Adventures on the farm and beyond...

We had a boy visitor arrive last month. A boy "goat" that is. We forgot to ask what the buck's name was when we borrowed him, so his name while he's here is "Calico Jack". No picture yet... He's provided a lot of amusement for the kids since he arrived. They think his "antics" for trying to attract the does are hilarious. They include sticking out his tongue, making silly faces, etc... Life on the farm is full of unusual things. Quite recently Scott and the kids found one of the kittens dead in the loft. We're not sure what happened, but it's quite common with farm cats, from what I'm told. We also had the opportunity to help some friends with butchering their chickens. It was a very cold day, but the kids actually thought it was a pretty fun day. Our friends had different breeds of chickens and the kids were asking lots of questions about the different feathers, etc... Elyssia brought home one of the prettier feathers, made some ink from raspberry juice and was using it to write a letter to her brother:). Pretty fun experiment!

We've also been reading through the Dear Diary(Canadian series). I'm enjoying them as much as Elyssia. I find it neat to read about the different places and times that these girls lived in and really enjoy it when they mention living in or passing through areas that we've lived in or visited. We've ordered a lot more of them from the library and look forward to cozy winter reading with hot cocoa and lots of little people to snuggle with! The boys have their collection of books and we enjoy reading through them together.

I have so many reasons to be thankful that I'm able to be a stay at home mom and homeschool the children. There still don't seem to be enough hours in the day to fit in everything that we want to do together. We also enjoy our town and library days. We've gotten a lot of nice comments lately about the children and how well behaved/helpful they are. It's a blessing to hear those, especially since there are still a lot of testing days at home. We love reaching out and helping as a family. We were blessed with lots of opportunities last month and look forward to seeing who the Lord will bring across our path this month.

We also had the opportunity to host a speaker from Creation Ministries last month! We learned so much and actually feel like we can help others to understand some of these issues a bit better now. Some of them were a bit more complex and will take time to really process, but we were able to get some materials to continue learning and share with others. We had a couple of visitors that we knew and they really seemed to appreciate it. The kids really enjoyed the first session and the donuts/hot cocoa during the break time:).