Along The Road

Two months in and we are still really enjoying school this year! We’ve finally hit our stride, and God is continuing to bless 2nd grade like I expected He would! This month we enjoyed the local Salzburg Festival, learning about the early settlers of our area, and a trip to Bee City Zoo. This is also the year I officially become a soccer mom! Making corn husk dolls Grinding corn into cornmeal Ballet lessons started!  Sabbath trip to enjoy God’s creation at a State Park Showing the girls some creatures Bottling our own honey at Bee City Pouring beeswax We were allowed to & encouraged to feed all of the animals at Bee City Zoo!

We are off to such a fantastic start! God is blessing this journey in all the best ways, and we are seeing fruit and redemption from all of last year’s struggles. We had some amazing talks over the summer about doing hard things, taking a deep breath when we feel frustrated, and choosing our attitude. On her part, Liliana is doing an excellent job pacing herself when she encounters challenging work and controlling her emotions when she starts to feel frustrated. On my part, I am doing better at staying engaged and controlling MY emotions when I start to feel frustrated. 😆 And sweet little Ivy...she does preschool 4 half days each week, but when she is home with us she is SO eager to learn! She really is so bright - both intellectually and her precious little personality. Here are some snapshots of our first month of second grade.... Had to snap this pic because she was so excited to be building sentences with linking verbs.  A-M-A-Z-I-N-G! Working on our CC maps. Ivy is surprisi...

It's that time of year again...the time where we reflect, pray, meditate, and consider where God has led us thus far and where He is leading us next. We look back over the triumphs and trials of the past year, and we plan for the next chapter. What's interesting to me is that in the midst of all the crazy and chaos that was this past school year (see previous post), somehow we were still able to homeschool. There were days I could barely move because of chest pain, yet school still happened. There were days I was afraid to leave my house for fear of having "an episode," yet school still happened. There were days I was weepy for seemingly no reason, weak from physical and mental exhaustion, and yet still school happened. I say "somehow we were still able to homeschool," but I know exactly what (or rather who ), that was and why that was the case. There's this saying in church world that goes like this: "if God has called you to it, He will see yo...

Where to even begin? There's a reason I haven't written any posts for L's first grade year... life happened.  The year 2017 started out with lots of energy and excitement as we pursued what we believed to be God's purpose and vision for our family through international adoption. When I learned that India is only barely behind China in population yet has more orphans than any other country in the world, is noticeably smaller in land mass, only about 2% of the people are Christians, and there is widespread, violent persecution of those Christians, I quickly went from wanting another baby to passionate about offering the life-changing hope of Jesus to at least one...  (learn more:  https://www.opendoorsusa.org/ ,  https://www.persecution.com/ ) I was firing on all cylinders at the speed of light, knocking out the mountains of adoption paperwork and training. The goal was to have all of our end of the process checked off in record time over the summer while we were ...