Tie Dye

This week we hosted a tie dye party. I just provided the location for the messy work and for kids to play. We are a good local for both of those things. The kids had asked about if we "ever could" tie dye and since my friends had been discussing it on-line I decided to see about making it happen. I have only tie-dyed once and that was in college, way too many years ago. I am so grateful for friends that share, teach and coach others in new arts!

Here is the whole new family wardrobe.

This is Joshua's creation

This is my shirt and a scarf - got it as a freebie with the order so I dyed it too! And it turned out so gorgeous, the swirls look like flowers.

These are Maggies a peasant shirt and pajamas. Yes, I made hers for her!

This is Caleb's creation:

I made this for Aaron:

And here is Gretchen's creation:

We really had fun (even though I worked tediously to do all of the tying).

Raising Generations

I am loving this blog about Raising Homemakers, one of my heart's desires for my girls is to be Godly homemakers that love their families, homes and serve the Lord through serving others. Now, a home and a house are very different and the home is the heartbeat of the family; the house is just the structure that we dwell in as a family.

They are doing a giveaway today so go check it out!

Raising Generations Necklace

New Starts and Enduring Days

Today I marked a milestone in Maggie's life. I dedicated her at church this morning publicly committing myself to raise her to love the Lord with all her heart, soul, mind and strength. She will have pictures of the occasion and her siblings will likely remember it most of their lives. She is blessed by a legacy of generations that love the Lord and walk with him in their daily lives. And she is blessed that those elders are covering her in prayer and will someday exhort and encourage her as she matures in her faith. What a rich heritage!

We also attended our Financial Peace University class, almost done! As we all checked in half of us 4 couples were back to step one of creating our baby emergency fund. Our teacher was discouraged by the significant drop-out rate due to summer travels, etc. But the good news was that we had a fund for our emergencies and were not whipping out credit cards to solve the crisis. This I assured our teaches was progress. If we had not had the class we would have been still cycling down the spiral of debt and justification rather than preparing and purposed planning. So we are enduring through life's normal ebb and flow. Emergencies do happen and we are wiser to stay prepared for them.

Endurance is also present as we struggle to reconcile challenging parenting days. There is so much to learn and understand and we are weary. It is difficult to know if expectations are too high, too low, too fast or slow. It hurts to see a child struggle and make repeated choices to struggle more. Does the child see they are making it harder on themselves and why don't they do differently? Some answer that it is effort to defeat rejection from others by being defiant and asserting rejection first. Sabotaging so that risk and vulnerability are extinguished.

As we talked today Aaron asked again: how am I suppose to do everything well when it requires that failure in some areas will occur? There are too many roles in life to even have success at the bare minimum of those roles. It does look futile for accomplishing anything successfully. But I recently did have a successful day, I made a list of the priorities and started at the top. I didn't make it to the end. But it turned out that those last two could wait or be dismissed. It was a successful day and all I did was what I could and I felt so accomplished! I didn't do everything that COULD be important I just did what I felt the Lord told me would be pleasing and would bring the most harvest for that day. Anyway, I am going to try to do this more regularly and see how this bring better focus and success to my days as I endure at home.

hum-drum summer

Well, we are really pitiful at posting to our blog. I imagine that people have even quit looking at it because it is just so boring to never have anything new!

Not that I am here to tell you that it will be any different. I am just here to say "Hi" for the evening. Umm, I am avoiding dishes and the kitchen so this is a totally more fun diversion!

It is HOT in Idaho, we are hovering near 100 and it is toasty! Makes me into a house hermit, love me some AC!

So I am in spring cleaning/topsy-turvey the house to declutter and re-organize. Want to define how each space is used and ONLY keep items in that space that are utilized. I have so many things stashed here and there because I am not sure where to "home" it at. I would truly love to have an outsider "professional organizer" type come in and help my mind jump start the mental processing. But that is only happening in TV-land - so I hear, and I don't even watch TV so I am left to my own devices and utilizing my family's assistance.

I have been mortified to find my mind not up to par this week. I am not remembering things so well and that bugs me. I think that I am getting more sleep and would thin that would help. However with more sleep I am feeling MORE tired, like my body is confessing just how bad it really is in my "burn the candle at both ends" mode of life. YES, I know that this is BAD, hubby reminds me that I lack in the sleepy-land and need to be better at self-care. Self-care has tumbled into non-existence since the end of May. I don't sleep well, eat kinda-well, stopped exercising, don't journal, haven't had a babysitter for any time alone. So it has been a down-ward spiral of self-care.

So my first step is to address the house, it is the "mental realm" that I manage: bills, paper-flow, organized cabinets, closets, etc. When it is up to snuff then I can move on to the next level of management. Aaron has stepped in the past 2 weekends tackled some of these tasks to help - drowning people need assistance - and boy was I drowning! Okay signing off to face the kitchen!