She finally came!  After being 9 days overdue and a grueling 15 hours of labor, our sweet little grandbaby finally showed her cute little face.  8 lbs. 11 oz. and 21".  Fresh from heaven.  I am so excited to have this new little baby in our lives. My little girls have been clamoring to hold the baby all day.  They're so excited to be aunts! I have to admit, I had no idea how great it would feel to be a grandma.  It's sort of like the way you don't know what it will feel like to be a parent until you actually become one.  But I'm pleased to say that I have a lot of tender feelings for this precious child and I look forward to being an active part of her life.  I want to be an involved grandma. It feels like a payback day although I don't really know why.  You're just so happy that this baby has come into your children's lives to bless them.  At least for me, when I'm not the one who has gone through the whole labor, delivery, and pregnanc

I can hardly believe it but any day now I'm going to be a grandma!  My oldest son and his wife got married a year ago and now they're expecting a new baby.  The baby was due on Friday and we're all very eager to meet this new little one. I'm so proud of them for taking this huge step in their lives. It takes faith to bring a child into the world, although I don't think I realized that until a few years after I became a parent myself. This last weekend I went to a church meeting where we talked about how to strengthen our families.  We watched a  video clip on a pioneer single mother whose husband was killed early in life.  She crossed the Great Plains with her 9-year-old son driving the wagon.  She relied on God to help her through all the hard times.  She raised good children and her posterity continue to honor her name.  As I watched this clip, my thought was that all the effort of being a good parent is worth it in the end.  We just can't give up. So my

Consider planting onions the next time you plant a garden!  I started planting them a long time ago because I read somewhere that they would help keep bugs off your tomatoes.  I don't know if that's true or not--my tomatoes are rarely buggy--but I started then and haven't stopped. We harvested ours yesterday and a few of them are really monstrous.  I put a tennis ball next to them for size comparison, although the picture doesn't quite do them justice: Here are the virtues of onions: 1.  You can plant them early.  I usually plant them in April and we live in zone 5/6.  They're pretty hardy. 2.  You can start harvesting them not long after you plant and use them all summer long.  I think I started harvesting them in late June more as green onions but then as regular onions in July, August, and September. 3.  They don't take up much space and they don't need a lot of water (important in my dry climate). 4.  They are a very low-maintenance plant.  S

I don't know about you, but fall means canning season at my house.  I can't say I LOVE canning but I really like the end products, especially canned peaches.  So the other day I canned 35 quarts of peaches and I love how they look on my pantry shelves.  I was trying to finish all my peaches in one day, but I ran out of time.  So yesterday I canned 6 more and now I'm really done. About 6 years ago or so, I worked a shift at a cannery.  My church really believes in self-reliance but also in helping people who don't have enough, so they have a pretty amazing welfare system.   And one part of the system is the canneries where they can food so they can give it out later to people in need.  They recruit volunteers to get the work done, so I helped one afternoon with canning peaches.  I learned a lot of respect for people who do this kind of work full-time.  It's very tedious and tiring.  I was helping to sort the fruit and staring at peaches for an hour or two can ma

As perhaps you've read in previous posts, this summer we made a monster road trip back east--6000 miles.  So continuing with the saga...After we left Kirtland , we drove to Virginia to stay for a week.  One of the main reasons we went on our big trip was to visit our son and daughter-in-law who lived there for the summer while my son worked at an internship.  This was a little bit like coming home because we lived in this area back in the 90's when my oldest son was just a little boy.  We definitely enjoyed our time there. On our first day, we saw the Museum of Natural History and I took my youngest two into the butterfly exhibit: I don't have any good pictures of the lobby but my children recognized it right away as being in "Night at the Museum". We saw lots of monuments (and did lots of walking!): One of my favorite places to visit is the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier but it does require a hike to the tomb. Right by the Korean War monument,

About a month ago, I blogged about the challenges of finding homeschooling curriculum and recommended a book  that I liked. Here are some other websites that I found to be interesting: This website talks about the common teaching approaches that homeschoolers use: http://www.homeschoolmarketplace.com/e-zines/ejournalapr2706.htm This page says there are essentially four different educational philosophies people subscribe to today. It discusses what they are and how to know what yours is: http://www.homeschoolmarketplace.com/e-zines/ejournalmay0406.htm This book: http://www.amazon.com/The-Well-Trained-Mind-Classical-Education/dp/0393067084 , is one that I bought quite a few years ago and have consulted quite a few times. I find the "Classical Approach" of homeschooling to be very appealing. However, its main drawback is the huge amount of time and effort it requires from the parent. I have not ever completely implemented it although I tried a few years ago when I pul

Last fall I bought a dehydrator.  Finally.  I bought a Nesco Professional Food & Jerky Dehydrator at our local Bosch store for maybe $140?  I can't remember but I think that's close. I've enjoyed using it!  Last fall I dried apples and green peppers and banana peppers. I wasn't sure if we would eat them but we have.  I added the dried peppers to soups and stews and they added a lot of flavor. The dried apples haven't been quite as popular with my kids as I hoped but my husband and I have enjoyed them.  I don't know how healthy they are but they've got to be healthier than chips and cookies. This summer I almost forgot I had the dehydrator until I saw a newspaper article that reminded me of it.  Oh yeah, I need to use that dehydrator I paid all that money for!  So first I dried some tomatoes.  My garden's producing a lot this year.  The prep work went pretty quickly.  The drying took longer than the instruction book said but leaving it overni

When we moved into our house about 10 years ago, the kitchen and dining area had white vinyl. Can you think of anything worse for a house with small children?  So we ripped it out and got a fairly dark laminate by Pergo installed.  I really like it.  It has held up very well and doesn't show much dirt at all.  I like it much better than the real wood flooring we had in a previous house that scratched way too easily.  I loved how it looked but being paranoid about your floor when you have children is no way to live. But when we discovered real wood flooring hiding under the carpet in our toy room, we decided to rip out the carpet even though the floor needed refinishing pretty badly.  My plan was to get it refinished eventually.  I made an attempt to find somebody who would do it but nobody would come out and give me a bid, probably because it was a small job. So ten years later...we finally refinished it! With everything going on, it just never happened until now. You can&#