Leading By Example

This is Payton painting at "movement".

A finished product at "movement".

This is Clay and I with our paintings from "movement" a.k.a. art night. BTW our four year old Payton took this photo, that's right the acorn is not falling far from the tree!

"Hello, this is (insert name)," is something you will commonly hear around my house these days when someone is answering the phone and nine times out of ten it is Payton, our four year old daughter. I am continually having friends laugh at me because we are answering the phone in such a proper manner. Well when Payton began to discover the novelty of answering the telephone she perpetually picked it up with a "Yeah" or a "Hey", which neither one was typically how anyone in our home answers the phone. So we began asking her to answer the phone with a "hello, this is Payton speaking". However we (the adults, Clay, Holly & Kaytie Jo) continued to answer the phone as usual around here, "Hello". Well Payton asked me one day why I didn't have to answer the phone the same way she did? So now we do.

Look at that sweet little monkey hanging on her momma!

We attended our first annual (many more to come) used book fair at Holland Hall school. OH MY GOODNESS!!! It was a book lovers dream and we are a family full of book lovers. Neither Clay or I were avid readers as young people, however in our early marriage (it has been 10 years this July) we discovered reading as one of our passions. There are some days that I worry that I am overcompensating for not reading much as a child by drowning my children in stories and books, but it doesn't seem to be hurting them.

Payton asleep with a book in the car after the book sale.

This week was OK Food Coop delivery week! Okay so I am a huge dork because I LOVE delivery day. It is like Christmas once a month! AND I get to be an adult with all adults! This is rare moment in my month where I am without both children. I just had to post a photo of our eggs, we think they are beautiful, such a rainbow of colors and sizes. Hopefully my children will value where and how their food is raised because their mom and dad educated them in this area. I can remember being so angry with my mom because she wanted me to go and weed the garden with her. Well 20 something years later here I am an avid gardener.

Clay and I are raving fans of Rob Bell, a minister at Mars Hill Church in Grand Rapids Michigan. Any road trip more than 20 minutes down the road is an excuse to listen to a podcast of his teachings. A couple of weekends ago when we were going to the dairy we listened to one of his teachings about Grace and Peace. It really stepped on our toes in several ways. So what if we were a world of Grace and Peace just oozing out of us was kind of the point. So Clay and I began discussing thoughts on this subject and suggesting to others the idea of having grace and peace in areas that are hard to have grace and peace and people that it is hard to extend grace and peace to... And then one evening in the car this past week I hear Payton "reading" to her imaginary friend and discussing the ramifications of extending grace and peace.

I am not sure who is leading who around here but we are definitely leading by example.

Grace and Peace to you,

Holly

Sorry about the sideways photo. This is our chalkboard wall in the kitchen and Clay always leaves us sweet notes to find in the mornings.

The smiling cook

Sweet baby Eden asleep on my back in her sling!

This is our family bed...yes both girls are typically in our bed either all night or at some point in the night.  Bedtime is our favorite time of the day.  

Well I have tried to start this post about three or four times now and as a few of you have realized as far as I got was the title! I intended to write two weeks ago tomorrow and between baking some bread and a screaming baby in a backpack on my back it didn't happen. And then last weekend once again I sat down with intention to blog and something else got my attention. So here I sit almost three weekends down the road finally getting a moment in time. Of course any second a three year old will come running in barefooted and ready to play or an eight month old will wake from her slumber wanting some milk. So since it has been so long I may just give you a running commentary of what the last couple of weeks looked like.

To start off we got a incredible break from the winter weather which meant in the Peevyhouse family - GO work in the garden!!! We were so happy and excited to get out and dig in the dirt that we forgot to eat lunch and get the kids down for a nap (both pretty important things in our world)! I tilled up all but two of our raised beds, picked weeds, and raked all the while with Eden on my back in the backpack. It was so good for my soul. Payton played her heart out - this will be the first of many years that I think it will be hard to get her to come back inside from playing.

The weather continued all weekend and into the beginning of the week. Payton, Eden, Kaytie Jo (our roomate) and some friends all headed out to the zoo Monday morning and spent the whole day!!!

Tuesday came with snow in the morning!! Can you believe that, after having a record high of 82 on Monday morning?  Tuesday evening Clay got the hook up with singer/songwriter Jeremy Camp!!!  I know it sounds like serious cheese for us to be excited to meet someone like this but we are very appreciative of his work.  A ton of you know this story but for those who don't here is the Cliff Notes version.  Summer of '06 we lost a baby to miscarriage and the weekend that I miscarried Clay and I went out just to get our mind off of things and randomly picked up a CD of Jeremy Camps at our local Borders.  That was the best thing for us...it repaired our brokeness in so many ways.  So to him we are grateful and have always wanted to tell him so.  Well Clay got a chance to tell him...so nice. I have tried to post a picture but it will not load.  Maybe I can get it to post on the side somewhere.

Sometime in the past couple of weeks we ran to Target for the first time since the 1st of January - so about six weeks (a VERY long time for me).  Well it was pure hell and torture for me.  We were there to return some Christmas items that were too small for Eden and simply replace them.  Well I found out what my friend Justine has said to me about Target and other such stores before - "I am fine with everything I have until I walk into one of those places and suddenly I need everything that they have"!!!  That is exactly what I felt - like everything I had at home wasn't good enough, even though right before I got to the store everything I had was fine.  It hit me like a ton of bricks that this was going to be one long year if I thought of it in Target terms.  So we made our way out quickly.  However, a Target and many other retail chains are being built very close to our home and I have decided it is like Jesus being in the desert and satan tempting him with some bread and water!

We are very fortunate to be in a dairy coop with eight other families.  So every eight weeks we deliver milk to the rest of the families and the other seven it shows up at our front door!  How FUN!!! We love it.  I am going to include some pics of us at the dairy farm.  Just another little underground group of people getting their food in unconventional ways.  The dairy is great because it is RAW - straight from the cow to your table.  We also get cream and cheese from there as well.  With the cream we make our own homemade butter!!  YUM YUM!!!!

For other random foods that we have added to our diet...kombucha!!  It is a fermented tea that is great for you.  It aids in digestion, energy, metabolism, liver function and more!!  So the "scoby" which is like the starter was a gift to me over a week ago from my kindred spirit friend Justine.  So I have been brewing it in the pantry for over a week now and I can't wait to try it.  We have been buying bottled kombucha from Whole Foods this past month because we are addicted to it.  At $3 a bottle it will be nice to have our own here at home.  I will let you know how it turns out.

Valentine's Day was a fun event here in our home.  We made chocolate cover strawberries and valentine cards with cut outs from magazines that were inspired by our friend Angelyn.  For our celebration we had my mom a.k.a. "Gigi" over for dinner with us and Kaytie Jo.  Now Clay and I have always kept Valentine's very personal and only between the two of us.  However this year we decided to ask my mom and Kaytie to be our valentines. Instead of dinner with just the two of us we had a very nice dinner with the whole family.  As I was cooking dinner I could hear the chatter and laughter of my mom and Payton on the front porch making some sort of creation with glitter paint, Kaytie Jo was loving on Eden and my wonderful husband was walking in the door and I realized that I was smiling and didn't even know it.  Truely happy with our decision, to share our day of love with several of the ones we love.