Courageous Joy

Tuesday Night –

Bible study was fun. I wish we had a bigger group but the discussion is precious. One of our ladies just moved here from Korea….AF flew her ahead as she is pregnant with twins. That’s sort of fun to watch unfold :::snort:::.

I baked 4 more loaves of bread. They looked great when I had to leave the house. Three of them flopped one of them is perfect…all taste great. I did the 7 grain again. I’m simply not sure what to do beyond this. I may have someone bake the same recipe at their house and see what happens…though I HAVE baked Adrienne’s bread recipe here and it flopped to so I’m not sure what that proved. I can’t even make my own dough enhancer to use because every dry milk that I find has BHT in it.

I made cookies this afternoon. Zander was my “big helper” but in actuality Arielle ended up baking the cookies. She’s getting quite good. This recipe originally called for sucanat and I’d used turbinado last week…..makes a lot of difference. They are much better with sucanat. I have some rapadura ordered and wonder what sort of adjusting I’ll have to do when using that.

One of my young ones had a dose of reality discipline today. I pair a young one with an older one for chores. They take turns with kitchen clean up. If not doing kitchen clean up then they do laundry and if there are no piles dried and ready to fold they do other chores I want done while the “kitchen crew” is at work. One child said, “I feel sick” right when it was time to begin. He may have had the flu? He may have not wanted to work? But I was not going to accuse him of lying and have THAT stick in his mind “Mom thinks I would lie”. SO….I excused him. I then called and cancelled two other appts he had for the day…both of which he likes. WE were also planning to go to the park for an hour and he missed out on that. I was not mean or huffy whatsoever…just explained that since he was to sick for work and school we couldn’t take the chance of exposing others around town. One of my older boys told me “Mom, I remember faking it once and missing out on all the fun – I’ve never done that again” and I didn’t know he HAD done that. LOL

I was totally frustrated with myself today. Zander is on a very strict diet which is helping with the list of letters after his name. This weekend we were given some yummy venison sausage….yum…and on our eating plan too. BUT the guys wanted me to BBQ them right away and didn’t want to wait for me to make hot dog buns….I bought some. Zander had one on Saturday…Sunday (and by afternoon we were noting changes)….Monday (I spent yesterday disciplining him and wondering if he’d eaten anything but couldn’t think of a single thing off his plan…TODAY at lunch Jamin pointed out his ketchup sandwich…gross but o.k. THEN he pointed out the bread that Zander was using….Josiah read the label….artificial flavor AND BHT….We’re still in awe of how much eating that stuff affects him…..and so maybe we can get this back under control and I will be much more careful to keep bread and buns in the freezer. BTW he was not eating sausage dogs all week…he was using the white bread for sandwhiches. The younger three still love white bread. I gave them a bottle of glue and told them to squirt that on the whole grain bread for the same effect but they didn’t go for it.

Mike’s read Narnia to us about 5 times. First just to me then to the girls (now living in WA), then with the older 4…then with Jared alone, and now he’s reading through it again with Josiah – Zander. This time we are reading it in Chronological order….we love that series and it gets better with each reading.

Mike just solved the “case of the missing sippee cups”. He found FIVE of them…..I’d better go help him scour them….