So many blessings, so little time to blog them

I know it's been too long since I sat down and added anything here. I haven't forgotten ya'll, there has just been so much going on that sometimes I have a hard time remembering if I'm coming or going. I spent nearly an entire week flat on my back in bed sick with a virus that turned into an infection that caused my ear drums to retract too so I do have a valid excuse for a little bit of the time I've been away from the keyboard and screen.

Apart from having been sick I have also celebrated Caleb's 10th birthday, attended the meetings this week for our church mission's conference and spent a lot of time studying and praying and just seeking God on some things that have been on my heart for awhile now. If ya'll would pray for me I would sure appreciate it, the Lord is working on me and Troy about some things and we just want to make sure that we are listening to Him with both ears wide open.

There has been alot going on and I wish I could blog it all but I really am not feeling well tonight and I need to go rest. I've just been overdoing for too long and my body is telling me to do that right now. Ya'll take care and I'll post again soon.

It's yogurt!

Hee hee, I did it and it wasn't nearly as hard as I had always thought it would be! I made homemade yogurt!! The Hillbilly Housewife has the recipe on her website...... www.hillbillyhousewife.com (one of my favorite sites in the web world by the way). It calls for powdered milk but I'm sure you could use fluid milk if you are one of those folks who has an aversion to powdered milk. The kids have all played guinea pig with it this morning and asked for more....even my super picky hates everything tries nothing eater Jared asked for more. I'm so tickled!!

On another note, please pray for Jared. He got a sudden sore throat yesterday in the evening and woke up this morning in tears saying that he felt bad. He rarely gets sick and usually even when he is sick he is pretty tough about it.

Well, I'm off to start my next batch of yogurt.....this time we'll try strawberry ;-)

Home sweet Home

I am just so thrilled with the wonderful new home that the Lord provided for us! I really love it here, it's peaceful and we have plenty of room to run around and play and for the last several days we have worked and worked on cleaning up the yard and the land on the back of the property for our garden. I still have boxes to unpack but that pile is getting smaller by the day and everything that we have to have to function is unpacked.....it just might take me a little while to find it all. Anyway, I thought since my hands are still swollen and really hurting that instead of my typical ramble I would post a few pictures.

Ahhhh....relief

My Lord is just so sweet to me!!! Even when the things that I say make no sense and totally betray what my heart really feels He knows exactly what I need and when.....too bad my mouth just doesn't want to remember that. My last post sounds so awful....yet that is the way that my mind and my body felt...completely awful, anyone who has had constant hot flashes and those horrible post menopausal mood swings can tell you that sometimes you really have no control over what comes out of your mouth. I have literally heard myself talking these last couple of weeks and thought "who just said that??". It is so awesome to know that no matter how my mind and body feel and how much those two parts of me run away with the rest of me that God knows all the stuff that runs even deeper than that....and even more amazing is that he cares about it.

Ya'll know how much we hate to hear men blame our hormones for something that we have said or done, but the bare and brutal truth of the matter is that an imbalance of certain hormones will make us more than just a little temporarily insane. Troy took Monday off work to help me find a doctor since by Monday I could only alternate between the 'cry' and 'yell' cycles with brief periods of 'sullen' scattered between and as bad as that sounds the worst part of it is the plain old forgetfulness, I must have asked Troy 20 times in an hour 'where are the extension cords?' ....how much do you dislike being asked the same question every 3 &1/2 minutes?? My poor husband spent Sunday night up and down as I would get up and turn the heat off and fans on...he would wake up shivering and turn the fans off and the heat on and cover up the kids. He never even complained about doing it but he sure was glad to find a doctor that could help me on Monday!

The Lord was looking out for me on Monday with the doctor visit too. I told the doctor that I needed the estrogen and answered his questions about why yada yada yada....then he puts down his pen and says "is there anything else you need while you are here?". Well, after I recovered from my brief period of shock over a doctor actually paying attention and asking a reasonable question I remembered that I'm out of migraine medicine so I told him that and he wrote me a prescription for some of that too and sent me home with a sample of the new kind I"m going to take. I would never have remembered to ask about that stuff in my estrogen deprived state, but the Lord knew that I was going to need that medicine when I woke up at 3:30 in the morning with one of my meanest migraines yet....and the medicine worked too!!! For the first time in years I had a migraine that came on and then left all within just a few hours instead of the usual 3 days to 4 weeks!

Even though I still haven't had a full day to just stay home and work on the house (and most likely won't til maybe next week?) it is getting better. Troy got me a desk for the computer so it isn't sitting on the kitchen counter anymore and now I can unpack all of my office stuff and kitchen stuff .....hmmm maybe I will actually find my iron. I'll have gobs of boxes emptied by the weekend I'm sure and hopefully my house will start to look like a home. Troy has done most of the work on the Jeep and is planning on finishing that up within the next week or two and then he is building our chicken house!!!! We get to have a garden here and chickens...... yippeeee free groceries!!!! and an excuse to play in the dirt!!!! We are planning to get guineas first since they will kill the snakes and bugs and mice and all of the icky things that I don't want living in my yard and garden, then we will get chickens and maybe bunnies. I'm hoping to be ready for bees by next spring....I love fresh honey! But first things first.....where oh where is my iron???? Hee hee, unpacking is such fun!!

bad bad Jeannie

Okay, I'm being really really bad and stealing a little bit of time just for me to sit here and type. I know that there are at least 2dozen other things that I should be doing, or sorting, or unpacking, or fixing, or tending to but I will go back to the steady running pace that I've kept up for so long now as soon as I'm done typing. I have temporarily set the computer up on the kitchen counter because I haven't gotten a desk for it yet and there is only one phone jack that is working in the house right now but I *NEED* the excuse to sit still and do 'nothing'.

We are finished with the moving stuff from one house to the other part....that part of moving only took a day (that has to be a record for us). I think almost everyone we know in North Carolina showed up at our house with a truck to help move stuff!!! I've never had help moving like that and it shocked me kinda.....things sure did go fast though!! Now I seem to be stuck in the trying to get things out of boxes part of moving.....and to tell the truth it's a little depressing. We have just been so busy with all sorts of things that getting settled into our new home just isn't happening. What I have gotten done is what I have had to get done for everyone else....Troy's stuff so he can function for work, the kids stuff so they don't have an excuse to "lose" things, the kitchen stuff so that no one starves. For me I've only gotten unpacked a few changes of clothes and my medic bag just in case we need it. I love our new house and I'm so glad that we moved, I just can't wait to get moved in here and start living here....right now it just feels like a place where our stuff is stored and we sleep in between franctic spells of running around taking care of other stuff.

I'm sorry for complaining, it isn't something that I really do very often.....maybe I'm just tired, and unsettled, and a little frustrated, and very very very out of estrogen. I have to make it to a doctor's office this week and get a new prescription so that I don't have some sort of horrible hormonal episode and end up doing something really awful......like I don't know what but I do know that I haven't cried this much since I was pregnant with Caleb.

Things have been hectic.....we moved a week ago and haven't had one single day or evening to stay home and get anything done. Troy has been working 12 and 15 hour days and I'm wondering sometimes if he really exists or if he is really just a figment of my imagination. I'm beginning to feel a little overwhelmed with trying to do all of my work at home and all of his too. I wish I really was the superwoman that he seems to think I am sometimes.

I've been really worried about my two oldest kids who still live back in Missouri too. Jessi and her new baby are living kind of from place to place since the baby's daddy's mother evicted them from their apartment because she disagreed with Jess over something.....I know that sounds so 'soap opera' but that is the way Jessi's life seems to go sometimes. I hate the thought of the baby not having a real home right now and Jessi having to move around so much with a newborn and worrying isn't helping anything for either one of them but I don't know what else to do other than pray for her and I'm doing that. Joshua is doing okay.....he says....He is working A LOT and trying to finish his last year of high school. He sounds really stressed every time I've talked to him lately and I don't know if it's just 'stuff' or if he is really having trouble over something. I'm trying not to worry too much but that is really really really hard sometimes.

I'm also worrying myself silly over car trouble. I've been trying really hard to just take this kind of stuff as it comes but I am kind of tired of always working on a vehicle. Troy has been putting stuff off and putting it off......right now it's brakes, he has known for months that they needed replaced but there was always something else he would rather do and now the rotors have to be replaced too....so a job that would have only cost us $20 in parts is now costing us $75 and a whole lot more work. It's hard to not get irritated over it when he manages to always be ready to run do stuff for everyone else and spend every single saturday with the fellas but our own stuff that needs done gets put off to the point of being a real problem before it gets dealt with. I probably wouldn't obsess so much over this if we had more than one car on the road so that I could park the one needing the work until it got done. I have done alot of it myself but that seems to cause trouble too so I'm not sure what to do about it other than worry and pray.

Well, I've complained and fussed more than enough now on my little bit of stolen time so I guess it's bye bye for now and I promise to be back to my normal self next time.