Happy New Year!

For those of you who know of the Astronomically & Agriculturally Corrected Biblical Hebrew Calendar

THE BARLEY HAS BEEN DECLARED AVIV!

The long awaited report has come from the Land of Israel, declaring that after a diligent search, Aviv barley was found in several locations sufficient enough for harvest in two weeks. Nehemia Gordon wrote; “On Thursday March 26th we found Aviv Barley in two fields in the Jordan Valley, several kilometers south of Beth Shean. Samplings from these plots of barley were between 70% and 90% Aviv or beyond. Much of the barley we found had ripened past the stage of Aviv.

Based on this there will definitely be sufficient quantities of barley that will be harvest-ready in two weeks time. Therefore, the upcoming new moon this last Friday night (March 27, 2009) will begin the Month of the Aviv and the new biblical year.”

Igloo Toy House

Judah and Serenity had a lot of fun making this toy igloo house with chunks of frozen snow and they used some fire wood scraps for the roof. They had a lot of fun and were very excited about it.

Moose by the Road

Just thought I would share this picture of a good size moose. Jason took this picture the other day on his trip to the dentist. A moose like this can go a long way to feeding a family for the winter. They are neat to watch too. They are amazing creatures that our God has created.

Blessings!

Teething Chew

There are many teething toys out on the market today. Often I wonder what people did before all these neat gadgets that made raising babies so costly in many peoples eyes? There is one great idea for the teething child that we will share with you. This is letting the child chew on the cob after having corn on the cob for dinner. Every one of our children enjoyed corn cobs very much. You can cut the corn off the cob with a knife and let the child eat the corn for dinner, if you feel they are ready for corn (Vision loves corn). This will get you down to the rough texture of the corn cob which seems to feel good on their teething area, rather than giving it to them with the corn on.  Here is Vision chewing on a cob. She has a good batch of teeth and more on the way. Even if you never use this idea, it seemed a good chance to post these pictures of Vision. 

~Blessings

Rice Cooker~Moose Dinner

I had thought about posting how much we like our rice cooker and how it is very useful. But then I thought I would post on it being used to make a yummy dinner. What better way could I show it but in action. I find it is very useful because of several reasons. The first is that is makes perfect rice every time! Second is that it is very simple and you don’t have to watch it at all. All you have to do is add rice, water, close the lid and press the button down. Then the light will turn RED for “cook.” When the rice is done in about 25 minutes the button will pop up and the light will change from red to ORANGE and it will set it’s self to a “warm” setting, keeping the rice perfect until you are ready to use it. With children and things going on, this feature is very nice. I can even make the rice a little ahead of time and then dinner is less hassle.

For dinner I fried some moose stew meat and seasoned it well with Nature Seasoning, garlic, and pepper. I also added some chopped onion and mixed bell peppers from our stash in the freezer (see our bell pepper post). Then I boiled a bag of mixed vegetables and added them to the pan of meat to get them out of the way and used the pot to make some gravy. I would love to say I made every thing home made (including the gravy) but sadly in the real world things don’t always work that way. In this case the moose did not render enough fat to make a good gravy. So I had to make a instant (powdered) gravy.  The instant gravy we feel is always lacking in seasoning so I jazzed it up a little with some garlic, pepper, celery seed, and onion powder. I was careful to not add any salt as the powder gravy has plenty already. When the gravy was set up I added the veggies and meat to it. Then bringing it to the table I removed the metal bowl from the rice cooker to serve out of. It makes for a little more room on the table. I know some people are really into fancy serving bowls and would be appalled at this (if you’re one of these, sorry) but they would probably would not like our “for good” bowls either.

Pictures of Children in 3rd month 2009

Here are a few pictures of the children just having fun the other day. Mercy Fire was napping. Jason and the children playing memory when he got home from work. The children showing their pictures they made with their boxes of crayons.  All the children together and a few pictures of  Vision O”YHWH. She is getting big FAST! She is 10 months old now.

Salad and Moose Steak

The other night I fried up some moose steaks from the deep freeze. When cooking moose they say you are supposed to cook it more thoroughly than you do beef. This kind of sad, to kill the meat like that. I hate to make shoe leather out of them, and if your not careful- done becomes leather in no time.

It seems to me an animal eating in the wild as YHWH our creator intended them would be better to eat a little on the rare side, than a beef that has “who knows what” added to it. If you can get organic (and believe it really is), I guess that would be great. Even if we all could afford organic meat and the like it would do us little good here, because our town has no organic offerings to be had. So we will stay with our moose or caribou as much as possible.

Jason made this great salad for us to go with the moose steak. It had a spring green mixture, baby spinach, cucumber, orange bell pepper and green onions. It made for a great dinner.

Toy Tents

We have gathered several to tents over the last couple years. The children have a great time playing in the the tents, pretending they are houses, churches, or stores. And one of the great parts is that they fold up very thin and take up very little room. In the cold part of the winter here it is hard to go out and play so it helps to have a few fun things up your sleeve to help make things fun. When we were kids we used blankets and chairs to make tents, we had nothing this fancy.

Icicles

We have had fun watching the icicles growing as things begin to warm up. The warm makes the the snow and ice melt and keeps re-freezing making nice icicles. This big one has been extra fun to watch. It is about 4 feet long.

Getting Dogs Ready for Spring

Every spring we give our cocker spaniels a good short hair cut. We cut as close as we can with the shaver (don’t want to have to do this again to soon). It is not the normal hair cut for a cocker, but it helps in the spring time here during what we call “break up” it is a very muddy time of year, as all of our snow will melt this next month (4th month) when it starts. Some snow may linger on the ground until 5th month but we always hope it will go away fast. The short hair makes them so much easier to keep clean, and keeps them cooler come summer. We shaved both Ms Kitty and Ms Monkey last night after putting the children to bed. It took about 3 hours to get them done. They always seem so happy after. Here are some before and after pictures.

Here is a picture of mother and daughter laying together.  In front of the heater (but then again they also liked that spot before they got the hair cut).