Urban Chickens!

Yes, we live in Orange County California, and Yes, we just got three chickens :-)

It's very exciting and slightly nerve wracking.  Exciting because these are adorable pets, and the funnest things to watch.  Also because we LOVE fresh ranged organic eggs, and my kids can't stop playing "farmer" in the backyard.....priceless.  B U T......nerve wracking because I keep thinking "I'm a city girl, what do I know about raising chickens??".  I keep thinking I am going to mess up somehow and kill them through my ignorance.  Is my dog going to kill them?  Will they fly over my fence and my neighbors dog kill them?  What about all those chicken diseases???

It's still fun though, even with all the worries.  I am reading up more and more everyday on how to best take care of them and I am confident that my knowledge will be sufficient.  Plus, I mean, my kids are learning awesome lessons on taking care of things.   They are almost completely in charge!  They change the water, fill the food, scrape the poo with the shovel, let the chickens out to free range, and they even somehow manage to get them back in the coop later when we decide they need to go back in.  I love it!

So here are my 7 month old chickens.  Two Buff Orpingtons, and one Ameraucana. Their names are Hannah, Julia, and Ruby :-)  The kids picked the names.  Too cute.

Making hand soap.

About a year ago a few good friends of mine and I got together and made bar soap. It was a wonderful time of learning, fellowship, and well....soap making! I felt slightly old fashioned and very frugal, both of which were good feelings :-) I still have that soap and sadly we are down to our last two bars. However, making the soap was a lot of work, and buying the initial ingredients wasn't super cheap either. But when I read that you can make your own liquid hand soap easy AND cheap, I was in! It really is one of the easiest things I have done. So, in the event that you might not yet be on the frugal, do-it-yourself bandwagon, here is something cheap and easy to get you started. Also, and I cannot stress this enough, this is wayyyyyyyyy healthier than the soap you buy in the store. This can be a completely natural soap with NO chemicals or parabans.

You first start with....
~ a bar of organic (or natural) Castille soap (trader joes, health food stores, even target carries these)
~ a small bottle of Glycerin (super easy to find. I bought mine at CVS)
~ scented oil of your choice (or tea tree oil for its anti-bacterial properties.) OR no oil at all. It is not required for the soap.

As you can see in my picture above, I have a bar of soap, a cheese grater, two small containers for oil and my Glycerin. The two small green bowls holds my Tea Tree oil and Jojoba oil.



Next you grate. And grate. And grate. And grate. When you feel your hands and muscles burn like fire, then suck it up, call yourself a sissy and push on. Your usually only halfway done ;-)

After you grate you pour our grated soap in a pot

Then you cover it with water (a lot of people measure this out, but that's not my style, so I cannot remember how much water I used. Maybe 5 cups??)

Once you have sufficient amounts of water in there, then put it on your stove on low and stir occasionally until all the soap is melted. Mine even turned clear and I thought I had done something wrong like added too much water. I thought it would be gloppy or at least slightly thick. No. That happens over night. It actually turned out that I needed to add much more water than I did because mine became way too thick originally. If this happens to you then just put the soap back in the pot the next day, add more water, and heat on low again. Then let it set overnight and viola, perfect hand soap.

But I digress. Where was I? Oh yes, the melting. So while you are starting the melting process and you notice that most, if not all, of your shavings have melted, then add your tablespoon of Glycerin and your oils if your using oils (I used around a teaspoon of each tea tree oil and jojoba oil).

When you are certain your soap has melted, allow mixture to cool down for about 30 minutes then pour into a container. I used a jar, but had I added the amount of water that I should have, which I later ended up doing, it would not have fit in the jar, so be prepared to pour it into something semi-large.

Lastly, let it sit overnight and thicken. When you check it the next day, if it is of desired consistency (kind of like egg whites or thicker), then grab your funnel and pour into old washed out hand soap bottles. I love seeing my new soap that I made for about less than a dollar a bottle, put into containers of hand soap that I bought for $4.50 a bottle. Have I mentioned before how I love the feeling of saving my hubster some money????

The end product should fill AT LEAST 3 bottles with some leftover (I probably could have filled four bottles but I didn't have a fourth bottle, so I had to stick the rest in a jar.

And there you have it.
Oh and by the way, just ignore those insane amounts of crumbs on my table. That was just a trick of photography. They're not really there ;-)

Living with health issues.

(photo credit)


I have so many blog posts that I have been wanting to write lately. It's kinda driving me crazy that I can't get on the computer more to get them out of my head and on to bloggy world. But every day I say "when I am done with this task I will hop on that computer and get that post written!" And yet, that task leads to another which leads to another which leads.....you guessed it...... to another! :-) But I am NOT complaining. I am joyous, and I will explain way. You see, I am blown away that I am even able to get "tasks" done. There was time, not very long ago, where I was lucky to get my self going each day, and was barely achieving my small goals of keeping the basics running. This was my life for a few years, but increasingly more so over the last 18 months. I will tell you in a moment how God is bringing healing into my life, in more ways than one. But first, I want to go into what it's like to deal with health issues, and to doubt God's goodness in the midst of it.

For the longest time I didn't know what was going on with me. I was noticing differences in my health, but was seeing it as several UN-related symptoms. As many of you know, over 3 years ago, my husband and I felt convicted, compelled, and convinced that we should leave the conceiving of children in His capable hands. We had the Vasectomy reversed and awaited the inevitable pregnancy. It never came. As we went through the first two years we assumed the vasectomy had failed. I became consumed with sadness. I so wanted to have new life in my womb, but none came. We finally went to the doctors to have the semen analysis done. The results......The reversal had worked.

"hmmmmmmm........ This is odd", I thought to myself. I was pretty sure I had two children without any sort of medical help already. How could it be me?? So the tests began. Nothing invasive really. An ultrasound, some blood tests, a dye test. That's when I was diagnosed with PCOS. Polycystic Ovary Syndrome. I couldn't have more misunderstood this diagnosis. I was assured by the doctor that this was a minor thing. That likely one day with some medical intervention we would be able to conceive.

Wait, what was that word? "Medical Intervention"? Oh no. We had sort of handed that area of control over to God. Does it go both ways???? Do we let Him decide How many more and also IF we have more?

I talked to my husband that night. He assured me that for him, it did go both ways. We accept it if he gives us "too many" (as we sometimes feared in the beginning) and we accept it if he gives us no more at all.

I can't say that I fully agreed at the time, but I submitted.

I now had a "diagnosis", but still, nothing made sense. My diagnosis was just.....well....a diagnosis. What was that going to do for me? It didn't tell me WHAT was wrong with me. It didn't tell me what I could do about it either. Getting a PCOS diagnosis was like getting told "we're not quite sure what's wrong with you, what caused it, or how bad it will get. We only now it's not good, and it will get progressively worse with age." yay :-/

Over the next year and a half I would gain 50 pounds, have my face wrinkle, grow facial hair, be tired every single day, crave sugar like a heroin addict, have mood swings, experience blood sugar spikes and severe drops, have heart palpitations every morning when I rise, hot flashes, night sweats, have my face cover itself in brown spots, headaches, joint pain, night time swelling of my arms and hands, and truly the list could go on. I think though I have communicated that overall, I did not feel well. I was stripped of my youthful energy, and my beauty. I am not even sure if I ever thought of myself as beautiful, but regardless of what I thought of myself before, I sure knew that I wasn't beautiful any longer. Dealing with the complete lack of energy was one of the harder symptoms. It was a torturous feeling to watch everything that needed to be done just sit there and not get done, knowing it would be waiting for me tomorrow. Only tomorrow, I wouldn't feel any different that today.
I watched my kids worry about me, and even become lazy for lack of direction and encouragment because I was just too tired or in too much pain to care. I received lectures and judgmental stares from family members and even my husband. I don't blame them really, for none of us really knew what was wrong with me. It's not like they could say "Oh poor Val, she has____(fill in blank with dreaded disease)__ " They would just look at me and say "Val you have to get this stuff done, your house is falling apart the kids are falling behind in school". You just need to pick yourself up by the boot straps and march on. It broke my heart.

For the first time in years my infertility, which had been at the forefront of my thoughts, now took the back seat.

What was wrong with me, I am only in my twenties???I would scream this at first at myself. In my head. Then after of months of praying for healing, I began to yell that at God. I was careful not to let anyone see that pain. I would try and smile around others and wait until I was alone in the shower or driving by myself to the store and then I would unleash it. My own painful dialog would go something like this....

"God, you can heal me, why don't you!!!????"

"Dang it. I'm sorry Lord, that was uncalled for. Maybe I am having another hormonal mood swing. I think I have been getting a lot of those lately."

"Wait a second, you caused me to be this way! If you didn't want me to feel sad and angry and out of control, why did you do this to me?"

"Dang it. I'm sorry again"

"I am just so angry God! Why were you not content to take away my ability to have children? Why did you take my health, my vitality, and by beauty as well??"


All I can tell you is that during those dark months I received a lot of interesting stares from fellow drivers on the road. I can't tell you how many times I have cried and yelled in my car only to look over at a red light and wish really really really badly that I had tinted windows.


Eventually I handed over the infertility. I gave it to God, and asked forgiveness for ever giving it such a high place in my life. I still asked that he would return my fertility one day to what it used to be, but I was content to leave God in control. I even, slow as it was, was brought to the point where I had to become content with my poor health (not to mention saggy boobs and growing mid-section).
I knew if I let this anger consume me I would loose my faith. I would loose everything. I knew my faith was weak, and small, but I still had faith. I knew God was in control, I knew God sent His Son for me. I knew he had forgiven me so much. I knew I was truly blessed. I knew I had no right to be angry at God.

But still I doubted his character and goodness.

I stayed in the word daily but nothing touched my heart as it had before. I kept praying but instead of my prayers drifting to Heaven like incense, they stopped at the ceiling. It had to change.

Slowly but determinedly, I turned my heart back towards God (or maybe HE turned my heart back towards Him). I acknowledged my sin before him, repented, and once again accepted His FULL and gracious forgiveness.
That was the best thing to happen to me in a long long time.

I am now on the road to healing. In more ways than one. First I began to focus my heart on Christ and heavenly things, not on earthly temporal things. Then I began to learn my habits of "blame when pained"(as I like to call it), I prayed often for God's help in the process and still do. Following my change in my relationship with God, I began to seek out better medical help and better answers.

I now understand so much more about my body than I ever thought that I would. After 6 doctors I now see a very knowledgeable doctor who is an MD but also has her degree and licensing in Naturopathy. She has reviewed all my blood tests, and all my samples, and all my symptoms and is helping me find out what exactly is going wrong and what I can do to treat it. It was great to have a doctor spend more than 7 minutes with me and also know what the tests mean.
For one, I have severe hormonal imbalances. When I say severe I mean very very bad. I am also insulin resistant (caused by the hormonal imbalance), have adrenal fatigue, and my thyroid is not working properly.

So here are some things I am doing to help my health,
I am taking natural (not synthetic) Hormone replacements
I am taking a natural Thyroid
I am taking Vitamin D (which I am also severely deficient in)
I drink water first thing in the morning every morning with lemon in it (helps the liver, which in turn helps the Adrenal gland)
I am taking 4 capsules of good quality Fish oil (helps the hormones and thyroid)
I am walking daily
I am not eating refined sugar and have severely limited any other sugars like honey.


Since being on the natural hormone replacements, and vitamins, I have stopped gaining weight for the first time in a year and a half. In addition to not gaining weight I have also lost 5 pounds. The biggest difference I have noticed is my energy. It is amazing to have energy again! I still have a few days here and there where my energy wipes out but it usually only lasts an hour whereas before it would last for 4 hours or more. I just feel overall so much better. The swelling at night has also gone down, my hot flashes are few and far between and I am becoming so much more productive. It has been so great. I can't tell you what a treat it is to get up and have a 1000 things to do and know I just might be able to get them done, or at least try!
Most importantly, by the Grace of God, I am learning to lean on and Trust Him in all things. I am breaking bad habits daily and tearing down walls of doubt.

What I have learned through all this will carry with me for a long time. Top three...
1)Never take for granted your health or fertility. It is NOT guaranteed to always be there, so be grateful while you do have it.
2)God is good. All the time. When we view Him as anything else every trial is a double trial. It is too hard to go through a trial and doubt His goodness at the same time. Nor is it right.
3)There are seasons in life. There is a time for everything under the sun. Yes some things last a lifetime. But a lot of the time if you hold fast with perseverance and patience the reward is great when the trial is over. I wish to God I had persevered with patience and faith. I did not. I still have wounds from those dark times and very bad habits that the Lord is still weeding out of me due to my lack of patience and lack of trust in Him.

I realize that I have once again been very honest in my blog post. And that lends me open to some criticism I am sure. I realize I was vain to complain about beauty, I realize I should have been glad that it was me and not my children suffering (as that would have been much much worse) , I realize a lot of things. But I also know that some people are going through things similar and they need to know that God is faithful. And they also need to know that they are not alone, and that they are not the only ones who think those thoughts and who doubt. I want to offer encouragement through my honesty and also stand as a monument that screams "Do not waste you time blaming God! Turn to him for love and comfort and you will be comforted! Do not give in to anger, it will poison your life."

If anyone would like to talk to me personally about any of this, or just need a listening ear for anything you are going through. I am here. Just email me at sgtswife03@yahoo.com.

Makin' Some Jam.

Although I recently gave up sugar (mostly refined sugar: sucrose. still working on giving up the other sugars) and can no longer partake of these beautiful jars of goodness, I am still proud of it. It was a fun time making it. I have a fig tree so it cost me very little to make this. It was yummy! A little on the sweet side for because I forgot to buy the low sugar pectin so I could sweeten the Jam with juice. So I had to add the sugar. It was soooo good on toast in the morning. Since I can no longer enjoy these, I am going to give them away as gifts. Do you all make Jam?

Going Green?

Recently I have been super inspired by one of my favorite bloggers ( Celee at Miscellaneous Musings) to share what we're doing to go "green". Let me clarify what I believe going Green means. I believe God gave us a beautiful creation, a creation marred by floods and sin, but a creation none the less. He gave us a duty to work and keep the land and animals, therefore I believe in being GREAT managers of that. I completely reject the modern concept of "saving Mother Earth", and also reject all forms of "green movements" that put animals, insects, or land ahead of the lives and safety of humans (notice I said safety, not convenience).

But I am convinced that as we do our best to be resourceful and good stewards of what God has given us, that we will not only shine our light to others, but we will live better, healthier lives.

Having said all of that, here are some very small steps my family and I make to be good stewards of God's creation.....

First, we recycle. We recycle most plastics, glass, and cardboard materials (we also do this for money because every little bit counts ;-). We even recycle foil for money!


Secondly, we practice a "re-using" style of recycling. Here are some ways I am doing this.....
I am trying to use less and less paper towels so, on top of the cloth napkins we already own, I am planning to sew more from this old long pillow sheet, pictured below.


Also, here you can see my homemade BBQ sauce that I am storing in a "recycled" peanut jar.(you save money and at the same time help Creation by not adding more production and waste)

And again, below pictures how I am re-using a plastic butter container for storing more food in the fridge. (never put very hot food or liquids however in most plastics as they can leak chemicals into your food)




One more Re-using idea is simple window coverings. I took two yellow pillowcases that we are no longer using in my sons room, and made them into curtains for my kitchen window. It was an odd shaped window and these fit just perfectly! I am not expecting you to put these in the rooms you entertain the most in, but I think they are perfectly acceptable in a kitchen, bathroom, sun room, or laundry room. The best part is you do not need to be good at sewing! I am not a very good sewer by any means, buy most of us can sew a straight line and make a seam. That is pretty much all I did here. Then I tied them back with some ribbon I had in my ribbon drawer. Like I said these aren't award winners, but they are very functional. I use them frequently at night due to the fact that my kitchen window faces the street (well that, and I happen to do dishes late at night in my pajamas, just sayin')




Air purification. This is something I might file more under the category of saving money, but you could make the case that you are also saving a LOT of plastic and production by skipping the expensive air purifier and buying special plants that Nasa has proven purify your house air almost as good (and in some cases better). Here are a few I picked up at the local nursery free with a coupon. I plan on getting more because only one of these was on the list.



Lastly, buy used. I know not everything can be bought(or should be) used, but there are definitely quite a few things you can. And you don't have to be one of those spectacular, trash to treasure, shabby chic women either. Here is a picture of an old dresser (I think that's what it was, although it seems a bit on the short side) that my husband and I bought at the Salvation Army for 10 dollars. We painted it white, and left the old knobs on instead of buying new ones. We put it in our son's room to hold all his legos. He loves it! It stores beautifully, and we couldn't be more happy with our purchase.