A Relaxing Week with a Beautiful Lady

I had such a relaxing week this past week. Portia and Paris went on vacation to San Francisco and the Redwood Forrest with their dad.

 It was the perfect time for my mother to come up and stay with me for a week. I love spending time with my mother and we never seem to run out of things to talk about.  We talked about the bible and God's Word, we talked a lot about the details of my brother and fathers passing. We talked about the girls and homeschooling, about all of our family dynamics. We talked about her future plans and her BIG house or at least her house that seems so big as she adjusts to her new life without my dad.

 We went to Wal- Mart and she helped me to figure out finishing the afghan that I have been working on. We went to church and it was fun to hear her perspective on what my pastor was preaching on. We sat and watch tv each night as I worked on my afghan and she rolled scans of yarn into balls. We talked about politics and things that are going on in our government and it was wonderful to just sit and have good conversation with a like minded soul.......you know, they say, "the apple doesn't fall very far from the tree".  We have so much in common, oh we are very different in how our brains process things but we are very much alike in our values and world views.

This is my beautiful mother, Fran. I love her so much! She is truly the matriarch of our family and has been a tremendous stabilizing force in my life. 

We have always called her the energizer bunny, it is so hard for her to just sit, she has to have a plan and loves to have something to do so while she was here I took advantage of her expert organizational skills and we cleaned out all of the school curriculum and art supplies, sorted out some old books that I no longer wanted and reorganized both the school cabinet and the built in bookshelf.  This took us an entire day!

Then we spent half of another day cleaning and organizing the garage pantry/food storage. Dealing with all the empty canning jars can be quite a challenge but we put our heads together and managed to get everything into the cabinets. The girls other grandparents gave us several boxes of their old canning jars that they were no longer going to use so I had to make room for those too. 

 I discovered that with everything that was going on last fall with my brother and my dad that I really did not get as much canning or reordering of bulk supplies done as I had wanted to.  God is so good though, our freezers are full and we have plenty. We still have some squash and pumpkins left from last years garden in cold storage. I cook the pumpkins and feed them to my dogs, they love it!

Then we spent the last of our time together getting her ipad and iphone set up in a way that made sense to her. We even learned how to change your apple id and downloaded a few new apps. We had fun learning together.  I do soooo love my mother!!!

Father, break our hearts for what breaks yours!!!

I am reading this book to the girls in the mornings as part of our homeschool. What a wonderful story Katie Davis tells about the beautiful children of Uganda and the contrast of beauty, joy and love in comparison to absolute poverty, pain, sickness and even death that she experiences daily and how God has made her so aware of these contrasts that come in the very same moment and even sometimes the very same person. The plight of these children, who so many have lost their parents to HIV/Aids yet their hearts are so full of joy and their faces are filled with smiles. You can follow whats going on with Katie and her kids at http://www.amizima.org

Last year the Lord lead me to another ministry called Harvest Ministry, they have a wonderful missions ministry going all over the world and are the founders of the  "Guma Na Yesu" (keep with Jesus) children's center which is also in Uganda. What an inspiration Jon and Ann Dunagan are to me.

 

Ann also has an outreach ministry called Daring Daughters

There, she has available to mothers of teen daughters a mentoring e-coarse designed to help mothers (and Grammies)  train up our girls in the ways of the Lord and to have a heart of compassion for the broken and needy people of this world.  We have signed up and plan to incorporate this into our school curriculum.

 

Every morning, as part of our homeschool morning devotions/missions outreach we are praying for the children at the Guma Na Yesu and now also for Katie and her kids.....Last year we were able to support, in a small way, Harvest Ministry's orphans and this year we are praying that the Lord will open up doors and finances for us to be even more involved.

One very special blessing for me as a Grammy and as an educator is to see  that the Lord is developing a heart of compassion in the girls for the orphans, the poor, the walking wounded and the unevangelized people of the world.  My prayer is that the Lord will help me to instill these values in them, deeply, and not the values that society would put in them, caring more about themselves and whats popular and the newest style or whats "COOL" , shopping at the mall, give me, let me have, have you got mentality.....



 Makes me want to scream!!!!

sorry

but to teach them what's "COOL" is this.......

James 1:27

New American Standard Bible (NASB)

²⁷ Pure and undefiled religion in the sight of our God and Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained ^[a]by the world.

Father, break our hearts for what breaks yours!

Blessings to all and remember to keep your eyes on the Lord and He will keep your foot from stumbling ~Susan~

New Homeschool Cabinet and Deer Jerky

I have to say that I am so thrilled with this project. I love to take old furniture and fix it up and use it for what is was intended to be used for but I really get a kick out of refinishing a piece and re purposing it.

This TV cabinet used to be popular but most people have gone to the big flat screen TVs and they won't fit in these old cabinets. This make them easy to find and fairly cheap. I bought this one for $125.00 and when I was looking on line or in furniture stores for a new cabinet or looking into having one built they were $1,000.00 and up.

All I did was sand it down with my palm sander then paint it black and sand it here and there to distress it. (I like that look) Then I varnished it and let it dry.

My husband removed the inner parts that were for the TV and installed two shelves and a new back. The TV backs have a big hole in them for the old style TVs to stick out. We actually had a big enough piece of Masonite board left over from the cabinet I redone for Portia's closet a couple of years ago. It is just like this one but we installed a clothing bar and painted it a distress yellow/beige. It is very cute and make a really nice piece of furniture for her room.

It's big and black, I have a lot of black furniture in my house and I love it.

 

 It gets a little messy inside but as you can see it gives us three deep shelves and three drawers. The best part is that at the end of the day all the folders and binders go into the cabinet and the doors close and everything is out of sight............For us this is really nice because we don't have a class room.  We do school at the table in the dinning room or at the table in the family room which is really one big room along with the kitchen.

I feel so clever!

 

 

We also made Deer Jerky

 

My husband has made deer jerky for as long as I can remember something like 25 years. I have never really liked it much. (strong for me) This time I asked if we could do some experimenting with the brine recipe.

His calls for Worcestershire sauce and I never really like the taste of it. He was nice enough to go along although the whole while he is saying his recipe could not be beat.....:o)

 

The meat is cut into strips and soaked in a brine for 24 hours. Two of the racks we did in one brine and the other two the brine that he has used for so long. I used a mallet and pounded the meat that I was using in my recipe before it went into the brine. Then it is smoked.  All we have is a small Lil Chief smoker but it works pretty well. I was thinking that a nice one might make a great Fathers Day gift......My husband smokes beef briskets at Christmas time and it is absolutely the best thing you could ever want to eat! The whole family RAVES, I'm not kidding. Even the kids love it.

 This is Tia, she is my new dog that I got last year......she is really hoping that she is going to be looked upon with favor and given a little deer meat treat......

 The meat is place in the smoker and the wood chips are heated be the burner on the bottom. He uses three trays of wood chips and then the meat stays in the smoker until it is done.

Tomorrow he is going to smoke a pork roast to make pulled pork for lunches. mmmmm

 

Here are the brine recipes that we used

 

 

This is hubby's secret recipe:

 

4 C. water

                                                             1 1/2 C. Worcestershire sauce  (I had to look on the bottle to spell it)

1 C. soy sauce

1/4 cup Tabasco sauce

1 C. sugar

1/4 C. salt

 

 

Mine:

1/4 C. salt

1 C. brown sugar

1/2 C. molasses

2 C. water

2 TBSP black pepper

 

Of coarse He still thinks his is best but he did say that mine was really good.....Me? Mine was awesome!  So good, I really liked it and I was right, it was the Worcestershire that i was not liking.

Guess he better get another deer this year. :o)

 

Blessings to all and remember, keep your eyes on the Lord, he will keep your feet from stumbling!

 

 

Kennecott Copper Mine:

Today we went on a field trip to the  Kennecott Copper Mine

Jana, her sister Lara and I took all the kids to the world famous Bingham Canyon Mine.  The mine has produced more copper than any other mine in history. It is one of two man made objects seen from space. To give you some idea about the size of this mine, it’s three-quarters of a mile deep and more than 2 3/4 miles across at the top. It is the largest open pit mine in the world.

DeWayne acually worked for Kennocott for 5 years when our boys were babies and he drove one of these huge trucks.

This is what the face of the mountain looks like where the mine is.

This view is looking west from the Salt Lake Valley.

 

Kennecott Utah Copper: Take a virtual tour

Portia has been studying American History and this morning we watch a movie about the Statue of Liberty.
She ask me if they painted it.....I said I did not know. Then while we where at the copper mine in the visitors center we saw a model of the Statue of Liberty and we learned that she is covered sheets of copper and her green color is the nice patina from age that copper goes when it is out in the weather......so cool....I might have known this at one time but if I did I have forgotten.

Hope your having a wonder summer
Blessings
*Susan*