The night before last as we had just finished putting the kids to bed and Nate called Jer back into his room. He said he felt like there were people all around him and he was scared. Justin then said, “Nate, there are people all around us, but they’re angels and you don’t have to be afraid of them.”

Then, last night Justin had sinned against his brother by hitting him when he didn’t get his own way. Jer sent him upstairs for a correction. About 15 minutes later he went upstairs to talk to him about his sin and discipline him. Afterwards Justin said, “I love my spank”. When they came downstairs Jeremy told Justin to tell me what he’d just told him and he said, “I love my spank!”. I asked, “Why?” and he said, “because I sinned!” How precious to see such a soft heart that loves to be rescued from his sin. Oh, that we would all receive our discipline with gratefulness for the Lord’s mercy and grace in rescuing us.

Just recently I’ve pulled out my Managers of Their Homes (MOTH) book again and purchased the new Managers of their Chores (MOTC). These are both resources created by Steve and Teri Maxwell. You can find them at www.titus2.com. The MOTH book is to help with scheduling and the MOTC book is pretty self explanatory. It comes with enough supplies for 4 people’s chore systems. I’ve also been enjoying and benefitting from the Choreboard message board that is available to MOTC book owners. Jeremy graciously gave us a summer break from homeschooling until the end of August so that I could really focus on getting these things established and work on training the kids in their various tasks. THANK YOU, JER!!!

So, each day right after lunch everyone goes to room time and Mommy has some planning time. I have so missed having this room time in our schedule…for some reason it just gradually disappeared! Nate used to have roomtime every afternoon and now Justin is learning what that is!! Almost everyday he says, “I want it to be over it one minute!” He’s not used to being alone for so long. But it is good for him and he’s learning to entertain himself.

Coming back from Texas I was jumping right back into daily life. I got back Sunday night, July 9th, and the following morning began a week of taking Nate and Lela to Summer Celebration at church.

In addition to that on Tuesday afternoon our dear friends arrived to stay the night with us. They had just come back to the States from Turkey where they had been missionaries for about 12 yrs. I spent the summer of 1995 over there with them as a Nanny. We had a great time catching up with them and hearing about their future plans.

Adding to that, one of my friend’s grandmother passed away and we had her children for 3 days while she left town to attend the funeral and be with family. Her children and mine are very close, so the children had a BLAST!! Each morning they were all at Summer Celebration, so I just had Justin and C.J. at home. We had lots of errands that week!

Needless to say, after being home for a week it seemed like it had been a month since I’d been in Texas! :o)

On June 30th me and C.J. headed to Texas to spend 10 days with my mom for her wedding. It was a special time with her. This was all made possible because my wonderful husband was willing to care for the other 3 children while I was away!

The first night I was gone he called me at bedtime to let me hear all the wailing that was going on. Nate and Justin were both wanting me and Lela was laughing at them for crying so much. Jeremy asked them if it was harder when he was gone or when I was gone and they said, “Mommy, because she’s always with us!” It was heartwrenching, but it did get better as the week went on.

This would also not have been possible without many of our dear friends here offering to help us out by caring for the children for the four days that Jeremy would be at work during my vacation! We are so blessed to have so many people who love us and care for us. They played games, took them for bike rides around the neighborhood, took them swimming, took them to tennis lessons, fed them, and who knows what else.

Even though they had so much entertainment and fun while I was away they were still happy and relieved to have me back…and I was glad to be back as well.

Back in May we started a garden project along with our neighbors. We chose to do a square foot garden instead of a row garden. Daddy built us two 6 inch deep 4X4 boxes and two 1X2 boxes that are a foot deep. The most time consuming part of the job was mixing the dirt (peat moss, vermiculite and compost) to fill the beds and dragging the dirt to our respective backyards and dumping it into our boxes. This took all afternoon one Saturday. When we were done we all went out for pizza together.

The next few weeks were spent planting the seeds. We planted refrigerator sized watermelons, cucumbers, tomotoes, broccoli, lettuce, spinach, carrots, potatoes, bell peppers, green beans, summer squash, radishes, mint, basil, cilantro, dill, okra, and a few different flowers. It has been so much fun to watch everything grow and start to flower and fruit. We’ve enjoyed 4 of our cucumbers already and some green beans. The radishes didn’t do too well and the carrots are pretty lame! Of course this is all an experiment at this point, so we are just enjoying the process.

Jeremy is going to teach me how to put pictures on here soon, so I’ll post some when he does.

Blessings,
Mindy

We asked Nate how many kids he thought we should have and he said, “I guess as many as we can feed!”

I was telling Justin that Aunt Sonya was mailing a package for Lela’s birthday on her birthday and that it would come on the weekend. He said, “Is she gonna wear mail clothes?” I guess he thought she was actually delivering the package herself. :o)

Justin said the other night, “I guess when we wake up in the morning, maybe Aunt Sonya will be here.”

Well, lately I just haven’t had the faith to invest in this blog. I have been trying to stay afloat in my day to day life of wifing and mothering and being a friend. I have been inspired by my friend Tamra’s blog to pick this up again and try to be more faithful to make entries. We’ll see how it goes!

Min