PJ Jonas – Page 108 – Teaching Families to Work Hard Together

Outside Fun

After what has been a brutally hot summer, the past few days have felt like heaven. It’s been sunny, but cooler, with no humidity. We always spend a lot of our time outside, but much of this summer was just too brutally hot, and so the children spent more time than normal inside with…

August 28, 2012

Cleaning Up the New Home Site

The site work for our new home is progressing nicely. They’ve started cleaning out the trees on the home site so we can see the “lay of the land” and decide exactly where to place the home. The land drops off more rapidly than we thought, so we’re going to have to bring it forward…

August 24, 2012

Playing at the New Property

Today we went out to the property and let the kids play around in the creek. They love getting muddy and seeing what great treasures they can find! The boys of course wanted to explore further up the creek, but Jade and Indigo stuck around and showed off their discoveries. We’ve always wanted a creek…

August 23, 2012

Be Protective, But Not Over-Protective

Busy Mom’s Survival Guide Podcast Episode 025. We are protective of our children while they are still young and need us to protect them. As they mature they are given the opportunity to test themselves and their beliefs while still under the protection of our household. We try very hard to be protective, but not…

August 22, 2012

Great Pyrenees Puppies

Meet the newest members of the Goat Milk Stuff family! Thornton and Baxter are registered Great Pyrenees brothers who will be guarding the goats (and the children) at the new property. Jim isn’t thrilled with the prospect of having two very large dogs (they’ll be around 150 pounds each), but the goats need some protection…

August 18, 2012

Asking Nicely

We’ve been going regularly to check out the progress on the new property. We were hanging out watching them work, when I noticed Indigo walk over to Lucky (our contractor) and ask him something. I wish I had gotten a photo of him bent down listening to her, but I didn’t pull out my camera*…

August 17, 2012

No Such Thing As a Typical Day

Busy Mom’s Survival Guide Podcast Episode 024. Do you finish your “typical” day feeling like you accomplished nothing? Or do you typically go to sleep feeling tired, but believing you had a good day? For me, I enjoy wrapping up the day knowing that I worked hard, taught my children, enjoyed my family, and accomplished…

August 15, 2012

Sleeping Hard

Jim has a saying, “If you have trouble sleeping, you didn’t work hard enough.” Since we teach our children to work hard, sleeping problems are pretty rare around here. A couple of nights ago, I sent the girls to get ready for bed. A few minutes later I entered their room to tuck them in.…

August 9, 2012

How Important Is Privacy

Busy Mom’s Survival Guide Podcast Episode 023. Several months ago, Brett got her own room. Since then we’ve been talking a lot about the subject of privacy because I don’t want her to over-value privacy at the expense of relationships. After all, if she gets married some day, she’s going to have to give up…

August 8, 2012

Are Children Ever Too Young to Work?

I took the youngest five children (Fletcher, Greyden, Hewitt, Indigo, and Jade) food shopping with me the other day. I pushed a cart, Greyden pushed a cart, Hewitt pushed the “car” cart holding the girls, and Fletcher walked on his crutches. I sent Greyden and Fletcher off to fill their cart with cereal, oatmeal,…

August 5, 2012

Soap Room Construction

Our builders have been working hard this week, and the new soap barn is looking great! We now have roof trusses up as well as plumbing. The frame is coming together!! August 1, 2012: August 3, 2012: It’s looking good!!

August 3, 2012

Learning Leadership

Busy Mom’s Survival Guide Podcast Episode 022. Have you ever heard the expression, “He is a born leader?” While I do think there are people who are natural leaders, I also believe that leadership skills can be taught. I focus a lot on teaching my children to be leaders because I want them to have…

August 1, 2012

Believe You Can

As many of you know, Fletcher broke his leg this summer and has been wearing a cast. He has less than two weeks left and I have been very pleased with how well he has done. There has been very little complaining this entire time. The fact that he has a waterproof cast and can…

July 30, 2012

Soap Room Construction

Today we went to see the progress on our new soap room! The kids had so much fun playing on the huge pile of gravel and Jim and I were really happy to see the structure coming together. It’s starting to look like our dream come true! Doesn’t it look great?

July 29, 2012

Spending Time

Busy Mom’s Survival Guide Podcast Episode 021. Our children desperately desire our attention. We can choose to give it to them proactively on our terms. Or we can wait until they misbehave and give them attention then in the form of discipline. Children are smart. They realize that if they can’t get attention from Mom…

July 25, 2012