Little Cowboy

Here is Stephen, our little handsome cowboy.
He dressed himself up in full cowboy garb, complete
with a vest, hat, boots and rubber-band shooting pistol.

Xiana loves her older brother

Lauren Ashley

Best and Worst Wednesday {Christmas edition}

Worst thing about this Christmas? It happened at the wrong time. I know it comes the same time each year, and I can't change that fact, but it was at the wrong time. With my Dad losing his job, the loss of my brother Levi, and my youngest four siblings having chicken pox, celebrating Christmas in the middle of it all just complicated things.

Best thing about this Christmas? Having Christmas in the middle of it all gave us a time to rest, most of the presents were handmade, the youngest four will be immune to chicken pox and we actually live close enough to visit family in Miss'ippi for Christmas. (In case you are wondering, Miss'ippi is how people with a real southern accent pronounce Mississippi.)

Best thing about living close to Miss'ippi? We can drive there in a day.

Worst thing about living close to Miss'ippi? It still takes 14-18 hours of driving, even though Google maps says it is 11.5 hours.

Worst thing about long drives? They take a long time and usually at least one person is very grumpy by the end of the trip.

Best thing about this long drive? Have you seen scenes in movies where the family is singing silly songs during a road trip? We don't normally do that, but as we got tired, rather than get grumpy Thomas and I got silly (extremely unusual for either of us) and started singing The Window by Trout Fishing in America. Soon we were trying to fit the words for The Bear in Tennis Shoes and Bill Grogan's Goat into The Window.

Worst thing about visiting relatives for Christmas?

Best thing about visiting relatives for Christmas? It is one of the few times we get to see them during the year.

Worst thing about making presents for my family? I wasn't able to finish them in time.

Best thing about making presents for my family? Since I couldn't finish them in time, my brothers will be able to help me finish making their presents (which just happen to need a lot of hands-on work).

Worst thing about writing this post? I am up at 11pm and extremely tired.

Best thing about writing this post? The fact that I am able to sit down and write it, even while traveling.

How do I do that? I wait until everyone else is asleep and snoring around me before even beginning.

Merry Christmas!

I'm Here Again!

 Some of Elder H's children at the Anti-TSA Outrage rally at the Capitol.

A perfect picture of Texas.

It has been quite a long time since I have posted, several months in fact. But what is done is done and here I am to start up blogging again. During this summer there were many things going on here in Texas. Here are some of them:

• Our animal count got up to 18 goats, 9 ducks, 2 geese, 2 cats, 5 chickens and 1 cow.
• I flew to Mississippi by myself to visit my Grandparents, Aunts, Uncles and Cousins for 2 weeks in April.
• We are surviving the longest recorded drought in Texas.
• We attended an Anti-TSA Outrage rally at the Capitol.
• We butchered 1 goat, sold 10 goats, and predators ate 2 ducks and 4 chickens, bringing our animal count down to 7 goats, 7 ducks, 2 geese, 2 cats, 1 chicken and 1 cow.
• Our family and two other families from church started a co-op with my Dad teaching Physics, and Mr. O teaching Singing and French.
• Thomas, Pierce and I were in the Filmmakers Academy for six weeks this summer, making one video each week.
• We are still surviving the drought and temperatures up to 100 degrees every day.
• All of us have grown.

There are many other everyday things which have taken up a lot of time and effort this summer, but these are the ones which I remember the most.

For the next three weeks I am going to be going on a trip to California to visit my good friends Mr. and Mrs. S (or Auntie M). Even though Texas is my home now, I lived in California longer than in any other place (4 years, one quarter of my life) and it will feel like I am going back to visit home. While I am visiting Mr. and Mrs. S we will take a road trip from California to Montana to visit Auntie M's family. I am especially looking forward to meeting E, Auntie M's niece, who I hear is very similar to me (or am I similar to her? In any case we are extremely similar to each other). I will be posting updates here for my family and friends while I am traveling.

Lauren

P.S. Well... I intended to start posting again during this trip, but alas, it did not happen. There were too many great conversations happening in the free time for me to even think of writing a blog post. What's done is done.

Catching Up

The sun set beautifully on our drive to TX

This move has been hard. Four years is just long enough to make some very good friends and leaving them is hard. As it got closer to the time to leave San Jose the move began to become real, not just something that we talked about. I began to push thoughts about what we were leaving out of my mind, replacing them with thoughts about what needed to be done once we got to TX. This only helped for a little while, but then the loneliness returned. In the middle of it all a godly woman called and told me to trust in the Lord, to not push everything out of my mind, but to praise the Lord for what He has taught me here. God provided exactly what I needed just when it was needed. 

Xiana loves being outside

The first week was extremely hard for me. We got into the house on a Thursday afternoon and Dad left before dawn the next day for a week long business trip. It was lonely with Dad gone and having no friends in this area. It made matters worse being deathly allergic to fire ants. I was afraid to go outside because their nests cover the ground in areas and wherever I walked big grasshoppers few up and landed on me. I was uncomfortable because of the heat and dirt. Just feeling generally ill about everything.

This sign was hanging inside the restaurant right above our table.

After the first week things have been getting better. We were told that a homeschool family owned a local restaurant, so we went there for lunch to meet the family. They told us that there are 40 more homeschooling families in our small town! We also were told about a church nearby (mostly homeschool families) which we have been meeting with the last couple weeks. 

A scorpion which Thomas captured

From the time we moved into our house we've been hard at work. Now I can understand the verse,

"...cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground..." Genesis 3:17-19.  I have been spending some time pulling up thorn vines, stinging nettles and sand burrs which are growing where I want to plant an herb and flower garden. Just this afternoon Thomas and I pulled up a wagon full of sand burr plants from our front yard. No walking barefoot here! Dad, Thomas and Pierce have also been building many things, including a pen for the guineas, a mailbox and a clothesline (Mom has pictures posted on her blog).

The butterflies are very tame

It is beautiful here. During the day you can just glance outside and immediately see dragonflies and butterflies everywhere. After it rains everything turns a beautiful bright green and yellow. You can see the milky way every night, though sometimes it is brighter than others. There are no street lights here, so instead of having an orange reflection in the sky all night the moon lights everything up in a pale white glow, just like in books.

Falcon, Thomas' guinea, died this morning

This place feels alive! If you go outside at any time of the day you can hear cicadas, grasshoppers, cows (from the neighbor's farm), the scurrying of lizards and calls of hawks and morning doves. Every morning we have to check our pool for critters which get in at night. So far we have found a turtle, toads, dragonflies, cicadas, scorpions, a mouse, a garter snake and even a rattlesnake in the pool. Deer and egrets are frequent visitors to our pond.

A Mediterranean Gecko

As for the intentional pets, we have 2 kittens and 10 guineas. There were 12 guineas, but this morning 2 of them died. My family is hoping to adopt a Great Pyrenees as a guard dog. Mom has never wanted a dog, but after visiting some friends nearby who have a Great Pyr and being told by multiple neighbors that there are a lot of coyotes around here, she decided that it would be best to get one to guard our future herds. The only indoor pets are Mediterranean geckos. We didn't mean for them to be pets, but they are cute and they get in the house anyway to eat the bugs, so why not call them pets?

A Great Pyrenees

There is also a surprise animal coming this weekend, which I am extremely excited about- you'll never guess... keep watching!

Lauren Ashley

Move Update

Every other time we have moved, people have said, "We will miss you." but this time almost everyone has immediately said, "Can we come with you?" or "I would love to come!" Many of our friends are seriously thinking about moving to the Austin/San Antonio area in the next couple years.

For those of you who thought we were already on our way to TX: My family is staying one more week in CA. We were planning to leave yesterday, but it worked out to be easier (and cheaper) to stay here longer. Why? It looked like the closing date for the house would get pushed off a week, when Dad called U-haul about a moving truck and found out that he could save $1000 by waiting a week before renting the truck (so many people are moving out of CA that they had a shortage of trucks). Not only that, but Dad's business trips also needed to be changed to different days, which fit in perfectly with us waiting one week before moving.

One of our friends told Mom about a map online showing migration within the US, county by county, in 2008 (the patterns have not changed much since then). Here is the exact link. I combined the maps of several San Jose-San Francisco counties to make one map and several Austin-San Antonio counties to make another. The red lines represent outward migration, and the black lines represent inward migration. It seems odd to apply the term migration to humans, but it describes the way we move perfectly. Go to the link and click on any major city and you will see that large amounts of people move in/out depending on whether they are liberal/conservative, concentrating in certain areas.

OUT

IN

I can't wait until we are done with the leaving and packing, and are on our way to TX.

Lauren Ashley

Latest News!!!

We are moving to Texas!

So far my family has lived in six different states, spending anywhere from one to three years in each place. Our four years in California has been the longest we have ever stayed in one place.

Now we are moving halfway across the country to Texas. And we have two weeks to pack.

Here are pictures of the house.

A pool for the hot Texas summer

15 acres, a pond and trees (plenty of room for goats and chickens)

Lauren Ashley

Guess Where I Am

Lauren Ashley

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