Doodle Acres

Here are some pictures taken on the field next to their home:

The second day of our journey went very smoothly. After a 10 hour trip from Long Island to Michigan, the 6 hour trip from Michigan to Wisconsin seemed like a breeze!!! We arrived at Julie’s house and saw eight little heads peeking out of the various locations to survey their new house guests.

This trip was really a leap of faith for all involved. Julie and I “met” about a year ago on a Yahoo group called “Magnum Opus” for large Catholic families. We have enjoyed sharing our lives through that group, our blogs and email. However, meeting in real life (and spending four days in the same house with someone) is quite another matter. As an aside, Julie had someone tell her that I was probably coming to rob her and I had someone suggest that we were going to be their Halloween dinner!!! LOL But things couldn’t have gone better!!!

Julie and I were already friends but it didn’t take long for the children to become friends. They spent hours playing in the beautiful autumn weather with my children soaking in the rural surroundings of corn fields, hay bales, and chicken coops.

Chess was big hit with the older children. Lenny, the chess king in our family, enjoyed taking on opponent after opponent:

On Tuesday, we went to a corn maze with a tire playground, a great slide, and a corn bin:

On Wednesday we made our spoon saints:

And then had our All Saints Day costume party because we needed to leave at midday on Thursday (Lenny had a soccer game on Saturday morning at 9:30 - Praise God it didn’t get rained out. They played in the rain, winning 5-1 - Lenny scored two goals!!!).

These are Julie’s delicious cookies which are featured in Cay Gibson’s Christmas Mosaic:

Each night after saying the rosary (it touched my heart seeing the children praying together) and putting the children to bed, Julie and I enjoyed our time of uninterrupted conversation. What a joy this was - sharing our stories, our faith, our challenges, etc. God is indeed good and He demonstrated His goodness to us every day in so many ways!!!

More to come…

The children and I are headed away on a roadtrip tomorrow a.m. We are off to visit Julie in beautiful Wisconsin. Please pray for travel mercies. Hubby will mind the homefront and our tribe of doggies!!!

Just returned from seeing “Bella”. It is truly a must see for teens on up!!! Please don’t take the little ones. Wish I had time to tell you more but I need to finish packing and get some sleep!!!

See you in a week!!!

Len and I took the children today to the Long Island Fair.  The children had entered some projects into the fair competition and were anxious to see if they had won a ribbon.  My motivation in entering them was the six free tickets we received for their entries.  So Cheap-o mom was the real winner!!!

Hope won second place for this dress and honorable mention for her drawing.

Lenny won first place for this Lego creation.

Lily’s beautiful picture did not receive a prize and I was very proud of her for being a gracious non-winner.

We had a great time as a family and with friends from our home-school group.  Peter and Lily loved the carousel.

We all enjoyed the Rough Riders demonstration although Peter had the best seat in the house - on Daddy’s lap.

Today we attended our homeschool ice skating outing at an indoor rink in our area.  The majority of the participants are homeschoolers from a Catholic homeschool group that we recently joined.  My children and I were having a grand ole time each in our own way - Hope(14) and Lenny(11) skating with their new friends, Lily(6) with her new friend (they spend more time off the ice than on), Peter(2) trying to plead with me in his non-verbal way to release him from his cage (aka "the stroller"), and me(40) enjoying talking homeschooling, parenting, faith, etc. with my new friends.  Lily came up to me with an urgent request for immediate attention because she had an urgent need for her water bottle.  Unfortunately, this wasn’t a polite request but more like a mugging.  After trying to politely and calmly correct her behavior (after all there was an audience ) and then supplying the needed water, I smiled at her and said, "Remember this is Mama’s playdate too!!!"  I guess you could say that I don’t get out much!!! LOL

Today in an effort to continue my commitment to getting fresh air and exercise DAILY with my children, we visited a local state park and took the mile hike up to and back from the fish hatchery.  The hatchery which houses mostly trout did not have much activity given the time of year.  However we did see a few valiant trout trying to swim upstream over the waterfall/damn.  It seemed like an exercise in futility but we did see at least one that was successful.  This led my daughter Hope(14) to comment that she’d hate to live her whole life fighting against the tide.  This was a God given opportunity to discuss how we as Christians live a life that is constantly in conflict with the culture and world we live in - against the tide, so to speak.  I asked my 11 year old son Lenny what types of things he thought we were fighting against.  He responded that he felt that the world values things and pleasure over God.  I thought this was a good assessment. 

In our family, we readily admit that we are not "normal" and don’t strive to be.  When we are with some of our homeschool friends, we can feel less weird but we are weird from a worldly perspective nonetheless.  If you had asked me 20 years ago if I would have wanted my family to be normal, I would have emphatically expressed my desire for my children to be popular and accepted in the main stream of society.  I thank God that He has changed my perspective.  We now proudly "embrace our weirdness" - although Hope thinks Lenny "embraces his weirdness" a bit too much!!! ;o)   

Several things have me breathing more freely these last couple days:

My Christmas decorations are away!!! Yeah!!!  I still need to freecycle what we are getting rid of but I feel like I lost a whole lot of clutter (that’s a four-letter word in my vocabulary LOL) just by taking down the tree and the rest of the decorations.

I decluttered my bedroom!!! Do I hear another - Yeah!!! If memory serves, Flylady says that after a clean kitchen sink, a clean bedroom is one of the most important things you can do for your sanity.  There is a peace that comes from going to bed in a room that isn’t a defacto junk room.

And finally, I took the children for a walk at the local Arboretum for some much needed fresh air, exercise and interaction with nature.  This is something we did regularly a while back but have been scared away by ticks.  I know that may sound lame but in our area they really spread a lot of nasty diseases, not the least of which is Lyme’s disease.  But I’ve decided that we can’t live in a bubble.  I feel like all our moods improved 200% just by spending an hour outside.  Charlotte Mason, in advocating for a person’s DAILY need for fresh air and interaction with nature, was truly a visionary.