We are a self-employed unschooling/unit study/homeschooling family of four. http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/dbennett20/ en-us Homeschool Blogger Wed, 10 Jun 2009 06:08:00 -0500 Wed, 10 Jun 2009 06:08:00 -0500 Genesis 18:1  And the Lord appeared unto him in the plains of Mamre: and he sat in the tent door in the heat of the day;   "Lord, show me how to always be in the position to be able to see You coming!!"   Genesis 18:2 And he lift up his eyes and looked, and, lo three men stood by him: and when he saw them, he ran to meet them from the tent  door, and bowed himself toward the ground,   "Lord, I am running to me You as Abraham did in Your word. I am humbling myself to You."   Genesis 18:3 And said, My Lord, if now I have found favor in thy sight, pass not away, I pray thee, from thy servant:   "Lord, I am entreating You to come in to me. I am inviting You to visit with me for a little while."   Genesis 18:4 Let a little water, I pray you, be fetched, and wash your feet and rest yourselves under the tree:   "Lord, I am entreating You to let me take care of You, to wash Your feet, to let You rest yourself here where I live." Note to readers: It was custom in this time to wash the dust of travel from the weary travelers feet.   Genesis 18:5 And I will fetch a morsel of bread, and comfort ye your hearts; after that ye shall pass on: for therefore are ye come to your servant. And they said, So do, as thou hast said.   "Lord, I want to entertain You! I want to be Your host! I want to do for You! I want to wash Your feet, to be Your servant."   How often do we come before the Lord with our hands out asking, always asking for Him to do something for us? How many times do we come before the Lord and just entertain Him? Just take care of His needs so to speak? Just to entertain Him? to let the Lord relax with us like we would any other visitor? to get up and get Him a glass of water, ask Him does He need anything? to just sit and chat with Him? to fix a meal for Him? to just spend time just enjoying His Presence?   http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/dbennett20/697589/ Wed, 10 Jun 2009 06:08:00 -0500 http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/dbennett20/697589/ Got the shower/bath ordeal over with and tried to sleep. I was so tired I was just to tired to go to sleep so watched T.V. for awhile. Got up the next morning and called Doug to see if he was getting ready to leave so he could drive to Dallas to pick me up. He was getting the kids ready to take to their Aunt and Uncle's house. I told him I would call him again when I was "ON THE PLANE" and not until then. Well, I finally got on the plane and we left. I made it to the Dallas/Ft. Worth airport with no complications. Doug made it there about an hour later. I was so glad to see him.  I hadn't seen him for nine days!! We were on the way home, well, after we ate lunch, because we both were starving. We made pretty good timing almost all the way home. There was one spot, due to really rough ice on the road and all the traffic slowing down for it, that it took us an hour to go about ten miles. We made it to the Aunt and Uncle's house to pick up the kids. Our daughter hugged and hugged me and said she would never let me go. We still had to drive the rest of the way home. I guess we finally made it home around 9:30 Wednesday Night. I am still recuperating from it though. I am soooo glad to be hooooommme!! http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/dbennett20/655201/ Fri, 6 Feb 2009 08:30:02 -0600 http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/dbennett20/655201/ Got back to the hotel. I was so ready for a shower. The Delta airline provided me with a travel kit so I had deoderant, a T-shirt to sleep in, tootpaste, toothbrush, etc. I was so looking forward to a nice hot shower. I got the water adjusted, turned the shower on and got in. Got my hair all lathered up with the shampoo and was getting ready to stand back under the shower to rinse when it turned ice cold on me. uuuggghh!!! The water stayed hot if it was running out of the tub tap but as soon as I turned it back to the shower head it went back to ice cold. So, I ended up taking a bath and trying to get my hair rinsed as well as possible under the tap in a tub that seemed only to be about two feet wide and made  for very skinny kids. Oh well, at least I was clean once again. http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/dbennett20/655200/ Fri, 6 Feb 2009 08:30:01 -0600 http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/dbennett20/655200/ I think I just got done jet setting all over the United States but not by choice. I went to New York for my grandfathers funeral. I was supposed to be back home late last Monday evening. My flight left New York at 5:00 on their time. When I got into Atlanta, Georgia and looked at the flight schedule it showed that my flight into Oklahoma had been canceled so I imediately went to the Delta counter and took care of it. They sent me out the next morning on a flight to Salt Lake City, Utah because they had an OKC flight leaving the next day. I spent the night in the Atlanta airport. Went to Salt Lake City, Utah and waited for my flight. So far, so good, no cacellations, that is, until fifteen minutes before the flight was scheduled to leave. You geussed it, flight canceled again due to the ice storm still here in Oklahoma. So, back to the ticket counter. No flights going to OKC until Thursday afternoon, this was Tuesday afternoon. I told them to just get me to Dallas, Texas airport and I would get home from there. I just missed the flight that left that day to the Dallas/Ft. Worth airport so they gave me a voucher for a discount on a hotel. I went to the hotel, dropped off my stuff and then rode their shuttle to the mall to buy a change of clothes. I had been in my clothes for two days already and was getting pretty smelly. http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/dbennett20/655199/ Fri, 6 Feb 2009 08:30:00 -0600 http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/dbennett20/655199/ I am back from the sign language sign up. Now I have to get everything ready for classes tomorrow with our homeschool group. I have been told that the best way to learn and to retain sign language is to teach it, evidently it is working because I have been able to retain it a lot better since I have been teaching it in our Coop class. I really enjoy our homeschool group and getting to visit with like minded people each week, the kids love it also. Until next time: Have a Blessed Day!! http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/dbennett20/580681/ Tue, 26 Aug 2008 18:53:00 -0500 http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/dbennett20/580681/ Well, It has been awhile again since I have blogged on here. For some reason I have not been able to get past where I am at on the foster parenting dialogue. Maybe somebody needed to read it more than once. I will do my best to get another blog added about the foster parenting. We will be going out of town tomorrow and won't be back until after Labor Day so maybe I will have time to do some blogging while we are gone as I will have my laptop with me. Today has been a very busy day. I had a meeting this morning to help start getting ready for the fair. If you know anything about Extension Educators, Home Extension, etc.  and any other names it used to go by back in the old days then you know that they are very involved in helping to make sure county fairs stay going by doing a lot of volunteer work at them and their own exhibit competitions in the fair. Ours currently is called OHCE for Oklahoma Home Community and Education. Our county currently has five of these clubs. I belong to the one called M.O.M.S which stands for Mothers On Mondays. (That is the day we have our meeting each month). Our county fair officially opens to the public on Sept. 4 Thursday evening but we have to get busy on Sept. 3 Wednesday morning starting to get the tables all set up, the display cases set up, etc.. All day Thursday we help the judges and then get everything displaying with the ribbons and everything before it opens that evening. It is a lot of work but to me it is a lot of fun. Gotta go for now. Gotta go get signed up for my Advanced Sign Language class that will start soon. Until next time:  Have a Blessed Day!!  http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/dbennett20/580605/ Tue, 26 Aug 2008 16:48:00 -0500 http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/dbennett20/580605/ We had to fill out a ton of paperwork for the homestudy. There were a ton of questions on the paperwork. All kinds of questions on all different subjects. I didn't think I was ever going to get done filling out paperwork and answering questions. I had to answer all kinds of questions like: Were you ever in DHS? Were any of your family ever in the system? Was there any abuse in your family? What do you think your parenting style is? How do you think you will handle the foster children that will be coming into your care? What do you think your reactions will be in such and such situations? Do you and your spouse agree on this? Etc. ,Etc., Etc. Then when we thought we were all done with the questioning a person with an agency (not the foster care agency) set up an appointment with us to come into our house and ask us more questions. She went over all the questions that we had answered already and asked new questions or asked the same questions in different forms.  She talked with me by myself and with hubby by hisself, then with both of us together. At the same time she was observing how we were parenting our son at the time. (I was unaware she was doing this until she told us afterwards). She was observing how we were treating him and how we were interacting with him. Then we had to show her all through the house (every room, nook and cranny) show her a working fire extinguiser, a escape plan for the house in case of fire or other emergencies, and checked to see that all the smoke detectors were in good working order with fresh batteries in them. We passed the homestudy easily. It sounds more intense when I put it in words that it actually seemed at the time. Next time I will expound on question three in the previous post a little bit. So, until next time: Have a Blessed Day!!  http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/dbennett20/557240/ Sun, 6 Jul 2008 15:35:00 -0500 http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/dbennett20/557240/ Well, we got the time and date from Sharron of when the meetings were to start. We weren't sure what to expect since we had never foster parented before and neither had either of our parents. The only thing either one of us knew about foster parenting was when I was growing up a neighbor of ours had a foster son, that was it. God had told us that he wanted us to do therapuetic foster parenting. He had also let us know that we were to foster parent older boys, not babies or toddlers. The first things we had to do to get started was fill out tons of paper work but the agency was there to walk us through all that and explain anything we had a question on. I am going to list some of the things we had to do but if this is something you feel like God is putting on your heart to do then do not let this scare you off, it really is not that bad. Here is a list of some of the things: 1. OSBI (Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation) background check. I had just started a new job and had already went through this check about a month before and let me tell you the agency questioned me up and down about why I had had a background check done so recently. They even called my employer to verify what I had said. They were satisfied when they called the employer and found out that it was a government agency that I had just recently went to work part time for. 2. Income verification. They mostly wanted to know that we were not doing this just because of the money that was involved. We had to show them our last thirty days pay check stubs. We had to show this at the beginning of the training course and then again at the end of the twelve weeks when the training was over because, as they said, a lot can happen in twelve weeks. 3. We had a list of question that we had to ask our families. Questions like were you ever involved with DHS (Department of Human Services) for any reason? I can't remember any more of the questions right now because the answer to this question from my family was surprising, but that will be another post. 4. We had to fill out paperwork to have a homestudy done. I will post more details about that in another post also. 5. We had to have a tb (tuberculosis) test done on every person in the family. (myself, Handsome and our very young son). 6. All the animals had to be up to date on their shots. It is now a requirement, at least here in the state of Oklahoma, that you get fingerprinted when you are going to be doing anything like this. At that time it was not required so we did not have to have our fingerprints taken although we would have if needed. I guess that is all for now as this is getting pretty long and I try to keep it fairly short so you do not get tired or reading before you get to the end. Next post: The Unexpected DHS story from my Mom. Until next time:                   Have a Blessed Day!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/dbennett20/557228/ Sun, 6 Jul 2008 15:30:00 -0500 http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/dbennett20/557228/ Here goes: Talking To Sharron Handsome and I had determined to talk to Sharron just as soon as service was over for that Wed. night. God works in mysterious ways though and he has a plan for every thing. Just before our pastor dismissed us he said, "Sharron has an announcement to make before we leave." Then lo and behold Sharron got up and said, "As you all know we have been foster parenting for awhile. The foster care organization we belong to is going to start a 12 week foster parent training course so they are looking for volunteers. Also, they will be holding the training course in the fellowship hall of our church. Please talk with me before you go home if you are interested." Well, if that is not a confirmation of what God had been talking to us about and not the right timing then I don't know what is!! We had a lot of questions for Sharron. She was so tickled when we said God had been telling us that this was something we were to do. The training was to start in just a couple of weeks. Isn't God awesome!! Next installment: Starting The Training. Until next time:               Have a Blessed Day!! • Post A Comment! • Send to a Friend! http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/dbennett20/557226/ Sun, 6 Jul 2008 15:28:00 -0500 http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/dbennett20/557226/ It didn't take long for God to let me know that he had been working on Handsome and telling Handsome the same thing He had been telling me about foster parenting. On the way home from church that afternoon Handsome said, "I think God is wanting us to be foster parents". I silently prayed, "Thank You Lord for telling him and then letting me know that it came from You". I said, yes, I know. I felt God telling us in SS that is what he has for us to do. But, I do not feel the time is right now." Handsome agreed. "So, we just wait on God now I guess." "Yep, said Handsome." Two years go by and we have a son. We decided that he would be the only child we would have. Even though my pregnancy, delivery and everything went easy and great we (at that time) wanted to be done. I did not have my tubes tied at that time though. A couple of years later Handsome, Ethan (our son) and I were on our way to church. I said, "I think it is time." Handsome knew exactly what I was talking about and agreed. We didn't have a clue as to how to go about becoming foster parents so we decided we would ask Sharron that night after church just how to get started. Remember, it is four years after God told us that we were going to be foster parenting. Next time: Talking To Sharron Until next time:               Have a Blessed Day!!!!!!!!!!! Donna http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/dbennett20/557224/ Sun, 6 Jul 2008 15:27:00 -0500 http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/dbennett20/557224/