eat at home

Do you want your family to eat most of their meals at home?  How do you do that when you hate to cook?  Well, I hear ya.  We eat at home almost all the time.  Literally.  Like we go out once every few months.  Crazy, I know.  But I’m going to let you in on a couple of secrets for how I manage to feed my family at home all the time and do most of it from scratch. My first secret is a practical one I learned from my mom: Keep your pantry andREAD MORE

Ever think about training for and running a half marathon?  Yeah, me neither 😉  My running career has been less than illustrious to say the least and I was positive I did NOT have it in me to run a half.  But, as they say, never say never…. So, my running has looked like this over the years : Start training in March Barely get up to 3 miles Run a local 5K in June Take a couple more runs in June Quit until next March I could barely eke out the energy to completeREAD MORE

My baby turns 11 today!  How is that possible??  I don’t feel old enough to have my youngest child be that old!  And to put a different perspective on it- my youngest brother was 11 when my twins were born!  Crazy how time flies.  I had so many people tell me that when I was a young mom deep in the trenches of babies and toddlers, but I don’t think I really believed them? Anyway, I’ve been spending the morning reflecting on the day Lindy came into our lives and what my expectations were forREAD MORE

Ok, so technically, we do have chores around our house and farm, but the farm jobs are the only ones we deem “chores.” I have never implemented the “chore chart” idea or assigned anything to anybody.  I’ve often pondered it and once bought an expensive magnet chore chart system at a homeschool convention, but after attempting it for a week, I gave up and a couple years later, I sold it. Yet, my kids still help me around the house daily. How do we do it?  Everything I’ve read maintains that assigned chores are theREAD MORE

Ten years ago, our family experienced a sudden shift in our life journey that no one saw coming.  Our son became autistic.  There were subtle warning signs starting when he was about 15 months old, but nothing jarring that really made us question his development.  That’s for another post. But, the fact of the matter is, at age 3 1/2 our only son swirled into autism and our life was changed. I tend to gravitate towards challenges and I always like to be great at everything I do (or I won’t even attempt it- itsREAD MORE