Kaake Family Blog

I know that God knows the desires of my heart. My hearts desire for awhile now is to move.  Move to the country. I would love to walk outside and look around (no other houses around me) and just breathe.  Breathe in the fresh air, look up into the trees, run my hands over the flowers. I would love for my children to be able to have a dog.  My 6 year old son has such a deep longing to have a 4 legged companion. I would love to get my daughter away from the bad influence that is around her where we currently live. I would love for my husband to come home and be able to prop his feet up comfortably in the back (or front) yard and not feel threatened/judged by neighbors.  But instead to feel at peace with God's surroundings. Sometimes God puts these longings in our heart to prepare us for what's to come.  But sometimes these longings are flesh filled.  Please be in prayer with me that God would direct my heart.

My 13 year daughter took these today for me at the Nature Preserve.  I was very excited.  Enjoy!

Picture borrowed from http://moneysavingmom.com/2011/09/get-a-jump-start-on-holiday-shopping.html/christmas-presents I love to plan my Christmas gifts starting in January.  This helps me not only save money but save sanity.  I save money because I have all year to look for those specific items and it saves my sanity because my family is not stressed about what to get someone.  We're prepared. Here's a few steps that have helped me. 1. First decide if you want to make all/some of your gifts.  If you want to make them, try to find neat and unique ideas online.  I LOVE pinterest.com for getting great ideas. 2. Is there someone in your family that has a lot of stuff?  For those people I get the same thing every year.  For our grandparents we do pictures in some form and homemade goodies.  For my mom and dad, I always get them a gift certificate to a Bed and Breakfast and add in something small for each one. 3. Make a list of everyone...

Here's a 17 week picture of baby November.  We will find out in less than 2 weeks if  we're having a boy or a girl :) 3 batches of strawberry freezer jam with the help of Jon and Allysha Lyshie made my favorite homemade ranch dressing today. Here Lyshie made some banana bread.  She's on a roll today in the kitchen!  So what's been happening?  Well, we went on a mini family vacation to Frankenmuth last week which was wonderful!  We celebrated my daughter's 13th birthday last weekend which was a blast!  She had a party with her friends and then that merged into a party with family members.  Everyone had a great time as did my baby.  We're so thankful!  I hope to get a blog post up on that soon. Baby November has been moving around so much it's crazy!  So glad to have the reassurance of the movement.   Jon not only hardended off all my plants, but planted most of them as well.  He's tur...