New Song: We have the love of Christ!

Shall hardship or trouble
Persecution of famine
Separate us from your love?
Shall shamefulness or danger
Or death by the sword
Separate us from your love

We are more than conquerors of these things
We are more than conquerors
With your love
With your love

Shall death or life
Or angels or demons
Separate us
From your love
Shall governments (between us)
Or heights or depths (beneath us)
Separate us from your love?

We are more than conquerors of these things
We are more than conquerors with your love
With your love

We have the love of Christ!
Conqueror of death
Creator of life
He has already won
What we're fighting
We have the love of Christ!
Redeeming me from the worst I've been
He has overcome
This storm we're in

Romans 8:28

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Typical Morning in the Life of the Minions

When I say minions, I mean my *almost* three year old and my fourteen month old.

6:30am my children wake up, and the moment I enter their room, they begin demanding smoothies.

I live to serve, so I make them smoothies. milk kefir, cocoa powder, vanilla extract, frozen banana, and coconut oil.

They chug them, and occasionally take breaks to scream about things.

Naisa is not sharing the babies. or the cars. or the books. or the kids hair brushes.

Then there is more screaming.

Naisa goes to the bathroom, but leave the door open, so I have to sprint to get Yonah before he causes an upheaval between Naisa and the toilet paper. It's a danger zone.

Then Naisa wants to poop, but only in a diaper and I want her to be done with diapers, so there is more screaming and crying, and me getting frustrated because she won't stop screaming while I try to explain that she is a big girl and not 'baby Naisa' and she needs to use the potty like mommy and daddy and not like baby Yonah.

I find myself making myself a smoothie with more screaming in the background. The iPhone didn't charge last night so there is no white noise for my husband to keep sleeping. When he gets up, he looks confused by the mornings screaming.

He eats cold oatmeal out the fridge and goes to ladle broth out of the crockpot and then goes to the sink and says, "I think I got all fat." and then spoons said fat into the sink.

I get mad and tell him to put it in a clear cup so he can see the fat line and he doesn't listen and keeps pouring fat into the now-greasy sink.

During this same time, I have found a movie on youtube call the Poop Song for two year olds and we are watching it over and over to get Naisa to get the idea.

I now have the poop song stuck in my head on repeat.

I make his lunch and feed Yonah cheese while he showers. Naisa begs to take a bath and I tell her she has to wait (did I mention waiting is hard for Naisa?)

We sit in the rocking chair and rock and snuggle and I tell her how much I love her and she says,"Yonah needs to be loved."
I say, "I love Yonah a lot, so I am giving you some love."
Naisa stops and thinks, "I love Yonah."

Yonah is very polite. When I hand him his smoothie cup later, he says an audible, "Thank you." That's pretty good, considering most of his words only make sense to him.

Naisa has now thrown all the toys across the room, hitting me and Yonah at least once.

There are now frustrated noises coming from Yonah, and I suspect he needs his morning nap.

Brown Recluse Spider Update, plus updates

We have been back in our apartment for two weeks now. I can't believe it's only been two weeks. It was an exhausting week last week.

We had to be out of our apartment that Friday at 7am, so Naisa, Yonah and I all spent the day at my mom friend's home, with her four kids aged 7 to 13. We had a great time, playing games, picking tomatoes, swinging on swings, exploring the house and yard. We also had dinner at their home and Naisa and Yonah had a wonderful time.

Then we went to the bed and breakfast, and had a great time.Naisa and Yonah got to help with the chores in the morning, which included feeding the pigs, milking the goat, giving the calf a bottle, and gathering eggs. Because we booked a room/suite that had no breakfast included, the eggs we gathered were a part of our meal. There was a beautiful swimming pond that had lots of hugh koi fish in it. We fed the fish several times. 

When we came home, we had to move our furniture back (We had to pull it all away from the walls so they could spray the floor boards. This took patience and energy. Our landlord asked us to clean, then pull everything away from the walls. All I could think was how messy it looked after we pulled the furniture away from the walls. We didn't receive any calls, so that was good.

I have been peeling and quartering and coring tomatoes that my neighbor has had excess of for the last two weeks. Now there are several gallon bags full in the freezer and I look forward to making salsa with them when the time comes!

I reread The Twelfth Imam, The Tehran Initiative, and Damascus countdown by Joel Rosenberg in the past couple weeks. They are a thriller series set in current time about a young CIA operative who is in Iran as a NOC when Iran gets the bomb and the Shia Muslims become convinced that this man performing miracles is the Twelfth Imam and is bringing end times.

It is very interesting and (as usual) I couldn't put it down. :)

I'm writing more music. The most recent song is called "Holding on to You" and is about how in whatever situation we find ourselves in, we keep taking time to be with God and meditate on Him and he keeps working on us. I love it.

Recently the top row of letters on Ben's laptop stopped working and we made the expensive decision to purchase a new computer. So now we have a new one!

My weight loss has paused, but I am losing inches, so I'm not concerned. I started attempting to space my meals out more shooting for four hours in-between meals, shooting for four meals a day. I'm trying to increase my raw milk consumption because it has calcium and I have a lot of calcium depletors in my life (#1 is Yonah). I also got gelatin at Lemon Street Market, and I am glad to have it. I mix it into my smoothies and it is very good.

Naptime is over, I'm afraid.

Week four of weight loss

I reached 203 today.
Down 1.6 from last week, and I feel good, and I don't feel like I'm starving and I get to have two tablespoons of coconut oil chocolate everyday. It's a good treat for me to have to make it through the afternoon.

I am using the old Points system from back in the day when I was on Weight Watchers. I was a pro. I still know all the points of everything.

I made a goal to be down 25lbs by the end of the year and also to workout with Ttapp four or five times a week. My goal weight is 165.

But I can tell you, but the time I am 190, I am going to be the darndest good looking person weighing 190 you've ever seen. Just sayin.

My body is healthier than it has ever been, despite my current weight. My basal body temperature is 97.8 in my follicular phase and 98.3 in my luteal phase. That might not mean much to you, but before I was pregnant with Yonah it was 97.0, sometimes in the 96.6 range. That's low. It is much better for you to have a higher basal temp because it means your thyroid is functioning. Yay functioning thyroid.

Also healthier: I am not using articifial sugars like I was when I was on Weight watchers in 2002-2007 and then all the way through 2013. And I don't crave sugars. Many things are too sweet for me now. Ben and I had some organic oreo cookies in the house and they were good, but they were too sweet, so he brought them for his employees at work and they loved them (of course). And I'm eating fat! Yay yummy saturated fat! That helps me feel much more satisfied.

This is one of those things that people talk about as a weight loss kicker after a baby is born: breastfeeding. Well I'm here to tell you that that is NOT the case for everyone.

Personally, I think that "bouncing back" after a baby is created and birthed has much more to do with genetics of the lady and her body's hormonal functions and metabolism than breastfeeding. Now that Yonah is nursing less I get to eat less, but I'm also less hungry. I like being less hungry. It makes weight loss more doable.
Let me tell you, I have to be intentional about every single pound I lose. I have to track my food intake, I have to keep working out, I have to weigh myself weekly, because I can't just hope that it's going to change and keep eating.

"Oh I'm going to weigh ten pounds less soon."
goes and makes more coconut oil chocolate

You know it's really funny where I lose weight first--and it has always been this way--in my chest. At least I know I'm losing weight--it's very notiicable.

Here's to keepin on, keepin on.

Yes you can!

Beef, Brown Recluse Spiders, cotton washclothes, cleaning, diapers?!

In order of the title.

We decided to go with the local smal scale farm, for the beef with the best price: $3.30/lb. It won't be until November, but that gives us time to also use the beef my parents have for us.

It is now August, and we have been in out apartment for eight and a half months. I had gotten used to it's quirks until recently--when a brown spider crawled over a washcloth crumbled behind my diaper stash. I caught it, put it in a jar and inspected it. I could see the fangs on this guy and that concerned me. I texted my slightly-more-arache-savvy neighbor that I had a spider for her to look at and then hit the internet. And there is was: brown recluse.

Sorry Marie

Nothing like getting the heebie jeebies from reading my blog, right? I stuck it in the freezer (cold, lonely death, I know) and told Ben when I got home and then we attempted to make a slight plan of action, which is actually hard to do. We bought glue traps. Our apartment is, for lack of better words, thrown together. There are holes in the walls where the cables for a TV come in. There are outlets that aren't covered. There are 1/8" to 1/4" gaps in the dry wall in the closet that I can see the insulation from. There are holes in the floor in the bathroom that open straight into the hallway below it (which is like an unfinished basement). Half of the windows do not work anymore. I could go on. I won't.

Let's add a couple of players to the game: Naisa and Yonah. My mess makers and crumb eaters. Ben's cousin Josh, who once was bitten by a brown recluse and spent a week in the hospital. What happens when you are bitten by a brown recluse spider: tissue damage--big ugly holes in your flesh. Do not Google it unless you have an iron stomach or you are a nurse.

Can you say conundrum? We also live in a big apartment building with four other apartments. I spoke to our aparmtent manager about ita nd they are willing to call an exterminator , but we now exist with another conundrum. The chemicals. I would love to say that eradication of poisonous spiders is a simple and safe task, but you can really go at it with a can of insecticide and attempt to wipe them out. But our concern, now is no longer the spiders themselves, but the chemicals that are used to kill the spiders. What is that going to do to our bodies years from now? Some companies use non toxic methods, some don't.

And if they don't do each apartment, who isn't to say that they will always be there, in the walls, sneaking out to kick my adrenaline in.

ok. that's all for now.

I've been knitting cotton washclothes like crazy. I thought about selling them. Anyone want to buy a cotton washcloth? $5each. lemme know.

because of the spiders, I have been cleaning the aparmtent more thoroughly, so it's clean every night and even when I am tired, I still try to persevere to finish. I finally got rid of some big piles that were in our bedroom and took care of some tasks that were needing to be done.

My bloth diapers have been giving me some frustration lately. They were ammonia smelling, so I took the time to strip them, but they still smell ammonia-y after using bleach and dawn soap. I am just going to have to break down and scrub every last one of the inserts with the dawn soap.

That's all.