Catching up
Over the last year, a handful of people have commented that they really missed my blogs. I was touched. I never considered my blog to be anything more than me practicing writing stories for the entertainment of a few of my friends. To have people saying a year later that they really miss those stories, was a huge surprise.
My response when people have asked me why I stopped blogging, has been, "this just hasn't been a funny year." And it is true. 2013 was a very difficult year for me.
Leading into 2013, I had a dream that my house burnt down. In the dream, I heard God's voice, and he said to me, "this is going to bless you." When I woke up, I packed up the kids, took them to Target and bought the biggest fire safe the store had. I thought the only way a fire could be a blessing to me was if I secured everything irreplaceable. So I put all my journals, everything I've written to my children, every important document and an external hard drive with all out photos on it into the safe. And then I calmly waited for my house to burn down, that is after requiring my everlastingly appeasing husband to haul the 300 lb safe into the the house and position it where I liked.
Shortly after, God lead me to Hebrews 12, which speaks of everything being shaken so that only what is unshakeable will remain... And, "God is a consuming fire."
Then the year 2013 hit. I came down with a miserable stomach bug, feeling like I had been poisoned. Two days later, I broke my ankle. Two days after that I was hospitalized with pancreatitis (possibly the least humorous experience of my life). The night I came home from the hospital, my husband drove our son to the ER with an aggressive and terrifying allergic reaction. A couple days after that our breaker box fried and literally should have burnt down our house. After the pancreatitis, I had episodes of feeling like I was poisoned about every 2-4 weeks for several months. Our son battled a digestive illness of his own, and then broke his arm. Our bathtub cracked in half. In a mysterious incident, something or someone turned on a water valve under our house, which drained our well, which fried our well pump. Our van died on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere. Our chickens contracted some sort of contagious disease, and our flock was cut from 54 to 16. The tenant at a house we own trashed the place and left. I continued to be sick, feeling poisoned. I had every medical test imaginable, visited many doctors, pursued several forms of alternative medicine. I became obsessed with finding the truth about digestion, my environment and lifestyle and anything that could be poisoning me. I spent all our money on doctors, organic food, herbal therapies... Anything to be functional again. I felt like a horrible mother, exhausted and irritable all the time. It got so bad that every time I ate, it felt like my brain was swelling. I couldn't think, my vision was blurry, my speech was slurred and parts of my face went numb. I couldn't eat. I was losing weight and obsessively reading and researching trying to find the truth about foods, toxins and digestive health. I learned a lot. And mostly, my desire to live a simple life following God grew and grew. Finally the doctors ran out of tests to run, and suggested I try anti-depressants. I hadn't thought I was depressed, but the thought that it was all in my head, that I was somehow inflicting all of this on myself... Now that was depressing.
There is the skeleton of 2013, now here is the flesh. What an incredible year! God provided for every need. Never in my life have I experienced anything like the peace, the grace, and the overwhelming favor of that year. Everything was taken care of. I was taken care of. I never had a chance to worry about each thing before it was covered. Bills paid. Car towed for free and fixed for free. Friends coming into my home and caring for my family. Everything fixed within hours of being broken. What an amazing year! Certainly there have been amazing stories to tell. But until now, I have not felt well enough to tell them. And they are not the funny, light-hearted stories I like to share online.
I will tell one funny homesteading story from 2013. Alex and I have long had the dream of making our own maple syrup. We researched what kind of trees you need and found 5 good trees in our yard. When there was a warm spell last winter, we tapped the trees and started collecting sap in buckets. It takes about 30-40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup. So we kept it in sealed containers on our front porch until we felt we had enough to start sugaring. Since I was recovering from my hospitalization, we had my parents over to help with the project. So we got everything set up outside: a large wood fire, plenty of comfortable seating, a large pot to cook it in, long-handled spoons, a strainer for skimming the sap, a timer and a thermometer. What we did not account for was the wind. It was cold, and windy. And it is very difficult to keep a wood fire hot enough to boil sap when the wind is blowing on it. Moving the project inside would mean risking a sticky coating covering everything in my kitchen from the steam rising off the sap. All the experts agreed, outside on a wood fire is the way to go.
Well you can imagine how long two small children, an infant and a woman recovering from illness can sit outside on a cold windy day. Pretty soon, my husband and mother were out there on their own. And then eventually, it was just Alex. After 6 hours of stoking the fire, he was the only one left who had any hope of making syrup. Out there in the cold, grumbling to himself he kept checking the temperature, skimming the foam and feeding the fire. His organized table of utensils had been ravaged by bored children, and there were sticky paper towels everywhere. After checking the temperature, he set the meat thermometer down on a log, pointy skewer sticking up so it would not roll away. He went back into the woods to find more dead wood, brought it back, stoked the fire, then sat down for a rest... On his log... Where he had left the meat thermometer sticking up. Feeling an intense pain in his tuckis, he jumped up to see what had bit him. He spun round and investigated the log... Nothing there. Turning, he felt another shooting pain. Knowing my husband, he probably shouted out, "Mother Monkey!," or, "Sweet Cup'n'cakes!," or possibly something less palatable. Reaching behind him, he felt the meat thermometer sticking out of his... well, rump roast. He grabbed hold of the sticky skewer, and gave a mighty tug.
In the end, Alex could not sit down comfortably for several days, but he successfully made a quart of syrup. After it sat on our mantel for several months, I decided to keep the meat thermometer, and sterilized it carefully.
Now, we are on to 2014 with high hopes that this year will bring some great changes. With renewed passion for living a simple, Godly, self-sustaining, healthy life, we are excited to kick off a new year of country life. We are hoping this year will bring us an abundance of home grown healthy food, a milking goat and maybe a honeybee hive.
My response when people have asked me why I stopped blogging, has been, "this just hasn't been a funny year." And it is true. 2013 was a very difficult year for me.
Leading into 2013, I had a dream that my house burnt down. In the dream, I heard God's voice, and he said to me, "this is going to bless you." When I woke up, I packed up the kids, took them to Target and bought the biggest fire safe the store had. I thought the only way a fire could be a blessing to me was if I secured everything irreplaceable. So I put all my journals, everything I've written to my children, every important document and an external hard drive with all out photos on it into the safe. And then I calmly waited for my house to burn down, that is after requiring my everlastingly appeasing husband to haul the 300 lb safe into the the house and position it where I liked.
Shortly after, God lead me to Hebrews 12, which speaks of everything being shaken so that only what is unshakeable will remain... And, "God is a consuming fire."
Then the year 2013 hit. I came down with a miserable stomach bug, feeling like I had been poisoned. Two days later, I broke my ankle. Two days after that I was hospitalized with pancreatitis (possibly the least humorous experience of my life). The night I came home from the hospital, my husband drove our son to the ER with an aggressive and terrifying allergic reaction. A couple days after that our breaker box fried and literally should have burnt down our house. After the pancreatitis, I had episodes of feeling like I was poisoned about every 2-4 weeks for several months. Our son battled a digestive illness of his own, and then broke his arm. Our bathtub cracked in half. In a mysterious incident, something or someone turned on a water valve under our house, which drained our well, which fried our well pump. Our van died on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere. Our chickens contracted some sort of contagious disease, and our flock was cut from 54 to 16. The tenant at a house we own trashed the place and left. I continued to be sick, feeling poisoned. I had every medical test imaginable, visited many doctors, pursued several forms of alternative medicine. I became obsessed with finding the truth about digestion, my environment and lifestyle and anything that could be poisoning me. I spent all our money on doctors, organic food, herbal therapies... Anything to be functional again. I felt like a horrible mother, exhausted and irritable all the time. It got so bad that every time I ate, it felt like my brain was swelling. I couldn't think, my vision was blurry, my speech was slurred and parts of my face went numb. I couldn't eat. I was losing weight and obsessively reading and researching trying to find the truth about foods, toxins and digestive health. I learned a lot. And mostly, my desire to live a simple life following God grew and grew. Finally the doctors ran out of tests to run, and suggested I try anti-depressants. I hadn't thought I was depressed, but the thought that it was all in my head, that I was somehow inflicting all of this on myself... Now that was depressing.
There is the skeleton of 2013, now here is the flesh. What an incredible year! God provided for every need. Never in my life have I experienced anything like the peace, the grace, and the overwhelming favor of that year. Everything was taken care of. I was taken care of. I never had a chance to worry about each thing before it was covered. Bills paid. Car towed for free and fixed for free. Friends coming into my home and caring for my family. Everything fixed within hours of being broken. What an amazing year! Certainly there have been amazing stories to tell. But until now, I have not felt well enough to tell them. And they are not the funny, light-hearted stories I like to share online.
I will tell one funny homesteading story from 2013. Alex and I have long had the dream of making our own maple syrup. We researched what kind of trees you need and found 5 good trees in our yard. When there was a warm spell last winter, we tapped the trees and started collecting sap in buckets. It takes about 30-40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup. So we kept it in sealed containers on our front porch until we felt we had enough to start sugaring. Since I was recovering from my hospitalization, we had my parents over to help with the project. So we got everything set up outside: a large wood fire, plenty of comfortable seating, a large pot to cook it in, long-handled spoons, a strainer for skimming the sap, a timer and a thermometer. What we did not account for was the wind. It was cold, and windy. And it is very difficult to keep a wood fire hot enough to boil sap when the wind is blowing on it. Moving the project inside would mean risking a sticky coating covering everything in my kitchen from the steam rising off the sap. All the experts agreed, outside on a wood fire is the way to go.
Well you can imagine how long two small children, an infant and a woman recovering from illness can sit outside on a cold windy day. Pretty soon, my husband and mother were out there on their own. And then eventually, it was just Alex. After 6 hours of stoking the fire, he was the only one left who had any hope of making syrup. Out there in the cold, grumbling to himself he kept checking the temperature, skimming the foam and feeding the fire. His organized table of utensils had been ravaged by bored children, and there were sticky paper towels everywhere. After checking the temperature, he set the meat thermometer down on a log, pointy skewer sticking up so it would not roll away. He went back into the woods to find more dead wood, brought it back, stoked the fire, then sat down for a rest... On his log... Where he had left the meat thermometer sticking up. Feeling an intense pain in his tuckis, he jumped up to see what had bit him. He spun round and investigated the log... Nothing there. Turning, he felt another shooting pain. Knowing my husband, he probably shouted out, "Mother Monkey!," or, "Sweet Cup'n'cakes!," or possibly something less palatable. Reaching behind him, he felt the meat thermometer sticking out of his... well, rump roast. He grabbed hold of the sticky skewer, and gave a mighty tug.
In the end, Alex could not sit down comfortably for several days, but he successfully made a quart of syrup. After it sat on our mantel for several months, I decided to keep the meat thermometer, and sterilized it carefully.
Now, we are on to 2014 with high hopes that this year will bring some great changes. With renewed passion for living a simple, Godly, self-sustaining, healthy life, we are excited to kick off a new year of country life. We are hoping this year will bring us an abundance of home grown healthy food, a milking goat and maybe a honeybee hive.