New products are always exciting, and we hope you’ll be as excited as we are about the 5 new DVD titles in the Reclaiming the Culture set.
Titles include:

• You May Not Take Our Guns (DVD)

• The Devolution of Law (DVD)

• Top Ten Questions About Genesis and Creation (DVD)

• The State of Parental Rights in America (DVD)

• Christianity and Science Fiction: Reclaiming the Genre for Christ (1 DVD & 2 CDs)

Description from the Vision Forum website:

At every level of government, our rights as citizens and parents are ignored and usurped by power-hungry politicians. Our news media, universities, and entertainers actively wage war against God’s Word and those who live by it. And our children are confronted daily by the lies of evolution and the horrific realities of its “survival of the fittest” ideology.
In an effort to provide encouragement, hope, and practical instruction to Christian families, Vision Forum is pleased to release five new DVDs. These timely presentations will equip your family to understand our culture’s most critical battles and biblically fight for the rights granted to us by God, rights recognized and preserved for us by our Founding Fathers.

Go ahead.  Enter now.  Tell your friends!!  Get hopping!!  The deadline is Friday the 15th!!

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New products are always exciting, and we hope you’ll be as excited as we are about the 5 new DVD titles in the Reclaiming the Culture set.
Titles include:

• You May Not Take Our Guns (DVD)

• The Devolution of Law (DVD)

• Top Ten Questions About Genesis and Creation (DVD)

• The State of Parental Rights in America (DVD)

• Christianity and Science Fiction: Reclaiming the Genre for Christ (1 DVD & 2 CDs)

Description from the Vision Forum website:

At every level of government, our rights as citizens and parents are ignored and usurped by power-hungry politicians. Our news media, universities, and entertainers actively wage war against God’s Word and those who live by it. And our children are confronted daily by the lies of evolution and the horrific realities of its “survival of the fittest” ideology.
In an effort to provide encouragement, hope, and practical instruction to Christian families, Vision Forum is pleased to release five new DVDs. These timely presentations will equip your family to understand our culture’s most critical battles and biblically fight for the rights granted to us by God, rights recognized and preserved for us by our Founding Fathers.

Go ahead.  Enter now.  Tell your friends!!

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3. And the winner is…

Ann Marie, if I don’t win this time I’ll cry and stomp my feet have to order on Amazon.  You don’t want to make me do that do you? ::wink wink::

As a warning I must say that Ann Marie has given us several hoops to jump through but you don’t need to bother because *I* am going to win this book.  Excuse me while I go link and post and facebook this big event.  WOO HOO!!  Come to mama!!!

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So early one morning when only Jill and June were out of bed I forced them to choose a winner.

I printed out all the comments and printed out twice the ones that had a blog post as well.  Then the girls and I cut them apart, folded them and put them in a bowl.

And I decided to choose TWO winners.

Winner number one is Chasity!!  WOO HOO!!  Chas!!  Email me at Katie at teambettendorf dot com with your address and I’ll Jeff will ship that out right away.

Winner number two is Jonathan Diehl.  Congratulations!!  Shoot me an email with your address and I’ll consider sending your book to you.

Here they are, waiting to go to their new home.

And I actually accidentally ordered THREE extra copies of this book so some day (but I’m not sayin’ when ’cause I don’t know when) I’ll be giving away one more copy.

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I’m in town today talking to my friend Carey about the new Weston A. Price Foundation Springfield, MO chapter.  I’ll be back tomorrow.

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From Publishers Weekly
From first sentence to last, Coleman’s ( The New Organic Gardener ) book is a delight–an earnest guide written with an impish sense of humor. It will refresh anyone who wants to get the most from a vegetable garden yet doesn’t want to devote too much time and energy to the process. Apparently Coleman thoroughly enjoys every phase of gardening–from planting crops to weeding. Who else has ever suggested, only half in jest, dancing with a hoe? Or keeping a pair of ducks for pest patrol? This is that kind of book. It’s also a book full of valuable information on how to harvest fresh vegetables and salad ingredients literally year-round–yet without an expensive greenhouse or indoor light garden set-up. Coleman combines succession planting (small sowings three or more times, rather than one big endeavor) with cold-frame growing in the winter months. He includes how-tos for building simple cold-frames. Given the fact that he lives in Maine, his advice seems all the more reliable. He believes in simplicity ("If what I am doing in the garden seems complicated, it is probably wrong"), seasonality (tomatoes in summer, broccoli in fall, mache in February) and diplomacy in the garden (which "has more to teach us than just how to grow food"). Here, his philosophy of organic growing is shared easily. The book concludes with an extensive chapter on the vegetables that comprise his "cast of characters." Illustrated.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Real Food for Mother and Baby: The Fertility Diet, Eating for Two, and Baby’s First Foods

You only have until midnight tonight so you best hurry.  I’m just retarded and waited until the last day.  Sorry.

Go to Kelly the Kitchen Kop’s site and enter, enter, enter!!  And if you win you have to loan me the book.  Because I told you about it, after all.

Go, go, go!!

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Bovine pictures to follow.  I promise.

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No related posts.

I have not moved all my old posts over there yet.  Should I really take the time to do that?

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Congratulations Lori!!!

Your tag line Training, Teaching and Telling it Like it is! is the winner. **cough cough** It seems very appropriate in light of the recent posts, does it not?  Please email me with your address and choice of gift card.  I’d pick some place like Red Robin or Joann but I know not everyone shares my obsession with the Guacamole Bacon Burger and half price flannel so you feel free to choose some place YOU are interested in.

Now to convince Jeff to edit my banner.  Hmmm…cookies?

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Voting ends at 9pm (Bettendorf time) on Monday so vote early.  I can’t wait to see who wins!!!

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Ok, I think I might school today. Or something.

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Grateful for Grace said:

Lori said:

Oh my goodness, they are all so good!! If you have any more good ideas please post. You can enter as many times as you like. If you have not entered give it a shot. What would you do with $25? We’ll be making a decision on the 5th. All entries mus be in by the 4th. Get thinking!!

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This picture has absolutely nothing to do with the contest but I have no new pictures to share.  Like I said, we are scraping the bottom of the barrel.  Wonder who this is.

I need a tag line and I need one bad.  Even my dear husband has one and I can never let him one up me, so help me out.  Maybe something like these:

Team Bettendorf: Mom of twelve impales herself while unbuckling fifth car seat in the van.

No, that sounds like a news release.  A bad one at that.  Or maybe it would just be a bad accident.  Or perhaps bad humor.  Hmmmm

Team Bettendorf: A family with lots of flatulence. 

Then again is that something we want our visitors to know about us as soon as they get here?  Wouldn’t we prefer they get to know us a bit before they discover our odiferous lifestyle?

Team Bettendorf: So many kids we don’t bother to bathe them or remember their names (and you can forget schooling them).

Maybe not.

See, I’m no good.  You guys are creative and fun and creative and silly and creative.  Help.

I know you like this outfit.  Dana sent it to me.  Isn’t it great?

Post your proposed tag line here and the team and I will make a decision in 7 days.

Thx -The Management

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Stop by and enter her give-away HERE.  Please?

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I had to choose one though and it was SO hard but finally after reading and eliminating for days and days I decided that Heidi in MN had the most harrowing tale.  In addition to living without the basics for 4 years she regaled us with details about falling asleep while sticking her toes in cracks between the hand hewn logs.  Thanks for sharing your childhood memories with us Heidi.

Because I enjoyed it so much I will reproduce it here in its entirety.  Enjoy everyone!!

When I was 6yo, my parents sold their lovely suburban home and everything they couldn’t fit in the back of my dad’s pickup truck. My parents, my 4yo brother, and I traveled from Rochester, NY to 20 wooded acres in northern Minnesota. We lived in an 8′wide trailer for 4 years without electricity or plumbing while my parents built a vertical log cabin from trees on our land. On many winter nights, after my brother and I went to bed (in our sleeping bags, since the bedroom wasn’t actually big enough for beds), my mother would bring the logs into the trailer, one at a time, and peel them. We have memories of the potatoes in the closet rotting after they froze, and my parents waking up with their hair frosted to the headboard.

When the time came, my father sunk railroad ties as supports for the cabin. After the floor joists were laid, we made many trips to the nearby state forest with trash bags, which we filled with sphagnum moss. This was laid between floor joists on chicken wire, and was the insulation under our floor. We also chinked between the logs with moss.

It was several years before we had an outhouse. Instead, we used a porta-potty, which my father diligently emptied and cleaned. Oh, the memories of him chasing us with “porta-potty finger”!

The cap my father had built for the pickup truck on our trip to MN became a tool shed, and they attached a duck/goose coop to the back side of it. The roof of the coop was shingled with cut & flattened beer cans. That’s not even counting the beer my parents enjoyed at the bar in our small town (pop. 36) while all the kids played kickball in the street.

The first goat barn was made of unpeeled logs, and we lost count of the number of snakes we found in the hay. That barn later became a chicken coop, and the goats were moved to a beautiful log barn (now a sauna). We used to walk the goats down the road almost every day.

The cabin was heated with a tiny wood stove, which my mother uses in her current home 30 years later. We got to the loft via a ladder that was supposed to be temporary, with rungs nearly 2 feet apart. When I visited the cabin 3 years ago, that ladder was STILL in use.

I used to fall asleep pushing my toes into the cracks in the logs and reading the label on the Owens-Corning Fiberglass Insulation above me. Until my father put in a wind generator, I didn’t have a lamp in my room. I was too young to handle the kerosene lamp myself, so bedtime and nightfall often coincided.

There were four different attempts at digging a well, but only one was moderately successful. We never did drink the muddy water from that pump.

My father brought water from the fire station in the big town where I went to school (pop. 300), and we stored it in metal milk cans. Washing hair involved a canning pot and the kitchen sink. Sponge baths were the norm, using a mixing bowl in the bathroom sink, until we got an old military solar shower unit that went in the woods near the outhouse. That was crazy, considering the mosquito problem.

In 1984, we moved back to civilization and my family fell apart. The whole Minnesota experience was like a vivid dream for each of us who had lived it. The family ended up scattered around the country. In 2004, I was the first one to return for a visit and confirm that yes, the old homestead is still there. And in 2006, God totally surprised me by moving us from Kentucky to within 20 minutes of the cabin. But our lifestyle now is modern by comparison!

Thanks again everyone!!  Heidi, I have a Starbucks gift card with your name on it.  Please e-mail me with your address.

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Congratulations Amber.  You guessed 1/7/08 at 2:13 am so you were only 10 hours and one minute off.  Do you have a crystal ball?  Or did Angela give you the answer?  Please compile a list of items you would like from Vision Forum totaling no more than $25 and shoot it to me in an e-mail (Katie@teambettendorf.com) with your address and we’ll (Jeff, I mean) get it ordered up and shipped out tomorrow!!

Congrats again Amber and I’m going to go take a nap.

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So there I was walking through my cluttered house.  But it’s all in the name of education.  You know how dedicated to formal schooling we Bettendorf’s are.  And I saw the baskets below poking out from their designated place.  Bad baskets. Bad.

I gave them a shove.  They didn’t move.  I shoved again.  Bad, bad baskets!!  What is behind the baskets???

I slowly pulled out a basket.  With trepidation.  I spied a furry creature.  Is it a skunk?  A raccoon?  In the wilds of the Ozarks you just never know what you will encounter.

Oh…it’s a cat.  Scary. 

The probability of my leaning over and into the basket cubby to retrieve this feline creature from her hiding place, without falling over and cracking my head on the dehydrator that has come to make it’s permanent residence in my diningroom, was high.  I’m about as graceful as an elephant with my extra 25 lbs hanging out the front like an extra appendage.  Ya ya, I know the 25lbs will bring chuckles.  Keep your comments to yourself.

My master plan became to repeatedly take flash photographs of the misplaced kitty until she relented and relocated.  Lookie here!  It worked.

Stupid humans.

Poor Nickel. I continued to snap photos in effort to capture her true feelings about the whole ordeal.  What do you think she is saying?

And now the contest.  As I said the cat’s name is Nickel.  What famous (or not) animal is Nickel named after?  The first person to answer correctly will receive a $10 gift card to Starbucks.  One guess per person.  Contest ends in 24 hours.  Post your guesses below.

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