This Week’s Miscellany: Vol. 70

Whew! Editing done! Formatting done! Now I just need to finish up the logistics of being able to sell our book from the blog and we’ll be good to go.

I cannot WAIT to share the book with you! It was so exciting to send the draft to a few friends this weekend and hear their responses. (And also get their great feedback. Apparently, books need a conclusion and you can’t just end on The Feast of St. Martin of Tours with no wrap-up? Duh.) But formatting the final draft and realizing that we have 125 pages of content and seeing it all come together….pretty thrilling. I’m hesitant to commit to a launch date because I’m NOT good at technology and I’m scared there will be glitches as I set it all up, but I can’t IMAGINE that it wouldn’t be released before Thanksgiving. And MAYBE even by the end of this week. Eek!

Speaking of books…

Book Love: 

 I’ve mostly been in a black hole of book editing this week, but I managed to crack the covers of Villette and The Domestic Church. I’m not far enough along to be able to tell how much I like them, though. What are you reading?

In the Garden:

Check out Daniel’s cute garden helper!

I received an email from a reader several days ago (if you’ve emailed me in the past couple of weeks, I have probably not responded yet because I’ve been deep in book edits and haven’t resurfaced, so sorry!) asking about the whole homesteading thing and I realized that some of you might have the wrong impression. Yes, we do grow a lot of vegetables and we eat ’em. We also have chickens and we eat their eggs. But we don’t grow ALL of our food. And we don’t live on a farm (although we’d like to someday.) We live right smack dab in the middle of the city (urban homesteading). The reader asked if it’s all as ideal as it sounds… Well, if ideal means that it’s really fun to have our kids harvest peppers for dinner despite our neighbors probably hating us for growing sweet potatoes instead of grass in our front yard, then yes. If ideal means that we wake on a completely self-sustaining farm to the sound of woodland creatures and a beautiful country view and send our kids out to milk the cow…then no. Definitely not that cool. We just eat food from our yard in addition to food from the grocery store. But Daniel’s really good at making what we grow into awesome dinners:

(Basil, peppers, greens compliments of Daniel’s garden. Mahi mahi and zucchini compliments of the grocery store).

Sponsors:

And I quick shout out to Toadily Handmade Beeswax Candles and Angela Thomas-Shaklee for supporting Carrots and making it possible for me to maintain this space. (Show them some love, Carrots readers!)

After a couple of really rotten weeks, we are soaking up autumn and I’m loving every minute of it. This little lass is getting so big.

That little crooked smile just slays me. And then Baby Sister is just stealing my heart.

I look at her and think to myself how WORTH IT every minute of puking and misery during my last pregnancy was. And how I would do it all over. A thousand times, to have her in my life. And I’m so unbelievably grateful for these kids I get to mother. Because I don’t deserve to have this job of parenting them. They are the most overwhelmingly amazing gift of my life. And it’s simply not at all fair that I have three healthy kids and incredible women I know and love have lost their children. I can’t wrap my head around it. I don’t understand it. And I want to beg your prayers for several very dear friends who have lost babies in the past few weeks. In addition to some very close “real life” friends, the MAJORITY of my close blogging friends have lost a baby in the past year.  Some have been very open about it, some have kept their grief very private, but all need your prayers. And please pray especially hard for a friend whose baby was diagnosed with a condition that may mean he/she will not survive outside the womb. I just found out while typing this post. Please pray for a miracle.  I know I can count on you to intercede for this precious little one!

Love,

Haley