Almost 5 months old with the 4 month picture

Alright, so I am not on top of posting his monthly pics...but here is our potato on May 30...on Monday he will be 5 months. He sure is a cute baby...very happy, very ticklish, very attentive (like in the above pic...it looks like he is saying, "Hey, wha happened???"), loves to chew on anything, and he can almost roll over. Dallas has a new nickname for him, and I really never thought Dallas would ever call any of our sons, "Pooh-gee", but he has and does.

The Recently Ingested Quote

There is a price to be paid for fabricating around us a society which is as artificial and as mechanized as our own, and this is that we can exist in it only on condition that we adapt ourselves to it. This is our punishment.

Philip Sherrard, The Rape of Man and Nature

I love horses!

Elias recently spent a Toys-R-Us gift card all on horses. The rest are borrowed from his cousin Jack.

Making horse stalls.

T.V. update

Our first week without T.V. was awesome! We did go to MaMa's house on Saturday and they were both glued to her T.V., but this rule is only for our house, so watch out if we come over to your house and all they want to do is watch it.

This week we will let them watch one 30 minute show on PBS. They really don't ask for it anymore. My house is really not clean but I would rather have my kids playing and healthy.

It Is Beautiful

Let every Christian be a gardener so that he and she and the whole of creation, which groans in expectation of the Spirit's final harvest, may inherit Paradise. If we Christian's truly treasure the hope that one day we, like Adam and the penitent thief, will walk alongside the One who caused even the dead wood of the Cross to blossom with flowers, then we must also imitate the Master's art and make the desolate earth grow green.

-Vigen Guroian

When I started planning our Spring garden, I chose to "donate" one of our three garden beds to Carrie so that she could plant flowers in it instead of having them solely exist in the transient pots on our back patio. For some deep, at-that-time indescribable reason, I wanted a spot in our garden that lacked functionality and, instead, was decadently, lavishly beautiful.

As I write this, the sunflowers are starting to weigh down their stalks in the back of that bed. The flowers on the left side, the first ones to bloom and the first ones you see when you look around the corner of our house, are a rich, radiant orange. The front of the bed has seven different colors of some unknown-to-me bloom. The Lobelias in the middle of that space are a blue that looks like part of the sky was captured in the pollen and then bled into the petals.

Almost every day I go outside and hope to see the tomatoes turning red. I'm usually disappointed. The beans aren't always ready to be picked. The corn is taking forever to ripen. However, that flower bed never lets me down.

Every single day, I go outside and marvel at those sixteen square feet. They are, simply put, beautiful.

In the scriptures, in the mystery of how we all came to be, it is translated from Ancient Hebrew into English that God observes something as "good" after he speaks it into existence. In the Ancient Greek translation of the same text (the Septuagint for you kids sitting in the front row), it is translated that God sees something as "beautiful" after he makes it.

What I find amazing is that, after he made humanity, God said it was "very beautiful". I'm left in silent awe at the thought that the Creator of the universe takes more delight in people than I take in the flowers of that garden bed.

We killed our T.V.

Yep, we finally did it. The boys, especially Elias, are addicted to t.v. I don't use that word lightly either. Dallas has been saying we need to stop t.v. for sometime, but I kept thinking, "How I am going to get anything done if they aren't watching t.v. or at least have it on in the background??"

Well, Dallas and I went to a Homeschooling Conference this past weekend in Houston and they had a great keynote speaker and in one of his talks he talked about getting rid of your T.V....how it robs our kids of imagination, play, and originality of thought. This is so true of Elias...whenever he plays, it is usually about a character from PBS or a movie and a subplot from a show. So whenever this "expert" said we need to kill the T.V., I was all for it. (Dallas loves to point out that it takes an expert for me to "get it".)

So, after explaining and apologizing to our kids for letting them watch too much T.V., we told them we were unplugging our set at home and not having it at all for a week. (thought this was smoother than saying, "we aren't having it EVER again!!!!!!!!!!!!) Yesterday was our first day. Dallas went to work and after Elias woke up he asked if PBS was working. I asked him if he remembered our conversation from the previous day and he said yes. He then started playing with his dinosaurs. It was actually a really good day. We didn't go anywhere and the boys did great...playing together (a relatively new thing), playing outside, doing our school, and enjoying each other. I am not a moron...I know there will be BAD days, and my house is a mess, but what a great start! We also started reading together...we started Charlotte's Web last night and ended the night with a really simple meditation and prayer with the kids.

Oh, and we are also cutting out high fructose corn syrup and processed food and anything with Propylene Glycol (found in anti-freeze) and Sodium Lauryl (laureth) Sulfate.

I will keep everyone updated as we go along.

Guitars and horses

Deacon's favorite seat to listen to Daddy play.

Forest loves listening to the guitar.

Elias riding Lacy, the new pony.

Brothers riding Lacy.