use this amazon link to help support an adoption

My dear friend and her husband are in the process of adopting from overseas. They are currently saving to cover their travel expenses. You can help bring their baby (babies?) home by using this link for all your amazon purchases!

the cold hard facts of why my house is a mess: it's me

last night i confessed that i need to do some work getting things in our house in order. i did a few things. 

first, i really needed to commit this area of my life to obedience to the Bible. lets face it, my house is messy and i'm unorganized because i'm lazy and unorganized and i get distracted by shiny things and secretly love to procrastinate. not because of the kids, not because of the mud that surrounds a farm house and the boy and great big dogs that keep tracking it in, not even because we homeschool. yeah, these things contribute to it all, but fact is i just need to get to work.

 

Proverbs 18:9 says, "Whoever is slack in his work is a brother to him who destroys"

ouch.

that's me... brother to one who destroys.

so, in my overwhelmed and slightly-depressed state i did two things and only two things:

1. shine my sink

2. get ready for tomorrow: set out clothes and items needed for the next day (mine and the kids). set up the coffee maker and prep for breakfast. find my keys and my shoes. what's for dinner tomorrow?

-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-

 

i'm going to FLY my way out of this mess one baby step at a time. this is a method of running a household for crazy busy moms that is totally doable. i've done it in the past (years ago) and am working my way back to taking control of my  household and our schedule. if you want to join me on my journey you can start by reading Sink Reflections by Marla Cilley (the flylady). reading the book will help make sense of the website. the m-ville library has a copy. this isn't a quick method. it takes time to put it together, a little bit every day. but it's totally worth it!

cleaning house

i have a confession to make, cause that's what blogs are for, right?

i used to be a super organized, clean freak. 

i'm serious. 

the "i find it necessary to clean behind the furnace in the basement storage room on a regular basis" kind of gal. i loved charts, weekly routines, cleaning schedules, lists, household planners. flylady was my personal hero.

but somewhere between four kids, homeschooling, hobby farming, and a two-year-old foster baby things got messy. really messy. my old way of routines and schedules don't seem to work any more. i plan. i figure. i create. i schedule. we fail. i re-work. we try again. but none of these preparations make up for the fact that not one day seems the same, there doesn't seem to be enough time, and i just can't get organized.

enough is enough.

time to find my way back again. one baby step at a time. i'm starting here: shine your sink.

do you have the same problem? where are you gonna start?

passing the time durning those long winter months

making these...

Ice-coated trees outside mean only one thing inside an old farmhouse: layer up! Even with the super awesome new windows our incredible land-lord put in last spring, we get a bit chilly. So, Maya and I made several of these to keep us warm this winter. So supper quick and easy. You'll need to know this: front post triple and back post triple crochet stitch. And I can get the Simply Soft yarn at Wal-mart which means I don't have to drive into Dublin to get my supplies! Go here for free instructions.

...reading this...

Cool thing about this book, it's a fictional account of an "unsinkable" ship called the Titan that hit an ice burg and sunk... written 14 years before the sinking of the Titanic. No kidding. Free for Kindle here.

...and this...

True account of the sinking of the Titanic written just months after the disaster by people who knew the survivors.