Ministry Update :: May 16, 2013

Posted on May 16, 2013 by Troy

Each year GoodSeed has a number of opportunities to meet the public and share with others about our books and videos that clearly and simply explain the most important message to man: God’s love and His plan of salvation. Because we are a small organization, we can’t do as many of these events as we would like to, but one that we are able to attend is a large home school convention in a nearby city.

As a home schooling parent, Naomi wanted to be involved in this event with GoodSeed, as she understands some of the challenges and needs of this community, and how GoodSeed’s evangelism resources can help parents. Here is her report:

Recently, I was able to represent GoodSeed at a provincial homeschool convention. While GoodSeed does not specifically cater to home educators, we have found that our evangelism tools are meeting a real need within that community. Many folks we spoke to expressed a real concern for their children:
How could they give their children a solid foundation in God’s Word?
How could they help their children understand God’s gift of salvation as their own, and not just their parents’ belief?

Some expressed concern over the worrying trend of churched children leaving the faith once they leave home. We were able to direct them to GoodSeed resources that would lay a strong framework of understanding on which kids could build everything else in life.

I found it quite thrilling to meet so many folks who deeply desired to obey God’s command of teaching their children about God and to be able to hand them easy-to-use tools to help them along in that goal.

Troy & Naomi

First day at school

Posted on October 11, 2011 by Troy

This past week we had two first days at school. Ellie started grade one with homeschooling and Adelaine had her first day of Kindergarten.

Adelaine has been asking almost every day for the last six months how many days it was until she started school. When the big day arrived she was very excited! Despite the size of her backpack with all her school supplies for the year, she insisted on wearing it. She is so petite that it almost pulled her over backwards a couple of times. After her first week she is still thrilled about going to school and looking forward to her next school day.

Ellie seems to be doing very well with the homeschool and is thriving with the one-to-one attention from her mom.. er.. teacher.

Gardening

Posted on September 14, 2010 by Naomi

Posted by Naomi

I always thought of myself as having a black thumb, since house plants experience a steady decline from the moment they enter our home.

In other words, I kill plants.

So I figured any vegetable garden I planted would face a similar doom under my care. Instead, I discovered that I really enjoyed gardening. The excitement of planting a tiny seed and actually see the thing sprout, then the satisfaction of harvesting tasty organic vegetables in the end was definitely worth the minimal effort on my part (read: I get lazy about weeding). I’ve learned a lot about what not to do and a few things that I found worked well. The kids enjoyed helping me plant and harvest, especially Adelaine.

Ellie’s imagination would take off soon after work commenced and she’d forget that she was supposed to be helping.

And Ethan, well, Ethan was better at stomping on my plants than helping them to grow – at least the plants had to develop strong roots to withstand his trampling!

Adelaine, on the other hand, is a very hard worker when she sets her mind to it and she was a great help with planting my onions, shallots and garlic, and then later harvesting my potatoes. I have no clue how well my garden did – I have nothing to compare it to – but I would say we were at least successful at growing some lovely food and I look forward to another garden next year!

It’s time for a new family portrait

Posted on September 13, 2010 by Troy

It’s been a year since we last took a family portrait, so last week when there was a few minutes that it wasn’t raining, we packed up the kids and went out to the field.

“Ethan, where is the camera?”

On White

Posted on March 10, 2010 by Troy

As a gift for Naomi’s 30th birthday, I wanted to give her some nice photographs of herself. So one day after work I dragged home a ton of lighting equipment and set up a studio in our living room after the kids went to bed.

My beautiful wife:

The next day I dug out the white paper background again to get some pics of the kids. It was a challenge getting the kids to sit still and smile, but we managed to get a few photos of the munchkins that are keepers.

The perfect family:

But of course, photographs lie.

The reality was more like this:

Squinty eyes, big eyes, bye byes.

“Enough of the cute stuff, I’m outta here!”

For this one I asked friends on facebook to come up with a caption.

My submission was “Why are girls so weird?”

A few others were:
Becky: “What are they so happy about?”
Nichole: “uh oh, my sisters have gone stepford!”
Adam: “There are two of them, and only one of me…this can’t be good.”
Scott: “Smile and wave… just smile and wave.”

Ellie