Accomplishing

I (Mel) can’t believe it’s been since the middle of July since we posted last! Quite a lot has happened over the last month and a half. I’d say we’ve been busy, but as one of our dear friends, Shahar, said, we’re not just busy, we’re accomplishing what’s been put before us.

We have so much to share. I’ll try to let ALL the pictures tell the stories. 🙂

This has been a summer of learning to homestead with our dear friend, Sheila, at her home. We’ve learned about various types of plants and their biology, planting, weeding, tending, watering, various kinds of bugs and natural pest control, harvesting, seed saving, food preservation, threshing, winnowing, milling, and different ways of preparing and eating new-to-us plants! We have had so much fun learning and we are incredibly thankful to Sheila for investing her time in teaching us. She is a true gem!

Taking what we’ve learned from Sheila, we’ve been working on and growing our own garden. What an incredible joy it has been to tend it and watch it change! A special bonus from our garden, we discovered a couple of black swallow-tail caterpillars munching on our dill. We brought them inside to watch them make their chrysalis and turn into beautiful butterflies. How exciting it was to release them back into our garden! ❤ (Having nothing to do with our garden, also pictured are the kids helping me make butter for the first time out of fresh cream from our friend’s cows. Yum!)

Chickens, chicks, and more chicks. From our chickens, Caleb (aka “the chicken man”) has hatched not one, but two batches of chicks now. These pictures are a mixture of our first 14 chicks, who are now almost 10 weeks old, and our newest batch of 6 chicks that are 3 weeks old. Caleb hatches them and Lydia mothers them. Caleb makes the outside shelters, Lydia makes all the creative chick housing and loves collecting grasshoppers in old milk jugs for them. They are quite the pair! 🙂 The last picture is of our rooster and hens. They enjoy sleeping under our trees. (By the way, Caleb just started incubating two different breeds of chickens than what we already have. This is thanks to two different family friends who let him have some of their chickens’ eggs. There will be plenty more cute chick pictures to come!)

You saw Josh’s mobile home he renovated in our last post. That’s in closing! He now has a new project he’s working on. It’s a 1938 house that needs a lot of fixing up. He’s working hard on it and including the boys in the renovations. He also has a friend in the community, Ken, who is helping him out once a week. On top of that, he’s doing some electrical projects at our friend’s house which the boys also get to help out with on occasion. Caleb and Asher love working with daddy. What a blessing that they can!

We had the wonderful gift of having our first family members come to visit us. My cousin, Magen, and her husband, Martin, live in Fort Worth. They came and visited us for a day. Then our nephew, Kaden, visited us for a week from Seattle! The kids loved having their cousin with them! We had a fun time showing him around and including him in everything that we’re doing! Those visits deserve their own post, so for that reason (and for the sake of the length of this blog post!) I’ll just post a couple preview pictures here.

On August 28th, Caleb turned 14. I don’t even know how that’s possible! He’ll get a post devoted just to his birthday. I’ll leave a teaser picture here, though. 😉

On September 3rd, Josh and I celebrated 16 years of marriage! Our anniversary is also deserving of its own post. Here’s a teaser picture of that day too. 🙂

As you can see, there is a lot that has been accomplished over the last couple months. As I look at all these pictures, I can’t help but thank God for all His goodness for where He has placed us at this time in our lives, in our world, and in our history. The following lyrics sum up my thoughts and emotions perfectly:

“All my life You have been faithful. And all my life you have been so, so good. With every breath that I am able, oh, I will sing of the goodness of God.”