trying to really get those fists in his mouth-- (couldn't be teething, that's impossible, RIGHT?) he is not hungry and won't take a pacifier-- just wants to get those FISTS in his mouth!   In the background I have some instramental music (so relaxing).  

 
***

To Fit and Happy...

I have seen off again /on again signs of some of us fighting some "cold" symptoms...no one has come down with anything-- but I am getting some stock out of the freezer to make into soup for tomorrow--to help BOOST up those immune systems. 

Oh and I scored 8 BAGS of beef bones last evening for FREE!!   So we will have more stock coming SOON!!

 

***

I am thankful for...

The renewing of our minds when we are in God's Word.   The "world" at large can really throw us off course if we are not careful---  only God's Word can be our plumb line---   even for some "good" things-- or things that "make sense".... if it doesn't line up-- it isn't TRUE.

***

From the Kitchen

The stock mentioned above.  

Had to re-stock my Honey and Maple Syrup this week-- always an expense but worth it in the LONG run.

Wednesday the boys and I will begin some preperations for our Thanksgiving meal with my parents.

Of course Thursday will be spent in the kitchen with my FAMILY!!  

 

***

I am wearing ...

A jean jumper dress that I LOVE and would like to take a part and have someone make me a FEW more-- (different fabric) but it is SO perfect, size, for nursing, and I just REALLY like it!

I have a white turtleneck under and my slippers-- it is getting colder out and my kitchen floor tells me so-- (not insulated well-- it gets COLD in the Winter.

***

In My CD Player

Instramental Hymn music in the kitchen.

Vision Forum CD-  "Why Christian Manhood Must Prevail"  in the Van

***

Towards a real education ...

READ alouds and the 3 R's are getting in!!  yeaaaaa   And we are really enjoying ourselves-- that is the BEST part!!!

 

***

 

I am thinking... 

Not too much-- thats a good thing-- TRUST ME!!

***

Around the Hobby Farm

Not too much around here either-- LOTS of PIG book being read my the male members-- ughhh 

***

  

I am reading  ...

The Bible

"Farmer Boy"  finished for the first time ever

Missionary Book on Fiji  finished tonight

Little Men

Missionary book to be decided tomorrow.... where will be travel???

***

I am  praying ...

For our family-- as we make decisions-- that we would have ears to hear and eyes to see what the Lord wants for us....

***

A Few Plans For The Rest Of The Week:

Relaxing and enjoying our family....

During this morning's church service, dad and I noticed Biruk was staring intently into the congregation, unresponsive to our attempts to get his attention.

I asked him what he was looking at, and finally he answered, with eyes shining and a quiet voice laden with awe..."I see...I see...Mr. Rogers."

Sure enough, a few rows ahead and to the right, was an older gentleman in a button-down burnt-orange cardigan.  He didn't look much like Mr. Rogers to me (except for the sweater), but looking closer, I could see how a two-year-old might think so.  A thin older gentleman, with hair just-so, a certain set of the ears, and a softly pleasant facial expression.  Combined with the sweater, "just like" Mr. Rogers. 

Dad and Mom do live in Fred Roger's hometown (and his show was produced in Pittsburgh, not too far from where we lived before).  Once Biruk heard about this, whenever we walk down the street he grew up on, he has to "wave at Mr. Rogers house!".  We don't know exactly which house it is, so we just randomly pick one and wave at it.  Between the house and seeing the guy "live" on PBS, it's no surprise that Biruk assumed that the nice old guy in the sweater had to be the real Mr. Rogers.  I think I'll wait a few years before I break it to him that Mr. Rogers isn't actually our neighbor.  For now, he can go on believing that he's seen Mr. Rogers up close and personal, a distinction he shares with former President Bush and his wife.  What a lucky boy!

If you saw us today and thought "What kind of mother makes her toddler walk half-way around a huge lake in wet clothes and a stinky diaper?"...this would be my answer:

The kind of mother who feels terrible about the fact that her son's pants and boots are soaking wet and probably very cold.

The kind of mother who's son walked the first half of the lake dry and warm, and then disobeyed her and sat down in a stream at the exact mid-point of the hike so that she couldn't simply run him back to the car to change him.

The kind of mother who carefully dressed her children in warm clothes and boots suitable for mud stomping.  The kind of mother who made sure to put a whole bag of clean clothes and diapers in the back, for just such an occasion.  Only she couldn't get to her car when she needed it.

The kind of mother who never, ever properly gauges the amount of time it takes to walk nearly 3 miles with 3 boys who want to stop and look at every hole in the ground.

The kind of mother who was thinking about this because "What kind of mother...?" is a thought that often runs through her own mind, and a comment that she often sees and hears leveled at other women.  Being a mom means it is incredibly easy to look bad to others, very difficult to look good to others (since there are so many ideas of "good mothering"), and easier than I'd like to forget that other mothers also have whole lives that lead up to and include the one bad moment I may see. 

What kind of "What kind of mother....?" are you?

I've tried out several "new to me" recipes this week. Most bombed, but today I tried out one that turned out pretty good. It's called "Bubble Pizza."  I am trying to break our habit of commercial pizza every Friday night. However, when Friday rolls around it's all want! So I found this recipe (on the All Recipes.com site) that I thought might satisfy my desire for pizza on Friday. I liked it pretty well. We had 5 people come unexpectedly for lunch, and most had seconds. I guess that's a pretty good sign! I served this with a basic green salad.  I haven't posted a recipe lately so I thought I would post this one. Below the recipe you will find what I did differently.  Enjoy!

Bubble Pizza

Ingredients:
1 pound ground beef
1/ 4 pound pepperoni sausage
1 (14 oz) can pizza sauce
2 (12 oz) packages refrigerated buttermilk biscuit dough
1/2 onion, sliced and separated into rings
1 (10 ounce) can sliced black olives
1  (4.5 ounce) can sliced mushrooms
1 1/2 cups shredded mozzarella cheese
1 cup shredded Cheddar cheese

Directions:
1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees F (200 degrees C). Grease a 9x13 inch baking dish. Place ground beef in a large, deep skillet. Cook over meium high heat until evenly brown. Stir in pepperoni, and cook until browned. Drain excess fat. Stir in pizza sauce. Remove from heat, and set aside.
2. Cut biscuits into quarters, and place in the bottom of baking dish. Spread meat mixture evenly over the biscuits. Sprinkle top with onion, olives and mushrooms.
3. Bake uncovered in preheated oven for 20 - 25 minutes. Sprinkle top with mozzarella and Cheddar cheese. Bake an additional 5 - 10 minutes, until cheese is melted. Let stand 10 minutes before serving.

What I did different:
1. Biscuits- I made these from scratch since we don't have canned or frozen biscuits here.
2. Pizza Sauce- I bought a can of pizza sauce imported from Italy since they don't carry one from the USA anymore. The can is a bit smaller than what was called for so I opened another can and used part of it. I didn't measure, just dumped part of it in. The sauce is very different from what they sell in the states so I added some Italian seasoning for a little extra flavoring. 
3. Olives- I used green instead of black.
4. Cheese- I used only Mozzarella.
5. Mushrooms- I did not have any to put on.
6. Extra ingredientes- I added thin green pepper strips with the onion and olives. I also added some cooked bacon leftover from breakfast.
7. Ants- I'm having an ant invasion in my kitchen these days so I'm pretty sure some were included in this recipe! (but not too many, and they are very very small. I don't think anyone noticed!)

Next week comes what would have been the due date for the first baby I lost.  Six months ago I was thinking "Wow, I could be holding our new baby at the Thanksgiving table!  But with my history, it'll probably be closer to Christmas, darn it".  After that miscarriage, I forgot about it until I turned the calendar to November, and saw where I had written BABY!!!! in big block letters at the bottom of the page.  I scribbled it out.

The next time, I knew better.  Just after Josiah left for Ethiopia, I found out we were expecting again.  But I only marked the weeks on the calendar page I was looking at.  I knew the due date was around the boy's birthdays in May, but I tried not to think about that much. 

At 8 weeks I was spotting and cramping, but it went away and I decided to ignore it.  At 10 weeks, the midwives didn't hear a heartbeat.  I was super sick.  The last time I was that sick, I was pregnant with Asrat and also had stomach parasites at the same time.  Surely, being that sick meant the pregnancy was going well?  At 11 weeks I was spotting again and was sent for an ultrasound.  "There's no easy way to tell you this..." said the nurse, but I already knew.  After three kids, I know what a heartbeat sounds like and how very wrong the silence in that room was.  Not only was there no heartbeat, but there was no form of a baby either.  At that stage (and there was no question about the dates), there should have been.  One of my regrets from last time was not having had even a glimpse of my baby, even by fuzzy ultrasound picture, before I lost him.  This time I had the chance to see, only there was no baby there to see.  Only a mass, which after a miserable day at the hospital, a D&C, and various and sundry tests, it was solidly confirmed that what had been growing in my womb was a molar pregnancy.

This left me hanging in midair.  I couldn't crash, because there seems to be very little information about molar pregnancy, except that sometimes conception didn't happen but cells multiplied and grew in a wrong way, or sometimes conception did happen but growth was so immediately deformed that there was no possibility of a little heart ever beginning to beat, or sometimes in the midst of all the deformity there grew a little body that simply couldn't compete with the fast-growing molar cells.  Even so, that's all googled information, and who's to say what's true or not, or what happened in my case?  Was there ever a baby?  If there was, did it live and then die, or just never lift off the runway in the first place?   It's hard to fall apart when you don't know what you should be falling apart about. 

I couldn't feel relief either, or closure.  Molar pregnancy carries with it a risk of serious and long-term health problems, even cancerous growth.  So every week for a while, and then every month for a whole year, I will go to a lab and have my blood drawn and look at my three little children around me and remember that I'm there because the fourth left early and the very existence of the fifth is in question.

I guess, at least, I can grieve a dream smashed, and hope crushed.  That will have to do for now.

 

Thanks to LitFuse publishing for providing this wonderful book for review. 

Due to address change issues, I didn't get this book until after the official blog tour was over, but it did finally arrive, I read it eagerly, and I am so happy to let you know that Tricia Goyer, along with Mike Yorkey, have provided avid readers with yet another fabulous historical novel to enjoy.

 

The Swiss Courier is a well-researched and excellently written piece of historical fiction (with a little bit of romance) set in August of 1944.  Hitler's Third Reich is in full gear, having overrun some nations and threatening others, including Switzerland.  Young Swiss-American Gabi Mueller works for the American Office of Strategic Services, but she soon finds herself at the center of an important mission to rescue German physicist Joseph Engel, after his Jewish heritage is discoverd by the Nazi's.  And so, a pastor's daughter becomes a "courier", delivering a pivotal "package" safely into the hands of the Allies.  She finds herself wrestling with her own heart along the way, as she considers the excitingly employed men she works with and the humble farmer she left behind.  In her adventures, Gabi Mueller consistently finds that looks can be decieving, and that is one of the main themes of this novel, which provides our heroine with a few devastating blows and several happy surprises.

By itself, the story line of The Swiss Courier is thrilling and captivating.  It has great drama, suspense, and feeling.  The romance is down-to-earth, realistically rendered, and not at all cheap or tawdry (no torrid love scenes, thank God!).  But aside from the plot, this book gives the reader food for thought.  Gabi Mueller's father is a pastor, her family is staunchly Christian, as are many of the others resisting the Nazi's in this story.  Yet in many cases, successfully opposing evil requires violence on some level, and sometimes killing.  People who sought to rescue those being killed by Hitler's minions were often faced with two options, both requiring them to sin (lying vs. allowing someone to be arrested and probably killed, killing a Nazi soldier in order to save a person from death vs. not committing "murder" and thus allowing an innocent to be killed).  These seem like simple questions to those of us with the benefit of hindsight (6 million killed, there's no ethical dilemma, do whatever it takes to save them!), but it is important to remember that very few people at that time had any idea of the magnitude of Hitler's deadly operations, and sorting fact from rumor was difficult, especially when the facts were so horrendous that it's difficult to believe even now that humans could be capable of such evil.  This moral quandry has been an issue for Christianity since very early on, and is still an issue today: Can Christians involve themselves in politics to seek change for a nation?  Can Christians ever participate in violence for a greater good?  When it comes to sin, are there "greater" and "lesser" evils, and if there are, how does God view the act of committing a "lesser" evil to prevent a greater one?  The Swiss Courier does not seek to answer these questions on a deep theological level, but it does provide insight into the choices of some Christians facing one of the greatest evils in human history.

Readers will enjoy the pace of this novel, a few heart-stopping moments, and the faith and courage demonstrated by a simple young woman who's life has fallen under the dark shadow of Hitler's Third Reich.

Do check out the reviews on the blog tour and also listen to an interview with Tricia Goyer and Mike Yorkey, available HERE.

While living here with my parents, we are blessed to be within close range of three beautiful state parks.  That's a lot of lakes and forests and trails to explore, and that's what we've been doing with these beautiful fall days.

Grandpa comes along on a lot of our hikes.  What made this one particularly exciting is that it was a Real Forest Trail, and apparently just what the kids had been envisioning when listening to The Hobbit at bedtime.  So Asrat gave us all characters from the book.  He was Gandalf.  Biruk was Bilbo Baggins, and the rest of us were dwarves.  We tracked trolls through the forest (they leave colored rectangles painted on trees, doncha know!), we were careful not to run into any goblins, and Gebre got his stick-sword and bravely fought off the brambles that threatened to take mommy down.  The most thrilling part of the trail was a very rocky portion, requiring us to leap like mountain goats from stone to stone.  Gebre's comment on that: "WOW!!! THIS IS FUN!!! WHOO-HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!"

This is a different park, one with a huge lake.  We like to go there and bother the fishermen.  "Hey, whatcha doin'? Are you catchin' fish?  How do you do that?  Why do you have two fishing rods?....."

This park also has yurts.

Oh look, there's me!

We met the most interesting people in Antioch. They came from all over the world, from many walks of life, from a wide range of income and with all kinds of personalities and lifestyles. There were men and women. EVERYONE was treated equally and equally expected to participate in all that was going on. How novel! Seriously, it did NOT matter one whit whether you had a seminary degree or ever even went to Bible School. It only mattered that you were a slave to Christ and His Kingdom.

We spent a good deal of time listening to the most amazing stories of "God things." One man there was Indian (from India). He grew up in a very wealthy, conservative Muslim family. In fact, he was a Muslim missionary out to convert people to Islam! He had answers for all the arguments that Christians would bring up.  In spite of his wealth and zeal he was not happy and had no peace, resulting in several suicide attempts.  He told us that the one thing Muslims seek is inner peace. While living in London he came across a young woman from Kentucky who was there for a few weeks with YWAM (Youth With A Mission). She was handing out tracts and talking to people on the streets of London outside a coffeeshop. He stopped to talk to her, to expose the fallacies of Christianity, and ended up accepting Christ as his Savior (that's making a long, very interesting story, short). Within a few hours he was out in the streets witnessing to and healing people. His life since then has been a series of miracles, a testament to how God can thoroughly and completely change a person. He works now with bringing the good news of Christ to Muslims in areas closed off to Americans.

He shared story after story of Muslims coming to Christ often at a risk to their own lives. I was surprised, but should not have been. One of the Enemy's favorite tactics is to convince us that he is too strong to be beaten. And that is what I discovered I believed about Muslims. I believed that they were so strong in their convictions that they were not open to the gospel of Jesus Christ. Only Christ can fill the void in us. And that is as true for Muslims as it is for anyone else. Talking with this man opened my eyes to the need Muslims have for Christ. I don't think I ever really saw them with that need. Guess I was too blinded by the flag in which I had wrapped myself.

I asked him about the young woman from Kentucky who had been so instrumental in his life. He doesn't remember her name and has never seen her since. I doubt if she will ever know what resulted in her obedience to follow God's leadership to London all those years ago. Makes you wonder.....

I love it when I can share the TRUTH of God's word in tangible ways with my children.  I am not at all sharing this to "brag" but because this is "my" personal record of our days--- and this was such a blessing to our family....

Last weekend we indeed did go and help my mother with her wood needs.   It should've been an easy trip-- go get wood, split, stack....but many things came up which tried to steal our joy and (money).   I didn't realize first of all it would cost more $ to take our trailer on the turnpike (due to more axels...Jason may have realized this, I was a bit shocked at first)....  then when we got to my mothers with her first load of wood-- we realzied a bearing broke-- and the wheel was SMOKING!!  It took a few parts and tools ($$$$) to fix the wheel.  Then when Jason began to chain saw some wood that was already on the ground at my mothers-- there were some REAL chainsaw issues  that required some parts/chains etc...  We were determined to do this for my mother, as we wanted to bless her and have her warm and toasty over the winter... so we kept working-- no one mentioning where this $$ was going to come from-- but realzing that this was a task that was needed and would be completed.....

At this same time I was made aware of a family (local) who is going thru some problems (out of their control) and the Lord has REALLY been laying it on my heart to bless this family in SOME way-- and I wasn't sure where exactly that would come from--- but when God lays it on your heart--  it STAYS there until it is delt with....   so I knew he would make a way--- and he HAS!!!   (not to mention as soon as I told Jason he knew JUST how we could bless them and help meet some of their physcial needs).

Low and behold I am about ready to do bills for the week-- and guess what?   Jason received a BONUS on this paycheck and a cost of living increase (not big-- but every bit counts)... so we have JUST what we need to cover those unexpected expenses....and I am so thankful we did not let those "little" hang ups slow us down--  and I am more thankful to GOD for seeing us thru and blessing us in the end with our needs continuing to be met.

The saddest part to my flesh is I can now see when we are "in GOD's will" he will make a way and the road will lead down the path we are to take-- but sometimes I try PUSH and PULL a path of my own making-- like my DESIRE (fleshly, selfish) desire to have a BIGGER vechicle--  A VAN.... do we all fit in our current vehicle?  Yes, it isn't the most pleasant arrangement right now-- but it works-- and I can see-- that WHEN God feels we are ready and the time is right-- HE WILL MAKE A WAY-- so I might as well QUIT PUSHING and PULLING!!   

As a matter of fact the older 2 and I were talking last evening about our "trips" outside the home and how they have DWINDLED greatly in number...and they said "well it is because all of the babies".  And to the human eye-- that is true-- it is a fact.   But then Zachary said "If we didn't have these babies we might be out more and get the flu".. (TRUE) and then Zachary said "If we were out more we would EAT OUT more" (SO TRUE-- that was always our biggest budget pitfall) -- and then we tied that in to that money can now be used for helping/serving others AND we are TRYING to be healthier and lose some weight-- and eating out DOES NOT HELP THAT!!  So this 'lack of running errands" will help us in MANY areas-- it might seem like a 'set back" at first glance-- but if we are quiet and seek God-- we can see him working IN MANY other areas... and how sweet that the older 2 boys could SEE IT TOO!!!!  Praise God!!

Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you."   Luke 6:38

 

If I had more time I'd LOVE to share about our new church and how I have NEVER EVER in my LIFE seen a BODY OF BELEIVERS take this verse PUT IT INTO PRACTICE so literally:

They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe, and many wonders and miraculous signs were done by the apostles. All the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.       Acts 2:42-47 

-- REALLY-- Maybe this week I can share a bit-- The boys too seeing this-- and realzie this is not "the WORLDs" way-- this is God's way-- and is very rare-- yet such a blessing--- and such a visable way to see God Work: