Ambitious for 8 weeks

Its finally March! and its raining, the snow has melted and spring feels like it is just around the bend. There is about 7 weeks till Easter and I have the best intentions of filling those weeks with back breaking manual labor and a couple sewing projects. Yesterday I build a trellis for my raspberry patch, relocated one of my grape vines to provide more of a gap between the several I have planted and removed some of the very determined leafy vines I have a plethora of. I need to build a trellis for my grape vines also so I can begin training them correctly before they grow out of hand. This week Jared and I picked up a gate for our driveway and some tools we needed to break through the cement to put in a chain link fence. We have to wait till Tuesday when blue stakes comes out and marks all of our lines before we can dig. I desperately want the gate/fence finished before this baby arrives so that I can keep my kids and chickens in the backyard!
I happened upon the term permaculture recently and I've found a fascinating amount of information to help with gardening. It changes the way gardens are put together and in the end it makes a ton of sense. I know that my garden soil isn't anything fancy and it is both expensive and time consuming to build better soil the conventional way but I plan on trying some other techniques that permaculture has to offer and hopefully I'll be able to get a healthier plot of land. I picked up the book Gaia's Garden from our library, its the only book on permaculture that Brigham Cities library has to offer but its a good one from what I've skimmed from it so far.

The two pictures below are of my hugelkultur bed. I dug a pronged trench into the ground and filled it with cut branches and some old fencing. The logs and branches help retain water in the bed so when I irrigate that water is absorbed into the bed and stays there for the plants.

 I then covered the branches with pine needles, straw, chicken manure and the soil I used to dig the trench up. It basically composts in place, provides worm food and nutrients for the plants as it breaks down. In a couple weeks I plan on bringing my whole compost pile I built last year into this garden, along with all of the straw and fallen leaves that were in the chicken coop all winter to mulch the ground and create better beds for my vegetables.

Hey if that isn't enough to do, I've ordered some fabric to make this baby a blessing dress and also make Makayla an Easter dress too. I picked up 6 patterns from the DI a couple days ago to help me make the dresses and over all I am really excited to get them put together. I love creating things so much more than cleaning things. I get in a rut of only cleaning all day long and it is miserable, so if I can fill my future nights with something creative it will be a welcome break.

The patterns are pretty retro but the fabric I have ordered for both dresses will be darling. I'll try to post more about the project when the fabric arrives and I get started.

The things I love

Its February and I thought I would write a nice list of the things I love on one of the many chalkboards I have in my house. While listing it all off in my head I realized that the list was really long and wouldn't fit so easily on my chalkboard not to mention it would take me a ton of time to write it all down so I figured the next best thing was to just type it out here. I was in the middle of picking up toys and sweeping and scrubbing the kitchen floor while I thought of these things and it was a really great pick me up, even when doing boring mother things.

I love my husband, he has seen the best and worst of me and he still sticks around. He is the one person on this planet who really gets me, he is just my best friend.

I love my children, they not only contribute to most of my frustration they are my constant reminder of the deep joy that can be found in this life and share with me their pure unselfish love.

I love being a wife and mom, as hard as both of those jobs are I love having a family to care for. I can't imagine my life without having a house to run and people to feed, I like finding ways to make our existence special and feel so privileged to have my family to share and create memories with.

I love having a yard to grow things in. Not everyone has a piece of ground to call their own, I have a whole 1/4 of an acre to try my hand at. Jared lets me have free reign of all of the garden patches and even lets me throw in trees where I please, in return he gets boring "status updates" of each of the things I grow... lucky guy :)

I love my home, there is nothing quite like making a house a home. I love that I can paint the walls, change the tile, drive nails into the walls because its ours.

I love cooking and baking. I love trying new or challenging food creations, but honestly I love cooking for other people. Although I could possibly impress myself with some of what I make, its so much more fun to make things for my family.

I love to draw, I think I always have. I see this trait in my little girl and I love seeing the art she creates.

I love to run. I love the challenge of a race, I love the sweet escape that running provides. I love how running somehow fixes any mental challenge I take with me.

I love piano music. I get this from my father, growing up he was always listening to piano music. Now one of my most played Pandora stations is "New Age Solo Piano" radio, it calms me and brings a peace into my home atmosphere.

And the list goes on for days, but I want to add one more. I love my Heavenly Father and his Son. As much as I love them I know for a fact that they love me more. Without them none of the things I love would even exist. The most profound and true things that I have learned from the past several years of struggle is that I matter to a Supreme Being. I have relied on Him to heal my broken heart, to hear my silent pleadings and to answer my many prayers. He knows my needs before I do and amongst my problems I have seen an endless string of tender mercies that only a loving Heavenly Father could provide.

As horribly long as February is, it's nice to have at least half of a month devoted to love. It sure makes chores and burdens light when your thinking on the things you love.

Life Goals

Where do you see yourself in 25 years? What are your definite hopes and dreams? I have a couple goals that have held in my mind for many years now. I'm not there yet with them but with each year I get a little bit closer.
One fanciful goal or ambition of mine is to live off the grid. I'd like to build a cabin or cottage home somewhere in a wide open space or nestled into a mountain side with a decent plot of land around it. I want it to be built in such a way that if need be I could operate all of my utilities without paying the public works for the service. I imagine such a space wouldn't be too close to cities or grocery stores so I also want to know how to be self sufficient.
Each year I work to learn more about being self sufficient. I'd like to learn all of the old skills that skipped my generation completely. My mother grew up on a farm and got to experience self sufficiency first hand. While raising her family she tried to avoid many of the childhood chores she grew up with. So I never learned how to garden, bottle and can food, milk cows, cook from scratch or really sew while growing up. I did convince my parents to let me have chickens growing up, we did have cows but they were always just for meat or showing, we also had pigs and some sheep once too. They raised alfalfa that a neighbor would come cut and bale for us. I tried growing a garden when I was in my teens and failed miserably, as in nothing grew, one plant I thought was a carrot was actually a weed. Still I always wished for more animals and more plants to harvest. Even though she didn't teach her kids any of those things growing up she is still the first one I call when I have a question on anything relating to bottling food and every once in a while I can pick her brain about other things she grew up doing. When it comes to gardening she sends me on to call my aunt or my nana. I've read and own several books on gardening that I reference, I think with each year I've gotten a tiny bit better at it.
One of the things I've always wanted is to have my own personal produce stand in my backyard. I love fruits, they are so much less picky than the vegetables that have to be re-done each year. In the past year and a half that we have lived in our new place I have added just about any fruit I can get my hands on. We planted apple trees, a peach tree, cherry tree, grape vines, strawberry plants, raspberry canes and two blueberry bushes. Fruit does take some time before it begins producing much but last year we had two apples, a bunch of peaches, a handful of cherries, raspberries, and a small amount of strawberries. I don't know that we will have grapes for at least another year, but hopefully we will get some blueberries before the chickens pick off the first fruits they spy.
I think we plan on living here for several years so in that time I will try to learn the skills it takes to manage a wide variety of fruits as well as learn all the ways to use them. It helps to have neighbors who are so smart with gardening too. In time I do want to take what I have learned and use it on a homestead somewhere.

Peace

Church began later today than its 9:00 time we had all of last year. It was a change that I have been looking forward to for quite sometime, getting a family of 5 up and ready for a 3 hour block of church is a challenge when you have to be there so early. Even though we didn't need to be there till 11:30 my morning was far from ideal. I bit my bottom lip twice in the same spot when trying to eat breakfast and then stepped into an argument with Jared that keeps finding its way back to the surface. When we were finally off to church I was emotional and distressed, far from the stress free that I had imagined I was going to be that morning. I pleaded heavenward for peace from what seems like so much useless turmoil in my life. I know what I want but when your a female you just have a hard time turning off the emotional feeling of it all. In my last class of the block my neighbor gave a lesson on a book that John Bytheway had written and I immediately was able to calm my distress and find a solution to how I can become more balanced in my expectations and life in general.
The lesson began with the discussion of contentment. In January it seems that everyone's focus is far off the mark of contentment because we all choose to add goals and a healthy (or unhealthy) dose of ambition to your expectations of the New Year. While its disguised as a great thing, and in some instances I guess it could be but it doesn't encourage contentment. When things are working great with me and Jared it is because of contentment. Peace prevails when we are happy with what we have and we aren't competing with the "Jones". When we are content with our own lives we have no desire to judge others and their life choices. I've been distressed because I wasn't recognizing what makes my life ideal for me and my family. We haven't happened upon our situation because this is just where we have ended up, we've made conscious choices that best fit our family framework to be where we are now. Today I re-found my appreciation for that reality and now I am working on remembering to be content with all that I have been truly blessed with. My life is exactly how I can handle it right now, all that I have deeply wanted to be, is; and if I can't find peace in that knowledge then I'm not going to find it anywhere else. So you can either be unsatisfied with what you have and miserable or  you can see the good and find contentment. I plan on choosing contentment this year and loving what I've got.

Our 2013 Christmas Card

I didn't feel like doing the whole Christmas card thing this year, but I did manage to create one for all of my friends on Facebook and here to see. We hope you all get to enjoy a Merry Christmas!

Parenting learning curve

I never realized before I had children what incredible characteristics each individual has. I may have taken note that not all kids in the same family act the same but I still assumed that when your raised by certain adults you take on their mannerisms and way of being. Then I became a parent, after several years of bringing up children I came to the conclusion that every child's spirit is so completely their own. The three kids I have are not carbon copies of myself or Jared, in fact if you were just to observe how they are without looking at them you wouldn't put them in the same family category or match them up with us. I parented each of my infants nearly the same but yet I had three different sleepers, two cuddly babies and one who needed distance and more evidence that no matter what I did that baby was going to march to the beat of its own drum. Its fascinating and completely terrifying all at once. I love seeing their specific interests in life, and what motivates them to be happy. I also realize that how I raise one child may not be effective in raising my others.
 When your young and to be honest fairly stupid its easy to find the fault in others parenting skills, I know a whole lot of "I would never's" and "My children will never's" crossed my mind and probably my lips when I was young and didn't have a clue. I've learned since that you just don't allow those thoughts to cross your mind because most of the time I've had a chance to eat those words or clearly see what someone else was dealing with.
In a manual I was reading the other night I came across several parenting tips that I know would help in my own parenting of my very different children. One suggestion is to get to know each child individually, a helpful idea was to help young children with their personal prayers at night. If you ever wanted to know what is on my sons mind just ask him to say the prayer and you'll have a pretty open window to his thoughts. That wont always be the case but it would help for me to take the time each night to help my children with their individual prayers and also spend 5 minutes or so talking with them about their day or thoughts. Its hard when I just want everyone in bed because I am spent, but I know that the rewards of actually knowing my child will out way my impatience.
One profound quote that I read by Elder Boyd K. Packer on parenting with the help of heaven is-
"Once parents know that there is a God and that we are his children, they can face problems like this and win.
"If you are helpless, he is not.
"If you are lost, he is not.
"If you don't know what to do next, he knows.
"It would take a miracle, you say?
"Well, if it takes a miracle, why not"
(in Conference Report, Oct. 1970)
Ultimately it doesn't matter what parenting advice I read in books or online, each of my children require their own unique approach, its a matter of lovingly finding what works and when that fails ask the one who has all of the answers for help in raising His children.

2014 is gonna be great

Have you ever had a year that just really sucked? We've had several but 2013 did its best to take the cake. It started out with a bang when in January Jared was told that the program that he was working on was being outsourced to a company in Canada. He quickly took an open position within the company paying about $5 less an hour until he could secure another job. Well that other job didn't come around until 3 months ago so we supplemented our income with the our tax return until it ran completely out. I went back to work cleaning for my moms business just to keep our heads slightly above water and then Jared started his next semester of school along with his new job. We saw him on weekends and sometimes he would surface from doing homework downstairs in between school and work. Now were in December and I'm honestly just waiting out the year. Jared should have a permanent position with Auto Liv at the first of the year. He plans on taking spring semester off because I will be due to deliver right around finals and that is just too much stress. We've been budgeting about $200 a month for him to drive down to school everyday which is a huge, but necessary bite of our budget. After Wednesday of this week he wont need to drive to Weber State until he begins his next semester of school possibly in the summer but maybe not till fall. I plan on using the extra $200 to pay down debts and then when our tax return comes most of it will hopefully go to get rid of the rest of our debt.
When we lived in Ogden we were robbed several times and one time after our door was busted in and just about any valuable we had at the time was taken, we had to make a home owners insurance claim to fix and replace all that was lost. Well that claim came back to haunt us after purchasing our new place and nobody wanted to insure us without taking us to the cleaners. Up until October of this year we were double paying for our homeowners insurance because they wanted our monthly payment and our mortgage company wanted to prepay for the following year. Can you see why 2013 just sucked every bloody penny from us? In March of 2014 that stupid robbery claim will be three years old and will drop off of our record and in turn our homeowners insurance should also drop.
Gratefully we have survived thus far, we aren't financially ruined, we have a home to live in, food to eat and clothes to wear. I know that the Lord has blessed us time and time again, I am so grateful to everyone who did so much for us in the darkest hours of 2013, I pray that you will be blessed with what you stand in need of for your kindness.
 I can't wait to toast away this crummy year and move on to better things!