Ultimate Blog Party 2012!

It's time for the Ultimate Blog Party 2012! 



Hi, I'm Amber.  Welcome to The Mommy Earth!

Last year was the first year I joined in on the party, on the very last day, so I'm hoping to be more involved this time. 

I'm a mother to 6 children, ages infant through 12 years old.  I stay home with them and homeschool them.

Here I am with my baby, Abraham.  He's 7 months old.  This was taken recently by my oldest child, Bethany.  She got a camera for her birthday and has been enjoying it.  And I've been enjoying her pictures. :)

Here's a picture of all of my children, taken last Thanksgiving.  Aren't they precious?  Peter (the one w/the soccer shirt) is looking at the piano.  Can you tell he'd rather be playing it than posing for photos?

I'm a Christian. My husband works for the church as an evangelist.  We've been married nearly 15 years.

I included some family photos on last year's UBP post, but I guess I may not have any decent ones yet since we became a family of 8.  The one below isn't great, but it does have all of us in it and was taken this month.

I post various things here, on topics like:

• God's Creation/Nature
• Recipes
• Large Families
• Our Life
• Stay-at-Home Moms 
• Books 
• Homeschooling
• Mourning/Grief (my brother died suddenly in July 2010)
• Pinterest  :) (I joined recently and am enjoying it)

You can also link to some of my most frequently-visited and favorite posts:

• Top 11 in 2011
• Top 10 in 2010 (Plus a Few)

I am PR friendly, though I've only begun to get into that and my time for it is limited.  I am willing to honestly review select products that interest me.  I would only promote something I genuinely liked. 

Hope you enjoy looking around.  Leave a comment and/or follow me if you like.  I had fun meeting people last year, and look forward to meeting more this time around.  Thanks for stopping by!  :)

Worldwide Cultural Exchange

We are excited to be participating in a Worldwide Cultural Exchange coordinated by Little Red Farm.  I thought I'd share here because some of my friends might want to participate in something like this. Thank you to delivering grace for introducing me to the exchange.

We are to exchange with people from Indonesia, Canada, England and India.  How cool is that? :)

One of our exchange families has a blog, which makes it that much more fun.  Especially since the blog talks a lot about the place they live, Indonesia.   

All this got me to thinking that my blog could do more to tell about our culture and part of the world.  It's also part of what prompted me to go ahead and make the "Our Life" page for our family posts, which I'd been thinking about for a while.  I have more posts I could make about places we've visited (whether I'll get to them or not is another matter), but often I don't even think about things that others from another part of the world might appreciate knowing about just everyday life around here.  So that's been fun to consider. 

Even something as seemingly mundane as a box of crackers can become interesting when you're talking about another country. Case in point:

This is a box of Digestives that my husband picked up at a local store, but he'd never seen them in the States until recently.  Years ago, he had them when he was in the country of Ghana, in Africa.  So of course he was surprised when he saw them here, and purchased some to share with our family.  They were pretty good. 

We've been developing a list of ideas for things to put in our packages to send.  It's about time to start gathering the items.  How fun!

New Page -- Our Life

I made a new page called "Our Life" where I am putting up links to previous posts about our family life and our photos. 

I've been increasingly frustrated with my inability to keep up with those posts at all, let alone do that and also post in any other area.  When I want to post something that happened more recently, but I'm not caught up on other photos, they get all jumbled up, which probably annoys me more than it annoys you.  But it does annoy me. 

Especially when I want to reference a post from the past, or the children ask to see one, and it takes a long time to find it in the archives because the post about it is far removed from when it actually happened. 

In theory, this new page will allow me to make posts about family happenings either recently or as far back as I want to at any time, while still keeping a chronological record of when they happened.

Not that I'm promising more frequent family photo posts.  You know me better than that by now.  But if I ever do post them, they will be organized.  :)

And no, I'm not at all this organized in real life.  You can tell from my photos.  But I wish I were.  At least sort of.  Obviously not enough to make it happen.

All comments containing the words "Type A," "control freak," "OCD," or "bizarre" will be deleted.  Or alphabetized. ;)