If you would rather watch it on Blip, here’s the link: http://blip.tv/file/1774653

If you prefer You Tube, here’s the link, as well:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GKFnqXrsUU

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Video: Men In The Kitchen

Ben (4 1/2)
He held his hand out and asked, “Is this my right hand?” His mother said, “yes”.
He asked, “Is this my right foot?” Mother said it was.

He ran out to play. A little while later, Joe (3 1/2) ran in from playing and held up his hand and asked his mother, “Is this my wrong hand?”

Eric (1 1/2)
His mom pointed out the different vegetables she had growing in the garden.
He told her she should plant meat.

Bethy (3)
Someone at church gave Bethy a drink of water. She told her mother later, “I didn’t like that water very much. It was too wet.”

Twins, Emily and Katie(4)
Anne (13) was fixing sandwiches for the twins (4) when she asked them if they wanted a half or whole sandwich. Katie said she wanted a whole. Emily said, “I want lots of halves.”

Ben (3)
While being kissed goodnight and during goodnight prayers, Ben asked his dad to pray for Jesus’ Birthday. When questioned why, he responded that he liked cake. His daddy said his Birthday was coming up, so Ben said, “Let’s pray for yours!”

Anne (5)
She was telling Gramma all about TillTill, her mother’s cat, and how old she was – she was so old, she was turning brown. She looked up at me and said, “Gramma, you’re turning brown, too!.”

Dennis and Ruth took the (then) 4 kids on a trip to Sacramento, California. It was their first experience of seeing palm trees. They said, “Look! Giant pineapples!”

Eric (2 1/2)
(You have to understand, Eric is a very compliant child) Eric was supposed to be cleaning something up with the other boys and he wasn’t doing his part. Ruth asked him if a spanking would help him do it. he replied, “Uh..uh..uh..uh..NO!” Ruth asked, “What would help?” He answered, “Pop!”

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Grammoo’s Notes

Below is a photo of my dad with me on the left, my sister on the right and our half brothers. He will be missed by many, indeed.

My husband wrote an email to friends and family. Here is a small part of that email.

While we had a time of sad parting at Grandpa’s internment and then latter memorial, you might be wondering how it’s possible we can be so lighthearted after a memorial;

I Thessalonians 4:13-18
But we do not want you to be uninformed, brethren, about those who are asleep, so that you will not grieve as do the rest who have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so God will bring with Him those who have fallen asleep in Jesus. For this we say to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive and remain until the coming of the Lord, will not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive and remain will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we shall always be with the Lord. Therefore comfort one another with these words.

It’s like I explained to Rase when Grandpa died; Grandpa laid aside the dead part, his body, so he could grasp real life, Jesus. Our body is subject to the curse of sin and has to die, but for those who have placed their trust and obedience in Jesus, their bodies die, but their spirits are made more truly alive in a way we can’t understand now because in Jesus;

Colossians 3:3-4
For you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is our life, is revealed, then you also will be revealed with Him in glory.

What is truly sad are the partings we make that are eternal because people choose to remain in their sins as opposed to accepting the grace of God available in Jesus to grasp what is truly life. Jesus said;

John 14:6
I am the Way the Truth and the Life, no one comes to the Father but by Me.

Fortunately, we will see Grandpa sooner than we think.

We drove home Saturday and arrived here at 2:30am Sunday. Sunday, we celebrated Eric’s 17th Birthday by having a feast of egg rolls! Here is a tutorial on how to make these.

Homemade Eggrolls

Today is catch up day with the checkbook, bills, and my forum. I hope to get back into the groove of things here.

Thanks for stopping by! Lord bless the rest of your day as you serve Him!

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This and That

Click on the link below and enjoy! Don’t forget to view the video of the moose!

http://www.allanne.com/hunting-2008-part-one

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Hunting, Come Take a Look

Horizon Wireless

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In Lieu of The Upcoming Hunting Season

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The McLean Household’s Presidential Endorsement

My boys did a lot of labor in order to bring this baby home for us. It’s beautiful! It’s a restaurant-grade Vulcan stove range!

This thing is mammoth! It needs a lot of cleaning up!!! It has 2 ovens, side by side. There are only 2 burners, which are in the center with 2 huge griddles on both sides. The splash guard comes with and includes a warming shelf above. The below photos is the closest I could find. It is iron like the old fashioned cook stoves, and ready for propane.

This is something we would have for years to come!

It means we get to go back to having hash browns! It means… we get to sit down and actually eat fresh pancakes together… or bake multiple pizzas at the same time, instead of a lot of waiting!

The biggest problem now is finding a place to put it!  We have to tear something up to install it.
It is very heavy! We don’t have a place to set it up right now. We’d have to maybe add onto our kitchen so it could be on a cement floor. Our kitchen floor would would not handle it!  We are considering waiting until we move, which we are hoping to do sometime in the future.

Thanks for looking!

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Show And Tell

An evening storm

Jayden

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A Few Photos From This Past Week

Too much excitement before 5am

My alarm didn’t go off at 3:50 like it was supposed to in order for me to take my oldest son, Ben, to work. I did awake to Ben knocking on my door at 4:10.  I hurriedly jumped out of bed and got dressed.  We left as soon as I got my coat and shoes on.

Thankfully, he started the pickup for us an hour earlier, which didn’t do a whole lot of good because the draft in the pick up is so bad, we shivered the whole time.  It was somewhere around 15°.

I got him to work fine, but when I came up our driveway, there was a huge snow drift that I got caught up in and lost it. I was stuck in the snow.

I went into the house. It was 5 am by this time and I was supposed to wake Dennis, anyway. I told him about it. I tapped on the boys’ bedroom door to wake up Joe and Eric.  Nephew Steven woke up, as well and between the three of them, they shoveled me out.

Dennis was up by this time and went out to check on things. He moved the [unstuck] pickup, then found that the door had froze open.  He couldn’t get it to loosen, so he headed over to the other pickup (the one with little to no brakes) and began to get it started.  Meanwhile, Joe took a screw driver to it and got it releasing fine. Dennis came back to mess with it and found that we had no tail lights or dash lights.  Evidently, we blew a fuse.  At the time, he thought it was wiring.

His car is in another city, the van’s battery is dead, the other pickup has no brakes, David’s van is at the motel with his folks. What was he to do?  Dennis starts to unthaw the older Chevy pick up, which has no brakes.  We couldn’t find the window scraper, remembered the flashlight is in David’s van…at the motel.  The good news is, though, that this pick up has 4 wheel drive, so off we went.

Our driveway goes down hill with a drop off on both sides, then heads back up with a curve in it, so Dennis, not wanting to get stuck, gooses it. I gasped, as I hadn’t gotten my seatbelt latched.  The three boys are in the back seat.  My nephew begins sweating.  Dennis stops! He backs up the driveway in the dark, then goes for it again.  He tells me he was carving a way through that snow drift for when I come home.  Okay… good…we need a path to get home.

We get to where Dennis’ truck is parked.  He set my brake. We all went into the little store because Dennis forgot his coffee and the boys and I went in to find a scraper. We go back out, said our good bye’s and pull out onto the street.  I almost immediately turn right and proceed onto the on ramp of the freeway when suddenly, this overwhelming cloud overcomes us all. Steven rolls down his window right fast and I pull over on the on ramp.  I tell the boys to (in the dark) run as fast as they can back up to the truck stop and catch Daddy… but don’t get hit! Remember? It’s about 15°. Nephew, Steven, is wearing only a sweatshirt. It’s black.  Joe is in his jammie pants and his hunting snow outfit, which keeps him warm and is hunter orange, so we thought surely Dennis would see them his headlights even shone on the boys, but HE DIDN’T SEE THEM!  They were waving at him and he drove on by.

Fortunately, before I left, I saw my mil’s cell phone sitting by our phone and took it with me, “just in case.” So, seeing the boys’ plight, I called my brother-in-law, who was snoozing peacefully at our house and woke him up. I told him what was going on. I didn’t know whether to move forward or what.  I didn’t want to burn something up! He finally told me to move a little while he was on the phone with me.  I did and it was fine!

We came on home.  No problem… until the driveway.  I did the turn and gassed it.  I aimed for one of the tracks Dennis made for me but instead, I must have caught part of the drift and it sucked me in. I gassed it more and made it up, up, up… then it died.  It wouldn’t start again, but we were home and all thankful!

There’s really more to the story. It has turned into a bit of an ongoing saga. Let’s just say, as it stands now… It’s a week later and the van is still dead, with one battery removed (diesels have two batteries), the pick up with no brakes is sitting up on our road, broken (probably a fuel filter), the yellow pick up has been pretty good…after we dug it out of a snow drift and in spite of it’s draft, and God is good to take care of us.

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Too Much Excitement Before 5am

In theory, it’s supposed to streamline and organize your family.

Reality is another thing…or is it?

This year, I sat Anne down with me to help me work out our schedule.  You see, the main reason we’ve been using the MOTH is because we have 3 networked computers and a handful of students and I needed a way to coordinate everyone doing their Switched on Schoolhouse Language Arts and their DIVE math CD in order to do their Saxon, not to mention all the “earned” computer time and educational “stuff.”

We got the schedule down.  It looked like a dandy!  It was beautiful!  I was pleased.

A few things have changed since last year due to Benjamin graduating and working full-time, as well as Anne taking on a new job of sewing hunting decoys for MT Decoy and Cabela’s.  (She does this from home)

The first day of our schedule arrives.  We are poised.  Mom is excited and motivated to take on the days ahead!  The schedule has been gone over, checked and rechecked.  By the end of the first couple of hours, it becomes very apparent something’s amiss!

I knew that something was wrong when Emily came to me and said, “Mom, you forgot my SOS.”  Ok.  I could deal with that minor oversight.  Another child came to me and said I had forgotten to schedule them for a bathing!  Hmmm  Later, Elizabeth came to me and said, “Mom, you forgot my SOS, but put me down for reading three times.” (Poor girl. Imagine that! What a rough schedule when reading is your very favorite thing to do in life!)

Of course, I got the usual complaints, “Mom, can you reschedule us to feed and care for the chickens at, say, 7:00?  6:30 Is too early.  “No, sweetie.  If I did that, then you couldn’t eat breakfast.”  “Mom, I don’t like that my ‘free time’ is scheduled.  It doesn’t feel free if it’s scheduled.”

Back to the drawing board…or in our case, Excel.  I work our MOTH in Excel.  Since there are so many of us, it seems to work well.  Some great ladies at the Titus2 forum, since closed to any ol’ yahoo, helped me out to learn how to monkey with the cells to get them to conform to my likeness. At least that is the hope.  In the past, I color-coded everyone, but this year, I am trying something new by color-coding times in which a person is on a computer in order to keep it all straight! It also helps that each of our computers have names.  My computer is fondly called “Mother” or “Mothership.”  Since the other two computers came from our office, we lovingly named them after the people who used them, “Darren” and “Valarie.”

I finally made the unfortunate decision to delete Abigail (1) and Jayden (2) off the schedule since we were hanging off the edge of the paper and I couldn’t find my tape to print more pages to put together like a puzzle.  I didn’t want to attempt “landscape,” for this old brain of mine just couldn’t handle further confusion.

Well, after a week of stumbling through my first draft of the final schedule, or was that the final draft of the first schedule… I sat down and revamped it once again.

Of course, there is an exception to every perfect schedule and our exceptions are those of Thursdays when one son has guitar lessons, every other Wednesday, two sons work in the morning, they just began a job each afternoon at a neighbors “until the snow starts flying”, Monday’s Daddy’s home, so we have to remember that we may not always follow schedule on Mondays…shall I continue with the “exceptions to the rule?”  Of course there’s sick babies, and sometimes, sick mama’s.

We used to have a “loose” schedule.  Up by 8 o’clock, chores and fed by 10 o’clock then start school until lunch, finishing in the afternoon.  When baby number 9 was on his way, I knew a few things had to change:  One, we needed curriculum that freed me up a bit, and two, we needed more order and discipline in our lives.  However, many other benefits have come from this schedule:  I can make sure we are doing everything Daddy wants us to get done in a day, if laundry is sitting there, I am assured it will be taken care of “in it’s time.”  You know the old saying, “A place for everything and everything in it’s place?”  Well, using this MOTH schedule is like that.  We could say, “A time for everything and everything has a time.”

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MOTH “A time for everything and everything has a time”