My Aunt Kathy and I had been emailing back and forth and we started talking about our gardens, starting our seeds indoors, and composting.  One thing led to another and she surprised us by sending us a big worm farm that eats your garbage and turns it into compost!  The boys were ecstatic!  They counted down the days until our worms arrived.  The farm arrived before the worms, which allowed us to read the book that came with it.

The drain at the bottom is for the compost “tea” that the worms make…also known as worm pee!  You dilute it one part ‘tea’ to one part water and your house plants will love you forever!

To prepare the farm for the worms, we read the book, shredded newspaper for ‘bedding’, collected our kitchen scraps in our cute little compost bucket for a few days, and soaked the coir (the hair from the outside of a coconut) in water for the first batch of ‘bedding’.

Then the big day arrived.  We were suppose to get the worms in the mail last Thursday, but instead we received a phone call from the post office informing us that we’d need to go pick them up.  I went to pick them up and they couldn’t find them!!  I informed them that I had six anxious children waiting on this package and then I told him what was in the package!  Still no luck.  I went home and looked up the tracking number online, called the post office again, and someone finally found the package, which was sitting on a supervisor’s desk.  Long story short, someone made a personal trip to my house when they got off at 5:00 to deliver our worms.  They came in this little white pouch:

One pound of little red worms.  I read in the book that there are an average of 600-700 worms in a one pound bag.  I didn’t believe it…until I dumped them in!!

When these little guys arrived, they were as skinny as an uncooked spaghetti noodle.  Now, almost one week later, they are as big around as a pencil and loving their new home.  We have yet to receive a drop of tea, but they sure are going through the garbage quickly!  We’re suppose to feed them twice a week until our first tray is full and then leave it alone and let the worms work their magic.  It has a total of five garbage trays, but it takes several months to add all of those trays.  The trays have little holes in the bottom and as you add a new tray of garbage, the worms migrate upward into the new tray.  It’s actually VERY cool!

Here is what we put in our worm farm on a regular basis:

fruit and veggie scraps–minus citrus peels, which the worms don’t like very much

tea bags and coffee filters, along with the coffee grains and tea leaves

cream of wheat

oatmeal

left over scraps in the fridge that are no longer good enough to eat (as long as it doesn’t contain meat)

NO dairy

NO meat

The cool thing about our farm is that it doesn’t smell and doesn’t attract insects.  Josh says it will not come inside, but I don’t think he’ll have a choice when the hot summer months get here.  The worms will die if they get too hot.  In nature, when the weather gets super hot, worms can go deeper underground.  But in our worm farm, they don’t have anywhere to go to escape the heat.  For now, their home is in the garage.  :)

Thank you Aunt Kathy!  We love our worms!  If we get really bored this summer, we’ll take the top off and begin to name them.  Hahaha!

~audrey

I’ve known quite a few people in the past who regularly read 5 Psalms and 1 Proverb each day.  This schedule brings you completely through both books every month.

This month, our worship leader challenged us to “March Through Proverbs”.  Today, obviously, is the 16th, so I read Proverbs 16.  I found a great verse that I will be using a LOT around my house with my children.  It is Proverbs 16:24:

“Pleasant words are a honeycomb, sweet to the soul and healing to the bones.”

Did you know that scientific studies have been done to prove that harsh words can change the molecular structure of a living thing?  Scientists looked at a piece of apple, for example, before beginning the experiment.  It would look like a ‘normal’ apple under the microscope.  Then, they would sit and yell at the apple (I’m not joking.) and scream horrible things at it, speaking directly to the apple.  When they placed the very same piece of apple back under the microscope, it looked completely different; almost as if things had exploded, like a war zone.

How much more of an effect do our words have on our souls?

Duet. 30:19b:  “I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing; therefore choose life, that both you and your descendants may live.”

In two days, I will read from Proverbs 18:21:  “Death and life are in the power of the tongue, and those who love it will eat its fruit.”

I don’t know about you, but with six children constantly pulling me in six different directions, I have to consciously and constantly mind my words.  I want to be speaking life and blessings into my children.

~audrey

Last week was a whirlwind of sick kids, drama, and a lack of sleep.

After Jesse fully recovered, Owen came down with the same 104 fever on Thursday.  He woke up with it and it never really broke all day.

I still don’t know how I did it, but I managed to spend most of the day in the bed with him.  Owen curled up in my bed after breakfast and I put a movie in for him.  I usually put the other two babies down for a nap between 10 and 10:30am.  On a really good day they can sleep for close to three hours.  Thursday was one of those days.  I only got up to move loads of laundry from the washer to the dryer and from the dryer to my bed.  Owen napped off and on all day long.  When he’d fall asleep, I would put clothes away or prepare lunch.

Joshua has music on Thursdays and a sweet friend was able to pick him up for music and drop him back off at home when it was over.  (**Thanks SO much Ali!!**)  That was another hour and a half that I had one less child to take care of.

At the end of the day, I still had a feverish two year old, but I had a smile on my face when Josh got home from work, because of God’s great grace.

Our pastor taught on the subject of grace yesterday.  Here are a few of his points:

*Grace means there is nothing I can do to make God love me more and nothing I can do to make Him love me less.

*It is by GRACE we are saved.  We have no grounds for an attitude of entitlement.  Nothing we do guarantees the blessings we want.

*Grace is God’s empowered presence, not His endless presents.

*Grace is available, abundant, and necessary for every believer everyday.

*It’s always too early to quit and never too late to start.

I’m grateful for God’s grace.

~audrey

Let’s see… how do I condense this story to fit into one post?

Sister and I were suppose to go to a relative’s house last night to get her hair done.  She had to get her current “hair do” taken out, given a perm/relaxer, and then her mom was suppose to braid it.  I was told this would take about two hours.

JUST taking the current “hair do” out took an hour and a half.  By then, it was almost time for me to pick up my boys from a church function, and her mom never showed up, so we decided to leave.  Sister’s “Grandma” felt bad about everything and decided to have us meet her at the Beauty Shop this (Saturday) morning so she could get her hair done completely.

We arrived at the Beauty Shop around 7:30am (Oh.My.Goodness.).  Josh called me around 8:30 to ask me how long I thought we’d be.  I asked Grandma and she laughed and said, “Oh, it’s going to be a while…like four hours or so.”

Once again:

Oh.

My.

Goodness.

I should have brought a book, my lesson plans, my household notebook, snacks, lunch….SOMETHING TO DO WHILE I SAT FOR HOURS!  Needless to say, I was the only white girl in the building and no one spoke to me unless they had a question about Sister.  I smiled a lot and tried hard to make sure I was presenting myself as approachable and friendly.

It just so happened that we watched “Good Hair” last night.  It is a 90 minute documentary done by Chris Rock on ‘black hair’ and the black hair industry.  I figured, we don’t know yet if our little girls are black, white, hispanic, asian… so I’d better be educating myself on all necessary subjects.  I learned a lot.  Seriously.

As I sat there, I looked through several magazines full of weaves, extensions, and wigs and I found that I recognized all of the lingo!  I probably smiled a few times as I turned each page and had flashbacks of last night’s documentary.  Did you know the black hair industry is a multi-BILLION dollar industry??

I noticed there was only ONE regular magazine.  The rest were all catalogs and hair books…then I discovered WHY.

These women come to talk.

Don’t get me wrong, I love talking with my stylist when I go to the shop, but it’s nothing like what these women were talking about.

The first thing that shocked me was when a woman began talking about her cousin who moved to Atlanta to marry a Jamaican man for $25,000 so he could become an American.  Apparently, there are “business arrangements” involving marrying men from other countries.  Her exact words were, “yeah, they just have to stay (live) together for about a year, then they can go do their own thing and in five years they can get divorced.  It’s just a business arrangement.”

Another woman asked if anyone had seen the “Smith boys” on the news.  Apparently they are well known in their community and had gotten busted for drinking and driving, with the better part of a liquor store in the back seat of their car.

One lady talked about her son just getting off of probation after two years, only to get caught making bomb threats at school and as a result, she was greeted by the police beating on the front door of her home.  They were all laughing hysterically as she was saying, “I was thinking, I HAVEN’T DONE ANYTHING!  WHAT IS GOING ON??”

I couldn’t help but laugh at a lot of their conversations.  White girl gossip is no better, it’s just usually about different subject matters.  Whose husband lost their job, who has recently gained weight, what friend is getting a divorce, who recently left the church, and whose child has been getting in trouble at school.

FIVE AND A HALF HOURS LATER, I felt insanely out of place, no matter how hard I tried to “fit in”. Sister’s hair looks adorable and is ‘good to go’ for at least two more weeks.  Maybe next time I’ll try harder at being a conversation starter…conversations that don’t involve illegal activities.

Live and learn.  :)

~audrey