Ultimate Blog Party {It's a lunch date at my place}

Hello. I am so glad you stopped by to visit! Whether you come often or this is your first time (thanks to the Ultimate Blog Party), I am glad to have you here. Please come in, I can't wait to visit and get to know you better! (Side note- this is what I love about blogging. Not only can I stay in contact with family and friends across the world- I can meet new friends too!)

In case we have never met before I guess I had better do some introductions... My name is Abbi and I am happily married to my husband of 12+ years, Ken. I am very blessed to be the stay at home and homeschooling mom of 4 beautiful children, Mara, Jonathan, Aaron and Megan. If you have kids I hope that you brought them with you as my kids would love to play with them!

Mara-11, Aaron-7, Megan- almost 5 and Jonathan-9

They can be pretty goofy and silly but they have a lot of fun and I am blessed to be their mother. 

 So lets send the kids outside to play in the tree fort if it is warm or they can play inside if it is cool. Come to our living room and have a seat and lets get busy visiting!

  What would you like to visit about? It is my goal in my visiting (whether face to face or on this blog) to say things that encourage and build up others and glorify my heavenly Father. I know that unfortunately I don't always succeed but that is my goal.

   I have many, many interests (I think the woman in Proverbs 31 did too!) so I am pretty sure we have at least something in common. Maybe you would like to talk about....

• Homeschooling. I would love to hear how you do it and what books you love. I enjoy talking about the ways we learn creatively, making the world our classroom. We love reading around here and I would be glad to show you some of the ones we have really enjoyed and learned from. It is always fun to get together with another homeschooler and pick each other's brains.
• Gardening. I would love to give you a tour but it is still to early to plant here. In fact there is still quite a bit of snow on the garden. I did just get my seeds in the mail though and I will be starting stuff inside right away. I like to garden very frugally and naturally. I love to be able to get a lot of produce from it with which I can feed my family. We do also enjoy having quite a few flowers around our place and we keep adding more fruit trees and bushes about every year in hopes of someday having a lot of our own fruits. I am also studying up on and dreaming of keeping bees which will provide both honey, wax and pollination for our garden.
• Living frugally. I very much enjoy getting to visit with other mothers and sharing tips on ways to live better on less. To me living frugally is not a chore but rather a really fun challenge! I love learning ways to spend less on food though the prices go up- and this while we eat healthier. I also love to challenge myself to make most of our gifts, save on electricity, go as long as possible without buying clothes or just go without shopping in general. So many ideas! I love to hear yours and I try to share mine so that we can all be better stewards of what God has given us.
• Making things. In fact, if you want, I could pull out my stamps and stuff and we could have fun making cards together.  I love to keep my hands busy and I also really enjoy looking around our home and seeing things that we have made ourselves. To me it makes a home so much more personal to have much of the furnishings handmade.I have many interests in making things- sewing, knitting, crocheting, floral work, basket making, quilting, painting and more... 
• Baking and cooking. If you ask me if I love to cook, "Yes" wouldn't be my first response. I have however learned to enjoy it by making it fun for me. I do a lot of cooking as we eat at home most of the time and I like to have homemade meals. What makes it fun for me is in the process of creating meals that are healthy for my family and help us to keep our food costs low. I also make things interesting in the kitchen by making up my own recipes, figuring out ways to use what we have an abundance of and by using our meals to further our education. I enjoy combining what we are learning in school with our foods. (Such as having ethnic foods to go along with our geography.)
• Raising children, being a good wife,natural health, organizing, taking care of the earth God has given us and not being wasteful or maybe we could even have a Bible study. There is so much to talk about you might just have to come back again!

Can you stay for lunch? Lunches around here aren't very fancy, when it is just us we usually eat leftovers but today I think we will have soup. Would you like potato, tomato or split pea? The potatoes we gleaned from nearby fields and the tomatoes I grew in our garden.  I think we will have some homemade bread too, would you like to slice it? And we have some ginger cookies for dessert. I hope you like them!
 

So, what would you like to visit about? I would love to have you introduce yourself and tell what your favorite topic is in the comments! I look forward to meeting you all! Thanks so much for visiting!