Changes

"Wow" is all I can say. The past six months have been chock full of changes, probably too many to even include in this one post. Actually, it's been more the past two months than six, but it started with the home schooling back in December.

So in December Abby and I started homeschooling and it...was...AWESOME. I highly recommend it to any parent who's even considering it as an option. I saw immediate changes in Abby's attitude around the house/family and our mornings went from a level Orange to Green. She use to FREAK OUT every morning either about her paperwork binder or her clothes, as there is a high priority set on these items in regular school, but as soon as we took those two stressors away our home life was a lot easier. And I also noticed a huge difference in our personal relationship too. I wasn't the enemy anymore. Instead we were a team working toward a common goal and the daily lessons forced our communication and collaboration. She had fun learning and so did I! Who knew adding fractions was that easy? Plus, with all the other neighbor kids in school all day my three kids HAD to play together and it became natural to ask to play with each other instead of other friends. THIS I loved seeing.

Abby started 4-H in January and is in the completing stages of her "Eye Spy In The Kitchen" book/project now. We joined a group of mixed age girls in Newark called Forever Friends and they are all so very sweet. They are doing Cake Decorating as a group project and Abby has taken to baking/cooking like a duck to water. SHE LOVES IT! So the book she's doing is walking her through Nutrition, getting to know the basics of kitchen utensils and using recipes. She has to learn about a topic (say Calcium content) and then complete a recipe that corresponds (Making Fruit Parfaits). Now at the end we have to make a simple scrapbook of her recipes, what she has learned along the way and cook or bake something as a final project to be judged. She'll be interviewed about the things she should know from the book and her final recipe. She has loved the 4-H experience so far and I know we're both excited to see how she grows. OH and she did enter an optional contest through 4-H - The Dairy Foods Contest. She entered a Nutty Banana Pudding recipe, which was a basic banana pudding, but instead of using Nilla wafers she used Nutter Butter cookies. And she won 2nd place in her age group! :) She was super excited about the win and already has her ribbons displayed in her room. Bless her heart! Mommy is super proud of her too and I'm so glad for her to have the experience. She's growing up so quickly!

And more recently Scott has decided to leave the company he worked for and helped grow from the ground up to start an Architecture firm of his own. Scott Baker & Associates, LLC opened it's doors on June 1st and is going strong. This was a big leap of faith for us! At the beginning of the year we thought it was our desire to move out of this house and find a new one on more land, but after six months of finding nothing we wanted, our house not having much action as far as buyers and then a bid on our new build drawings came back too high...it was apparent that we should stick right where we are and see what happens down the road. We figured it would be a good idea to get real serious about paying our home loan down and getting out of debt (home loan is our only debt actually). So we met with our Accountant and discussed our finances and that was when he brought up paying our full tithe out of our GROSS income instead of NET. Here is where the step of faith really began. This jumped our monthly tithe by a few hundred dollars. It was significant enough to an eye opener but not too much that it would hurt. So we did it! Our pastor challenged us to give it three months and if we weren't blessed he'd give us every penny back. NICE! So we did...and exactly three months later, the week after we gave our third full tithe...like a tidal wave cresting Scott felt the urging to go out on his own with his work. It was fast and furious how it all happened and while it was a very scary idea there was this underlying peace that HAD to be God. More about all that too come!!

Time to get ready for church today and hopefully some TENNIS later with my man again. I gotta tell ya...it's so awesome to have my own personal coach at my disposal.