Josiah James

Grief comes in many stages and long after you think you are done grieving you will fill the tears rush to your eyes and the hand constrict your heart as you remember.

I have posted previously about what I gained and lost when we gave birth to Josiah. This week I was reminded that even 11 years after the fact that my soul still grieves.

In the days, weeks and months that passed after we lost Josiah, grief literally flooded my soul much like a tidal wave. It would wash over me until there was nothing left. Even though my faith in God remained there was little to my spiritual life. I had no emotional energy it was like the grief had washed all the excess out to sea and it left me very raw and even barren.

As time passed the grief would still come but it seemed a little less in a way. Then last year as I dealt with some issues in my life it felt like the tidal wave was back again. It left me raw and emotionally barren. This year I have noticed that the grief still comes but it is a little softer. There is less rawness and more longing. Maybe that isn’t exactly right, I am still raw. I still deal with emotions that ride underneath the surface of my life. It seems I am more sensitive to certain things and more callous to others. But the under current isn’t rawness it is longing.

I long for the day when my family will be complete. I long for the day when I will finally after all these years get to hold and rock my baby. I long to see his face and know him. I long to see him perfected and whole not to erase the memories of his imperfection but to know he is finally complete.

Yearly photos

Since we homeschool and don't have school photos taken every year and I found that I couldn't get the boys to a photo place regularly, I started have my mil take pictures of the boys. (She does a professional job and works for cute smiles!)


W, don't let the smile fool you, he is a stinker.


J starting K this year.


E is doing 2nd grade work this year.


G in 4th grade. This will be his fifth year homeschooling.

Grocery Spending Challenge

I found this challenge listed on another blog and decided that this would be a good challenge for me to do. I am planning to keep the amount at $75 a week for everything we would normally buy with cash. This doesn't include gas because we use a refillable gift card for that. But I am including anything else we do groceries, toiletries, eating out, Sonic runs, all the rest.

This week was interesting. I went to Walmart on Monday and bought groceries. I decided to use this month to eat out of our pantry and freezer so my spending is a lot less than normal.

Tuesday Tim needed something from Sam's so we all went and we fed the boys lunch there. On the way he stopped at the Christian bookstore and found a book that he needed for church so that was an extra expense. On the way home we stopped at another Christian bookstore to pick up some things for the church and he also bought the boys a new dvd.

Thursday I had to return some things to Hobby Lobby and I ended up finding a Christmas present for family on sale so I picked it up but it was less than my return.

I sent Tim to Sonic one day for diet dr. pepper and he took the boys so that was an added expense and he also had a meeting one day at Burger King so he bought drinks that day also

Here is the breakdown for the week...

Walmart $26.71
Sam's $15.96
Hobby Lobby $14.51
Lifeway $15.43
Walmart $ 8.56
Family $17.30
Sonic $ 5.00
Burger King $ 2.00

total spent was 105.47 but the return to Hobby Lobby brings it down to 90.33. We were over by 15.33

If we hadn't taken t.he boys with us on the trip to Sam's then we would have been easily under the $75.

At the end of the week, I am out of coffee creamer, we are out of milk for cereal and all snack foods. I still have quite a bit of food in the freezer we can use and our pantry isn't in terrible shape. We still have apples and oranges but I imagine those will be gone by tomorrow. So we have pretty much gone through all the fresh stuff that I bought this week.

I am trying to decide if I can wait until Tuesday to go to the grocery store. I hate to go on a holiday because it will be crowded.

Our first week of school...

completed! We finished our first week of school and it was a good week.

We learned about maps and globes this week. We are using a combination of MFW Kindergarten and Exploring Countries and Cultures and just for fun we are throwing in books from Winterpromise Children Around the World and Animal Worlds.

This was J's first week of school and he was a champ. We spent this week doing assessments and reviewing different skills. The first two weeks of My Father's World K studies the story of Creation so that is what we focused on in our Bible time. We learned what God made on the first four days of Creation.

For language arts, J started using Ordinary Parents Guide to Teaching Reading. I have used this with both G and E and love the systematic approach to reading and phonics. J learned the first four lines in the "The Five Vowels" this week

A is the first vowel we will say.
/a/ is the short-vowel sound of a.
E is the next vowel, don't you see?
/e/ is the short-vowel sound of e.
I is the third vowel that goes by.
/i/ is the short-vowel sound of i.
O is the fourth vowel that I know.
/o/ is the short-vowel sound of o.

For ECC we all read There's a Map in My Lap, People, Maps and Mapping, Geography A to Z and Maps and Globes. G and E both made vocabulary cards using the map and geography books and they copied different writing styles from the book People. These will go in a lapbook that we are going to make next week about our intro to geography.

Today we did a fun experiment with an orange to see why it is hard to make a flat map of the earth.


Drawing the continents on an orange.


Trying to make the orange peel a "flat" map.


Snack time.


A car wash to end the week.

Our first day of school with school pictures.

We started school today. Here is J hard at work on drawing his Creation picture and writing his name.



E working on phonics/spelling.



G and W playing with the tot book games I made for Brown Bear, Brown Bear What do you see?



This is something new I am trying this year. I have found two sites that have lots of fun activities that work with different children's books. W loves Brown Bear, Brown Bear Tot Books has lots of cute ideas on making "tot books" which are a spin off of lapbooks. I modified this so that I made the individual parts of the "tot book" but decided to just keep them stored in library pockets for now. I may change my mind in the future and actually make a "tot book" but it worked better today for me to be able to give W an individual activity rather than all of them at once.



These are the individual games that I made for the books. As you can see, W wasn't the only one that enjoyed these activities.



J was playing with the "head and tail matching game" and came up with making funny animals, like a "cat fish" and a "flying fish". He has a vivid imagination!

Another site I love is Making Learning Fun I downloaded the M&M Sorting mat and also made the "I Spy" bottle for Brown Bear, Brown Bear. W wasn't as impressed with the "I Spy" bottle and we haven't used the M&M mat because I forgot to pick up M&M's at the store.

Overall we had a good first day of school. The boys did great and I figured out I have to do a better job of planning when they will do certain things since I had several incidents of all of them needing my help at the same time. I spent some time this afternoon working on a schedule so hopefully they will be able to rotate working with me and working independently. We will see how that works out tomorrow.

I am hoping to post there "school" pictures Grammy took later this week and also to post pictures of my Craigslist couch score that I am giving a makeover. Lots of fun things going on at our house right now.

A Makeover

We scored a couch and love seat off Craigslist. We needed extra seating in our living area so when I saw these for the right price, we grabbed them.

I didn't care for the pattern on the pillows and starting looking online for covers for them. The cheapest ones I could find were $25/each. I just couldn't see spending more on the covers than I did on the set. As I searched the web for a solution I came across this site.

A Soft Place to Land

I really like the idea of "no sew" since my machine hasn't seen the light of day in over 10 years (except when my parents come and my dad does routine maintenance on it). I stopped at Hobby Lobby and bought material and got it home and realized that I miscalculated the yardage. I didn't have enough to do the pillow with the "fringe". Then I decided OK how hard can it be to sew a square? I finished the first one and worst part was finishing the last seam.

I bought more fabric and then I found this site

Cottage Magpie

I thought this would be a little easier and I like that the cover will be removable. (You never no when or why you will have to wash something around here.)

So I made my second pillow, It actually looks a lot better than the first (which I am not redoing). I also found this dragonfly print and decided to cover the accent pillows with it.

Before photo of the love seat...




And after...




I love the way it looks and I am enjoying the extra seating in our living room now. I have five more cushions to cover and digging through my sewing supplies unearth fabric for a quilt that I bought years ago. I am putting the pieces together for it also. It will look great in our school room on our reading chair in there.

A Barnabas Experience - A Wife's Perspective

Ministry can be a lonely experience. There are days, weeks and even months that can fly by when you feel like no one understands (or dare I even say, cares) what you are living through.

This weekend Ron and Teddi Sylvia, Church @ the Springs and their staff proved that we don’t stand alone during this journey. In June, Tim received an email invite to a Barnabas Experience Weekend. We discussed it and decided pretty quickly that this was something we wanted to be involved in.

We arrived in Ocala, Florida on Friday night and were met by our host family and unpacked for the beginning of this weekend. On the trip down we discussed what we thought would happen during this weekend experience. Even though I am a natural extrovert, I told Tim that I didn’t want to have to share/discuss much this weekend. This past year has been difficult and there are lots of emotions that ride close to the surface and sharing those emotions, fears and doubts are hard.

We met together Friday night at Ron and Teddi’s house with twelve couples and staff from Church @ the Springs. We ate and visited with other couples and began to unpack what this weekend would look like and what we would experience.

Saturday morning we got up and met together. Ron started that day by sharing his vision and purpose behind hosting this event. It became clear that he has poured his heart into this event. He shared that there were over 160 applicants for this weekend experience from around the world. As we sat around the table with 11 other couples, my first thought was “Why us?” My second thought was how honored we were to be invited to this weekend. As we went around the table and shared it was apparent that while our stories were all different, the one thing that each couple brought to this weekend was the need for encouragement. We were all in different aspects of ministry. Our churches were at different growth levels. We had been in ministry for different lengths of time and we represented different age demographics. Everyone sitting at the table had faced some type of struggle; personal, ministerial, or spiritual (and some of us had faced all three).

We sat that morning and began to see Ron’s heart and we began to share our hearts. There were hearts that were broken and bruised and tears began to flow as God began to minister in our lives. As our stories came out it was apparent that we had shared stories in many ways. We had all struggled with issues that whether they were related to our ministries or not affected our ministries. As you looked around and the room it was filled with broken people who had a heart for God and the work that He is doing.

As we continued through the weekend it wasn’t about what we were learning (although we did learn a lot), it was about realizing that we don’t stand alone in our lives or our ministry. There are people who care about what we are doing and maybe most importantly “how” we are doing. I heard people speak into our life in a way that will continue to positively impact our ministry for years to come. I walked away knowing that God is moving and that we are privileged to be apart of that movement.

If you want to see a small part of what we got to experience this weekend check out www.thesprings.org, if you are a church planter and on twitter follow Ron Sylvia, if you are given the opportunity to attend a Barnabas Experience, book your flight, get a baby sitter, make all the necessary arrangements because it will change you. I know that we will never be the same. We will never again be alone on this journey.