It is never easy when Tim or I go out of town. It does not happen often but we truly are one and are a team in everything we do around here. I have to fully rely on God in times like this and keep telling myself that it is only for a short week. It will be over with soon.
Boy, am I missing them so much every day.
This year I decided not to push myself with Tim being gone. We are lightly home schooling and trying to do something fun every day. I want to stay a "happy busy" to keep my mind off it all but not overwhelm myself.
So...we started off our week bright and early on Monday morning with butchering 9 roosters. :) I know...not fun at all but really needed to be done. The roosters are done growing and are consuming a lot of feed right now. Also, 30 or so happy roosters crowing at 5:00 a.m. every morning can be a bit much. So we did 9 two weeks ago and did 9 Monday and now have 8 more to do sometime soon. It only took two hours and we spent the rest of the day together playing board games. It really was a good day. Productive and then we had fun all afternoon.
Tuesday, we had three appointments. (two of the three appointments were people coming to our home for things with Antonio) I spent the time in between the appointments, cleaning all of Zeke's work and play areas around the house. It is not easy to sort his things with him around. It stresses him out. He does not like people touching his stuff or moving it all around. So while he was gone I washed every piece of clothing in his wardrobe, sorted it and washed all his bedding. I think I did 10 loads of laundry. No kidding. The kids and I also dumped out all his toy buckets and wiped everything down and sorted them all out. I also cleaned out his home school desk area. Whew. Everything of his is organized and clean now. It looks great!
Wednesday was Therapy Day. We have to have Antonio up, pottied, showered, diapered, dressed, medicine, breathing treatments and g-tube fed. All the barn chores and milking done. All the kids and myself ready and out the door by 7:30 a.m. We do it every other Wednesday. I stop and get breakfast on the way for the children and am at the Therapy place by 8:00 a.m., so all of the children receiving PT, OT or speech can be seen. We are usually done by 11:00 am. Then we always pick up a friends child to come and play for the afternoon.
Wednesday afternoon, for something fun, I helped the children make "Sun Catchers". I found a really neat craft idea using clear colored pony beads to make these from. If you want to google it, they are called "Pony Bead Sun Catchers". There was also a youtube tutorial on them. I decided to do it for a fun project this afternoon to cheer the children up and keep their minds off Zeke and Tim being away. It was a fun and inexpensive craft that busied the kids for hours. I was even drawn into it and lost track of time. :)
William likes things in order and to have a plan. He got out his Kindle and down loaded a pixelated picture of Mega Man to work from. It took him about an hour!
Carolyn filled a VW bug cookie cutter and made some small flowers.
Carolyn helped Antonio fill his tins. She put in what colors he wanted and in a way he wanted them.
Here is Elizabeth making her flowers and patterns.
You pop them in a 400 degree oven for about 20 minutes and the beads melt all together, nice and shinny.
Here is Elizabeth's sun catcher she made and hung in her window.
Here is the one Antonio helped make. He wanted it hung over his office area.
It was a wonderful craft I am sure we will be doing again some day.
Today is Thursday and I played hookie from home schooling. :) I bailed and went antiquing with my dad. It was a nice and relaxing day. We had a great time and spent the morning away looking for treasures.
God is so very good to us and we have had a full but productive week this week. God has helped us get everything done that has needed doing and even though we miss the guys a lot, we know they will be home soon.
James 1:2-4 My brethren, count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations; Knowing this, that the trying of your faith worketh patience. But let patience have her perfect work, that ye may be perfect and entire, wanting nothing.
May the Lord God in heaven be your strong tower in all you go thru. May He be your comfort, peace and your guide, leading you into the life He prepares and desires for you. God be with you.
Blessings,
susan
We made the sun catchers a couple of months ago and it really was fun! I do not have a toaster oven, but someone had mentioned using a grill, so that is what we did! It worked great and kept the smell out of the house.
ReplyDeleteThank you for writing dannette! Never thought of using the grill! Wonderful idea. We really enjoyed the project as well. I love easy in expensive ideas like this one. Blessings!
ReplyDeleteWilliam's Mega Man is quite impressive! All the rest are pretty and colorful, too. We also don't have a toaster oven but that grill idea might work ...
ReplyDeleteThanks for leaving a comment Julie! William was excited you complemented his Mega Man! He says" thank you..I got the idea off the internet".
ReplyDeleteHe is a very meticulous kind of guy...thank you autism. :)
After dannette suggested the grill, I checked it out and many people have successfully done it that way.
I will share what we learned from our experience. We tried using the throw away baking pans and they were to wrinkly. They were hard to make a good pattern in as the corners were not sharp enough to make a good mold. . So we ditched those. I had bought a few older metal pans and muffin pans from a near by thrift store as I didn't want to use my good bakeware for this project. Those worked great! The molds popped right out and the pans cooled down quickly for reuse. I did run short on pans so took one of my Pyrex pie pans out for Elizabeth to use. That did not work as well. They stuck a little to it and the Pyrex took a very long time to cool down. So the best thing is smooth metal pans. The free hand ones we did, in the middle of a pan with nothing to hold it together as a border, spread a little so watch those so the edges don't burn. The ones that totally filled a pan or muffin hole cooked evenly and looked the best. The metal cookie cutter ones did good as long as you had enough beads in them to fill them completely. We did have a metal cookie cutters weld let loose as they are not meant to run thru an oven. We will have it spot welded to fix it. Oh yeah, and our toaster oven did not smell like melted plastic after wards. Once brought back inside. Hope some of this helps. :) Blessings!