We had a surprise last night! Our TV programme aired again and it caused quite a stir on our blog stats. It’s so lovely to have lots of new visitors. Welcome to you all 😊. Unfortunately you can’t all come to my kitchen table for a cuppa, but if it wasn’t for Covid you’d be very welcome. For now though I will come into your life through this blog and share my heart with you.
I really love spending time with people, sharing life together and putting the world to rights as we talk through our challenges. As that is my personality it tends to reflect in my writing, therefore I want to spend my writing time being helpful and interesting, and that’s where you come in.
It would be really helpful if you could tell me what you would like to see on this blog. What subjects would you like me to write about? Do you have any questions we could answer? I am very happy to write about parenting, pregnancy, Christianity, renovating our house, our small holding, and other subjects which you might suggest. I could also add more of my poetry to the blog.
Please don’t hold back, I need your help to inspire my writing. Looking forward to hearing from you.
Rachel says:
I’d love to hear more about pregnancy, parenting, home Ed, lots of house Reno pics please and some family favourite recipes! I struggle to cook for 4 some days… how do you cook for 11?!
Vicki says:
Thank you for responding, that gives me a great place to start. Cooking is a big job, which fills a lot of my time. My children all have different favourite meals and most days someone’s delighted and someone’s disappointed! You can’t please all the people all the time. I would love to do one pot slow cook dinners, but I have one child in particular (I shall not embarrass them by saying who), who loathes vegetables in sauce, so slow cooker dinners are a rarity, but would be the easiest. Anyway, thank you for giving me lots of ideas. I will get to work. 😊
Elizabeth Ford says:
I thought the programme was inspirational. You are both so brave . I would just love to hear about your lives , no sugar coating .
Your faith too that interests me , home schooling and hen health !! We stew up all our peelings these cold days with some porridge and they love it !!
God bless .
Vicki says:
Elizabeth, so good to have you here. Thank you for your encouragement, I’m so pleased you enjoyed the programme. I love your idea for hen food, I will give that one a go. How many hens do you have? Have you had hens for long? We have just wormed ours with flubevet layers pellets, as I noticed some little unwelcome visitors in their droppings, slightly gross, but part of the deal with hens. The good thing with this treatment, unlike others I saw, is that you don’t need to stop eating their eggs. Do you have a worming treatment that you prefer?
Our faith is a huge part of everything we do and so you will find that naturally intertwined into my posts. Without God none of this would be possible.
I’m really keen to be honest and open about the joys and challenges of our life, to reassure people that we are just normal people who serve an extraordinary God. Some days are just really hard, some days I cry, some days everyone seems to squabble, this is normal, but wearing. I look forward to sharing the highs and the lows and hopefully, on the hard days, gaining some reassurance from our readers that they too have struggles and we are in this together.
Lovely to hear from you, Vicki
Ruth says:
Parenting and home schooling and Christianity ( particularly raising children so they retain faith themselves) all interest me, along with how you are doing in the smallholding.
Vicki says:
Ruth, thank you for commenting. Raising our children in faith has been really important to us. We know that they will one day each make the decision whether they want to follow Jesus or not, but while they are little we believe it is our responsibility to show them the way to Him. I look forward to filling in more details on this on another post.
Running a smallholding is a challenge that we love and that keeps teaching us new skills. I will make sure I plan to write plenty of posts on this subject, as we learn and share what we have discovered.
Good to hear from you, Vicki
Jenny says:
I love hearing everything you have to say, but one thing you didn’t mention was food. I’d love to hear some of the meals you cook.
Vicki says:
Hi Jenny, that’s a great idea. I will definitely do a post on food, we have LOTS of it here!
Blessings
Vicki
Janet O'Neill says:
Hi Vicky,
I would love to hear about a day in the life of home schooling.
Love Janet xxx
Vicki says:
That’s a good idea Janet. I will try and get my head around writing a post about that. Every home educator has there own style, I am fairly informal and so my day will look less structured than some, but it works for us. Good to hear from you, Vicki x
Anna Collins says:
Hey Vicki. I’d love some of your poetry and to hear about your faith. you are inspirational and your poetry is just soo beautiful. xx
Vicki says:
Anna, lovely to hear from you 🙂. I hope you and the family are keeping well. Thank you for being such an encouraging voice to me. I will be sure to add my poems, as the Lord leads me to write them. I write poetry most days, but some are too private to share. I love how I can express my emotions through rhyme, it just seems to help to get my feelings down in words. I also love that thousands of miles has not separated us and we have managed to keep in touch. I will continue to share the stories of what God is doing in our lives, I can do no other, as he is front and centre of everything we do here. Lots of love to you my friend, Vicki x
Martin Turner says:
Hi Vicki, we love to read your blogs with interest! One subject we would like you to cover is home education. We are contemplating taking both of our children (13/11) out of school. One reason is we are just not happy with the school curriculum these days. Also we plan to make a bold move like yours and move to a small holding at some point in the near future, hopefully! We are very interested to hear how you home educated all your children? What structure did/do you follow? Did you follow a model or just create it yourself?
Vicki says:
Martin, What exciting days you have ahead! Having read all the suggestions of what to write about, I was just thinking that my next post would be about home education, your comment has confirmed to me that is what God would have me write about next. Hopefully, if time allows, I will write the post tonight (depending on how the day goes and how weary I feel by 10 pm tonight 😉). Please keep asking questions, it really helps to direct my thoughts. We are keen to serve the Lord by sharing what we have learnt and supporting other people in whatever way we can. Blessings, Vicki
Mark Ellis says:
Hi Phil and Vicky.
We just enjoyed the program very much as we are in the process of moving away from the south east to have more land for chickens etc… It’s great to know you are unashamed Christians.
I understand you may intentionally avoid mentioning any particular brand of Church but we are fascinated to know what denomination / Church tradition inspires your wearing a headscarf and having a larger than average family (as you said in the program with regard to your family size “it’s our faith”).
Thanks
Mark
Mark Ellis says:
Hi Phil,
So good of you to reply, and great to hear about the ways you’ve been led. It’s so important that we all seek to discern what the Lord wants for us as individuals and not just to follow the crowd! ..and so great to know that with the whole of humanity to take care of He is interested in each of us.
As we set out on our own little adventure we will be interested to follow your blog.
Thanks,
Mark
Phil says:
Mark Thanks so much for your comment and interest in our blog. It’s exciting to know that you enjoyed the program and are also in the same boat as we were a few years ago. I think that you have asked a question that many people wonder! If you look at the stats of referred search terms for the blog, quite a few are along the lines of querying our religion. I remember back to the days when I was in junior school and there was one girl in my class who had loads of siblings and a VW van to ferry them all around. She was allowed to skip our RE classes and go to the reading room as her parents didn’t want her being taught the “State’s” teaching on Christianity. This was well before political correctness and other views had skewed teaching in this area… I think that I, and the rest of the children, just accepted it and moved on. I was never sure what their religion was – but it was clearly different from the way they dressed, behaved and led their lives, so I fully understand your question. Both Vicki and I have had regular Anglican upbringings – infant baptism with us choosing to be Confirmed as teenagers when we believed in the Christian faith for ourselves. Neither of us thought that we would have a lot of children. However, after dating and getting married (almost 20 years ago) we wanted to have some (not a lot of) children. However after we were blessed with a few children, we became quite convicted that our children were an absolute blessing from the Lord and knew that the Lord would never want to give us something that (with his strength) we would not be able to handle. Through this, we made an active decision to leave the number of children we had in the Lord’s hands. It has been a rollercoaster ride but one that we know has been the right way to go for us. I say “for us” as it’s very much a personal decision that for us, worked, but is not something that we would ever impose on others. God’s plan for each one of us is unique. It’s the same with Vicki wearing a headscarf. Quite a few years ago now, she was convicted (out of her own reading and praying) that she needed to wear a head covering. This was a huge decision for her but one that has found to be a real blessing over these past few years. She actually has a lovely testimony that at some point, she may feel called to share. But it is her conviction, which I support, that led her to follow this practice, and it is not something that we believe others should do too, unless they felt they also feel led to do so. Before our move, we were very involved in a large C of E Anglican Church where we were the largest family (only by a few though) and Vicki was the only lady who consistently wore a head covering. In our new church, which happens to be a Baptist Church, it is the same. I think it boils down to us going to a church where the Bible is taken as the Truth, that brings fellow believers together (although that is a struggle in these specific times) and where we can live our lives as God leads each of us to, in our own personal ways. That personal relationship is the key to all this. Our life choices are not something that we have been told to do within any denomination we have been part of; it is our personal conviction based on the leading of the Holy Spirit and our study of the Bible. I hope that that helps you (and others) understand a little way into our thinking on this! thanks
Phil