Memories...

This week has been a bit emotional for me.  I've tried my hardest not to think about the house and count down the days that the bank has received our newest offer, however; every decision I seem to be making has to revolve around "the house."  I feel at a total standstill yet again, waiting on approval from the bank to go through.  We cannot improve our current home because (1) we need to save every penny we can for moving if it happens and (2) if we rent it out we would do things differently than if we stayed here.  We cannot pack up because we do not know for sure if things will pan out like we hope, and so for now we are just in limbo...waiting.

I have a friend who recently had sold their home and bought another.  Their previous home they had brought all their children home to and made memories in it, however; it was to be burnt to the ground in order to build on the property.  I saw her photos she posted on facebook about it and read all her statuses on how devastated she was to watch their home burn to the ground.  The other night I had a dream that we got the house!  I was a bit sad we were leaving our little rancher that we've brought all our children home to but was ready to make new memories in our new home.  Then I look up and see my friend sitting in her car watching her home.  It was not all the way burnt down like what happened in real life but, the fire was out, and the house was still standing.  You could see it had been in a fire, but the house remained.  My friend just sat there watching her home; tears streaming down her face.  I remember thinking in my dream, "wonder if she is sad it was burnt or happy it is still there."  As I thought about this dream over and over again, it finally started to make sense to me.  Just because the house had been on fire and burnt to the ground doesn't mean the memories will not stand.  We (and she) will always have amazing memories of our families in our old homes.

Tonight when the kids went to bed Nathan and I sat on the porch and enjoyed the 70 degree weather.  We talked about our fears, dreams, hopes, and memories.  We talked about how many neighbors in the houses around us we have seen come and go in the last eight years we've been here.  I told him I feel so stuck right now with not having an answer on the house.  I would be happy in our small house if they say no, but a little disappointed as well.  Then I realized that the first thing I had thought of when we got the news was other family members who need a larger home as well.  How I wanted them to have the house we were getting, how they deserve it more, need it just as badly.  I told Nathan that I just don't feel that I deserve to have that home.  He told me "Toneka, you have prayed for that home for eight years!  God knows the desires of your heart!"  It took all I had to hold back my tears.  I told him about how I just thought it was not coincidental that our neighbors at the new home also had six children and homeschooled.  I had prayed also so many times to be able to be close to a woman with a large family, who homeschooled so I can see how they do things and learn how to be a better mother and teacher for my children.  And he said, "and it's not a mistake, God knows the desires of your heart!"

So, while I feel content either way, I still feel on edge because I cannot move forward with life at this moment.  I'm so thankful that God has even given us this opportunity and has even allowed us to consider another home as an option.  I've just been praying that if it's God's will it will all work out smoothly from the bank approval, to financing, finding a renter for our current home and closing.  Keep your prayers coming!!

God's little blessings...

I feel like it's been forever since I've written a blog post, I have so much to say I almost do not know where to start to fit it all in in a smooth way; so if this post is a bit scattered (lol) that would be why.

April 25th, Nathan and I went to the perinatal center to find out if we were going to have another sweet little girl, or our first son.  I had so much anxiety about it!  On one hand I have been longing for a boy for the last seven years and my desire for that little guy has not subsided one bit, however; on the other I am so unbelievably scared to have a boy!  I've never had a brother so...having a little boy around would be foreign to me, and a bit scary!  I have thought every baby I have had so far was going to be a boy, so I'm not great at guessing, but I was convinced that this one had to be!  All my pregnancies were different in their own way, but this one had one thing that I knew I never experienced before, an aversion to meat!  Mostly beef!  The smell of it, thought of it made my stomach churn!  I also took the gender prediction test that you pay $44.00 for at the drug store and it said BOY, so I was COMPLETELY convinced that this time we were having a boy!  Imagine my surprise when we found out that we were in fact having another baby GIRL!

Of course I did cry for a minute when I found out, I tried my best to hold it together until we left the appointment but when my midwife came in and started asking me questions I just lost it completely!  So many things were going through my head!  Since before Nathan and I were married I felt that God gave me a name for a boy; I have had periodic dreams of that little boy over the last 7 years and have held him and talked to him from the time he was a newborn till he was five years old!  I felt like God has been trying to tell me all these years that we are supposed to have a boy!  I also had told Nathan I thought this was going to be our last child.  I am over 30 now and I'm tired, I do not like pregnancy one bit and each time I do it it has gotten harder than the last.  Does this mean I didn't really hear God?  Does this mean we are supposed to have more children?  Maybe I just clung onto something that wasn't really from God and said it was??  What was going on??!!  My crying and disappointment wasn't because I didn't want another beautiful girl but it was because I thought I knew what God had in store for me and I was wrong!  I spent the remainder of the next few hours doubting my ability to hear the Lord, and doubting my understanding of what he wanted for me in my life.  Then after all the questioning and sobbing, Nathan says to me, "If you never had those dreams we would not have 6 beautiful daughters!  If you never had those dreams, we would have stopped after 2 children!  If we had the boy after the first or second child we would not have anymore than that.  If God didn't give us this desire for another child that we do not have yet, then baby #6 would be our last, but we can have another!"  His words were so true!

I was then reminded of something I had read in one of Beth Moore's books.  She said that she wanted a boy so badly but ended up with a few girls.  She realized that God had given her an amazing task of raising Godly women!  Made me feel a bit intimidated but I think I'm up for the task!

So once I got myself together and was able to take some time to change my mindset that it was now a girl instead of a boy, it was time to find a name!  Again, another thing that makes me anxious!  I feel like we've already exhausted all the names that we've liked so finding another girl name that held up to our standards was going to be a task!  We didn't want something that started with a letter we already had so A, S, E, T, J, were out.  It had to have a good meaning and also be fairly rare, nothing you hear ALL the time.  So after much searching and rummaging through my over used baby name book, we found a name.

     "Vaerity Cossette"  which means "Truthful and Victorious!"

So needless to say I am extremely excited to meet our little girl!  I'm at 24 weeks right now and the days cannot go by fast enough!

So becoming a family of 8 means we have to increase the size of our van.  We no longer will be able to take the entire family together somewhere.  We currently have a 7 passenger van and will now need to upgrade to a 12 passenger!  The downfall we JUST paid off our van so not having a van payment has been wonderful!!  We've also been on the search for another house.  We currently are in the same home that we purchased when we first got married and have been out of room for some time now.  We started looking for homes back in October of 2012 and did not have the best of luck.  We found a white house we loved, put in an offer and it was accepted.  Thirty minutes later they accepted another offer from someone else!  So we went on with the search!  We found a great house that we loved even more than the last one and put in an offer.  The house was a short-sale and so it was possible it would take a while!  So we waited, and waited, and waited....we received a few updates on the house but never good news, then after a 5 month wait we were told that it probably wasn't going to happen, the bank wasn't being cooperative and we need to move on.  So we looked at another home.  It was a forclosure but a great price, we put in an offer and it wasn't accepted.  At that point I was becoming further along in my pregnancy, so we decided that we were going to wait till next year to "look" for a home, however if something came our way that was EXACTLY what we wanted and nothing less we would go look.  Nothing did.

This week we got word that after waiting 7.5 month on the short-sale the bank has finally promised that they will approve and close on the house within 45 day!

This was nothing less than a miracle!  I was excited but kinda numb about it.  Nathan and I went back and forth about if it's the right decision to go ahead with it, while we thought it was perfect for our family we did become content with not moving this year!  I don't want a larger home JUST because it would be more comfortable, or just because we want it, I want it to be God's plan for us!  So after lots of praying we decided to go ahead and resubmit our offer, and if it is God's will things will go smoothly and work out well...if it is not it will fall apart and either one will be fine with us.  So we will be praying and would love others to pray for us through this as well!

In the meantime, we found out the news about the house while we were on vacation.  We had planned to go on vacation with Nathan's family this year but because of our time constraint with the pregnancy and not being able to travel after the second week in July we had to go ahead and go ourselves before then.  The only thing available was Massanutten, which turned out to be a lot of fun with the girls!  We visited the water park, got to ride ponies, went fishing and just had fun together as a family.  I'm so thankful that we are able to give our children fun family memories like this!  I hope they will cherish them forever!!

House fire...

Nathan and I got married in 2005.  When we married we never imagined that God would bless us with so many children in such a short time, so we bought a house that was 1,095 square foot, three bedrooms, and two baths.  We purchased this home right before we got married, and after a two week honeymoon in Cancun, a week later we found out we were expecting our first child!  We moved into our home a month later and have been there ever since.

God has used this tiny home to mold me and shape me into the person I am today.  Who would have ever thought that he could use our living situation to strengthen our faith.  After a few months in our home, we realized that there was a leak in the kitchen.  We shut off the dishwasher, and the leak stopped.  We began to pray that we would get a new kitchen floor for free, because the floor was messed up from the water.  So for the first few years we washed dishes by hand until we were able to save up some money to get the leak fixed.  By the time 2009 came I was pregnant with baby #3 and somehow the leak got worse and just shutting off the dishwasher didn't work anymore.  We came home to water gushing up between the floor boards in our kitchen floor!  We were so upset and had no idea what to do, or that we could even afford the amount of money it was going to take to clean up that mess!  So we prayed!  Someone mentioned we should call our insurance company, so we took the chance and did it.  Although it was a huge headache, a huge mess, and a long process; God answered our prayers!  Not only did he give us a brand new floor for FREE, he gave us a BRAND NEW KITCHEN!!  They replaced the cabinets, the flooring, we were able to add MORE cabinets, and painted the entire kitchen!  We got a 14k kitchen for free!!

Not only were we praying for the floor in our kitchen, but we were praying that God would supply us with a new refrigerator!  While ours worked perfectly, it was cracked on the door on the inside and was held together by duct tape!  While they were doing the flooring in our kitchen they were being pretty rough on our fridge and when they were finished with it and had it back in place, it would cool my feet as I walked past it instead of our food that we had inside!  So we ended up getting a new fridge for FREE because they had damaged the one we had!

After baby #3 things became very tight in our home.  The living situation was becoming crowded, but still do-able.  I think my biggest complaint was that we didn't have storage space.  So I began to pray for a larger house!  I didn't need something huge, just something big enough for the family we had, plus room to expand that family with how ever many more children God wanted to bless us with.  After baby #4, I just became bitter!  I was angry that we didn't have a larger house yet and I didn't even feel financially that we were able to even make that step to look for a larger house because everything larger was a higher payment.  As our family got larger our house became smaller!!  

One day I was listening to a CD from our homeschool convention.  There was a woman talking about how bitter she had been because God would not bless her with a larger house.  She realized that she had been so obsessed with wanting a larger house that she couldn't enjoy what God had given her.  Her "larger house" became an idol to her.  As I listened to this story, I was immediately convicted that I was doing the exact same thing!  So I repented, and began to love the house that God had already blessed us with.  I built a garden out back, and we got a trampoline and swing set and we love our back yard!!  We made our kitchen into a homeschool classroom (who says a kitchen has to be decorated like a kitchen) and we love our learning space.  I love our spacious new kitchen.  There are so many things that I have fallen in love with about our little house, that I became completely comfortable and content with not moving ever!  UNTIL A MONTH AGO>....

Everyone in our family has had birthday's this year.  They are all getting so big.  Our 5th baby is 1 year old now and everyone is walking and climbing and fighting, and no one gets naps because they are all sharing a room and keep each other awake all day long!  I have a whole house full of crabby, babies!!  So after lots of talking, Nathan and I decided we needed to start looking.  We decided the best thing would be to rent out our home and buy another.  So we started looking.  We chose a Realtor who has been a family friend since I was little.  I actually used to babysit his daughter!  He has been fantastic!  After months of looking we kept going back to this ONE house that was just perfect for what we needed!!  

We felt for sure this house was the only one on the market so far that was that large, in a good neighborhood, and had a school room, play room, office and 4 bedrooms, at an affordable price.  We were pre-approved to get another home without having to sell our current home, which I felt was a miracle!  So we drew up an offer for the house and felt very peaceful!!  We were told it was accepted, but thirty minutes later another offer came in and they said they would let us know in the morning because they had to allow the seller to decide the next day.   

That night all 7 of us got on our knees and prayed that if it was God's will he would give us that house!  The next morning I woke up with a song in my heart:

    "Lord you are more precious than silver, Lord you are more costly than Gold, Lord you are more     beautiful than diamonds, and nothing I desire compares with you."

I knew immediately that God was teaching me a lesson and testing my faith.  Could my desire for that home compare with my desire for God himself?  Who did I desire more and seek after more...the house or my Savior?  That morning I woke up with a heart-change.  I knew that morning even before I received the call that we would not be getting that home, and that God had other plans.  And sure enough I received the call that they went with the third offer.  I was heartbroken over it, but I wasn't torn down.  I knew that God had a plan and there was something else out there for us!   

So for now we remain in our crowded, suffocating, loud, chaotic small amazing house that we were blessed with from God, because to Him those things were not important.  What was important was that we made God and only God, enough for us.  That we seek him and want him more than we seek and want a larger house because it will make things easier in our lives.  I've learned that God isn't in the business of making life easier, but he is in the business of making life a series of fire pits that will shape us and refine us as we walk over the burning embers, through the fire to the other side.  This time it just happened to be a "house fire."  We never look the same as when we went in, and once we are melted and shaped we never go back to the way we were before.  That I am thankful for.  I pray that through this process he continues to mold our hearts for him!