Frugal Life

I am so proud of my wife. With a limited income and some careful planning you can expect to see the fruits of your labor. Now, I know we don’t have the land to grow our own crops, however, the wonderful sweet corn my father-in-law produces and graciously shares with us is very appreciated. You know that when we have land we will try and use our green thumb to grow food as well.

About 2 years ago, we realized that planting our food was going to have to look a little different. So we tried something new. We (that is Supermom) began studying how to utilize coupons like a pro. Let me tell you, she has definitely become a pro. Saving us money so that we can live and get out of debt faster and feed our family for less, really brightens my day. If you are encouraged by the what you see, please let us know. If you want to know how we do it, we can point you in the right direction.

What can you get for $13?????

If you said, a box of kleenex, 2 boxes of cereal, a tube of toothpaste, a bag of chips, 1/4 carton of diapers or maybe some milk, and maybe some bread. You would be right on the money, (for the common everyday American); but not in this family. One trip to the store for $13 yielded:

12 boxes of…

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IMG_3761, originally uploaded by Abba’s Girl.

This is one of our favorite pictures of our gato. But something that is even better and more funny than this picture happened the other day in the car.

We were driving the 30 minute drive from the grandparents house and we were all silently enjoying our own thing. No one was talking, I had some country music on the radio, and Supermom was reading. Suddenly, Supermom blurts out:

“That proves it even more!”

Shocked and slightly confused, I look around to see if she has an imaginary friend she is talking to or what. I see nothing and she looks at me as if to say, “Don’t you agree babe!” I am still confused and my mind is continuing to try and figure out “What proves what even more?????”

Turns out, she was having a conversation with herself about what she was reading and tried to include me about half way.

I laughed so hard I started to cry. When she asked why, I told her:

“You just interjected a statement into an imaginary conversation you were having with me and expected me to respond in agreement! I don’t even know what your reading that would even give me a context for a response. I couldn’t even agree or disagree with you, and the funny thing is, you were expecting me to respond.”

I love being married and love my wife dearly. I wish we had more times like this where we could just laugh with each other. It really made the rest of the drive home fly by.

Have you ever had anything like this happen to you? Please humor us with your story by blogging about it and trackback to this post or share your comments with us.

the ride, originally uploaded by Abba’s Girl.

When did you learn to ride a bike? Remember your first time? I sure do.

Just the other day I took Monkey and Mowgli on their 1st mountain bike ride. Although it isn’t completely fair, they had to ride their single speed ‘bmx’ style bikes. Although singlespeed is really cool, not so on a bmx bike. They were tackling the heavy roots with ease. Bobbing and bouncing as if they were riding a bucking bull.

We ended up getting through the 4 mile trail unscathed. As I reflect back on that afternoon under the canopy of trees I will always remember their giggles as they were laughing so hard when we were going over a very rough patch of roots sticking up. They had so much fun. So did I. We were able to enjoy seeing the swollen Ohio river as we rode along the mountain 100ft or so above the rivers edge.

Is this what God feels like? I wonder, if our heavenly father who has adopted us into his family has as much joy as I had exploring a very familiar mountain bike trail with childlike awe!?!?

Originally uploaded by Abba’s Girl

I wish I could describe to you how much fun I am having with my kids this week.

OHHHHHHH….However, I must be honest…10 hours one day of working with our eldest on being obedient and his refusal to listen obediently to our directions took its toll on this “old” man. It drove me to exhaustion and precipitated some feelings of anger and hurt. But we worked through it, albeit slowly and painfully, he is beginning to understand what obedience looks like. Thank you Jesus.

After our struggle to be obedient this week we did something today that we haven’t done in a couple weeks. We went fishing. That’s right I took the 3 Amigos out for a day of fishing. WOW, I am so glad SuperMom, Grandad, and I taught them how to fish a couple weeks ago. Once we settled into our spot, they all visited the woods to pee at least 4 times each before we even all got to cast once. (frustrating)

Once we got to fishing those pesky little fish kept stealing our worms, so every 30 secs to 1min, we were replacing worms…then it happened. Mowgli bagged a largemouth…however he swallowed the hook and died so we kept him close to shore to take home….then after catching more weeds, a small tree, and the trees on shore, I finally bagged the finale fish of the day…about one and a half the size of Mowgli’s, we now have a pair of largemouth bass that we are going to filet and enjoy this evening…

I am glad to share these memories with my children. As their father, I desire to see them grow up and I hope and pray they will still be able to tie a knot, cast a rod, throw a frisbee, catch a ball, play an instrument, read and comprehend, kick a ball, ride a bike, and ultimately Love; God and others, like they see Mami and Papi do.

I was recently chatting with a friend of mine and we were talking about the microwave culture we live in.  We don’t slow cook anymore.  Everything is fast.  Fast fast fast…..

We get mad when we have to wait in line at McD’s or Arby’s or BK for more than 2 mins….2 MINS…. Popcorn is now cooked in about 3 mins…..and heck your cell phone can be a blessing and a curse….the world is literally getting smaller….and everything is moving faster.

Japanese cartoons produced in Japan are hit shows here in the states at the SAME TIME. Our ability to do things now and quickly have really helped us to forget about the crock-pot.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the life and time that I live in, where else could you become famous writing your thoughts and publishing them in a single concise, easily searchable database for the WORLD to find…..

The main reason my friend and I were discussing our microwave culture came from the perspective of the teens we work with or the kids we raise. When we see something we want, we want it NOW. We have lost the art of sacrifice to win in the long haul. A great example that I will leave you with is this, think about it….. "90 Days ‘Same’ as CASH"

In the book, Ascent of a Leader, the beginning of chapter 7 is a quote by William James which says this:

“Whenever two people meet there are really six people present. There is each man as he sees himself, each as the other person sees him, and each man as he really is.”

I found this to be profound and quite true. The real honest thing is to identify these people and acknowledge that they are sitting with you at that table or in that coffee shop. They greatly affect the resulting relationship and can influence the connection between the two people.

When I meet someone new for the first time I really see this play out in our conversation. Every week during the school year I spend about an hour at the local high school meeting new teens and connecting with old ones. I sometimes enjoy the scrumptious nutritional lunch as well.

I notice this right away, the teens are trying to figure out who’s dad I am. Then I usually break the ice by introducing myself and saying what I do. Right away I see their minds struggling with how they identify themselves to me. “He’s not a teacher?! He is short?! Does he really care about me?!”

They ask themselves these clarifying questions before they even proceed to introduce themselves. Usually the defenses go up and they try to push me away by acting like a jerk or establishing their social dominance over me by poking fun at me. That’s ok, I’m a grown man, I am not confined by their social order.

Every-time I walk into a lunch room, I am reminded that I am clearly a missionary..

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I stayed up last night watching an episode of Raymond.  It was the episode where he begins to be more authoritative and get his twin boys to clean their room and he stunk.  After some guilting from his wife, parents, and brother he admits that this is hard.  He can’t be the "mean" one and whines to his wife to be the mean one. 

His family and his wife then recall how they continued to disobey their strict parents by doing things as teens and young adults that their parents didn’t know about.  Raymond then goes upstairs and offers this not-so-great parenting advice to his 5 year old twin boys. 

"Promise to obey what your mother and I say until your 65?" "yes, dad!"  "We know you will do things when you get older and we can’t stop you or there is nothing we can do about it…just don’t let us find out.?"

First off, let me acknowledge that I believe our children will make poor decisions as teens and young adults, but I don’t believe there is nothing we can do about it.  We, as parents, have a great responsibility to not only try but seek help from others to help our child go from good child to Great Man or Woman. 

The second piece of his advice also rubbed me the wrong way because it told me as well as his twin boys.  Everything you do is okay with me especially if I don’t know how stupid you are going to be, or how close to death you come.  That kind of parenting is a lot like russian roulette… load it, spin it, then pull the trigger.  In other words what that says to kids is this, I give you permission, just don’t tell me, you can do whatever you want, I will close my eyes and pretend to not know, and hope you survive. 

Turn your head, close your ears and deceive yourself kind of parenting doesn’t work.  Instead we should, Open our eyes, turn our hearts toward God and our kids, and always correct and love them. 

WAIT

Patience

Creation

Virgin

Modest

God

Marriage

    What have these words become in a culture innoculated by the virus of Anti-Judeo Christian values.  The rise of P.C. and the "Tolerance" gospel have festered these beliefs for many years in America.  These 7 words are my first attempts to identify what the world would identify as threatening language and/or a faulty or "naive" worldview.  What other words would you add to this list?

    Why does this concern me?  Well, I am a Dad and I want my children to understand these words as positive parts of a Judeo-Christian worldview that I believe provides more answers and hope than a humanist or pantheist or even atheistic worldview could ever pose to provide.

     Please challenge your children to "think" and challenge the world they live in, to challenge the ‘popular’ gospels of today.  If you have a teenager or older child, consider going to view the new groundbreaking movie in theatres now, "Expelled."

Remember the umpires? From a couple posts ago. Find it here. I ended the post with a question that I left unresolved for you. In this case, the question was, “Are they all right?”

There is a part of me that says, yes they are all right because their perspective is theirs alone. But I believe they are all only partially right, because they all have to judge what the balls are. They are the umpire, they must interpret the rules or law set before them and pass judgement on a ball when it crosses the plate. If they didn’t do that, we might as well throw the scoreboard out and let everyone ‘win.’

But they are passing judgement on something based on a set of rules. So, how much does interpretation of said rules, play into their decision to call strikes and balls. So far as this discussion relates to baseball, I recall my playing days, and the days I sit and watch about 10 mins of any baseball game. The announcer proclaims this, “Man, that umpire has a pretty big strike zone today!” It should be pretty cut and dry. If this…then this. The theory of relativity should be relevant to those sets of rules set forth by the governing body of baseball. But they aren’t, even though the ’strike zone’ is given a definition in the rules of baseball. The boundaries of what constitutes a ‘hitable’ ball in baseball are still left up to interpretation by the umpire.

Maybe a better question for the pre-modern, modern and post-modern to ask is, “How do you determine what is just?”

For the last couple of weeks our kids have been learning/memorizing Psalm 23.  They have since got it down but every now and then Monkey, our daughter, gets to the verse that says, “He prepares a table before me in the presence of my anemones.”

I hope you are laughing as hard as we do when we hear her say what she thinks is the right word.  Supermom, corrects her and says no monkey, it is not ‘anemone,’ it’s enemies.   He prepares a table …in the presence of my enemies.    Sometimes we wish we had it on video for you to enjoy.  Life continues to happen and take us by surprise.  Hope you are enjoying your ride as much as we are.