Summer Busy

I have been trying to find some time in the past couple of weeks to hop on here and share with you all. Apparently that is harder to do than I thought! It's harvest time and the food is pouring in. Thanks to all the rain we had this year the crops are going crazy and the fruit is juicy and big. 

Last week I ordered 2 two bushels of peaches and put them up for a total of  51 quarts.

We also harvested about 3/4/ of a bushel off of the one tree that produced this year. I took those after we ate as many as we could and made cinnamon spiced peaches. I have never done these before so I am looking forward to trying them in a few weeks. They smelled so good as I as putting them in the jars. 

We also went and picked blackberries to make some jam. 

The berries were beautiful, and the vines were so full. 

I also made dilly beans, canned green beans, garlic, and banana peppers. 

And lets not forget the tomatoes. I've lost count of how many gallon Ziploc bags I've put in the freezer to deal with later. I am so thankful to have so many this year. Last year with the lack of rain and disease I had to buy whatever I needed. I am looking forward to spaghetti sauce again after we ate out last jar in April.

Through all of this we have been doing school also. I normally don't have anything planned for August but due to all the moving, not moving, having the house on the market, etc. we felt we were a bit behind. So I have been using this summer to catch up.  It has been lots of fun as we are studying the Revolutionary war and finishing up our botany lessons. I am looking forward to our first 6 week break and a couple of field trips to Valley Forge, and  Brandywine Creek. I also have a post in the works about our curriculum for the new year starting on September 16th!  Now, I must get back to the kitchen the tomatoes are calling smelling.

The post that explains it all (or why we are still here)

Back when I stopped blogging there were so many things going on in our lives that I couldn't share because my husband had asked me not to and we were just trying to survive the days. This blog became one of the things pushed off the list of must do's, I even stopped taking pictures it was just to much. This is the story of why and the happy ending that God gave to us as a gift.

As you may remember my husband took a job in New Jersey about an hour and a half away when his company was bought out back in 2009. We spent all of 2010 deciding whether to move or not . Then we made a decision and I spent the early part of 2011 preparing the house to sell. We thought we would put our house on the market, sell it and move to New Jersey. Well, we tried that  for 6 months. We had so many people walk through and always got the same feedback. Beautiful house, but... It gets to be so tiring trying to keep it perfect for 6 months. We decided to take a little break. I even wrote about that here. 

In the meantime things at my husbands new job turned south and it was not a good environment to be in, especially tacking on a 3 hour commute round trip. He went through some seriously difficult things while working there. He started to look for another job and even a career change and move south closer to family. He spent the winter of last year applying to over 25 positions is various states. Then we heard nothing. Silence, not even a rejection letter. 

Waiting can be so difficult especially when emotionally drained by work conditions and being so far from home every day. God was the only one who got us through such a dark time. One day in March of 2012, after a particularly bad day at work my husband noticed an open position at a company 10 miles from our home. He applied and was hired in June. He quit his job in July and started the new one in August after a month of much needed vacation and a mental break. Despite the fact that we tried for 3 years to move out of the state of Pennsylvania, God kept us right here in the same house and with a job that my husband calls his dream job.

We laugh about it now and often when we run into someone we haven’t seen in a while they ask us what we are still doing here. We have settled into a routine now and moved past such a difficult time in out lives. Waiting can be so stressful and put such a strain on people but it only brought us closer together and closer to God at the same time. He is good even when you can’t see beyond the next day and I’m so thankful for all the lessons learned during that time.

So what’s next? Only time will tell, for now I am working on some projects around the house and we are still gardening and of course homeschooling takes quite a bit of time. It's nice to finally put down a few roots and be able to commit to things like volunteering at Church, hosting people for dinner, and planning things out a bit more than "just next week".

  I hope to share some of the projects we have done, updates on our garden, and just daily life stuff which I am so thankful for!