Restoration..

Just a quick update. My husband is home after agreeing to some changes and we are working through things. It's actually been a really positive step in making some much needed changes to our household. My husband is seeking God in a way I have not seen for a long time and it is so encouraging to see!!! He has joined a group to help with the issues he struggles with and has been keeping in touch with some other guys, things I've wanted for him for so long but which took him getting to rock bottom to realise the importance of. I have also been thrown on God in a very deep way and have realised I need to make some changes too. Things are peaceful as we learn how to walk forward and we are in a better place in our marriage than we have been for a very long time. Thank you so much for the prayers and support!!!!

Matters of the heart!

This post will be short and sweet unlike my last epic. I am actually unable to find words to describe how I feel at the moment which for those who know me is a very rare thing and shows the depth of what I am working through at the moment. Some things have happened here in our home that have not been good and it is going to require an awful lot of work and many heapings of God's grace to get us through. My husband is presently staying with his parents, not sure when I will be letting him come home. Please pray for our family, epsecially the kids who are both very unsettled at the moment. Thanks.

Seasons of Change.....

I have so much to write about what's going on for us right now, but will start with a catch up of what the kids are doing. This is the result of Jaden's cave experiment. The epsom salts worked really well and we started out with a stalactite and stalagmite growing and by the end of 2 weeks ended up with a column, Jaden was thrilled!!!

We've also been out and about quite a bit. This is Jaden contributing to a group artwork at the hub where they are learning about Aboriginal culture, he is obsessed with tornadoes and decided that was something that would represent him well on the canvas. We've also been going to a chemistry course once a week which he's been enjoying, they made slime last thursday but I didn't take the camera.

Bethany is looking like such a little toddler now. She is getting a lot more adventurous with her walking and takes quite a few steps before falling now. She has just started wearing some new shoes this week and it makes her look so grown up.

She actually climbed up on some equipment all by herself yesterday and was very proud of herself, and she loved these balls!!!

So that's the kids, but how have I been doing? Well to be honest I have been struggling in many ways lately and have spent a lot of time crying. For a while I was just chalking it up to being so tired and hormones, but it's more than that, I have been feeling very burdened and overwhelmed and a little bit lost and trying to find what God was doing in the midst of it all. For a start I have been seriously doubting that home schooling is our path ahead. I know I've had those doubts before, and they were linked to my own feelings of inadequacy, but this has been different. Jaden just doesn't want to do school at home anymore. He is missing his friends and despite my best efforts to tailor work around his interests he is being un co-operative all the time to the point where just getting a page of handwriting done could take 2 hours of arguing. He has been so defiant and I have gotten frustrated to the point where I know I could easily snap and hurt him. I cannot be this child's mother and his teacher or we will end up hating each other.

I have been so worried though that if I gave up on home schooling that I was being disobedient to God and was a failure at what I thought He called me to do. I have been feeling miserable, that God had thrown me into the deep end and I wasn't coping and feeling like that made me a terrible Christian too. After trying for weeks to seek God on this on my own and just feeling condemned that I couldn't hear Him, I sought some prayer with friends and finally found some peace. God showed me a picture we had used on the camp of a woman with all these bubbles above her head that were overwhelming her, like juggling way too many balls, and that's what I feel like. I had thought that once all the ministry stuff stopped things would get better but the biggest weight of all those balls for me was the schooling and I felt like it was crushing me! I felt it was finally time to lay it down and that was ok.

Yes God did ask me to home school last year and Jaden really needed that time out. He was facing a new sibling for the first time and wondering if he was wanted as part of this new family and he was struggling at school with a teacher who was not suited to teaching an aspergers kid at all, but things are different now. When I thought about sending him back to school this year I felt the local public school was our only option but had no peace about that. I hadn't thought that the Christian school he had been at was a realistic option because of the travelling involved, with 2 babies that wasn't something I wanted to do twice a day. God had clearly spoken to me about the importance of Him being the centre of Jaden's schooling, so I took that to mean I'd better keep home schooling then, but God can still be the centre of Jaden's schooling at a school too, and with my nephew at the school now the travelling is not an issue because we can car pool or I could even just give my sister some petrol money and not drive there at all for a while once the baby comes.

So we have met with the principal and Jaden is going back to the Christian school next term and I have such an overwhelming peace about that. Jaden is excited and I am relieved, and so is my husband who was sick of coming home to a war zone every day. I don't know if this is the decision I should've made at the start of this year, but I know it is definately right for now!!! So that's one big change.

The next big change for us is church. I have been at my church for 13 years and to me it is home, but both my husband and I have been feeling for a while it is time to move on and I have found that to be an incredibly hard step and have been grieving just thinking about it. I have been through a lot at my church. I was 21 when I started going there and it was the place that nurtured me when I walked away from God and ended up pregnant, the place that loved and supported me through single parenthood and many years of a healing journey. The place that celebrated with me when I got married. The place that cried with me when I struggled with infertility and rejoiced with me over my babies. A lot of people have come and gone over those 13 years and of the 'young people' I used to hang out with when I first came I'm the only one left. But it has become very evident over the past year or so that my church is not my husband's home the way it is mine. It has always been my place and he has tried to connect with other guys but hasn't really found a place he fits and it has left him in a real rut, where church is just a habit and I see no spark or joy in him that used to be there when he talked about God.

So as a family we are starting somewhere new, where it will be 'our' church and not just mine. Hubby is the one who has decided where he wants to go and visit and I am happy to follow his lead. As heartbreaking as this is for me I know I need to do this for him and God has made that very clear. I am a little excited at a whole new church journey but also scared. I was especially worried about it before we sorted the schooling out because I felt like I was drowning and that if I left my biggest support system right now I would never recover. But without the burden of school weighing me down I feel like I have the emotional energy to walk this new path and my friends have made it very clear that leaving the church doesn't mean losing them. I still plan to go to playgroup there anyway so I will still see some people.

So everything is all about to change, new church, new school situation, new baby, and although I am still quite emotionally raw with all the stuff I've been struggling through with God I am feeling really peaceful that he does know what he's doing and if I keep holding His hand I will be ok. :-)

Camp!!

Here are some pics of the ladies camp I was part of organising for this past weekend. The place we stayed is Called Ararat Lodge but is actually called The Ark by most people. This stained glass window is above the main door.

If you look really closely you can actually see an image of Noah's Ark as part of the rendering, to the left of the main archway.

It is literally in the middle of nowhere and just surrounded by nature, this mist in the hills was the view outside my room on Sunday morning.

I was the overall admin and organiser for the camp, but thankfully was blessed with a team of fabulous ladies who actually ran the weekend, doing the talks and worship, organising creative activities etc, because as I suspected my hands were full with a little girl who was out of her routine, wanting to get into everything and not wanting to sleep!! So my job was the 'details' over the weekend. Like these goodies on each pillow. When I made the verses cards I prayed that they would end up with the right people and even though they were quite randomly placed by me I had several people comment on the significance for them of the verse they got, God takes care of the details!! :-)

The main meeting room became a walk in rainbow (well the best I could do with rendered walls that make it hard to attach anything to). I had various coloured materials draped over all the windows, this beautiful rainbow banner (I didn't make this one, sewing is not my strong point!!), and Bible verses on coloured paper on the walls (some of which took the render off with the blu tak when we packed up, oops!!).

This treasure chest was also full of various Bible verses, 'treasure' from God for his children.

This was the foyer area which became a chill out space to reflect on Christ's love at the cross.

This was our banquet night (The red and purple banners were reused from the girls camp I ran last year, they're done with cardboard, I really need to learn to sew!!).

I made placecards for everyone and little bonboniere gifts of more choccie hearts. The verse on the place cards was the same as the banner about being taken to the banquet hall and God's banner over us being love.

The feedback we've had so far has been that the ladies got a lot out of the weekend and were really touched by God. Most women had prayer ministry at some point and we also had a time on the Sat arvo where no-one was allowed to talk to anyone but God which was a really powerful listening time for a lot of people.

As far as how it went for me well to be honest it was a lot of hard work with Bethany and I came home exhausted. I missed a lot of what was going on in the meetings and at one point felt like being there at all was pointless and I should just go home, but even through all that God did speak to me about what's going on in my family at the moment (which I will talk about another time) and I am still processing that. For now I am emotional, worn out and ready to start pulling back more and more from ministry to save what energy I do have for my family.

1!!

My little bubba girl is 1 today, wow how quickly that year has gone!! We prayed and prayed and waited and waited to fall pregnant and after getting to the end of myself and just handing it all to God I now not only have a beautiful little 1 year old but also another bub coming to meet us in 3 months time which was such a wonderful surprise. Yesterday was party day with family and some friends coming round for afternoon tea to help celebrate our little princess.

We hired a ball play pit for the day but ended up getting heaps more use out of it because they dropped it off on Sat morning and picked it up this morning so we had it for 48 hours and both Jaden and Bethany loved it, especially when they had it all to themselves!!

Bethy was very excited by the presents, especialy this big package from nanny and poppy.

and the piano inside the package was a bit hit too!!!!!

The other kids loved the ball pit too, it was quite chaotic and crazy for a while there!!!!!

This is my niece Abigail having a lovely time.

Bethy LOVED the cake, she's never had cake before and polished it off very quickly!

This morning there were pressies from mummy and daddy.

Trying out her new riding horse, she's not quite sure about it yet.

And this is her new stroller/walker. She has actually taken steps on her own a couple of times in the past week but loves walking around with something to hold onto, so I'm hoping the stroller will prove more popular than my desk chair which she wheels around at the moment as the stroller is a much better size for a bub. :-)

A last play in the ball pit this morning before it got picked up.

My gorgeous kiddies :-)

Science.

This is an experiment that is part of the lesson we did on caves earlier this week. There are epsom salts dissolved in the water and it's all slowly dripping down the cotton to make a mineral deposit. This is day 2.

This is what it looks like today which is day 3, it's not all that clear in the photo but you can actually see crystals forming and the puddle is no longer growing because the edges have gone hard! We need to leave it and observe every day for 10 days so we're looking forward to seeing what the final result will look like!!

Jaden also started a 10 week science course today with about 18 other home schooled primary kids. They're looking at chemistry and today was about looking for changes and reactions when adding liquids to different powders.

In other news I am now famous.... ok not really but if you are a HEA member you'll see my family pic on the front page of the February newsletter. They did a little article on me cause I was the 1000th person to sign up. :-)

The top end.

So where in Australia are we 'travelling' at the the moment?? Kakadu and Arnhem Land with the help of the beautiful books above. We've been learning a lot about Aboriginal culture and about the nature of this part of Australia that we've never seen for ourselves.

We went on a nature walk to see what we could find in our own backyard, not quite as impressive as Kakadu but still nature all the same. One thing that did stand out was the different smells of different leaves. We had lavender, lemon verbena, rosemary and a geranium leaf, all with their own distinctive smells.

Jaden finished reading 'Tom Appleby, Convict Boy' and wrote up a fabulous book report about it. I was really impressed by how much history info sunk in by reading it as a novel through a convict's eyes. He kept coming out and saying "mum did you know..." and it was usually something we'd already talked about that had obviously gone in one ear and out the other, but through literature it stuck (yay for books!!!) He is now reading "The goat who sailed the world" also by Jackie French, about Captain Cook's travels. (He was meant to read that one first since Cook had to check Australia out before they actually sent the convicts here, but he'd left it a friends and we just got it back last week).

In science we're doing the unit on the lithosphere (the top 2 layers of the Earth), so since our next lesson is on caves we sat down to watch one of the 'Planet Earth' documentaries. It showed some amazing cave formations, one in the USA had spectacular crystal formations!! It's not open to the public and it took them years to get permission to film it. It took them days of crawling though to get to the 'chandeleir ballroom' which was breathtaking. Another cave in Borneo was much less impressive to me cause it was filled with the hugest pile of bat poo covered with crawling cockroaches, so gross!!!!! It always amazes me though seeing so much diversity and beauty on our planet how people could not see the hand of a Creator at the helm of it all and think it just evolved by random accident?????

Jaden is also excited that his science course starts this thursday. 10 weeks of chemistry with other home schooled kids, he's counting down the days (science is his fave!!) :-)

So what's everyone else been doing?