It's been a few days since our last entry. Since then we've talked about our future plans and come to some decisions. Our desire to move out to the country where there's land has become our future plans. God seems to be using all that has happened to guide us in this direction. It's so neat to see the hand of God moving in this way!

So our plans are to get our house on the market soon before school starts

Go visit our new home area where Leland's sister lives right now and look for a job and for land or a home with land

Have a garage sale and get rid of LOTS of STUFF!!!

Hopefully move before winter!!!

Explore entrepreneurial options to start with part-time but hopefully down the road, to become a larger business for our family

So we'll see how this whole cleaning up, getting rid of junk process goes - especially with 5 little ones!

I'm so enjoying throwing stuff away and putting it in a garage sale pile!!! It's so satisfying to get rid of stuff. Why do we have so much stuff that never gets touched anyways! It will be interesting to see how much stuff I can get rid of, what I get rid of, what I keep, what is really important for living!

It's funny the responses I get to downsizing and living in a small area - especially in the winter up North! Our culture thinks that so many things and so much living space is necessary. But I wonder how the pioneers did it living out of a covered wagon, or the people back in Bible times... They certainly didn't have large living areas with rooms for everyone and beds and all of the things our society thinks are necessary to live!

So it will be interesting to see what it's like with 5 kids in a smaller space downsizing! There will definitely be some serious training issues going on, but I think of how hard having a bigger house is sometimes. Not just the cleaning and organizing of it, but dealing with kids in a large space. For example, tonight I needed to feed the baby who was exhausted and fussy and the older 2 kids needed to go feed the fish before bedtime but had to go down into the basement to do it and my 4yo daughter wanted me to come with down there with her, but I didn't want to try to feed the baby down there. Now if we had less space, the fish would be right there in an easy spot to feed and we'd be right there. There are many times when I'm in one area of the house and I need to send kids to other areas of the house where they can't hear me, or they start to fight out of sight and far away and I need to try to reconstruct what happened because I wasn't there. With all of us all together in close quarters, there would be plenty of issues, but I would be there to watch them and guide them and know what's going on better.

So we'll see where the Lord leads with all of this, but I'm excited to be getting this process going. I've lived in this area for 15 years after living in another state for 15 years, so it's time to move on and start over. It will be exciting to see how God leads in this whole process!

Melanie