This is our living room of the old house facing south. The color looks green but it is very much a coffee ice cream brown. This is the only back bedroom of the old house on the south end. I am hoping to use it as a scrapbook/office room. Our beautiful wood stove on a chunk of granite that BJ and I picked out. Our favorite thing to do as a family is to huddle up around it and visit about our day! Can't wait to be in the house so we can do it every night. Anyone is welcome to come and enjoy a fresh cup of coffee and snuggle by it whenever you please! This is the beautiful kitchen. The counters and sink should be here in the next two weeks. Hooray.
I will go thru and try to explain each room so that you kind of get an idea of what we are doing. Keep in mind that the camera does not do the colors justice so you will just need to stop by or come for a weekend and use the guest bedroom and see the beautiful home that we have been truly blessed with! This is BJ and my bedroom there will be a trim board that runs between the two colors when all is done. Here is the boy's bedroom. They picked the color out themselves :) My mom says wear your sunglasses. We were blessed with so much help painting! Karl and Kristin did a wonderful job in the boy's room. Rachel picked pink for her room and I think it looks beautiful! I have lots of great ideas for this room and so does she. This is our attic that will be the play room and family room all in one. The ceiling will be car siding. I am looking forward to this room so much and so are the kiddos. This color is also in the upstairs bathroom as well. I will get pics as soon as we get the vanity installed. Here is the guest bedroom. Please feel free to stay anytime it works for you! This is the upstairs hall way, landing and laundry room. BJ sprayed all the primer and all the ceiling paint while someone rolled behind him to smooth things out. He was such a trooper! It is amazing how much paint falls on you. Thank you Kristin and Karl for sharing the sprayer that cut so much time! This is the kitchen/living room/ and office-homework nook. And last but not least the mudroom!
Here are a few pics of the upstairs after insulation was blown in! Now plumbing, heating and a little more electrical. These pics are a little late so there will soon be a post with all the drywall!! The upstairs is done with drywall. We are making great progress this week. Praise the Lord! This is on the west side of the upstairs. That is the roof of the old house and the hallway that enters the attic of the old house. Here is a dormer is one of the bed rooms. This is looking east at two out of the three bedrooms on the south side of the new part.
I have always loved Thanksgiving from the time I was a child, I so looked forward to going to my good friends and family's house to have all the wonderful food and a great day of hanging out with friends. Now, that I am older and a farmer's wife there is more meaning to Thanksgiving than ever! The pilgrims that celebrated the first Thanksgiving were giving the glory to God for the crops that he provided for them. When I was younger that was just a history lesson more than anything, but now I know how they felt, how important it was to them to have a crop so that they could feed and care for their families. We rely on the crops in the same, that we need good crops to provide our food, clothing and all other necessities. This year the crops were not as good as we were hoping but God still has provided so much and we are not in want! My father-in-law has said many times that "if we fill our shovel and give to the Lord, that God will give back to us and God's shovel is much bigger than ours!" God is so good and has provided for us in so many ways just in this year, that we cannot even begin to make a list of all the things we can be thankful for! I praise the Lord for the wonderful family and friends that He has given to us to help us grow in Him and to love us and care for us when we need encouragement and wisdom. I hope you all have an Amazing Thanksgiving!!
I found this poem in the High Plains Journal,
Lord, I am grateful that I am a farmer. I am glad to live close to the earth that You have made. I am happy to spend so much of my time in the open air, under the bright sun, the symbol of Your own justice and light. I am grateful for the rain and for the freshness that it brings, the rain, a symbol of Your rich and undying blessings.
I am happy to cooperate with You in Your work of continuous creation, by growing the food that men need to sustain life.
By Your almighty power You make grow seeds I plant. You fill the earth with minerals, You send the rain and the sun, the wind and the snow, and the dry, hard seeds I plant are raised to soft green life. You have given men great wisdom and cleverness to build machines that make the labor of the farmer much less burdensome.
Dear Lord, I am in Your almighty hands. I depend on You for everything. If I sow the seed and cultivate the young plants, and You do not see fit to give me a good harvest, I will be satisfied. You are the Lord and master and creator of all things. You know what is good for me and what would do me harm. I trust You, absolutely and without question.
I thank You again for calling me to a farmer's life. I beg of You never let me forget its great advantages of closeness to You, absolute trust and confidence in You, and the fullness and richness of my life, close to the earth that You have made and have so marvelously blessed.
Lord, I am grateful that I am a farmer.
Amen -Author Unknown
I have learned over the years of being a farmer's wife that I can worry about the crops and if they are going to grow strong and provide for us what we need as long as I want but in the end I have worried for no reason! All the worry in the world will not make them grow better! I have learned that it is so important to do all that we can do to help them grow but most importantly give them to God and trust that He will provide for us!
This is our precious Adalli that is no longer our "little" baby anymore! I truly cannot believe how fast she has grown. The more kiddos you have the faster they grow up. She is still our little joy, she plays peak a boo, claps her hands, waves and says bye bye, she says dadda very well, she loves to eat anything and she crawls all over and is pulling herself up onto everything! I would not be surprised if she is walking by her birthday. Her big brothers and sister still think she is the greatest and she feels the same way about them. We are so very thankful to have such wonderful blessings!
Once again I am behind the others on blogging! These are just a few pictures of Karl and Kristin's special day. It was a beautiful sunny day outside and we truly had a wonderful time celebrating the last of Mom and Dad Boenders' kids to get married. I thank the Lord every day for the family we have been blessed to have! I absolutely loved the flowers that Kristin picked out! I am sure you can imagine how many times Kristin's mom had to tie my busy little Rachel's bow. And we were all amazed that her hair was still pretty presentable by the time the wedding started, thank goodness for lots of bobbie pins and hairspray! Grandma and Grandpa with all twelve grandkids! Gideon is the oldest at 8 and Zachary is the youngest at about 3 months old. Our beautiful and handsome kiddos!
Adalli's first (documented) bites of Macaroni and Cheese. Needless to say she LOVED it! She is getting so big! She crawls all over, has 5 teeth, says and waves bye-bye and dadda, claps, plays "so big" and gets into all of her older siblings things! She is such a joy to have around and I thank God every day for the healthy beautiful children He has so richly blessed us with! This is a pocket bib that I was given by a friend. I always thought that the pockets were really just for show because I never thought they would actually catch anything. I was mistaken! There is a small pile of veggies and noodles in this pocket. I suppose that if you compare the amount in here to the amount on the floor it is pretty safe to say that it doesn't catch much but at least the food caught in here can be eaten, unlike the food that falls on the filthy floor! It truly amazes me how I can sweep every day at least 3 times but still end up with Adalli's knees getting brown from crawling all over. I blame it on the constant cloud of dust that seems to hover over my house on these dry days! I am so very thankful for the sunshine that comes from the dry days and in the end a filthy house is worth the crisp mornings and warm afternoons full of sunshine! O Praise the Lord, all ye nations: praise Him, all ye people. For His merciful kindness is great toward us: and the truth of the Lord endureth forever. Praise ye the Lord! Psalm 117
We spent a couple days in Illinois at Aunt Kay and Uncle Ben's house a couple weeks ago. We had lots and lots of fun crammed in two days! This is a picture of a tug boat pushing a barge up the river. Johnathon was really interested in it. We had a picnic lunch by the river and spent an hour throwing rocks in to the big river. It was 80 degrees and so beautiful! Ben took us all to a neat park in Clinton,IA and it had this really neat castle we could climb up and look over the river and the valleys. The trees were beautiful. Fulton, IL is a small dutch community a lot like Pella. We were able to visit the wind mill there. It was built then brought over from Holland. It was so neat to see how everything worked inside. They really grind grain in it, and we were able to watch it spin and feel the grain after it came out of the stones. I highly recommend stopping. The best part about it is, it was donations only so you did not have to pay for the tour unless you felt like donating.
Our beautiful wood stove on a chunk of granite that BJ and I picked out. Our favorite thing to do as a family is to huddle up around it and visit about our day! Can't wait to be in the house so we can do it every night. Anyone is welcome to come and enjoy a fresh cup of coffee and snuggle by it whenever you please!
This is the beautiful kitchen. The counters and sink should be here in the next two weeks. Hooray.
