Rejoicing in the new year!

When I started this blog, about a year and a half ago, my hope was to use it as a means to generate some business for my sewing projects as well as keeping family and friends that are out of town updated on our family. This was right before I got pregnant with our fourth child, and well, sewing has kind of fallen by the wayside except for the occasional project for myself or special order for a friend or family member that is actually aware of my products. The demands of homeschooling have increased. Life has been quite full with four young children and the time it takes to write posts and upload pictures has been more time than I was willing to put into it, but now I am feeling like our days are finally getting into routine with school and just the general maintenance of life. While I still don't have tons of time, I am hoping to get back into the swing of some sewing projects as well as updating this blog more than once ever three months. Specifically, I am hoping to add in some posts about the realities of my life--striving to be a faithful, Godly mother and wife to my sons and husband.

I have been struct more recently on how easy it is for my mind and heart to give in to complaining! Life is hard and my days are long and full of disobedient children whose hearts are full of sin and most often, my responses to their sin, are sinful too!! How I long to be a mom who has gracious, gospel-centered words to lavish on her children, instead of condemnation and anger! I am praying for much growth in this area over the next year and I am hoping to begin to journal (and blog) regularly on things that I am thankful for so as to cultivate a heart that is not quick to dwell on complaining and grumbling, but rather to praise God even in the midst of long and difficult days. That I might be a woman characterized by joy to the glory of God!

Merry (late) Christmas!

I feel like it is only fitting that I post our Christmas pictures a month late, because well, all of my good intentions just seem to not always work out quite how I hope, but hey, I'm posting them right? That has to count for something! We had this brilliant idea to only make and send a few select Christmas cards to family and friends that don't have facebook and then to just scan the card and post it to facebook so that it would get out to more people than we normally would send cards to anyway and save us a few bucks at the same time. Our good idea failed miserably. The scanned copy looked very poor and we couldn't get it to rotate so that it wasn't sideways. So here we are a month later and most of the people that normally would receive cards from us didn't! So sorry! So anyway, here are the pictures that were included in our card. They are not in a cute little collage but are still cute nonetheless!

Hudson, 8 months

Elliot, 3 as of December 30th.

Caeden, 5 next week.

Owen, 6 years old.

The whole fam!

Love these crazy, cute boys!