The link below is a part of a sermon I preached for a Christmas Eve service. I wanted to share it here once again.
Christmas
Saturday, December 22, 2012
A Couple of Changes Around the Homestead
Earlier this week I told you i would solve the lack of posts. In fact after this post I have several post ideas that I will share with you. For this post I thought you might be interested in seeing a couple of big changes that happened here... at least big for us. Let me preface the pictures by saying that we had a few reasons for the changes.
The first change is we moved the goat pen:
The old location of the goat pen was on the side of the yard toward the back. This location was near to the garden, it was also kind of awkward to get to for the purpose of unloading feed. We also will be moving in a lot more feed. We ended up moving the pen and the goat house to the front of the property and leaving the milking area there. You can see we moved a picnic table out there. I'm also going to be moving the horseshoe pit into that area as well, probably parallel to the garden.
We have another reason for moving the goats. You see, now that Ashley has a job and has some disposable income she decided to buy a horse. The horse she bought is the one that her and her brother were previously taking lessons on, so they knew her, they know her habits and they knew the owner, which happens to be a friend of ours.
Jake is spending a lot of time with Maggie and when Ashley isn't at work or running around town she does too. Jake is the one doing most of the care, keeping the pen clean feeding and other chores, while Ashley is at work earning the money to keep the horse fed. Below is what we see a lot of.
The first change is we moved the goat pen:
 | |||||||
| This is the old location. |
 |
| The area with the pallet fence is the goat pen. |
We have another reason for moving the goats. You see, now that Ashley has a job and has some disposable income she decided to buy a horse. The horse she bought is the one that her and her brother were previously taking lessons on, so they knew her, they know her habits and they knew the owner, which happens to be a friend of ours.
 |
| This is Maggie, she's a great addition to the family!! |
Jake is spending a lot of time with Maggie and when Ashley isn't at work or running around town she does too. Jake is the one doing most of the care, keeping the pen clean feeding and other chores, while Ashley is at work earning the money to keep the horse fed. Below is what we see a lot of.
 |
| I'm not sure who's posing the most, Jake or Maggie. |
Tuesday, December 18, 2012
Christmas Letter from the Homestead
I am going to post the Christmas letter my family sends out. In the days and weeks to come I'll show you pictures of some of the changes that has happened in the last five months.
December 17, 2012
Hi Everyone,
Can’t believe it is once again time to write our annual Christmas letter and it doesn’t help me that my brain seems to forget the dates from time to time (or minute to minute LOL) and so I am shocked when I once again remember that it is already December. I don’t know if it I am getting older or blonder …..or both. I do hope that you are all doing well. And I very much wish each of you could come sit on our patio and enjoy a cold drink while we visited for hours.
This year once again has flown by us but we are very thankful that God has taken awesome care of our family and taken care of all the details of life to provide for us.
This year has been a huge year for Ashley of course. On May 10th she graduated from nursing school. And June 27th she took her state nursing boards. June 28th she found out that she was officially an RN! And June 29th God provided her with her 1st nursing job!!! Was that all not a God week or what? She started as an RN at one of the local hospitals. She usually has 5 to 6 patients at a time. Each day is a new adventure and thankfully she has found most of her co-workers to be very help and encouraging to her which is very much an answer to prayer.
In November Ashley had the opportunity to fulfill one of her childhood wishes…..own a horse! Maggie is part Morgan/Quarter mix horse and is around 12 years old. Ashley and Jake have been taking horseback lessons for the last year and a half on Maggie so she isn’t a new horse to either of the kids but having a horse on our property is a new adventure for sure. Since Maggie moved in we had to move the goat house and pen over next to Maggie. For a few weeks they were in Maggie’s pen with her and they weren’t sure for the first few days that she was going to kill them. I didn’t know if I should protect them or laugh at them. By the way we are hoping to have baby goats in the spring which again will be a whole new adventure around here.
This year I have worked 5 elections(Every two months) and I have gotten Andy and Ashley to work most of them with me. The last two elections I had two full election boards which was interesting. And to make things even more fun my sweet Grandma fell and broke her ribs the day before the General Election, so after Andy and I turned in stuff that night my sweet husband dropped me off at the hospital so I could stay the night with Grandma. The next couple weeks for my precious Grandma as not only did she have three broken ribs but she mentally checked out…we later learned (thank the Lord) that she had a UTI. Praise God, now she is back to her old self and back in her assisted living apartment.
Jake turned 13 this year! How did that happen? WOW. He also completed a hunter’s safety course and in November Andy and Jake went deer hunting. On November 13th Jake killed his first White Tail Deer! Jake is in love with deer meat, so I am sure there will be many deer hunting trips in his future. He is already scouting for javelina he is hoping to hunt in a few months with Andy.
This week Jake had his cardiac checkup. We learned that even though Jake is looking good on the outside some of his cardiac numbers have gotten higher since his echo in January and there is a pocket of fluid the dr found on echo that he is wanting to learn more about. So Jake will be having a cardiac CT in the next few weeks. We would love if after getting the results of the CT the dr says “all is well, see you in six months”, but our prayer is that if there is issues going on with Jake’s heart that God would give the radiologist dr and Jake’s cardiac dr the wisdom and understanding they need to see and deal with Jake’s heart. We would so appreciate your prayers for Jake’s health, and for peace, wisdom and grace in dealing with it all.
A lot of Andy, Jake and my time this year seems to have been spent working around our property getting different projects done. It is amazing to me that in a little over a month we will have lived here 10 years! I have never lived anywhere more then 2 years at a time. I told Jake and Andy the other day that at one point we hardly walked around our property, now there is hardly a day that we aren’t walking all around our property. We are still working on our gardening skills and this year are trying to grow some winter crops…..not going as well as we had hoped so far but we are learning. Oh how I wished I learned gardening skills from my Great Grandma and Great Aunt and Uncle. UGH.
It has been an adventure around here this year for sure. And the one thing I am sure of is that it will be an interesting year next year and with many more adventures to come and that no matter what God will take care of us and provide for us along the way. We hope and pray that you all have an awesome year and PLEASE if there is every anything that we can be praying about for you please let us know.
I wanted to let you all know that Andy has a blog http://desertratshomestead.blogspot.com/ that he posts (ok, I just realized he hasn’t updated it in a while…..I will have to work on that) about different things we are up to if you would like to see what we are up to during the year. I have even thought about posting from time to time on his blog.
We hope you all have a very Merry CHRISTmas!!!
Love,
Andy, Trudy, Ashley and Jake
Hi Everyone,
Can’t believe it is once again time to write our annual Christmas letter and it doesn’t help me that my brain seems to forget the dates from time to time (or minute to minute LOL) and so I am shocked when I once again remember that it is already December. I don’t know if it I am getting older or blonder …..or both. I do hope that you are all doing well. And I very much wish each of you could come sit on our patio and enjoy a cold drink while we visited for hours.
This year once again has flown by us but we are very thankful that God has taken awesome care of our family and taken care of all the details of life to provide for us.
This year has been a huge year for Ashley of course. On May 10th she graduated from nursing school. And June 27th she took her state nursing boards. June 28th she found out that she was officially an RN! And June 29th God provided her with her 1st nursing job!!! Was that all not a God week or what? She started as an RN at one of the local hospitals. She usually has 5 to 6 patients at a time. Each day is a new adventure and thankfully she has found most of her co-workers to be very help and encouraging to her which is very much an answer to prayer.
In November Ashley had the opportunity to fulfill one of her childhood wishes…..own a horse! Maggie is part Morgan/Quarter mix horse and is around 12 years old. Ashley and Jake have been taking horseback lessons for the last year and a half on Maggie so she isn’t a new horse to either of the kids but having a horse on our property is a new adventure for sure. Since Maggie moved in we had to move the goat house and pen over next to Maggie. For a few weeks they were in Maggie’s pen with her and they weren’t sure for the first few days that she was going to kill them. I didn’t know if I should protect them or laugh at them. By the way we are hoping to have baby goats in the spring which again will be a whole new adventure around here.
This year I have worked 5 elections(Every two months) and I have gotten Andy and Ashley to work most of them with me. The last two elections I had two full election boards which was interesting. And to make things even more fun my sweet Grandma fell and broke her ribs the day before the General Election, so after Andy and I turned in stuff that night my sweet husband dropped me off at the hospital so I could stay the night with Grandma. The next couple weeks for my precious Grandma as not only did she have three broken ribs but she mentally checked out…we later learned (thank the Lord) that she had a UTI. Praise God, now she is back to her old self and back in her assisted living apartment.
Jake turned 13 this year! How did that happen? WOW. He also completed a hunter’s safety course and in November Andy and Jake went deer hunting. On November 13th Jake killed his first White Tail Deer! Jake is in love with deer meat, so I am sure there will be many deer hunting trips in his future. He is already scouting for javelina he is hoping to hunt in a few months with Andy.
This week Jake had his cardiac checkup. We learned that even though Jake is looking good on the outside some of his cardiac numbers have gotten higher since his echo in January and there is a pocket of fluid the dr found on echo that he is wanting to learn more about. So Jake will be having a cardiac CT in the next few weeks. We would love if after getting the results of the CT the dr says “all is well, see you in six months”, but our prayer is that if there is issues going on with Jake’s heart that God would give the radiologist dr and Jake’s cardiac dr the wisdom and understanding they need to see and deal with Jake’s heart. We would so appreciate your prayers for Jake’s health, and for peace, wisdom and grace in dealing with it all.
A lot of Andy, Jake and my time this year seems to have been spent working around our property getting different projects done. It is amazing to me that in a little over a month we will have lived here 10 years! I have never lived anywhere more then 2 years at a time. I told Jake and Andy the other day that at one point we hardly walked around our property, now there is hardly a day that we aren’t walking all around our property. We are still working on our gardening skills and this year are trying to grow some winter crops…..not going as well as we had hoped so far but we are learning. Oh how I wished I learned gardening skills from my Great Grandma and Great Aunt and Uncle. UGH.
It has been an adventure around here this year for sure. And the one thing I am sure of is that it will be an interesting year next year and with many more adventures to come and that no matter what God will take care of us and provide for us along the way. We hope and pray that you all have an awesome year and PLEASE if there is every anything that we can be praying about for you please let us know.
I wanted to let you all know that Andy has a blog http://desertratshomestead.blogspot.com/ that he posts (ok, I just realized he hasn’t updated it in a while…..I will have to work on that) about different things we are up to if you would like to see what we are up to during the year. I have even thought about posting from time to time on his blog.
We hope you all have a very Merry CHRISTmas!!!
Love,
Andy, Trudy, Ashley and Jake
Monday, December 17, 2012
Lack of Posts
I just realized that I haven't posted in MONTHS. I apologize to those who have followed me, this situation will be rectified soon.
Thanks for your patience....
Thanks for your patience....
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