A Peek

I'm not doing New Year's Resolutions.

I never keep them anyway. 

God has shown me what is good and right for my life.

 To Love Mercy, To Seek Justice and to walk Humbly Before Him.

That's enough for me.

That's my life resolution.

So here is a peek into our personal lives....

January 1st was for our family a HUGE beginning. 

We are now the sole owners of BiblioPlan for Families.

Our wonderful partner for the last number of years decided back in the summer that she could no longer juggle her part of the business, her writing classes and her family and stay sane.  So she asked us to buy her out.  We did it with heavy hearts.  I will be honest.  I have been grieving for the last few months the end of a partnership that was precious to me.  After we signed the papers at the end of December to make everything legal and official, I got in the car and cried.  I'm still grieving the change.  I miss Rusty. She is a dear friend and I just plain didn't want her to go.

Rusty is the person everyone loves.  She is from Texas and calls everyone Honey and has an amazing ability to remember names and faces and stories.  She loves blessing people with gifts.   I learned so much working beside her.  I am horrible with names and tend to focus more on selling the product than relating to the person.  I loved watching how she drew people in with her warmness and joy.   Dang I'm going to miss her.  Raining tears as I write this.

Buying out the business meant that we had to make some changes in our living situation.  Our little house in the woods was NOT big enough to accommodate our family AND all the materials associated with BiblioPlan.  Up until the buy-out - Rusty had stored all the material at her home.  Up until the buy-out - Rob's office was in our bedroom.  Needless to say, we needed to make some changes.

So... for the last few months Rob has been writing AND renovating.  We had an unfinished, rather large room above our garage that we decided would be perfect for storing the curriculum and would provide a REAL office for Rob.  It is also big enough to store all my materials for teaching at our Co-op AND there is room left over for the boys.  It isn't finished yet and frankly the last few months have been stressful as we have tried to add in a renovation project on top of all our other responsibilities   But we are seeing a light at the end of tunnel.  I'm excited that my bedroom will be JUST my bedroom in the near future.  Aaron is excited that there is an area in the new room where he can put up his massive Tepee tent he got for Christmas and enough floor space to lay out his train tracks.

 Buying out a company is a huge leap of faith, but God has been good to our family and has provided what we needed to move forward.  We are excited about BiblioPlan and its future.  We are working on new products and upgrading old ones.  We have finished THREE of FOUR books.  We are hoping that the fourth book will be finished within the next year.  This past week I spent an hour talking to someone who is going to be using BiblioPlan for their homeschooling co-op in the fall.  I was so encouraged to hear them praise what we have done and express excitement over the curriculum. Those bits of praise in the midst of such a huge change provide healing balm to my quaking spirit.


So please bear with me if I am a bit quiet on this blog for a season.  We are trying to figure out our new normal and it is going to take some time.  For those who have noticed that I have seemed distracted and tired in the past few months, this peek into our personal lives should provide some understanding of what we have been working through.  Plus, in the midst of all of this change, my body has decided to make some changes that come with the joys agony of turning 50.  Nuff said.

So 2013... here we come....

No resolutions... just the same old same old....