Sunday Afternoon Tea

This past Sunday I stayed home from church with Stasia, Seth and Sayer because we had colds.  I thought it would be fun to surprise them with an afternoon tea party.

Tea

 

Honey Cinnamon Cookies

The Table

While we enjoyed our tea and cookies, we read about missionary David Brainerd who was an amazing warrior for Christ and shared the gospel with many different Indian tribes in the mid 1700's.

We had a very enjoyable time together!

Shenandoah's First Birthday!!! December 4th, 2009

It is hard to believe that Shenandoah is one year old already!!!  She is such a sweet little thing and a huge delight to our family.  Hope you enjoy the pictures from her first birthday!!!

The Birthday Girl

Shenandoah by her birthday sign.  She loved the balloons!  Do you notice the "Baby's 1st Birthday" balloon in the middle?  That is from the same package that all of my sisters and I have had on our first birthdays.  We thought that was fun!

The Cochran Kids

Shenandoah and Stasia
(I love this picture)
  

 Stasia with funny face Shenandoah!!

Seth and Shenandoah 

Shenandoah and Sabrina 

Shenandoah and Sienna

Shenandoah and Sayer

Aren't they fun!!

 Shenandoah and I 

 

Present Time!

  

Daddy helping her undo the packaging.

She was SO excited when she opened up her baby doll.  She really loves it and likes to take it with her wherever she goes.

 

Shenandoah and Baby.

Shenandoah with her presents.

She was facinated with the candle.

Thinking about it...

Tasting...

  I think she liked it pretty well!

(I made her an almond bunt cake and it was the first time she had ever had any cake!)

We love you Shenandoah!!!  

Back To The Blog!

Greetings!  With preparations for our trip, gone on the trip, settling in after the the trip and getting sick from being on the trip it has been a couple weeks since I posted!  Oh, by the way, did I tell you we went on a trip?!!

Some quick updates...

We are doing well except for a few colds.  Thankfully, they are getting better.  That's a blessing!

Over the next few days, look forward to several new posts I've got coming up including:

Shenandoah's First Birthday.


A Sunday Tea

and...

The Creation Museum and Sufficiency of Scripture Conference 
(please note: I'm waiting on pictures so, no garrantees that those posts will be soon.  But, hopefully so!

I hope everyone is doing well and enjoying this beautiful cold winter weather (we are supposed to get snow sometime this week.  I'll post pictures if we do).  Stay warm!

God Bless,

Savannah (for the rest of the Cochran's)

Shenandoah is Standing!!!

Shenandoah is such a joy to our family. We love her so much!!! It is SO hard to believe that she is one year old today!!!  She is growing and changing very fast. Standing has been her new "thing" to do and actually, she has already taken a couple of steps. It won't be long until she is walking!!!

Here is a video of when she first started standing up by herself about a week ago. We were having family worship, and all of the sudden, Shenandoah just started standing up over and over again in the middle of the floor!

The video is about 3 minutes long. Towards the end, she starts standing up for longer periods of time! We were all so excited (as you'll probably guess from all the cheers in the background).

We hope you enjoy it!

Thoughts From Thanksgiving

Greetings! We hope everyone was blessed with a glorious Thanksgiving just as we were. We had a wonderful day as a family spending time together and remembering all that the Lord has done for us.

One of our family traditions is to give "thankful" cards to each of our family members.  We enjoy telling each other what we are thankful for in them and encouraging each other as well.

This year, I wanted to share with you Sayer's card to me. It was very precious and we thought you may find it somewhat humorous as well - just as we did! As you will read, his revolved around food. :) I'll post what he said below.

"Dear Savannah,

I am thankful that you make me oatmeal, oatmeal bake, cornbread, beans, and that you are already making pie.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Love,

Sayer"

Happy Thanksgiving!!! 2009

"O give thanks unto the LORD, for He is good: for His mercy endureth forever." ~Psalm 107:1

Remember to give thanks to the Lord!!!

The Purpose Of Thanksgiving

Somewhere in the years since George Washington delivered the first Thanksgiving Proclamation we have lost sight of the intended purpose of the day. I thought it would be beneficial to publish it here as a reminder. I hope you'll take a moment to consider the words of one of our founding fathers and take time over the next few days to do as he directs.

George Washington's 1789 Thanksgiving Proclamation

Whereas it is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits, and humbly to implore His protection and favor; and Whereas both Houses of Congress have, by their joint committee, requested me to "recommend to the people of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer, to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favors of Almighty God, especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness:"

Now, therefore, I do recommend and assign Thursday, the 26th day of November next, to be devoted by the people of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being who is the beneficent author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be; that we may then all unite in rendering unto Him our sincere and humble thanks for His kind care and protection of the people of this country previous to their becoming a nation; for the signal and manifold mercies and the favorable interpositions of His providence in the course and conclusion of the late war; for the great degree of tranquility, union, and plenty which we have since enjoyed; for the peaceable and rational manner in which we have been enable to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national one now lately instituted for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed, and the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge; and, in general, for all the great and various favors which He has been pleased to confer upon us.

And also that we may then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations and beseech Him to pardon our national and other transgressions; to enable us all, whether in public or private stations, to perform our several and relative duties properly and punctually; to render our National Government a blessing to all the people by constantly being a Government of wise, just, and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed; to protect and guide all sovereigns and nations (especially such as have shown kindness to us), and to bless them with good governments, peace, and concord; to promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue, and the increase of science among them and us; and, generally to grant unto all mankind such a degree of temporal prosperity as He alone knows to be best.

Given under my hand, at the city of New York, the 3d day of October, A.D. 1789.

-- Post From My iPhone

Cochran Chronicles

Greetings Everyone!  I hope these blog posts find everyone doing well and enjoying the beautiful fall that the Lord has given to us.

Our family has been doing quite a lot around here, so I'll try to briefly re-cap some of our doings below.

This past Sunday was mommy's birthday.  So we had a fun day as a family celebrating the day with her.  After church, we spent the day in Oklahoma City running errands and just hanging out!

On our property- Fall is certainly upon us (which is hard to believe it's already this time again! :) and we've been doing a lot in preparation for winter.  Over the past month we... built a new goat shed on our back 2 1/2 acres and put up new fencing all around our back acreage so we could move the goats back there (the goats were getting out of the old fence :).

We completely went through our shed, sorting through and organizing everything!!!  We also came up with a lot of stuff that we just didn't want or need any more, so we've been doing a lot on eBay and Craig's List.

I also was able to get my bee hives all bedded down for the winter which went well and felt good to get done.  I ended up combining my two new hives for the winter with the help of an older gentleman who lives nearby and has been bee-keeping for over 30 years!  It is such a blessing to have someone with a lot of experience so willing to help and near-by too.

A couple of weeks ago, a family from our church came up and spent the day (the fathers with the help of some of the kids) cutting/tearing down an extremely big pile of trees, dirt, brush, etc.  It went great and is looking so much better.  We were blessed by and so grateful for the help!

In our home- We are finishing up some re-organizing and more switching of rooms to try and make things even more efficient.  It has gone well and will be nice to have finished in the near future!  We are also keeping up with school and all of the day-to-day stuff that life involves. :)

Shenandoah- Is crawling and pulling up everywhere!!!  It is hard to believe she will turn one next month.  Time goes by so fast.

Last but certainly not least, we've been happy to participate in doing a couple of baby showers over the past month for two different families in our church who have been blessed with another gift from the Lord.  We have several other showers soon to come in the future as well! :)  Regretfully, I've been unable to retrieve the pictures of the showers from our camera.  So, I hope that you will view the lovely posts that my good friend, Sarah,  did on her family's blog.  You can view pictures from the Bender family's shower here and the Ocker family's shower here.

Well, that's about all for now.  Enjoy the pictures of Stasia's birthday below.

Blessings and Happy Fall!

~ Savannah

Stasia's 8th Birthday Oct. 20th

Happy Birthday Stasia, We love you!!!

Her Sign

The Birthday Girl

Stasia's Castle Cake

 Stasia and Sayer

 

Stasia and Seth

 

Stasia and Sienna

Stasia and Sabrina

Stasia and I (Savannah)

Stasia's Birthday Prayer

Daddy and Stasia by her birthday countdown sign.

Harvesting Honey!!!

About two weeks ago, we harvested honey for the first time!!!  It went great!!!   Harvesting turned out to be a lot easier and less messy than we were expecting.  We are very thankful for how it went and are so pleased at having our very own honey!!!  It is delicious!!!  The difference between it and store bought  honey is amazing!!!  We took quite a few pictures so, I've posted some below.

After washing our buckets and getting our equipment together, we headed out to the hive!

Out at the hive.

 

Brushing the bees off of the frames.

 

Look at all of that capped honey!!!

 

We decided to use a "crush and strain" method.  What you do is just scrape all of the wax and honey off your frame into a bucket and then mash it all together.  Of course, after you do all of that, you'll have to strain it.  In this picture we are scraping the frames off into our bucket.

 

The mashed mixture.

 

Getting ready to dump/scrape the mixture into our straining/filtering buckets.

 

Dumping it in.

 

Scraping...

 

 More scraping!!!

You can see the two buckets stacked on top of each other.  In the top bucket, we had a paint strainer which is what we dumped the honey/wax into.  In the bottom of the bucket, we cut out some 1/2  to 1 inch  holes.   So, the honey strained out of the paint filters, through the holes into the bottom bucket (our bottling bucket).  In the top of our bottling bucket, we had another very small micron filter.  By the time the honey went through the whole process, there wasn't any wax left!!!

Because is wasn't extremely warm, it took a couple of days for the honey to do all of the straining.  It was SO hard to be patient!!!

 

The bottling bucket with our honey!!!

 

Sienna and I had an excited audience as we began to bottle our very first harvest of honey!!!

 

The first jar of the first harvest.

 

Bottling the honey.  Isn't this a neat picture?!

 

 Myself with our honey crop.  We got about 36 pounds of honey off of just one honey super!!!   Considering all of the rain we had during the major nectar flows this year and also that this was our first year to harvest, we were extremely pleased!!!

We also got a little over 5 pounds of wax.  I am looking forward to making candles and lip balm this winter!!!