Mmm… cheesecake. It is so good, and we’ve been on a roll trying out a ton of new recipes. I would love to host a cheesecake party where everyone brings their favorite cheesecake and recipe to share!
Here are some of our favorites:
No Bake Cheesecake with Flavor Variations
What is your favorite cheesecake?
There are so many simple joys that can be found when we embrace the concept of ‘slow living’ which we are trying our best to do around here.
This month has been full of adventures here at home and away. We just never know what to expect. Our area has been experiencing a severe drought so that made gardening a little more challenging this season. We have been so blessed to get a decent amount of rain lately and I don’t complain about it, even when it happens mid harvest!
We haven’t really celebrated this, but it might be a fun idea to do. I know that in North Carolina, some places had festivals around this time of year, and they were always a lot of fun.
CHRISTMAS IN JULY
Smoked, BBQ, or Roasted Turkey
Corn Casserole, Carrot Souffle
Smoked Salmon Dip, Stuffed Tomatoes – these can also be stuffed with chicken or tuna salad
Watermelon Trees & Strawberry Santas
Pip: Pollywog’s Place Blog is the kind of corner of the internet that asks you to slow down — and then actually makes a case for why that’s worth doing.
Mara: Today’s episode comes from Susie at Pollywog’s Place Blog, and it’s rooted in one idea: what a garden teaches about faithfulness, patience, and trusting a process you can’t always see. Let’s start with the garden itself.
Mara: The post opens with a simple premise — that tending a garden, done slowly and with attention, becomes a spiritual practice. The question it keeps returning to is: what does faithfulness actually look like when nothing visible is happening yet?
Pip: And the anchor for that question comes early in the piece, framed around the quality of faithful work that goes unobserved: “faithfulness can look: Quiet. Unnoticed. Consistent.”
Mara: That’s the spine of the whole reflection. Faithfulness isn’t defined here by results or recognition — it’s defined by showing up anyway. The post draws a direct line between what a gardener does before anything blooms and what a person of faith does before any prayer is visibly answered.
Pip: The gardening metaphor does real work here. Soil preparation, planting, waiting — each stage maps onto something in a faith life, and the waiting stage gets the most attention. There’s a line that captures it plainly: “growth often begins where our eyes cannot see.”
Mara: The post backs that up with Galatians 6:9 — “let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not.” The “due season” framing recurs throughout. Harvest isn’t withheld; it’s timed.
Pip: There’s also a harder turn in the piece — the weeds section. Worry, fear, bitterness, discouragement. The post names them plainly and says faithfulness sometimes means letting those things be removed, even when it’s uncomfortable.
Mara: That’s where the reflection gets practical rather than just encouraging. It’s not only about patient waiting; it’s about what you allow to compete for space while you wait. The post closes on a direct address to anyone in a season of planting, tending, or waiting — the Gardener, it says, has not left the garden.
Pip: Which is a quiet way of saying the process isn’t abandoned just because it’s invisible — and that’s a harder thing to hold onto than it sounds.
Mara: Exactly the kind of slow-living conviction the whole post is built around.
Pip: Faithfulness as a daily, unspectacular practice — it’s a countercultural idea dressed in garden soil.
Mara: And one worth sitting with. More from Pollywog’s Place next time.
You can read the post HERE:
Pip: Welcome to Pollywog’s Place Blog — where the posts are personal, the stakes are real, and nobody is pulling punches.
Mara: Susie at Pollywog’s Place Blog wrote something this week that takes on prenatal diagnosis, medical pressure, and what it actually looks like to say no — repeatedly — when doctors are certain they know better.
Pip: Let’s start with that story.
Mara: The post opens a question that cuts to the bone: when a prenatal diagnosis arrives loaded with worst-case projections, who actually gets to decide what a child’s life is worth?
Pip: The answer, in this case, came appointment after appointment, and it was the same every time. Here’s the line that captures the whole experience: “At every MFM appointment I was asked if I was ready to schedule ‘the procedure’ — I was told that it would be simple, we could try again in a couple of months, and this was just a rare occurrence that we wouldn’t have to worry about happening again.”
Mara: What that means in practice is that the medical framing wasn’t neutral. It was a campaign. The word “procedure” does a lot of work when you use it to describe ending a pregnancy — it flattens the decision into something routine.
Pip: And the pressure didn’t stop at clinical language. Two weeks before the birth, she was told she was being selfish for refusing. That’s not a medical opinion — that’s something else entirely.
Mara: The post is careful to say it isn’t condemning anyone who has faced this choice differently. But it does make a pointed argument: doctors were presenting opinions as facts. They said Shyanne would never walk, would never have a happy life, would be a burden to her other children. Post-birth genetic testing couldn’t even fully confirm the original diagnoses.
Pip: They called it a rare occurrence that wouldn’t happen again — which is a remarkable thing to say about a child who was, at that moment, doing somersaults.
Mara: She frames the core message plainly: “A disability should not be a death sentence for any child who hasn’t even had the chance to live yet.” And she points toward adoption as a real alternative for families who feel unequipped, noting there are communities and support groups that offer something a single genetics appointment simply cannot — time, experience, and people who have actually been there.
Pip: Shyanne defied every projection. She’s described as healthy, active, and, to use the post’s own words, able to light a room.
Mara: The post ends where it began — with faith, and with the insistence that fear of uncertainty is not the same thing as information.
Pip: One post, one family’s experience — and it raises something that stays with you.
Mara: When the data runs out, the question of who decides is still very much open.
You can read the post HERE:
Pollywog's Place Blog 