In September I plan to:

Read:
God’s Smuggler by Brother Andrew
False Intimacy and The Red Badge of Courage
 Swallows and Amazons, our family read aloud

Personal Goals:
Increase full pushups to 15, decrease girly pushups to 10 (for 25 pushups daily)
Ab routine,  continue100 crunches
Swim 500 3 days weekly
Complete my evening “must dos” each night before bed
     wash face, lavendar steam
     read to kids
     pray and bless each child
     read a few pages before sleep

Homemaking:
grape jelly
jalapeno jelly, we have grown an abundance and our youngest likes most things spicy…so we’re going to try it.
Salsa

Reorganize kitchen cupboards.  Our gluten & dairy intolerant daughter has moved back home.  She needs room for her “food.”

Business & Ministry
Bottle our first batch of Home Brewed Vanilla extract
3 Blog Posts week, if fits
Write to each of our Compassion sponsor kiddos

 savoring a  fine moment from the week

Dinner made by 13 yo hands that gathered from the garden, chopped the veggies and added them to the dishes
Peaches from the tree
Sunflowers bobbing in the breeze
Smiling moon
Heavenly blue morning glories lift my eyes
Easy lunches
1^st week back ended with hope
Spur of the moment fellowship
The blue moon, 2^nd full moon this month
Excited ballerinas, Clara & Party Girl friends
Another letter!  2 in 1 week!
The knowledge that God is in all the spaces, bumps and turns
Blessing words from a friend

choosing joy and linking up with the gratitude community,
michelle

Lesvia Herlinda

What a great end of the month mail week we’ve had.  First the letter from Neema, and Friday a letter from Lesvia.  On all of our paperwork she is “Lesbia” but in this letter more than once she wrote her name with the “v” instead of a “b”.

The letter is written on a “Mis Suenos” (My Dreams) letterhead.

Dear Sponsors, Benjamin & Michelle
I greet you in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.  It is a joy to write to you again.  I want to tell you that I would like ot visit different places from my beautiful country Guatemala, especially Atitlan Lake.  I would like to meet you and to give you hugs and to laugh with you.  I would like to be like my uncle Cesar Ponce, because he is a policeman.   I would like to play the flute.  In these last months, we have learned Bible verses and color pictures.  I want to thank you for the pretty letters, drawing and stickers that you sent me.  I ask you to pray for my family.
I say goodbye with love, wishing you success in your daily activities.  May the Lord bless you.  I was forgetting to thank you for the gift that you sent me.  I ask the Lord to bless you abundantly.

Lesvia.

This letter is the first from Lesbia that allows me to feel like I am getting to know this girl just a little bit.  I love that she wants to meet us, give us hugs, and laugh with us.  Hugging and laughing are two things we love to do!

Builder and I talk often about visiting our sponsor  kids, and this letter just makes that desire all the more intense!

I’m linking up with other Mail Call writers over at Blogging in the Boonies.

As sweet Mae continues to work hard preparing for the Pre Pointe written test and that long time dream…pointe shoe fitting and first pointe class!!  we have looked around the web at a few sites and videos, learning more about all things en pointe.

Nutcracker audition have passed and we have a twirling, giggling Party Girl again this year.  Her sweet friend Emma is cast as Clara.

Carpooling has started up, WOW what a blessing!

Our enrichment classes have started up, with me teaching 3 hours on Wednesday afternoons.  The semester is off to a rough start, but the staff worked really hard in my classroom last week (location & technical issues) and I have hope that things will smooth out this next week.

Petal Rose tested for, and tied on, her BROWN BELT!!! 

A lot of reading has taken place this month, compared to the very busy June & July.

Marme’s reading God’s Smuggle and False Intimacy.
Mae’s read Call of the Wild and White Fang, and continues to savor The Two Towers as well as all of her “assigned” reading.
Petal Rose is greatly enjoying Little Britches and reading through The World of Captain John.  She is trying to gather the courage to read the next chapter of The Two Towers (Shelob’s Lair).
Chica is finished The Horse and His Boy and dove right into Prince Caspian.  She is also reading Jack’s Insects and The World of Columbus and Sons.

The garden is producing a steady crop of green & yellow summer squash, the tomatoes are ripening and the sunflowers are dazzling.

And as the freezer has quite a bit more room this week, I decided to take another look at how we can be better prepared for the upcoming month.  September promises to keep me in the car in the hours surrounding dinner time.

List of desired foods made, I broke the preparation down throughout this week…with the big cooking day coming on Saturday.

Petal Rose was home with Chica while Mae and I were at the Imagination Celebration site for Nutcracker Auditions.  I called her and asked her to scrub the bag of potatoes and set them to dry.  By the time we arrived home, she had started chopping them.  Mae took over, diced them all and put them on to boil.  I put away a few items, check my email and plans for Monday school, then pressed some garlic to throw in the boiling pot.

About an hour later we have 2 gallon bags of garlic mashed potatoes in the freezer.

Monday, as we left for Karate, I realized that we could probably get a few bags of breakfast burritoes into the freezer if we worked together again.  Mae scrubbed and diced the potatoes, putting them on to cook.  While I chopped more veggies and got other things ready, the girls took turns reading from our current read aloud, Swallows and Amazons.

Within an hour, we put 20 breakfast burritos into the freezer!

It is amazing how much lighter the load is with 3 helpful daughters switching laundry, washing potatoes or scrubbing a few dishes, and pitching in with the reading aloud!

Neema, in Tanzania

This is what she has to say:

Dear Benjamin and Michelle

Praise the Lord Jesus.  Neema greets you so much.  She says she is so much thankful for your love of sponsoring her because she will get her basic needs like educations, treatment and religious teaching whenever she is at the center.  Neema says sherfelf and her family always pray God to bless you in your life.   Amen.

The letter is signed by the person who wrote the letter for Neema and by the translator.  There is a sweet drawing of a pot on the backside of the paper.

When I figure out why my printer and computer won’t talk to each other for scanning (it prints fine) I’ll upload a copy of the letter.

Oh, I am so very excited to recieve this letter!  Builder sponsored Neema as a birthday gift to me in late June.  Just two months later we have a letter from this precious little girl in Tanzania!

linking up with  Michelle at Blogging from the Boonies.

Tucking away memories of laughter and silliness

Gathering bounty…

Through everything there are glimpses and right out bold sightings of amazing grace.

graces #1159-1177

Safe travels

Cool winds during the night
He listens to my overflow
Quiet at the laundry mat
Enough
Movie with my middle oldest
Her head on my shoulder
Sharing the sofa seat at the theater
Other kids enjoying an evening of nerf wars
Veggie songs on the way home
Getting to know new friends

Remembering “Grandma Stories”
Our sponsor child quiver is full…what joy those faces bring us as we pray for them
Beloved calls me from the top of the world.  How blessed I am that he’s having that fun, and thinks to call me
The glow on a girl’s face as she tells me some one else loves her hair
Homemade yogurt

Home packed instant oatmeal
Fresh eggs
Pancakes after a  month of not cooking breakfast
 Fresh new school books