Joyful Living

Santa Clause is comin' to town!

Imagine if we could bottle up some of that energy and drink it??

CHOOSE TO ENJOY THE MOMENT TODAY!!!

Today we are going to visit grandpa who just came home from the hospital after having surgery. We are bringing him some "frog muffins". We are going to tidy the house and cook dinner. We are going to light the fireplace. It's FREEZING out there!!!

Thursday on the Homestead

 

We still do not have our tree up. We always get live trees and if we get them too early they dry out to fast so we will wait until maybe next Saturday to get it. Because the cold hit us I have yet to get my Christmas decorations out either. I hope to get to that either today or tomorrow. We need this house looking a lot more festive!  About the only thing we are doing regularly is playing Christmas music! I must say my favorite CD for this Christmas is Casting Crowns new Christmas CD. I keep switching between that and a couple of Kenny G holiday CD’s and Kenny Chesney’s Christmas CD (with my all time favorite song.. All I Want For Christmas is a Real Good Tan..  LOL) and others.. I am amazed at how many Christmas CD’s I have collected over the years. Hopefully by the weekend our home will not only sound like the Christmas season but look like it too!    

The countdown continues for my son.. less than 2 weeks now until he leaves Iraq. These last few weeks have really been tough for him.. you would think things would lighten up as they prepare to leave.. but he says, nope.. they are working the guys 16 hours a day except on Sunday, they only work 12..  I know he is exhausted both mentally and physically. I am so looking forward to him coming home and getting some relax time with us… and he is too! 

Frog muffins??Eeeeeeeeew!!

We made some muffins this evening. My 3 year old had an interesting view of the whole process!

He's such a great baker! He even pretends to read the recipe quoting "three cups of flour!!"

We made these muffins before...of course they are not called Frog muffins rather lemon poppy seed muffins and in real life they are quite tasty The original recipe is from http://tammysrecipes.com but I changed it a bit to accomodate my dairy allergy:

(Dairy free)Lemon poppy seed muffins

Ingredients:

~2 cups warm water

~1/2 cup oil

~1/2 cup margarine

~4 tbs lemon zest

~1 1/4 cups sugar

~2 eggs

~4 cups flour

~3 tsp baking powder

~1 tsp baking soda

~1/3 cup poppy seeds

Method: Prepare batter as you would any other muffin batter and bake in muffin cup lined muffin tins for about 15 minutes in a 350F oven. Very yummy!!

We also made some more walnut snowballs. The batch made 63 pieces. It was gone in 2 days

My 7 year old helped with those as they were for her activity club's Christmas party.

I wish I could do all the things I'd love to do with my kids...but the greates gift I can give them is to slow down and really listen to what they are trying to tell me. Even if I don't get around to doing all sorts of crafts with them and we don't make it to the park every day......they will still at least know they are loved!! I get so impatient. But that will change!

Weight watchers update......

I went in to my weigh in at Weight watchers today thinking I had probably gained weight because of Thanksgiving. Was I suprised when the scale said that I had lost 3.2 pounds, that brings my total to 9.8 pounds and this was my 4th weigh in. It seems to be coming off but it is very hard for me to stick to. Roger is a big help, he is very supportive and encouraging.

I have to get some things done around the house and then will be back later to put a new post up about some of my favorite ornaments on our tree complete with pictures.

Enjoy your day

Blessings,Joann

Banock for breakfast!

Here is a quick and tasty breakfast that all my kids love!! It's a native Indian food and we've totally adopted it:)

Ingredients:

~4 cups flour,

~4 tsp baking powder,

~1 tsp salt,

~water*enough to make a very soft and sticky dough*

Method: mix and drop by a large spoonful into hot oil to fry. Fry both sides until golden in colour. Serve immediately topped with your favorite jam or sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon. We eat it with jam. Tastes great with barley coffee!!
For dropping the dough into the oil it helps to dip your spoon into water first then scoop and drop. That way the dough glides off your spoon easily!

Monster raisin cookies

I made these the other day and they were big and yummy!! Of course I do have a few people in my family who are partial to chocolate chips  so this cookie was not really for them

Ingredients:

~1 cup margarine

~2 cups brown sugar

~3 eggs

~1 1/4 cup peanut butter

~1 tbs vanilla

~5 1/2 cups quick oats

~1 tsp baking soda

~1 tsp baking powder

~1 1/2 cups raisins

Method:

Mix together like any other cookie dough and form into golf ball size balls. Arrange on greased cookie sheet and flatten with fork before baking. Bake at 350F for about 7 minutes. Do not overbake! Enjoy!

A busy season

This is such a busy season. Not only because it's Christmas soon but also because of the intense season of life I am in right now. It's very interesting and I am never bored but get sooooooooo tired and often "sick and tired". However I do not want to dwell on feeling "sick and tired"!!!!! I can waste so much time wishing to make things slow down or different but I just know it isn't going to for a while. About 5 years or so before I can say it's going to be a tad easier. But you know what? Instead of wasting those 5 years or whatever number of years dwelling on how insanely busy life is and stressing out about how complicated it is to run this home I am going to just embrace this time. Let this be my public announcement to that end!! I WILL enjoy my life. I WILL enjoy my children just the way they are and I WILL enjoy my hubby too!! The purpose to my life isn't that I can do everything perfectly. I do not want to beat myself up about not having my life just so.....................

And in the meantime I am simplifying!!!!!!! Christmas is one area that can be totally overwhelming. I am buying the kids one gift each and we picked names so each of them will buy for one person in the family. The older kids use their own money for this and for the younger ones I pay. This way they get 2 nice gifts each from our immediate family. Today I took my 3 and 6 year olds to pick out the gift for their sibling that they are supposed to buy for. Then when we got home I helped them wrap the gifts.  Then they got to find a spot to hide the gift until it's time to put it under the tree. It was such a nice time to just take some time to do that  and not doing it last minute before Christmas! Hubby said I can go shopping tonight without the kids so I'll for sure buy a few presents then as well. I bought some frozen tart shells and will just fill them with something simple. Grandma will bring lots of baking anyways.

I'm just so happy that I can just chill out and give up my expectations on life and just go from there, thankful for the many blessings that are in front of my nose but would otherwise have missed!! Complaining robs you of joy and I've done pleanty of that even if unspoken!!! God has chosen to ENTRUST me with extra busy children. It's not that God has cursed me with BAD children. It's that He has ENTRUSTED me with these children knowing that he will also supply my every need to raise them and point them to Him. So many times I just marvel at how busy they are and wonder why me??? Just the other night it just came to me. I've been ENTRUSTED with a precious treasure. 9x!! How lucky am I??? That kind of thinking sure puts a different spin on things. I will pour myself into blessing these children instead of thinking of myself. There is a crushing in the inner man that takes place. God knew exactly what he was doing for I would otherwise most likely remain the same selfish person I always was !!

Have a wonderful Tuesday!

Evolution of Dance

Oh my! This guy is GOOD!!!

Here is  his website. What a fun video to watch!!

Things I did today....

I really didn't do too much today. I did go through my file card system and made some changes. I got my Christmas cards ready and took them to the post office which was rather busy, but I did get them mailed out today. That is one thing checked off my list of things to do this week.

We are still waiting to hear when our new stove will be arriving. Right now I have a microwave, a crock pot and an electric griddle. If I get real desperate there is a side burner on the BBQ.

Oh I did finally remember to take a picture of the Christmas tree after I had gotten it all decorated.

Here is what it looks like with the lights on,it's not that great of a picture but it will have to do~

As you may notice there are no presents under it yet, that's because I haven't wrapped any yet, don't have all of them bought yet but the ones I do have are just sitting here waiting to be wrapped.

It's been getting really foggy here the past few days, some nights down to less than a quarter mile. I really don't like Roger having to drive to Livermore in the morning. If it is too bad he will have to go later, or maybe just stay home all together.

I have a few more quotes from my Bible Study (A woman's walk with God)

This one really hit me, I am certainly guilty of not doing what this says you should do

"Love means that no matter what a man may do to us by way of insult or injury or humiliation we will never seek anything else but his highest good....never...seek anything but the best even for those who seek the worst for us."

"Our life then bears the mark of God because only He can enable us to serve the very person who insults, snubs or hurts us. In fact, such injury makes us far more dependant on God as we seek to obey His command and love the unlovely."

Both of these statements remind me of what I have been going through with a person I met through a message board online. I have known her for over 2 years and even went and visited with her while we were on our summer vacation. We were going to Missouri and she lives in the Southern part of Illinois. She met me in Cape Girardeau where we had a hotel room for the night and we went out to eat and had lots of fun. Now for some reason she won't tell me because she has decided to stop all contact with me we are no longer friends. She has accused me of things I have not done, she has even gotten another person on the message board to ignore me too. For these reasons I have stopped posting. At first I wasn't going to let them steal my joy but then I realized that it wasn't joyful to go there and post anymore. It was very hurtful and made me sad. I know everyone has told me to just let it go and get on with my life. So far I am still dealing with it. Maybe if it were someone else on the board someone I didn't consider my good friend then it would be easier. This is the same person who used to call me daily just to see what I was doing, she would call when she had a bad day, we were there for each other... With God's help I will eventually work this out, but right now I am just so hurt by it...and to top it off this is what she has as her signature for her posts

  Treat people in a way that should someone speak badly of you others won't believe it.

This is a very fine and dandy statement but strange when she is the one who had treated me badly and I guess she thinks others won't believe it. Well they don't know the real person~I DO and I don't care how Christian you want to make yourself seem on a message board, nobody really knows you.

I have some work to do in these areas as you can see but at least I admit that I don't do everything right and that I have things to work on . This Bible study will be a blessings in so many ways..

Blessings,Joann

Laundry helper

My adorable laundry helper! She is a CLIMBER!!! Sje wants to do everything mommy does and is into EVERYTHING!!!

Ok I'm off to clean up the dinner things!