Quiet

I haven’t had many words for my blog this week. I’ve felt very quiet. I know it was partly due to having guests for three days straight last weekend. Got all my words out then. I’ll warm up again right now, because we’re about to have some of those friends over again tomorrow (Saturday) and Sunday. The same family that came to help Jeff with the fencing last weekend is coming again. They’re so good to us. And we have such good fellowship.

Some things that happened this week –>

Naomi found 1 remaining egg from a wild turkey’s nest (we had seen as many as 4 eggs in the nest). She’s got it in her bedroom incubating under a lamp. She prays for it every day. She asks us to pray for it, too. The incubation period is 28-days, but we don’t know if this egg is even fertilized. We also don’t know if we’re achieving the correct temperature of 105 degrees because the one thermometer we had at the beginning of its incubation broke on the second day.

Jeff just about stepped on a bunch of wild turkey chicks today out on our property. They were with their mom; she was very nervous. All the kids have been outside trying to observe the chicks. It is hard because our grasses are so tall and the chicks are so small. And also, Mama Hen is very nervous. I said that already, didn’t I? I sent the kids out with the camera, but they just couldn’t get close enough. Except for little stinker Mikah, who picked one up. Mama Hen got very nervous. This made Naomi so nervous that she couldn’t take the picture.

Mikah wrote a little story this week, when we were practicing for standardized testing. It goes: “I was in the forest and I saw a fox. It came to me. I was not afraid because God was with me.”

Today is very, very hot. The thermometer outside reads 102 degrees. Very hot for May 16th. The kids keep saying that they wish they were in Jeff’s parents pool or in Montana with my parents where it just doesn’t get this hot. Actually, I am worried. Naomi is feeling quite ill in the heat, poor thing. Earlier today, Haniya worked through her discomfort helping Jeff with fencing. He took the day off today so he could have a three-day weekend of working on it. And Mikah is working up a sweat, riding around and around the house on his bike. Every couple laps, he comes in for a drink.

I put 1/2 gallon jars of lemon zinger tea outside. Wish they were done and cold right about now.

When our friends are here, I have some projects in mind. That is, if the mom and I don’t watch Jane Austen movies all day! I have lots of them and my friend does not, so I wonder if I could talk her into a movie or two? If we don’t watch a movie and my friend doesn’t mind, I am thinking about two other projects. Actually, three or four. Here are the options:

1) Make liquid castile soap (my friend’s desire).

2) Make cold process castile soap. I have only ever done hot process, but I was given a box mold recently and would like to try cold process in it to see if the resulting bars are smoother than hot process bars. I suspect they are.

3) Finish reupholstering my couch! Gasp! Bet you didn’t realize I wasn’t done! This is the project I tackled the week before Christmas 2007. But the couch still doesn’t have a skirt to finish the bottom and I think it needs it. It also needs a bottom piece of material tacked to the bottom frame to gather up the unsightly threads that hang down. Also some of the staples are coming out because they are too short. So I purchased some deeper staples this week to beef up the stapling.

–OR–

4) Finish a quilt for a friend at church. The top is done, but the borders need to be added and then the whole thing quilted. Perhaps together, my friend and I could tie the queen-size quilt?

But, we may be so busy in the kitchen and/or so hot that we don’t wish to do any of it. That would be option #5.