Mrs. Sheila

June 14, 2009

Just returned from a delicious breakfast with my husband, my dearest friend of all time.
How blessed am I to have him? He is wonderful as a provider, helper, comforter, and soul mate.
I know if I am lonely, I can just reach out and he is there. If I am scared, he uplifts me, if ill, he takes care of me.
He has helped me to raise our children with an iron fist and a gentle hand, one in the same. Wonderful children, who have grown up to be wonderful adults (well... mostly! Haha!)
He tends our garden and usually doesn't complain when I need help in the kitchen....
I am proud to call you, my husband, my love, my best friend....
Thank you for always being there, Dennis...
even if we don't speak, as long as I am in the same room with you, I feel a comfort and a love that I would have never known otherwise.
Now I truly understand the meaning of happiness.
And it is... being married to you.
I love you.

Just a small hello

It's been busy, busy, busy around here.  My two brother in laws came into town with their two beautiful wives and children.  Doug and I are in our own little world just loving our little neices and nephews while they're all here.  Especially the two newest edition...the TWINS.

We are two weeks into our planting season and already the peppers, lettuce, tomatos and squashes are starting to sprout up from the earth.  PRAISE GOD!  What an awesome thing to take part in....watching life as it grows.

We're still here living with my husbands gracious parents.  I'd be lying if I said everything was perfect.  I think when you take into consideration we all have been in tight quarters, you'd know this living arrangement, while hard, is an awesome experience that God needs us to go through.  So, This week, I've decided to enjoy where He has planted me and let go of the control.  Accept what cannot be controlled and look to the future.

We think we may have found THE HOME.  It may not be a homestead right now....all are either WAY too far from the hospital Doug works at, or need far too much work that we couldn't afford to finish the home.  So we decided to try for a smaller town outside the city limits in a cute town...nice place, and who knows, maybe the town will let us have our chicks for eggs.

In the meantime, I'll be in and out as usual.  With family here, we're trying to enjoy them for what little time we have them for and look forward to many memories spent with them all in the future.

Be Back in awhile dear friends!

Love

June 9th, 2009

Busy day, no pictures, LOL

I was so busy, I didn't have time for picture taking!  Actually there wasn't much to take pictures of.  At least with what I was doing. 

I finished planting the BIG garden today!  WOO HOO!  I am keeping a close eye on my squash however, because I am almost sure they aren't coming up... I used old seed and the pumpkins (same year seed) came up, but the butternuts are not up yet.  I may have to replant those...*sigh* 

Steve helped me in the garden some today.  We got a fence up for the cucumbers.  We figured we have 10 more rows of climbers to fence up.  We don't have enough fence, so we plan to put fence post and weave baling twine between the posts for the climbing peas and beans. 

Yesterday, while working in the garden, I was feeling flustered... nothing was coming up.  Two rains, two weeks and only about 3 plants of okra seemed to pop out of the ground.  Well, between yesterday evening and this morning... my potatoes popped, many of my wax beans, my snap peas...and much of the okra, a few cucumber plants and pumpkin plants... PHEW!  How impatient I am, but in just 12 hours... things were up and my heart was lightened.  God is good! 

I also finished the box gardens today.  I planted some huckleberries in containers (new to me).  I planted tomatoes, peppers, radishes and carrots in the boxes.  I also worked on the container potatoes which are now HUGE!  They are as tall as the can... they got away from me.  I buried up about a foot more today and will try to bury some more tomorrow.  It seems that I was stressing the plants so I quit for a bit to give them a rest from all that soil being dropped onto them. 

Now, I can focus on the weeding.  We actually got round one of the BIG garden done today as well.  The grass and weeds came up in their fury after that last tilling... Dh is actually letting me do a bit of layering around in the big garden!  I'm so excited!  LOL  I am testing lasagna style gardening in some of my boxes in the box garden.  But Steve didn't want me to do it in the large garden.  However we are going to test it with a couple rows to see if it makes a difference with weeding.  So I have 3 beds of onions.  The first bed Dh tested with some urea... which he didn't tell me about until tonight.  He was fertilizing the pasture and threw a handful on my one bed of onions and they are up about 4 inches taller than the other two beds... crazy.  He says it is natural... but I'll have to read about it before I fall for that one... he said Round up was safe, too... but after alot of reading... I am not using that anywhere near our garden again... likely not on our property either.... since we drink well water.  I am a researcher and my husband is a truster of small words when it has outstanding results... like killing all the weeds so he doesn't have to bend over and weed.  *grin* 

I understand that awesome thought that a product could make life so much simpler, but I believe that when God said we would have to work in the ground... it would be work... and the chemicals to eliminate work... are proving to be bad for us... just as not doing work is bad for us... God only knew what was best for us and I believe there are things we can do to make gardening easier... like the raised beds... the soil is so much easier to work with... crazy idea... but it works!  I can run my 3 tined hand tools through the soil and it is easy to work with... not so with my large garden... which is hard as a rock from over tilling!  I still have to get out and weed, I still have to work the soil, but it isn't back breaking labor.  It is work that is good for me! 

I also am going to work on mulching more in the gardens this year... hoping to put some more organic material back into the soil by mulching heavily ...as heavily as possible.... our garden is quite large and the amount of mulching materials on hand is limited to grass clippings and a pile of compost. 

Well, off to shower.  I've been in the garden since 11 am short of a meal break and a rest break... about 7-8 hours in the garden!  Whew!  It was a long day!

Warmly, ~Melissa

June 3, 2009

Life at Hatfield House is never dull....

Logan has went to Colorado for the summer, (and maybe more), I have been battling the never ending battle with Financial Aid at school, putting foods up has begun, and teenage girls in the house for the summer.... nah... never dull....

Logan is having a blast there with his Mom and brother. I think this may just be the break that our daughter needs and that Logan needs. They need each other, and the timing is perfect... but we shall see....

Financial Aid has become the proverbial thorn in my side.  It's an ongoing battle to try and get all this paperwork figured out! I thought it to be finally complete, and today, I get my deferrment for my school loans in the mail, stating that I had to "sign here and fill out this section..." All this would have been done if they had left it alone in the first place and let me fill it out and fax it the way the loan place told me to do.... now I have to sign here and fill out there, and take it back to them... again.

I put up 24 pints of strawberry jam today.

Then with supper tonight, we ate almost 1 pint with our warm biscuits! Yummy!

The girls are home for the summer. They don't really want to help with the housework or with cooking, but I figure it don't hurt em none....

We had a dickens of a hail storm here yesterday. HAIL! In June.. in Indiana! Geezy Petes!

I took a video of that... let's see if I can get that up here.

Hailstorm on June 2nd

New things around here include teaching the girls how to shoot. I want them to learn. Dad knows how, I know how, and it's time they learned how. As much as we're out and about, you just never know what you'll encounter! (I'm sure I'll be flamed for that one...yes, it's legal WHERE we were shooting, yes, the gun is legal, and yes, both parents are legal. Oh.. and the gun that is being shot is mine...)

Before anyone questions... no, we DO NOT condone violence, and we DO expect safety, which is why we are TEACHING the girls....

Target practice

The garden is coming along nicely (except for the hail storm damage), and the laundry is done yet one more time.....

So life is good.....

~Blessings~

Box garden is growing...

Box of four o'clocks and zinnias.

Box of wildflowers.

Box of sunflowers on upper left.  Box on right not planted yet.  Box in center is cosmos and dwarf hollyhocks.

Salad box.  Spinach is growing well and ready to start picking.  The lettuces will be thinned out and fed to a baby rabbit that my daughter found/saved from the dogs. 

Warmly, ~Melissa

Blossoms and Bees

The apple, pear, and plum trees have all lost their blossoms and are just putting on fruit.  I was a bit disappointed, but was pleasantly surprised to see another bunch of blossoms apppearing. 

Clover blossoms in the field. 

Strawberry blossoms (yes, my bed still needs more weeding).

Raspberry blossoms.

This is the best picture I could get of trying to capture a bee on a raspberry blossom.  This little guy was moving quickly from flower to flower and as soon as I could focus, he was buzzing on to the next flower.  I love these big bumble bees.  Below are a few of my mishaps with the bee.

You can see the detail in his wings in this one, but I wasn't trying for this view of him. 

This one is a bit blurry, as the hen moved before I could take another.  I am trying to get a picture of the bumble bee (I took dozens) and this hen is in the thickets of the rasberry vines just peeking out at me.  LOL  Must of thought I was nuts! 

Locust tree blossoms.  I am unsure of the variety, but the smell is wonderful... it competes quite well with the plum trees which are a bit more fragrant than the apple and pear trees. 

There's a bumble bee in this one... can you see it?  (you'll only catch his backside).

You can see him better now. 

You can see he is fluttering his wings to keep on the flower as he is upside down on the blossoms. 

As I was trying to catch the bee in the locust blossoms, A hummingbird came up quickly and I was watching and when I realized I should get a picture, it flew off before I could get the camera to focus.  *sigh* 

Anyways, I had fun exploring the yard.

Warmly, ~Melissa

A Blister a Day Keeps the Weeds Away

Today I got my official first blister of the season from weeding the garden.  Actually I don't believe I have had a blister on my hands for several years (tells you how much I weed my gardens!)  LOL  The blister isn't very large, it is just under my middle finger. 

I weeded the flower beds, my salad bed, part of my strawberry bed, then decided I would tackle the larger garden and I weeded about 1/3 of the garden.  I will let Dh work on the corn area as I am unsure where the rows exactly are... he didn't mark them and the corn isn't up, yet.  I haven't decided how to weed the other third of the garden as of yet.  That is my vine part of the garden where everything sprawls.  It's not all planted yet, either, so I sit and Hmmmm... and I still haven't figured it out!  LOL. 

I've hit the bad spots down.  Now I need to finish planting what is left to plant (another salad box of greens, zucchini, yellow squash, MN melons, watermelons, and huckleberries...plus a box of peppers, a box of tomatoes, and a row of tomatoes).  I also need to put some poles with baling twine to support the peas and beans.

After that, I hope to weed it thoroughly one more time in another 8-10 days.  Then we're off to campmeeting.  I always return to weeds that grew feet in height over our short vacation... I'm hoping that we can stall some of that.  Last year our efforts weeding before we left were not for vain... it really did help.  Get the weeds when they are small and they can't bite you in the butt!  *grin* 

Warmly, ~Melissa

Driver's Education...

Chelsea and Megan are taking driver's education together.  Their cousin is also taking the same class with them.  This is a common scene at our home this month since they've begun the course.  It is fun to see them apply themselves to the class.  They were nervous about taking the class, since Chelsea doesn't remember much of school, only having attended Kindergarten and 1st grade at school.  And Megan has never attended school at all, she's been homeschooled the entire time. 

The first week was a bit rough for them, but they have adjusted, and felt more comfortable.  They get asked lots of questions about being homeschooled.  Some are really strange questions like... does your Mom teach you?  Do you wear pajamas all day?  Are you really smart?    They've been accepted into the class for the most part.  Their driving teacher loved them, probably because they already knew how to drive for the most part... just needed help with some things like parallel parking (which I don't do well) and interstate driving.  Their classroom teacher has had fun with them and everytime they are split into groups they get asked by the kids more questions about homeschooling. 

One day they had a guest speaker and he was talking about emergency workers and he asked if anyone had family that were emergency workers... my girls with their cousin, all at one table, raise their hands and the girls thought it was so cute that their "cool joe" cousin says... yah, he's my uncle.  We all had a good laugh about it.  We love my nephew and are glad that he feels proud of his family.  He's had a hard time connecting with family over the years and it is nice when he shows some warmness towards family. 

So far they've passed the driving part of the course, now they have two more tests to take to complete the class.  They have to get 80% to not have to drive for the DOT.  70% to pass the class.  We will see, but they have proved to do well so far. 

Warmly, ~Melissa

ps... like the scooby doo t-shirt?  My husband loves anything with scooby-doo and the girls often ask for a shirt just to please Daddy.  The shirt says "Got Munchies?" 

May 24, 2009

Today I took my grandson to the airport and put him on a plane.

He has lived with us the past 6 years, and we have custody of him. He calls us Mom and Dad. He has been held when crying, been raised in church, praised for things learned and taught how to ride a bike....

We think he needed a break from us and needed to get to know his Mom. Our daughter. She had a few rough years, and we're hoping and praying that it is all behind her now. She has a decent man in her life, and appears to have straightened up enough to have a summers visit with her son she has been away from for most of his life.

It's hard, but they need each other. Please pray.

Then we come home and napped and spent the afternoon together as a family. Resting and watching movies.

And tomorrow will be a new day.....