I won!!!!!!!!!!!!

Well, let me tell you, I am soooo excited. I entered Nicole over at Our Cozy Nests chandelier giveaway. Now keep in mind, I have entered Susie's giveaway, Boo Mama's, the Nester's and on and on. Too many to even count. And have never won. Usually as I am entering them, I am thinking I wont ever win this, why bother.

Well, Guess what!! I won!!

I can not tell you how excited I am. It is the perfect giveaway for my new house. I think it is going to go in the dining room, as we have a ceiling fan in there now.

Have a great weekend!!

Life and death on our little piece of paradise

We had a very trying Sunday around here......

I will preface with, we spent a lot of Saturday night preparing food for Sunday, as we were going home to church for potluck. Our church back home has potluck the first Sunday of every month and we haven't been since March and I was really needing the encouragement. I have missed our home church soooo much.

So when we woke up Sunday morning, needless to say we were on a TIGHT schedule. Well, everything was going along well until youngest daughter, Lindsey, went out to put her rabbit in his daytime pen and feed the chickens. Well, she went down to the chicken coop and she saw 2 dead chickens in the pen. She ran in hysterical. My honey went down there to find that there were 2 chickens ripped to shreds on the ground. I will tell you a little about our chicken set up. We have a pretty large chicken yard. Our coop is a large rectangle box that sits about 3 feet off the ground on posts. The coop has doors on it that can close the chickens in at night. However, we had not been doing this, as we had not had any problems and probably out of pure laziness. Well, Saturday night some predator dug under our fencing and climbed 3 feet to get in our coop and got some of our chickens off their roost. We are thinking it was a fox. We're not sure. We lost 7 chickens and 3 guineas. It was a devastating loss, especially for Lindsey, as these are her project.

On top of all this commotion, we went on to church and had a great day of like minded fellowship. I sooo needed it!! We got home around 5 ish and went down to the coop to see if all was ok. I looked over to the rabbit cage and did not see a rabbit. I wanted to be sick. It seems that in all the uproar of the chickens my Lindsey forgot to latch the pen. I can not tell you how upset she was. We were scouring the yard, the pasture, and the barn with no luck. I came in the house and just begged God to let them find Lindsey's rabbit. My husband finally came in and said he was going next door to borrow a post pounder to work on the chicken yard. I told him I would ride with him. A little ways up the road, I looked out in the neighboring pasture and saw 2 little white ears. I screamed for hubby to stop. He stopped in the middle of the road and jumped out to run across the pasture to get the rabbit. He screamed back up at the house for the kids to come get him. They did and all was well.

I praise God that He hears our most nonessential, ridiculous prayers and that He cares about the broken heart of a little girl. He is an amazing God and I praise Him in the devastation of death and the rejoicing of Life.

I am not getting a lot of great decorating done, as we are getting ready to start back to school. I am trying to get organized!!!

Have a great day!

A Simple Woman's Daybook entry August 4th.

For Today...

Outside my Window...

I am looking out the big picture window behind our computer desk at the freshly cut pasture, that my Ronnie worked furociously on Saturday. It looks great!!

I am thinking...

How much I love living here and being able to be at home and enjoy this place. Also, I have so much to do today and need to get off this contraption. (Keeping it real)

I am thankful for...

My family and the fact that my honey finds it important for me to be here in the home!!!

From the kitchen...

This is a tough one, as we are revamping our eating. We are really trying to watch our diet. I think I am going to be making dried beans and cornbread. Something light.

I am wearing...

Nothing special, a T-shirt and shorts. My hair is pulled up in a bun and I have my favorite Mudd ballet type shoes on.

I am reading...

I will be reading 1 Timothy today.

I am hoping...

That today is a better day than yesterday. Yesterday, we lost 6 chickens and 3 guineas to a predator.

I am hearing...

I have the news on in the background.

Around the house...

We have some cleaning to catch up on from the weekend. I also really hope to work on a home management binder.

One of my favorite things...

Yesterday, we went home to go to church. Our old church has potluck on the first Sunday of every month. One of my favorite things is sitting around fellowshipping with likeminded friends and watching my children just have a great time. I wish we could find that same thing here.

A Few Plans For The Rest Of The Week...

To work on really getting organized for the new school year. Hence, the new home management binder.

Here is a picture thought I am sharing with you...

I forgot to put my picture in first and then right my post. So my pic of the day is at the top. It's a picture of Ginger and her not such a baby anymore.

Do any of you know how to move the pictures after uploaded. I hate it when I forget to put them in first!!!

To view other great daybooks go over to Peggy's at the Simple Woman's spot. I really enjoy doing these and seeing what other's are doing.....

Help!!!! I need some great ideas.....

I wanted to pose this question to this amazing forum of creative people. This is my "easy bake" kitchen.

It is atrocious. It measures a whole whopping 8 ft. by 9½ ft. I am talking tiny, hence the name "easy bake". Well, we fully intend on extending the width from 8 ft. to at least 12 ft. However, that will not be happening right now or even in the next year. We have soooo many other projects, fencing being one of the biggies. We did not buy this place for the great house. We bought it for the location and the land. The view off my back porch is what I have always dreamed of and sitting out there in rockers with my hubby makes everything complete. (enough of the mushy stuff).......

Nevertheless, this room is truly driving me insane. It needs a temporary face lift to get us through to the permanent change. Here is where I would love your input, please!!!! I will tell you the things I love......

I love the ceramic tile floors and counter tops. I love the new black and stainless appliances. I even love, hard as it may be to imagine, the hardware on the cabinets. That is it.

Now tell me what changes you would make in here? This room connects to my newly painted living area. That door you see goes to my rather large laundry room, 8 ft. by 10 ft., go figure. I know the first thing is that that door needs to be painted but I am waiting until I know what I am doing in the rest of the kitchen. Would you paint the cabinets and what color? I love these.....

http://ratemyspace.hgtv.com/snc/ViewItem.aspx?pguid=6db6be3f-1720-4ba3-a081-999042c09b6b&itemguid=b0eba824-329f-49f5-87bb-473849692e0a

but I am not sure that my room is big enough for that color and what color would I do the wall. I literally mean 1 wall, as that is all there is to paint. LOL I want the room to still be light and airy, so it won't look any more like such a teeny tiny box.

Well, I am so eager to get some suggestions. Thank you all in advance, I so need the help and a starting point.

The Old Red Barn Co. giveaway.....

I can not tell you how much I would love to win this delicious quilt. It is so beautiful. The old red barn Co. is doing a giveaway and this is the prize. Run on over and check it out!!

Busy, Busy, Busy!!!

I am so unbelievably busy around here. Ronnie, my honey, has been off for the last 4 days straight and we have been doing a lot of outside work. We expanded our temporary chicken yard by another 50 ft. making it a little more permanent. We have also done a lot of tree trimming and landscaping. We have several oak trees that had not been trimmed. We wanted to get all of the lower limbs trimmed up so that you could cut the grass easily underneath them. They look soooo much better. We also cut down an unnecessary post on our back porch. The people who lived here had a porch swing on the post but we just felt like it was an eye sore and also a little flimsy. Ronnie will be making a bench out of it for extra seating on our porch. As you can tell, when he is home we just work like crazy. Between the two of us, we try to get all that we can done, while we have help. So today, I am catching up on laundry, making kombutcha, cleaning the house, really cleaning the house, and getting together home school books to sell on eBay. As well as, working on my list of home school needs for the coming school year. I just wanted to take a moment to check in and let you know I will be back soon with pictures of all of our latest doings.

A Little About Us.....

I decided yesterday that I don't want this blog to just be about all of the redoing we will be doing on our new home but also about the lives that are led inside these walls. We are a conservative Christian family. We have not always been, but God eventually brought us around to this path we are now on. My husband and I met when I was 16 and he was 21. We have been married for 18 years and have 3 children, Katherine 16, Lindsey 13, and Peyton 11.

We started our lives and marriage chasing the "American Dream", that all mighty dollar. My husband was a licensed Contractor and built custom homes. For the 1st 16 years of our marriage we lived in 13 different homes. He would build a new home and if it didn't sell right away we would live in it and decorate it and then it would sell. It was a fun life but very high stress for my husband and very 24/7. We lived in nice, new, and sometimes pretty large homes. However, they were always in a subdivision. Which is not a bad thing in itself but during all of this, our 16 year old Katherine, had been taking horseback riding/jumping lessons. She longed for a horse of her own. We, of course, were no where near that path or lifestyle.

Anyway, fast forward over the next few years we would come to grow closer to the Lord. We hadn't sold out 100% to Him, and I don't even know if we are there yet, but we were walking more and more with Him. I had been teaching in a small Christian school where my children went. My youngest was 4 and he was in the K-4 program there. I loved the job and the children but I felt like I was loosing a closeness to my family and my children. At this time, we started researching homeschooling and by the next year we were all home. It has not been an easy road but it has been the most rewarding road. I share a relationship with my children that I could not have even imagined.

Now, we will come up to May of 2004, my husband had been in the Army or Ms. National Guard since he was 17. He joined to get the GI Bill for college and stayed in because he loved it. Well in May of 2004 he got the call for activation to go to Iraq. He would be leaving in August. We had 3 months to finish houses, dissolve the business, and get settled. I can not tell you how heart wrenching and stressful this time was. We really didn't have time to really mourn the fact that daddy was going to be gone for 18 months because there was so much mourning of the life we were changing from. I know how selfish that sounds, but in keeping it real, that's where we were. Anyway, Ronnie left in August and I finished up the contracting of his last house, which was a nightmare of its own. Then we started our new chapter. The kids and I slowed down, and really got to take note of our life, and how we were living, and what was really important to us. For Ronnie and I it was a big time of reflection. We were renting a house in a subdivision in town and when Ronnie came home for his 2 week leave in June of 2005, we moved to another rental home in the country on 10 acres. We loved it. I would never have thought we would. Ronnie came home Dec. 28, 2005. He had no idea what he was going to do career wise. We did not want to start the business over from scratch. You do those things when you are young and stupid.LOL So he stayed on full time with the guard until he could get a job with a big construction firm as a Construction Manager. As he was full time, we really started to enjoy the fact that when he came home the job was over. He had a ton of time off and when he was off he wasn't consumed with the job. We were really enjoying life. We got Katherine her first horse and we got our middle daughter a few chickens. We were really seeing the life we wanted, unfold before our eyes. It just kind of fell in our laps.

So now to the present. My honey works full time for the Ms. National Guard. We make much less money. We are still homeschooling. We moved an hour and a half from our childhood town,so that he could take this job. The house we ended up buying is 20 mins. from a small town with a WalMart and about 40 mins. from a town with a Lowes and Hobby Lobby (the important places). We now have 3 horses, 24 chickens, 4 guineas, 1 rabbit, 3 barn cats, and 3 dogs. We see a chicken we don't have and just seem to keep collecting, it may be a problem. We live on a small acreage and hope to put out plenty of fruit trees and bushes, this next fall. It's a very slow and simple life, we are now living, but we love it!!!

So if anyone can come turn 180 degrees, we did and it was great.

There is so much more that I could fill in like all of the many, many things the Lord has shown us on the way but it would be so long and you would never make it to the end. Which you probably haven't now, but if you have, here is a glimpse of our life.

Giving Credit Where Credit Is Due....

I have had a couple of comments about the new look around here and I wanted to give out some credit. Kimba over at A Soft Place To Land , I can not even begin to tell you how much I love her blog, got a makeover and posted where she got it. She got it from Lena at Simply Fabulous Blogger. I got one of her free templates, of which she will load for you for free, and had a couple of customizations done. I had my signature added and my blog name done at the top. She did these things for next to nothing, which is soooo great for my budget. I can not brag on Lena enough!!!! She did a great job!!!

Busy week for some more before and aftering....

So, my super, wonderful hubby took the whole week off last week. My first thought was just how much work can I get out of him in one week.LOL He would not think I was joking when I said that.LOL Anyway, we worked on the house hard last week. Here was the first project. We painted 2 coats of Alexandria Beige in here.
Here is the before:

And here is the after:

It went from an off white color to a deep khaki. I was going to paint it the Nester's Tobacco Road but a dear friend gave us a full gallon of this Alexandria Beige (Benjamin Moore) and I quickly decided to love it!!! It goes very well with my budget. We also painted the cabinet Bright White. We painted the back wall of the cabinet the Alexandria Beige. I think it made a 100% difference. What do you think? I also accessorized the shelves a little more.


I would like to add a collage of family pictures with some iron work above them on the wall next to the built ins. Here is an example of one at the Berry Patch.



Then we also painted two coats of a creamy yellow in the hall bathroom. My girls have a sort of horse theme going in there. Which is fitting, as they have 3 horses and possibly 4 soon. I painted yellow because the tile and sinks are yellow and we don't want the expense of changing all of that out right now. We are working with what we have. We will be painting the door and trim bright white and change out that Hollywood light fixture. That fixture has 10 bulbs and will burn you out of the room.LOL

I wanted to kind of class up their horse them so I hung this painting. What do you think?
I also hung a lot of my pictures and decorations. I hung this swag over my hutch. What do you think of this wall color in my dining room? My girls love it and want to keep it but I just don't know. It hasn't grown on me yet.
We also did a ton of yard work trimming trees and mowing. It was a busy,busy, week and I think my husband was ready to go back to work this week and rest.LOL

Fabulous Flag Flying Fourth

Those unbelievable sisters Kari & Kijsa have a Fabulous Flag Flying Fourth going!!! They have challenged us to put up our favorite flags. I am a little late getting in on this, as we have been sooo busy but I could not miss this great opportunity!!!


My husband spent all of 2005 over in Iraq. This huge flag, that we put up behind our piano, flew over his FOB while he was there. It is soooo beautiful. I wanted to bunch it and drape it over the piano, but in case you are like me and didn't know, there is flag etiquette and my hubby would stroke. I also have his American Soldier Freedom Defender flag, award, and pins on top of the piano.

This is an eagle that my dad painted and gave me last year. When he gave it to me, I thought, what in the world do you do with a giant painted eagle. However, being the daughter that I am I took it and made it work. It now resides in one of my flower beds. I don't think it looks too hideous, especially when everything is blooming. On the corner of the garage, is a little statue of an army man. We have drug him around to all of the many houses we have moved to. Last but not least, my youngest daughter added the flags to the whole ensemble. We have a ton of these little flags that we had when my husband came home from Iraq. We had them lining our driveway when he drove up.

Being as this is such a meaningful holiday for us, I would love to share a ton of historical facts. However, we have been painting, putting up pictures, cleaning out, and so on and so on for the last 3 days straight, and I am soooo tired. I will leave you with two amazing sites.

http://www.wallbuilders.com/ We will be ordering several resources from this company for our homeschool history this year.

http://www.heritage.org/ This is just a great site for accurate American History!!!

I hope you all have an amazing 4th and remember that Freedom is Not Free!!! Please, remember our troops!!

P.S. Please come back on Monday and see what we have been up to around here!!!