Restarting, again!

So, for the past year we have not had internet. The hardest part about not blogging for so long is where to start? So, I will start with the fact that once again there are major life changes going on in our lives. Our youngest daughter will be graduating high school in less than two weeks. I can't even type those words without my eyes brimming with tears. Such a bittersweet moment. Luckily for me, she will still be home and learning with me daily as we ease into this next chapter of our lives. I am so thankful to have this time with our kids to enjoy a deepening friendship as they mature into full-fledged adults. I am doing all I can to savor each precious moment with them while they are still in the nest. Learning to enjoy my journey. Getting a little better at it each day. God willing I will continue to get better and better at this! Of course it's always easy when life is going well, but I do think I'm getting better at keeping the joy going when it's bumpy. Probably the hardest part is having my kids throw my words back at me when I'm grumbling. lol! I worked hard to teach my kids contentment and not to grumble, and for a long time I did very well with it. Then suddenly life seemed to take a tumble and I struggled to regain my footing, but with God's help, and my kid's encouragement, I am finding my way back to contentment!


May you have a blessed day today.

Learning to Enjoy the Ride

Wow has the roller coaster continued to twist and turn this year! Last year we moved to the high desert and started a little farm. I thought it was the adventure to end all adventures, but I was so wrong! I had hoped to record the journey here but life had other plans. As usual. As my friends say, my life is never boring! That is an understatement. Well, we just got internet back after many months without it. So, here we go again.


About 6 months ago I learned that I was going to have to undergo another surgery to repair some damage from my surgery last June. Before I could do anything about that we got into a pretty major car accident so the surgery is on hold while I try to recover from my injuries. I am so grateful that we were all able to walk away from the accident. Everyone suffered varying degrees of injury but we all walked away alive after hitting a semi truck head on so I consider us blessed! However, after 4 months I continue to suffer unbearable pain and extremely limited mobility. I have faith that eventually I will be healed, I have a great doctor who is dedicated to seeing me through and I trust him and his staff. But I am ready to move on now, and once again I am sitting and learning patience. The story of my life. I'm never heading in the direction I'm wanting to go in, and I'm constantly learning to trust and enjoy where I am today.


I won't go into details about all the unpleasantness of the past year, but it has been an extremely difficult year with many trials. I would love to say that I handled them all with grace and faith and was the epitome of a gentle Christian wife and mother through it all, but what's the point of lying? lol I did NOT always handle things well at all. Through it I struggled with anger, depression, fear, and did more than my fair share of murmuring and complaining. All things I thought I had put behind me long ago. But I continue the journey towards being the woman I long to be.


The newest chapter of our life is that we have moved full time into a travel RV. We still have two of our four children with us so we bought a two bedroom trailer with a bedroom for us and a bunkhouse for the kids. We can actually accomodate more of our kids if they choose to come, but for now it is just my husband, myself and our two youngest. We are excited about what God has planned for the next chapter.


And as this new chapter unfolds I continue to learn not to murmur, complain and focus on the negative. Some days are better than others, but I am learning. :-) Do you ever feel as though some days you have more of a stumble than a walk? I do! But I hope to continue to get more sure footed in my journey.


Years ago when I was struggling with murmuring issues the Lord showed me that the Israelites never got into the promised land because of their murmuring. I thought that was enough to teach me to control my mouth, and for awhile it was. But little by little I let the habit creep it's way back into my life. Recently as I have really struggled I decided to do a little study on complaining and lo and behold what I found stunned me! I found Deut. 28:47-48! Here is what I found:


"Because you did not serve the Lord your God with joy and gladness of heart, for the abundance of all things, therefore you shall serve your enemies, whom the Lord will send against you, in hunger, in thirst, in nakedness, and in need of all things; and He will put a yoke of iron on your neck until He has destroyed you." (emphasis mine) Wow. I think I would like to get a grip on my attitude now! lol


Here's the thing I've learned about attitude, if I don't get a grip on my attitude during the bad times, I won't have a good attitude during the good times either! It is shocking how hard it is to switch tracks once things turn around in life. I've also learned that it is definitely easier to get through the tough times with faith, joy and a good attitude, than with worry, fear and a bad attitude. Yet even though I know that, and have experienced that many times, I still struggle with it! I am such an Israelite!


So, my journey for the moment is to learn, yet again, to walk in joy and faith. And to enjoy where I am now, not continue longing for where I am going. I guess I am a destination kind of gal living a journey life. I am always focused on getting to where I am supposed to be, but what I believe God wants me to do is to learn to enjoy getting there! I hope you'll join me as I take this new chapter one day at a time.


So, for today I leave you with this thought: "Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding: In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He shall direct your paths." Prov. 3:5-6


His ways truly are better than mine, all the time. And this stubborn girl is determined to walk in that!


Be blessed!
Colleen

Happy 2010

Well, it's been over a year now since I started my blog. And as I feared, I didn't keep up with it as I had hoped. But guess what? It doesn't matter! I wrote when I could write and when I couldn't nothing dramatic happened! There were many times I wanted to write something but life just kept getting in the way. And that is, I guess, how it should be. Life should come first. And it has. Whether for better or worse. It has been quite the rollercoaster year in our house! Two surgeries later I am finally, slowly, getting back on my feet. We also moved twice in the past year. Once as I documented here, and again at the end of the year which I have yet to talk about, but will, soon. Today I am sitting here recovering from a very nasty stomach virus that has had me in it's grip all week! Thankfully we enjoyed our youngest daughter's birthday Monday before this horrible virus grabbed most of us on Tuesday night! I am still very shaky and weak but think I can see the end in sight! So, as I sat here looking around I decided to pop in and make a very brief entry to begin the new year by wishing you the happiest and grandest of new years! Be back soon.


Blessings!

Lost Friends

Just days after my last post I had to have surgery again, so here I am two months later still working on my recovery. Sitting is not easy so computer time is rare. And as I have spent the past five months recovering and feeling like time is just passing me by, we have lost 3 very special friends and I am reminded how very precious and fleeting time is!


All three of these special people were much too young to pass, and yet it reminds us that none of us knows the number of days we are allotted here. Thankfully I have no doubt that each of them has left this earthly place to go home to be with their heavenly Father, yet still their loved ones ache with the emptiness that is left when someone you love so dearly, a daughter, sister, mother, wife, husband, father, friend, is suddenly gone.


It makes me want to hold my loved ones closer, tighter, longer. And yet I still struggle with the busyness of the unimportant! What can be so important that it takes me from those I love and cherish and steals my precious time? And so I vow once again to make better choices about how I spend my time! Perhaps today is the day it sinks in? Teach me to number my days oh Lord that I may gain a heart of wisdom. Ps. 90:12


Blessings!

Enjoy Today

I found this little blinkie and just wanted to share. Too many times we find ourselves wishing we were somewhere else or at a different time in our lives. I know I have been very guilty of that as I have been recovering from my surgery and not just taking the time to enjoy this time with my family. That changes today. Enjoy today!

Be blessed!!

Life On The Farm, and On The Mend

Well, after my last post I had to have a hysterectomy and repair surgery. I was told that recovery would take 6-8 weeks but I'm not really sure what I heard when they said that because I really thought it would be a couple of weeks of recovery with a couple of weeks of taking it easy and then BAM, I'd be back to my old self, only better! Well, I could not have been more wrong. When they said 6-8 weeks, they meant 6-8 weeks! I realize now that I didn't take the surgery seriously enough, and if I could do it over again, which I hope not to ever have to do, I would take it much easier than I did. I would take advantage of laying down more and I would insist on much better pain management. A lot happened with this surgery, and I don't really feel up to going into that now, but I may later so that anyone who reads it may avoid the nightmare that I went through with pain management issues. The good news is they left my ovaries, the bad news is that I seem to have been thrown into menopause anyway! Major hot flashes since the surgery. But enough about that for now.


Because of that I have not been able to unpack or decorate our new farmhouse at all and it gets more irritating every day that goes by. We have added assorted rabbits, two more roosters and a baby chick to our menagerie. I know, two more roosters? Why? Well, it wasn't exactly on purpose.

Daniel and Charlie during their morning routine.

First came "Charlie" the rooster. He came from a neighbors flock that practically lives here, his mother attacked and tried to kill him. He escaped and came running to our son, Daniel who happened to be sitting in the backyard at the time. Daniel gave him some grass and he adopted Daniel as his Dad. He would follow him everywhere he went and when Daniel came inside he would run around the sliding glass doors and cry and peck at the window. We got him a cage and would bring him in at night and put him back out during the day. Because of what happened he is an outcast to all the neighboring flocks so he lived on his own in the front half of our backyard. Our kids are very protective of him and chased away any of the other chickens that tried to come into that area so they stay away from that part now. It was so much fun to watch him develop his routine. The way he followed us around whenever we went outside. The way that he would come to the door at bedtime to let us know it was time to put him inside. At first we thought he was a chick, but as time went by we realized we had another rooster. Oh well.


Then we found two baby chicks at the feed store so we bought a Rhode Island Red and a Plymouth Barred Rock. Unfortunately the Red died after a few weeks, but the Barred Rock is thriving and growing and is very close to Charlie. In the beginning Charlie was not very happy and felt more than a little displaced by the new arrivals, but with the death of the Red, he began to grow closer to the other chick. They even got to the point of sharing a cage.


A few weeks ago a friend called and asked if we could take in their rooster. It seems that they bought a bunch of baby chicks and one turned out to be a rooster, which they are not allowed to have and a neighbor was complaining and they were desperate to find a new home, so we brought home Topol. He's a Russian Spangled Orloff, and we are musical lovers, hence the name. We watched them closely and he and Charlie seem to be living peacefully enough together. It is very funny now to watch the three of them follow each other around the yard.


The only one not very pleased with the situation is Elvis, our cockatiel who lives on the back porch and who's cage has become their favorite roosting place. At first she, yes she, I'll explain in a minute, at first she put up quite a fuss, but now she has resigned herself to the fact that the three of them jump on her cage at night and settle in for a good night's rest.


We had a cockatiel named Clyde that we got from a friend when his mother attacked him and tried to kill him. He was hand raised and had a huge bald spot in the back of his head from where his mother had attacked him. Clyde loved my husband more than any of us and loved to snuggle up on the back of Kevin's neck and play in his hair. Well one morning the kids came running into our bedroom waking us up with a chorus of, "Clyde laid an egg, Clyde laid an egg!" My husband and I looked at each other through bleary eyes and asked, what could be in the cage that looks like an egg? Kevin got up and went into the other room to investigate while I stayed in bed wondering what in the world could have gotten into the cage that looked like and egg! What could have gotten in the cage at all? Could the kids have maybe put something in the cage? When my husband returned to fall back into bed I asked him, "Well, what is in the cage that looks like an egg?" He said, "An egg." hmmm, okay so Clyde became Cleo and went on to lay many eggs in her time. My mother loved Cleo so much that for her birthday the next year we bought her a cockatiel of her own whom she promptly named Elvis since she loved Elvis Presley so much. He lived with her for 5 years until she passed away, then he came to live with us. We were hoping for some baby cockatiels with Elvis and Cleo. Cleo was in the process of laying so we had high hopes for some babies! Soon we were being deluged with eggs! Tons of them! More than we had ever had before, surely there would be babies soon! But then we began to suspect that perhaps Cleo wasn't the only bird in that cage laying eggs. Well, actually the kids suspected, I was still sure that Elvis was a male since he had lived with my mom for 4 years without laying a single egg. Surely he wasn't laying now. Surprise! One day we found Elvis with an egg stuck to him, err her. Sometimes when birds lay too many eggs they lose calcium and can become egg bound. Luckily for us we had gone through this with Cleo before and luckily in both cases the eggs became attached outside the bird. If they become bound inside, the bird usually dies from it. The only thing I could figure was that Elvis moved in with Cleo, saw her lay an egg and said, "Oh is that all there is to it? I can do that!" And then she did. lol I tried to change Elvis' name to Priscilla but Elvis just stuck and so Elvis she remains. Cleo passed last year after 9 years with us.

We have yet to name our flock of 4 Rhode Island Red hens and 1 Rhode Island Red rooster who have to be kept secluded because their beaks have been cropped so they have to be kept in their own area away from the other chickens. I expect that we will always have to keep them separated for their own safety. It seems that now we will have to have at least 3 different coop areas for the 3 roosters. Although we also hope to get some arachonas so that means perhaps 4 different coop areas. I guess we'll see how well Charlie and Topol get along as Charlie grows.

The goats, who remain unamed also, continue to neglect the weeds in the backyard in favor of the various fruit trees which they are destroying! I am about to fire them! We had been watering the back area to make the weeds more desirable to them but the only part of the weeds they would actually eat was the dead part. And they only eat the weeds if we pull them out of the ground and feed it to them!! I don't need finicky goats! At that point they're just a disposal system. When the weeds got almost waist high I made them stop watering! My hope was that the rabbits would take care of the weeds but I have been unable to build a run for them so for now they live in the front area with the chicken and two roosters and are pampered. This whole farm thing is just not starting out the way I thought. lol


One frustration of this long recovery has been that I have been unable to build my chicken coop that I have been dreaming of, and that my garden never got planted. So many plans, so little achieved.


Well, that's it for now. Hopefully I will be up to writing more frequently, but the recovery continues to be a roller coaster ride so time will tell.


Be blessed!

Moving Day

So, in the time I've been missing we have found a new home to rent, moved out of our old home and into the new one and started a whole new facet of life! Something we've always wanted to do, we've gotten a little farm started right in the midst of the big city. Okay, so not really the big city, but the city. For the past couple of years we've all been crammed into a very small 3 bedroom townhouse which was a true blessing to us, but which was way too small for us. We were used to having a large home on a large lot and we missed that more and more each day. But God's timing is not our timing, so while we were thankful for the townhouse, we longed for the time when God would move us on to something bigger with a little privacy and our own little spot of ground. And preferably with no stairs! :-)

This year when our lease was up the opportunity suddenly popped up for us to move up the road to a wonderful 4 bedroom ranch style house that sits on 1/2 an acre! We've wanted to live the country lifestyle for many years, when we were in our old house we had chickens, a rooster, ducks, rabbits, turtles, and various "normal" pets, dogs, cats, rats, hamsters, assorted birds. When we moved to the townhouse we were basically pet free except for our cockatiel. Now we are beginning to gather a menagerie again! We now have four chickens, a rooster and two goats to begin our little farm.


So, life continues to change each day and as we journey we marvel at how God weaves things together to form this tapestry we call life. Our days are full of settling in and getting things in order. The back 40, or livestock area, has been neglected for the past couple of years so there is a lot to do. We're hoping the goats will take care of a lot of that but since they can easily reach the grape vines in the back they are much more interested in munching on those than the 1/4 acre of weeds waiting for them. I guess I can't blame them, as I told my husband, if you had to choose between grapevines and dried out dead weeds, which would you eat?!


There is a pond in the mid yard area that we are working on cleaning out and getting up in working order. I look forward to that as I have longed for a pond for over a decade! I have many vegetables started and awaiting transplanting once we get an area fenced off in the back area so the goats don't neglect their weed eating duties to feast upon the delicacies of all those vegetable plants!


I love how God works things. In my impatience I often forget to just wait upon Him and His timing, but when He works it out His way it is always so sweet!


Well, there are chores waiting for me and a nice warm bed calling my name so I close for now to enjoy life on the farm. :-)


Have a blessed day!