Cheese and Jammies :-)

We love making cheese...and eating it too! Here is the beginning of making mozzerella cheese. There are four gallons of milk in the pot. I am slowly heating the milk up to 98 degrees. Here I am stirring the curds. Exciting!!

Now for the really fun part, stretching and shaping the cheese. I have to dip the cheese in 200 degree salt water so that I can stretch it. This cheese in my hands is very hot. If I did not stretch the cheese it would not have the right texture. It is at this point that we all eat a big, warm chunk of it. It is sooooo good!

Below are the finished shapes. That is how much cheese comes from four gallons of milk. A couple of days later we made homemade individual pizzas with our homemade cheese on top. Yummmm!! :-)

For Christmas, Sunshine (dd) and I made matching flannel jammie pants for our three men. It was really fun to keep it a secret and work on it while Papa and Vision were gone together. Sunshine is becoming quite the sewer. She entirely made Papa's and Vision's after I cut them out for her.

Christmas with friends...

I know that this is a little late, but I wanted to put up a few pictures of our Christmas day with friends. Here are all of the adults, minus me, at the big table. We had turkey, fruit salad, crackers with a cheeseball, rolls, sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, stuffing, gravy, and sparkling cider. This is the medium aged children's table.

Here we are getting in line to fill up our plates.

This is the little children's table.

Three dear friends of mine.

Thanks so much for having us all over for a Christmas meal! It meant even more since we live so far from our home state with so many family members and friends.

Celebrate!!

How much we love you our precious Beloved son!

He loves splashing in the water. Hello everyone near and far! :-) How is your new year going so far? Our family is doing well and has a big reason to celebrate today. We received something very special in the mail today...Beloved's finalized adoption papers! He is legally our son now even though he has been our son in our hearts since the day we received him. Wow!! What amazing things God has done in our life this past year. How WONDERFUL to have three blessings...we can't wait to have more! The way has, at times, been the most rugged we have ever had to climb, but He is faithful. I am not just saying that either as a nice little spiritual cliche'...we have watched our God provide for us time and time again during this journey of adoption. No He didn't make it all easy and soft, but He never left us. It is good that God doesn't show us in advance what we will have to walk through. I am afraid I would have quaked in my boots. But, He lovingly gives us strength and provision for each day as we need it. I can look back over this past year and see how God was always gently teaching us more and more to live by faith in Him alone.

When nothing whereon to lean remains,

When strongholds crumble to dust;

When nothing is sure but that God still reigns,

That is just the time to trust.

'Tis better to walk by faith than sight,

In this path of yours and mine;

And the pitch black night, where there's no outer light,

Is the time for faith to shine.

Last week we had another exciting event...Vision's first cello lesson! What a beautiful instrument. How I have loved hearing him run his bow across the low, mellow strings. :-) I am so often proud and in awe of Sunshine and Vision's musical abilities. They both have more talent than I so I just love getting to watch and hear them. They both sing harmony and play to some degree or another 5 different instruments. Anyhow, our whole hearts are to honor our Father with our music and worship. May we never do any of it for the applause of men.

This year I am reading the devotional 'Streams In The Desert' by Mrs. Charles E. Cowman. It is sooooo good! Each day I read one little section along with my Bible reading. I am also reading a book called 'The Children's Storm'. It is a true book that relays the historical happening of the major blizzards in the Dakotas that Laura Ingalls Wilder based her book 'The Long Winter' on. So far it is very interesting though I only get to read a few pages a day. ;-) I am also, very slowly, reading a biography on Adoniram Judson. Christian biographies are my very favorite.

I am soon going to post about making mozzerella cheese, and the most yummy dinner rolls I have come across.

May God bless you all as you live for Him who died, gave His all, for you. We have SO much to be thankful for.

Cooking Together

For those of you who know me well, you know that I am a bit of a health foodie. :-) I love to read about healthy cooking and how to make things homemade that are healthier and more economical for us. I am also quite an old fashioned lady. These are a few of my favorite things ( can you hear Maria singing??) ...a homemade quilt, cast iron pots and pans, a marbled, rustic bar of homemade soap, a batch of freshly baked bread, candlelight, woodstoves, knitted wool mittens/socks/sweaters/hats, little rustic log cabins, campfires, washing dishes by hand, shelves filled with home canned goods, freshly made cheese, milking goats, a walk in the thick woods, carrying babies in slings or packs, homebirth, freshly churned (or shaken) butter, cooking over an open fire, homemade skirts and dresses, homemade corn brooms, and gardens bursting with health giving life. Mmmmm what wonderful things God made! He also created work and how good it feels to create good and beautiful things with our hands. One Sunday morning, before church, the children and I made a big pot (this is my cast iron dutch oven) of beef stew. Here are the onions and stew beef browning. My two faithful potato washers, peelers and choppers. They help me in the kitchen so much. Sunshine was trying to make her hair curly by doing the 'rag curl' method. :-) I think they did this in 'Little House and The Prairie'.

Above is a picture of all the carrots that Sunshine sliced for the stew. They are waiting to go in. The pot on the front left is our breakfast of steel cut oats. They had been soaking on the stove overnight and we are just starting to cook them here. We really enjoy them...even more so than oatmeal.

And the delicious, finished stew. I have always loved stew. One of my most sentimental memories of growing up involves beef stew. It was a snowy, beautiful Michigan winter day. The snow was falling beautifully and we were outside shoveling the driveway. Meanwhile my mother was inside making homemade buns and beef stew. The house smelled heavenly and we couldn't wait to enjoy her efforts. After we finished the shoveling we all went in and ate and ate of Mom's wonderful meal. Yummm! I love that memory.

A misc. picture of my daughter and I playing music together. Thank you Lord for music and the chance to worship you with our voices and instruments.

Hodge Podge...:-)

Hello everyone! I so enjoy putting up pictures and posts for you all...I hope you enjoy the peek into our life too. :-) Here is the local concert hall. We went to a string quartet concert here. It was quite amazing. There were 4 male players, all professionals from New York. I wish I could have taken a picture of them playing but it was forbidden. We sat right in the center front row so we got to see them playing up close. With two violins, one violia, and one cello, the music was just beautiful. This was the first time we had ever heard a violia being played. This was also our first classical concert that we have ever been to and we enjoyed the experience. Here is the outside of the music building. This picture does not do the real sight justice.

Here is our beautiful Sunshine playing with her little brother. How they all enjoy each other.

Here I am holding my sleepy baby. He is such a snuggler when it is time for sleep. Snuggling sleeping babies has always been one of my favorite things.

Here we are all ready for the day. Beloved is such a GIFT from the Lord to our family. How my arms love to hold him...my arms do get tired at times though since he weighs 24 lbs! That is one reason why I LOVE my Ergo!! I carry him in it almost daily at some time or another.

Newspaper Route

About 3.5 weeks ago our family started a new job...all 5 of us! We are doing a paper route here in our small town. When we first started our alarm was going off at 2:30 a.m. and we did not get back home until 7:00 a.m. . We were soooo slow at it. Finding all of the house numbers in the dark and looking at a map doesn't make for quick progress. :-) We are now getting up at 4:00 and getting back home by 6:00 a.m. . Much better!! Six days a week we deliver around 125 papers. On Sunday we deliver 160. Most of these are delivered by us running up to a person's porch and tossing it by their door. Some people have us put them in newspaper tubes by their mailbox. We have had so many, many laughs doing this all together. Imagine with me for a moment...it is 4:15 in the morning, quite cold, everyone has froggy voices and puffy eyes that make you not want to smile since you know you look like a big puff, we are all munching away on a small snack for energy to do the route, and we are as stiff as can be. After a few minutes have passed we are pulling up to our first houses. As we each in turn get out to run up to the house, our bodies protest and we look like hobbling elderly people trying to run as fast as we can but our bodies just do not obey our commands to 'RUN FAST'. It is hilarious!! Almost every day we have to laugh at ourselves and at/with each other. Papa likes to make squeaky noises as we all run and that of course just makes us laugh harder. Thankfully our joints and muscles do warm up after a bit and we are moving like normal people. We also have spent quite a bit of time singing in the car as we are trying to soothe Beloved. He loves singing and almost always goes back to sleep if we will just sing to him. Here is Papa this morning picking up our 125 papers. This is the drop location and where we pick up our papers each day.

Here are the troops ready to go in the car. Vision is munching on a snack of nuts and fruit.

Each paper has to be rolled and rubberbanded. That is what Papa is doing here. We all do parts of the rolling and dh and I take turns driving. On days that there is rain in the forcast we have to put all of the papers in plastic bags too.

Here is Vision sprinting back from putting the paper on someone's porch. He does such a great job and wears a headlamp around his head so that he can see in the dark. Sunshine uses our flashlight. We are so proud of our children and their hard work to help get the job done. We are really glad that we are doing this as we can see the benefit of teaching us all responsibility and hard work. Thank you children for such diligence and for being so cheerful while doing the job. We are making memories as a family that we will be able to talk and laugh about for years to come.

Newspaper Route continued...

Here is our dd running up to an older woman's porch and putting it in the little gray tote that the lady would like her newspaper in. The tote lid has a square cut out of it. Here is Papa running up a slippery deck this morning to toss the paper by the door.

Here I am doing 'my house' in a group of four houses. We each take one of the houses and run as fast as we can to see who can get back to our vehicle first.

Here is our little crew (minus the photographer ;-) ) just having gotten back from the route. We are all ready for a little nap...after our little snack of course.