Ah, regular life..I'll take it!

This past weekend we celebrated with a baby shower for the upcoming new niece coming into our family in the next few weeks.  We are literally over-the-moon excited to welcome her!  My kids have given name suggestions that are a combination of all the nieces' names joined together.  I don't know why they wouldn't want to use one of those!

Having not sewed for the longest time, it probably wasn't the wisest idea to make a blanket.  I shouldn't have done that, but I did.  I knew something would probably go wrong and it did.  I was so close to running out and buying something adorable, but after taking out 100 stitches, I finally finished - of course, the day before.  It turned out ok, a cute little blanket made of pink and grey squares in a whole bunch of different patterns.  She ended up getting multiple homemade blankets that day but each one was so different that it was fine.

We finally heard from our son overseas.  He had been out of touch for a long time and we sure hoped he was ok.  He had been out in the rural villages participating in 87 different cataract surgeries which he said was amazing.  Now he's working in another hospital near a river infested with crocodiles and hippos where black mambas are known to live.  He's super excited!  He feels his desire to be a doctor continues to be confirmed over and over.  I still find that amazing and hard to believe, but I can see it.  Today my daughter will hand in a story to a writing contest called "The Lemonade-Kitten-Africa Miracle Story".  She wrote an amazing story about our whole summer where the kids put all the lemonade stand and kitten money into a little jar that slowly added up to over $600!  We don't know how it happened, but we're convinced God multiplied the money all summer long and contributed to his going to Africa.

Meanwhile, the farm is slowly being put to sleep for the winter.  My husband "hilled up" the vines which we weren't able to do last fall because it was too wet.  The dirt gets piled up around the base of the vines and protects them from the cold.  It actually makes the vineyard look so nice and clean.  I'm not sorry to see them go to bed.  It was a lot of work this summer.  My modelling hand career is well over thanks to the vines.  We actually have a guy coming by this week who plans on buying the grapes, so Lord willing, we'll have a buyer for next year - first partial crop.  If we actually sell something next year it will have all been worth it.

Now we move on to fixing the multitude of vehicles that are down.  That'll be the project for the winter.  I don't know if we'll get to any house projects right now.  We are just trying to get the farm in working order and get rid of things that are taking up space in the shop.

Yesterday I threw away a ton of things I'd been storing for a LOOOONG time in our storage room, just because I couldn't part with them for whatever reason.  However, after realizing they were no good to me or to anyone, I just threw them out.  Very freeing.  It'll create more space to store what actually needs to be stored as opposed to storing for no purpose.  It felt really good, though I have a long ways to go.  It's harder and harder to do it in the cold and yesterday was warm, so I took advantage of it.

I continue to count my blessings, though there are many moments in the day where life is hard either because of kids or just the amount of laundry, but all you have to do is read the news and everything is quickly put in perspective.  Regular life with not as much drama can be a blessing.  I'm enjoying that!