Here is a sweet child that is in desperate need of a family to love her. She is only available for adoption until November. After that she will never be available for adoption. This situation is URGENT! Please pray for her family to find her. http://reecesrainbow.org/32733/bernadette
With dreams of adoption rolling around in our minds, we are in the process of cleaning and organizing our house. If we are to be blessed with a little one with special needs they will need their own space. We are also in the process of finding a like minded church. We are seeking one that welcomes large families and has similar theological beliefs and similar views on how the body of Christ should function. One of our main goals is to find a family integrated church. To our knowledge there are none in our area but we trust that God will lead us to the right one in His timing. We feel very strongly about finding a group of faithful Christians to worship with before getting neck deep in the adoption process. We will need prayers. Lots of prayers and we want the support established before we get started.
I know that I probably have a grand total of one reader but I am still going to put out a plea for prayers for the children at Reece's Rainbow. Please pray that these children will be joined with their forever families soon. So if you have a moment pop over to Reece's Rainbow and pray for these sweet sweet children.
I've been in the midst of trying to get my house organized and decluttered for the past few weeks. So I tend to follow a lot of Christian blogs on Facebook that give hints and simple tips to getting organized. One of those updates posted a link to a blog for the sweetest little girls on the planet. The Blessing of Verity. This is a blog where a sweet mother of 11 talks about her journey with Down syndrome. Her insight on the conditions in orphanages for these sweet children with special needs just pierced my heart. Then the thoughts began. Could we possibly give a good home to a child who so desperately needs love? (Maybe.) Can I just sit here and do nothing? (That answer is a resounding NO!) Then of course I start comparing myself to others and start listing all the reasons I will fall short but I always forget to factor in God and His wonderful Holy Spirit. I realized if we undertake this journey we will not be alone. So while I am still organizing my house and getting rid of all the stuff we simply do not need, we are walking a fresh path with a new goal adoption. Do I feel that I am called to adopt? The honest truth is I do not know. What I absolutely do know with no are of doubt is that this is the path I am supposed to be on. We are at the very beginning. So far it mainly has involved gathering information. Our main focus at this moment is finding a Church family that is supportive of families in general. We are seeking an Elder led family integrated Church that sees all children as blessings and will embrace and love a child with special needs. I trust that God is working in my life and my family and He will lead us where we need to go. I am excited about this fresh path that we are on and where it will lead.
This year we bought an entire cow for our freezer. I am really enjoying finding different ways to cook the beef. One of my favorite recipes is by Not Quite June Cleaver. It is a wonderful Sausage Stromboli. I always double the recipe as my family loves it so much. Also if I am in a hurry instead of stuffing the French bread, I will cut it into slices and broil it with mozzarella cheese and spoon the Stromboli mixture over the top. Very yummy! You can find the recipe at the following link.
One of the changes I have made in the last 2 years is more planning for our homeschool year. I always wanted to be a fly by the seat of my pants kinda gal but that simply does not work well for our family. We tried doing the boxed curriculum where you just do x number of pages in each subject each day but that did not work well at all for us. So I embraced the planner.
First I do an overview of an entire year. I use the method described in the following video to map out our homeschooling year:
On this page I put all the info for birthdays and holidays plus field trips or any vacations we might take during the year. It also helps me to plan out breaks too.
I get my other planning pages from Donna Young. I gather up the curriculum I plan to do for that year and just write out some goals. Some science and history we use over 2 years. I typically plan 2 weeks out at a time. I use one of the weekly planners from Donna Young. I have bought planners but none have really suited our needs and I just end up not using it. This is all still a work in progress. Starting next semester I plan to do at least 3 weeks at a time so that I am looking forward to what books we might need to check out from the library. It also gives me more time to get a suitable substitute for books that do not work for us.
During the school year I am blessed to be at home with my children learning right along with them. We have been on this journey for 7 years now. It has been trying at times but mostly it has been deeply satisfying. I feel like I really know my kids and the bond in our family is very strong. I would like to start a series of posts where I share about the curriculum that we choose to use. There are many different styles of homeschooling and I do not feel that any really describe what we do. I guess if I had to choose the closest would be eclectic. We use a lot of the resources provided by Ambleside Online. This is a Charlotte Mason/Living Books approach to teaching. I lean heavily on this method but like all things in my life I am not a purest. I also use some of the Waldorf methods of homeschooling and some of the classical stuff too. This year has been the first year that I have really spent time in prayer and asked God's guidance in our school year. It has made this year the best year so far. I am more at peace with my choices and the kids have gotten a lot more out of our school year than ever before.
Over the next few posts I will talk about the different curriculum that we have used over the past 7 years and what we are using now.
