More Little House on the Prairie!

Can you believe it’s been five years since I wrote my first Little House on the Prairie post? I read it and am taken back to the simpler days of only having my first two kids to homeschool where we practiced a more relaxed homeschool approach. Now my oldest will be entering high school next year and the next is fully immersed in the world of junior high. How time flies. I’ve added four more kids to the mix of homeschooling with one more still to fit in the next couple of years. Gone are the relaxed, take-your-time days of yore. Now we are fully immersed in a heavy classical school load for the older two and, while the younger ones still have fun and are covering a lot of the same material as the first two, my schedule is much more structured with this next group of younger kids as I have to make sure there is enough mommy teacher time to go around to meet all the needs. Hence the sound of crickets on this here blog!

We are on round two of our history cycle wrapping up modern history this year. We began the year just post Civil War and started right in on Pioneers and the Homestead Act with my younger children. This, of course, is a perfect time to introduce another generation to my love of all things Little House of the Prairie! Oh how I wish I had more time to spend and camp out here. Even though I only had a week to fill, I made the best of it with my very kinetic learners with two great hands-on projects I wanted to share with you all.

Sometimes with homeschooling I get caught up in the wants that cost money. I would’ve loved to have had a big set of Lincoln Logs for my preschooler through fourth grader to play with. This would’ve been great to keep little hands busy while mommy was reading our literature Little House on the Prairie or our living history book selections. This was not in our budget this year. Instead, I decided to concentrate on using what I already had that also keeps little hands busy. Play dough. I decided the best way to help my hands-on learners remember what the Homestead Act meant was to immerse them in the world of sod house making. They absolutely loved this and all decided, at least the first week of school, that history was definitely their favorite subject. Score for mom! We used this play dough recipe that I had used before for a Valentine’s Day party because it smells like heavenly chocolate.

And don’t let the blog pictures deceive you. My first batch turned out horrible. I thought I could get buy without the cream of tartar and it was a disaster. So while my kids were busily, and happily, playing in the sticky muddy mess on the table, it wasn’t the right consistency to make our sod bricks out of and mommy had to do a quick run to the store in order to redo the recipe the right way. But it turned out all right in the end and they were very happy with their sod houses. Note to moms: try to gently encourage your students to stack the bricks in the staggered pattern that real builders use. Otherwise, when this project dries it will fall apart! My kids had to learn this the hard way. As their houses dried they looked great but immediately collapsed in a heap of dried sod bricks when they did not heed my warning.

We also played this fun game online that shows if you have what it takes to make it on the prairie and build a sod house properly. Both my third and fourth grader failed their first two attempts but finally got it right on attempt number three!

Our next project this week was to build this cute little pioneer peg family to live in their built sod houses. My children love to play what they learn. When we studied cowboys they played cowboys. When we studied Indians they played Indians. When we studied women’s suffrage they played making signs and voting. I love watching them play what they learn. It makes my house always chaotic and a bit on the messier side – an uphill battle I struggle with already just having seven kids living here with me all day long – but the extra effort at cleaning is worth it when I hear them ask if we can study something again because they want to play it again.

Now the crafty, OCD mommy part of me had to forcibly take a back seat on the peg project people. I modeled the project for them. I made wonderful suggestions to them. I used scrap material and yarn I already had on hand and only had to buy the peg clothespins – $2 for a bag at Michaels. But my children are nothing if not consistent and hard-headed. They had there own way of doing their dolls and mommy had to let that be okay. They had a lot of fun with this project. And, if they had listened to me with their sod houses, the houses would’ve been built high enough to use and play with the peg people. We will probably revisit making these dolls again this winter while reading “The Long Winter” for literature. Maybe I’ll teach them how to make some snow candy like Laura and Mary did if we get a dumping of good sticky snow. While this experiment didn’t quite turn out how I wanted it to with my oldest kids, it was still very yummy!

For more fun activities to pair with your Little House on the Prairie study or any history study pertaining to the early pioneers, check out my previous Little House on the Prairie Unit Study.  Also, if you wanted to expand on the activities that I listed here today, you could also try your hand at these. I wanted to get to all of them but a week is such a short time and flies by too fast.

• Make your own butter!
• What’s For Lunch pdf – lessons on what homesteaders ate, including color pages and mason jar butter recipe for above activity
• Exploring Sod Houses Lesson Plan
• Short Video on History of Sod Houses
• Make Maple Snow Candy
• Build a Marshmallow & Graham Cracker Covered Wagon
• Covered Wagon Color Page
• Westward Expansion Unit – page 1 is a Homestead Act notebook page (tracing and illustrating)
• Wild West Mega Pack for Tots

We also read a great new book that I’m adding to our list of Pioneer book must-haves. Dandelions by Eve Bunting is a picture story about two girls who move with their parents out to the prairie. I choose this particular book for several reasons. First, it was set in Nebraska – where we live. I love making history personal. It seems to stick more. Second, they build a sod house and talk about the Homestead Act, which went well with our project and notebooking for the week. Third, dandelions are my favorite under-appreciated flower! So many uses and benefits – I have a whole Pinterest Board dedicated to them – and such a bright yellow sign of hope in the spring when the winter blues have seem to permanently set in. In fact, this is kind of the point of the story. Many pioneer wives of that time, while hard and persevering women, experienced depression. While they did set out to try their hand at a new life, they also left everything behind. Being in this harsh new world without shade and trees and the beauty of flowers, without the comfort of their extended family or even neighbors and community, without their furniture (not much could fit on the wagon ride out) and heirlooms, even without wood to build a comfortable house, living in this world of dirt and nothingness must have been so hard for so many women. This story touches on that very hardship and the young girl ends up saving and planting some dandelions on her sod roof for her mother. It is a beautiful story that touches on that hope that so many prairie wives needed. I just loved it.

     

Books I would add to my first list for this time period:

• Dandelions by Eve Bunting
• Pioneer Girl by Andrea Warren (a true memoir about a Nebraska Homesteader)
• Pioneer Girl: The Story of Laura Ingalls Wilder by William Anderson (picture book biography)
• Dakota Dugout by Ann Turner
• Prairie Willow by Maxine Trotter
• Wagon Wheels by Barbara Brenner (and I Can Read! Level 3 book)
• You Wouldn’t Want to be an American Pioneer!
• A Pioneer ABC! by Mary Alice Downie (for the littles with beautiful illustrations)

Another thing I’m excited to do this winter with the kids is work through watching the first season of Little House on the Prairie. They really don’t make shows like this anymore and I mourn the loss of wholesome family values that this show teaches. This will make a perfect wintertime activity to binge on in evenings of our cozy house with the outside world shut out to us. But we will kick it off with this documentary The Legacy of Laura Ingalls Wilder. I may be a bit of a nerd but I’m so excited about watching this. You must visit the blog Little House of the Prairie and watch the trailer. It looks just divine! While your at their site stay and look around a while. It is chock full of wonderful activities to pair with a Little House study!

They are also offering a one time savings to you homeschool moms in order to add it to your living history library as well. Just click on their Amazon link to buy the documentary and put in the coupon code (LHSCHOOL) to receive an additional 20% off!

Why We Celebrate Lent {Shhh! We’re not Catholic!}

 

It is February 18th today and already, again, Lent is upon us. Every year it sneaks up on me even though I know it is always 40 days before Easter. Last year it came and went without any celebration. I just didn’t have it in me. I was exhausted. I was nursing all the time and trying to stay up with school. The kids were branching out into extracurricular activities and friends and our time was being sucked out from beneath our house feet.

And the kids felt it. Maybe not until it was closer to Easter but, they felt the lack of liturgical fluidity that links Lent to Easter. And they asked about it. And they whined that I “forgot”. So when I was checking the date last night I was sucker-punched again as I realized it was the next day and that, again, I still hadn’t planned for it. But after realizing how much this meant to my kids, I resolved, however imperfectly, to acknowledge and celebrate today.

And the Lord, in His infinite mercy and goodness, helped me along. One of my best friends handed me a 2015 Lenten Devotions guide that she received free through a community service event a few weeks ago. I fished it out under a pile of books and flipped to the first day’s devotion while making breakfast.

Mathew 4: 1-4

The story of Christ and his temptation after 40 days in the wilderness.

At breakfast we read the verses. We read the devotional. We discussed all the rich links.

Why is Lent 40 days before Easter?

What is the link between Jesus 40 days in the Wilderness and Israel’s 40 years in the wilderness?

Why are we to sacrifice for Lent?

What does our sacrifice have to do with Jesus and his 40 days? And with his ultimate sacrifice?

How or what do we sacrifice?

But my favorite discussion came from the little conversations surrounding the quandary of what to give up. We talked about keeping our sacrifice between ourselves and God. (The last thing I want to be is the Lent police picking out how my kids are failing one more time or in correcting them with a more appropriate sacrifice.) We talked about failure and how that is actually a positive thing. Failing at Lent is a perfect practical application for us about how trying to “be good” on our own will always fail. Only one will not fail. Only one has not failed. That one – Jesus – is why his 40 days resisting temptation really means something and why his ultimate sacrifice covers everything. This allows Lent to truly become a walk to the cross as we practice living for Him but, in our failure, rejoice in the Resurrection on Easter morning.

 

So, how do we do Lent as a family?

First, we discuss the meaning of Lent, why it comes before Easter, and what sacrifice means.

Next, everyone picks something they would like to sacrifice for the next forty days leading up to Easter. Note – this can be something tangible like giving up desserts or coffee, or it can be something intangible like giving up anger in exchange for self-control towards siblings. And for littles we let them pick regardless of if it seems sacrificial enough for us or not.

Then we take our sacrifices to the fire. Just as we, as Christians, are refined in the fire of the Holy Spirit in order to make us more holy, we offer these sacrifices to be burned out of us in a physical representation of fire. A candle flame is a tangible symbol of this. Each child is allowed to relinquish their sacrifice to the death of the flames.

Afterwards, we take the ashes and make the sign of the cross on our foreheads. This is a great reminder of our promise to God especially as we go out into the word. We are set apart as a people. Others notice. What better way for your child to evangelize as another child asks them why they have soot on their forehead? This is a perfect opportunity for you, as a parent, to also role play with your older teens on how you explain their budding faith.

And – my kids favorite part! – then we color the Lent Countdown Calendar to Easter! What a fun way (that doesn’t involve candy) to countdown to, what should be, the most celebrated holiday of the year for us, as Christians.

 

So just because you may be reading this post after Lent has already begun – maybe way after – don’t let that stop you from participating with your kids this year. Start where you are today. Your kids won’t mind coloring in extra spaces on their calendar. In fact, you may discover next year that you, too, have started a new family tradition that makes your family’s faith walk much richer.

 

 

How Do You Prepare Him Room?

I’m feeling the stress of Advent creep into my bones.

This weekend we had our big Christmas at the Cabin weekend with my side of the family and friends. Such a good time. So full of wonderful Christmas memories for the children. So good to visit and not have a baby attached to me that I need constant supervision over. Christmas carols, food, late conversations into the night, Nerts games by day. All is well. We come home and unpack in a reasonable time and fix a light dinner then realize the Christmas Encounters church program is in less than half an hour. Little girls need to be in dresses, hair needs brushed, boy needs jeans, kids need shoes and winter coats.

We’re almost there. No time to redo my messy braid but I do manage to throw on a red Christmasy-ish shirt and ribbon. Girls are beautiful with a special strand each of mom’s pearls. Dad says all are ready and we rush toward the van. Then I realize that boy is still not in jeans. He is in van with coat and shoes but also pj pants covered in food from the past two days. I rush him back inside as he whines that he has no jeans. I yell. I am not pleasant. We hurry into jeans that I find for him and rush back to car.

Still on time, I think. We pull into parking lot and I realize, with a pit in my stomach, that my camera is sitting on boy’s bed back home. I’m feeling really frustrated. I wanted a picture of their song. I wanted a picture of the girls in front of the Church Christmas tree looking beautiful. I wanted this Christmas memory captured. I seek out hubby to take over kids and run back home. I hear an emphatic NO and I know he’s right, but I feel panicky. We rush in to find seats in the crowded auditorium.

We sing. The opening song is beautiful. Mary Did You Know. This was the song my mother requested we learn this Christmas. My kids know the words and are excited to hear it. It is a beautiful accapella rendition except one of the main singer’s microphones aren’t on and you can barely hear him compared to the sound of the others on stage and I see the worship leader straining a smile as he keeps singing and pretends it’s not happening and I know he has a pit in his stomach too because this isn’t how the night was suppose to go.

I start to slow and say a quick pray for God to change my heart. What I want to do is tell my boy that it was his fault that my camera is not here to capture this moment. What I do instead is bite my tongue and hug him him and rub his back during the song. My heart is pierced with how broken I am. I am so glad I did not let ugly sin words stain this night and break my boy’s spirit.

Soon my littlest girl is squirming in my lap and making noises that are disruptive. I realize that with her I wouldn’t have been able to hold a camera and take pictures anyway. I remover her after hearing the kids sing and we traverse to the bathroom and then hang out in the foyer. I meet another large family mother with two littles crawling around her and we commiserate together. I tell her my story and she tells me hers. She didn’t want to come but her son really wanted to go. She capitulated at the last moment and dropped everything, very literally, with her mixer still sitting in potatoes and milk and no supper in anyone’s belly except for a rushed grabbed cookie. She realized that if she was going to make the decision to go it had to be now regardless of circumstances. And here she was in the middle of that act of love sitting on the floor in the foyer with littles that wouldn’t sit still and be quiet missing the whole thing.

I returned to my seat for the last two songs thinking about this woman and her story while singing the chorus of O Come Let Us Adore Him. The last song was a raucous rendition of Joy to the World. As I was swaying the baby and enjoying the music a line jumped out at me.

Let every heart prepare Him room…”

How do we even do that? Prepare Him room? What does that even mean?

I think of our tradition of keeping Advent. Of meeting nightly and reading scripture and singing songs to remember. Surely this is good. Surely this is what that means. Or so I have always thought. Yet every Advent season I walk away feeling slightly still empty. Sure there were good memories, beautiful pictures. Yet there is always something that I can’t put my finger on that seems missing or off kilter. I always thought of Advent as a time to draw nearer to the Lord. And I always chalked up my not feeling nearer due to this season of life with littles. Surely one day when everyone was bigger and could sit still and not fidget, when everyone really got what Christmas was about, surely then Advent would fill up my soul and satisfy that yearly holiday longing.

But as I listen to Joy to the World and think of that line again I begin to wonder if my thinking is what’s off kilter.

Let every heart prepare Him room…”

I think of Mary in that dirty stable. I think of her in real pain from labor. I think of the messiness of birth with no sanitary hospital staff to whisk it away. I think of being up all night with a crying, fussy child who won’t latch on properly. I think of being bone-tired and no matter what not abdicating responsibilities. I think of raising a toddler who won’t sit still while wise men come in a formal display of gifts. I think of the frustration of how this ceremony feels less than ceremonial with a toddler’s antics. Did Jesus hide shy-like behind his mother’s skirt or did he interrupt wise speakers by poking at the fancy feather on the turban?

Mary was in no different season of life than I. She knew this was the Holy Child. The Savior. Did she so very often ask her Father above why this experience didn’t feel very “holy” at all? Or did she understand in a way that we too often don’t that He chose this vehicle of human experience exactly because it’s not holy. Because in our brokenness He meets us.

Maybe preparing for Him is recognizing those moments when life interrupts and instead of trying to fix it we allow Him in during that very unholy moment in order to sanctify us. Maybe we need to stop waiting for a feeling to show up and instead focus on moving over a little in our hearts. We make room in our own brokenness to prepare room for Him to show up. Is it as simple as that?

So I’m going to hop off this mom guilt-train of not “feeling” spiritual enough and just prepare Him room by allowing Him into my mess this Christmas. Won’t you join me?

Back to School {The First Week}

In my Back to School – Planning post I talked a little about what we were doing for the year and how we were fitting it all in. In this post I’d like to just recap our week. I’m not always good about doing this weekly but the first week is always important to me, even if I’m finally finished writing about it 3 weeks later! It is my way of scrapbooking digitally our year and there is just something indescribably special about the first week. The kids are excited for what’s to come. I’m excited for what’s to come. Everything is ripe with possibility even as we stumble through getting the daily rhythm down.

So how was our first week?

Math and Art were our biggest hits for the week.

For math we’ve switched to Khan Academy this year for our oldest son. His dad started using it to sharpen his own Algebra skills over the summer and Gabe started sitting down beside him and helping him work out problems. He absolutely loves it. Khan is self-paced, independent, and FREE! We had already been using Khan for history, science, art, and math supplementation (they have great videos and now they’ve teamed up with the guys who do Crash Course whom my kids LOVE and we use for history and science) so this was a natural carryover for him. Since Gabe is already a year ahead in math, using Khan will give him the independence to move ahead at his own pace. He may end up doing two years in one this year and be into Algebra by year’s end. We also allowed the other kids to try it since Khan does have math all the way down to an early elementary level, but we found after a few days of trying that they still preferred their Teaching Textbooks for math.

Although Teaching Textbooks is very pricey, I LOVE their program. It is set up tutorial-style so each kid is completely 100% taught on the computer without me. It is great for auditory and visual learners or for those that need someone to sit with them step by step through each problem. It does automatic grading and my kids love it. That is enough for me to spend the hefty price tag. Plus, we discovered that the book is actually just a repeat of what they are already doing during the lessons and a needless piece so we’ve eliminated that this year and gave each kid their own spiral notebook to use for working out math problems. That saves us $30 for each program. And you can use them with more than one child so we are only buying one year at a time and by next year won’t have to buy any. While the 2nd and 3rd grader are doing their math independently on the computer, it frees me up to work with Ivy and Eli with their Pre-K math and phonics.

Art was also well received this week. Mainly, because we actually did it! Every year I have these great intentions for art and music and every year life gets in the way and then they get bumped for the more “important” subjects that are required. So this year I decided no more. Creativity is a must for me to flourish and it is extremely important for my ten year old girl as well. This year we bought everyone their own sketch pad and we labeled them all pretty and are keeping them organized in an inexpensive tote from Michael’s. For the two littles, I used a primary composition notebook and  covered it in pretty scrapbook paper and then laminated the covers to keep them sturdy for the whole year. This allowed them to be cheaper (twenty five cents back to school sale!) and keeps them accessible for their age range.

Our first week of art we read the Drawing Rules in Drawing in Color and talked about how their is no wrong way to draw. We read ish and Dot, which the littles especially loved and imitated immediately in their notebooks. Our first assignment was to draw whatever we liked. Each child shared their picture and everyone said one thing they really liked about each picture as well as one thing they would like to improve upon for the year. The kids did not want the afternoon to end and it has inspired Lily to check out several drawing books at the library and she has been practicing every night. This year we will be focused on learning to draw animals in pencil using a combination of youtube tutorials and Drawing Animals in Nature with Lee Hammond . This will mesh very well with our zoology science course.

Zoology, unfortunately, started off a little rocky. I was so excited to start the lesson with a great hands-on, visible way for them to understand the concept of classification through classifying legos. This ended up with mostly fighting over said legos and Norah ended up teething and crying for a huge chunk of our time. It was a bit of a letdown for me because I have such huge expectations for this year’s zoology lineup. Our second week fared way better after a trip to Fontenelle Forest to pick up our Vertebrate/Invertebrate Educator’s Trunk and the kids got to handle and feel all kinds of bones and animal skins. My favorite was the owl skull and bobcat skull. After examining everything, the older two got to dip into their first experiment and the littles played an online classification game, all was right again in our science world.

We kicked off our first week of history by diving into Columbus and the Age of Exploration. The younger ones listened to me read from A Child’s History of the World, which I just adore, while they happily constructed ships out of our magformers. They colored and notebooked and then finished off their time playing an online game about Christopher Columbus.

The older two are doing history with daddy again this year. He is a huge history buff and has a wonderful conversational Socratic method style of teaching that our kids just love. They are watching the Crash Course World History and US History videos in conjunction with their reading and then join me on another day of the week for fun history where we get to watch the Horrible History videos, watch fun songs and do map work. Favorite song of the week: Fifty Nifty United States. I learned this song in fifth grade and it has stayed with me to this day. I am giddy passing it on to my children. They are song nerds in the same way I am. Okay, maybe I’m a bit more of a song nerd but they really do love this song. This has been our constant car-schooling anthem for the past couple of weeks to go with our geography study for the year.

I’ve been most impressed with Ivy this week. Being 5 and “officially” starting kindergarten, I wasn’t sure how involved she’d be for the multi-age taught subjects like history, science, and geography. We always have stuff planned for the littles but beyond their basic 3 R’s in the morning, we don’t require them to do school. They are free to play or watch an educational video. But she’s stuck with us through much more then I thought she would. She played the Columbus history game like her older siblings, she’s colored history sheets while listening to the stories and she’s even picked up on the Latin we’ve been studying. And her coloring has taken a dramatic turn for the better since school has started. I perceive that she will show the most overall growth this year.

Latin was by far the most unexpected successful subject of the week. We discovered Classical Academic Press by accident last year through their sister site HeadAdventureland.com which is full of fun, free latin videos!!! (Check out our fave…The Three Little Pigs!) The older two have totally resonated with the DVD chants in the Latin for Children, Primer A. They love doing the activities and discussing everything with their dad over coffee. And the younger 2-4, depending on if the two littles join us, are throughougly enjoying SongSchool Latin. It is SO kid-friendly and fun that the kids can’t wait to do Latin and have told all their friends they should too. Even I have awoken in the middle of the night with a catchy Latin song stuck in my head. Makes me want to check out their SongSchool Latin Spanish.

I also enjoyed doing Bible with the littles this week. We read out of Vos’s Child’s Story Bible starting again at the beginning. And I was once again captivated by the way she conversationally draws the little ones into the story while simultaneously weaving Christ’s redemption story in from the very beginning pages of Genesis. This is by far the BEST story Bible I’ve ever read. The children sat and listened spellbound and asked for more when I was done. Can’t ask for more than that!

Some other fun highlights of our first week…

The girls temporarily dying their hair purple and pink.

Enjoying playing golf during recess time.

Building nanoblocks during free time.

Watching caterpillars emerge as butterflies!

Taking care of pet toads.

I’m so excited to see how the rest of our year unfolds.

How was your first week of school?

Back to School – The Plan {2014-2015}

It’s time again. Everybody is posting first-day-of-school pictures on Facebook. Although I missed that deadline by 3 weeks (as I usually do with getting pictures up on Facebook…still have a whole summer’s worth of albums to put up), I did manage to take a first-day-of-school picture. Maybe sometime soon it will get to Facebook. Maybe…

I’m ready and not ready to start all at the same time. I’ve spent the last month cramming to get everything done (we’ve switched doing all our lesson planning to OneNote but that is a post for another time) and still am a bit behind.

All in all though, I’m pretty happy with our schedule and our curriculum scope and sequence for the year. After running it for a few weeks it needs some minor adjustments, but overall we did good. The major goal I am setting for myself this year is to get up earlier and more consistently. Last year with having a newborn and being up most nights, I didn’t do very well at all with getting up at a consistent time. We still had a great year and accomplished a lot but I always felt like we were running behind all the time. Mainly, because we were running behind all the time. With Norah past the one year mark this school year, my nights are a bit more regular.

This year is a big adjustment for us schedule-wise in that it is MUCH more structured. I’ve always been a very relaxed homeschooler. I loved that we could start school at 10ish, be done whenever-ish and follow lots of rabbit trails, especially in history and science. But this year I have an official junior-higher going into seventh grade, a fifth grader, a third grader, a second grader, a kindergartner, a preschooler, and a toddler. To say my life is full is an understatement. Somehow I need to move my seventh grader into more challenging work to prepare for high school, which is really just around the corner, while also making the time to spend with my kindergartner who is just ripe for learning to read. But I also need to give extra time to my two middles, third and second graders, who still need more teacher-to-student time as they are transitioning into independent readers. I need to keep my preschooler busy and out of trouble and my one year old just learned this week (yeah me!) to climb chairs. I see impending disaster in my future with that one.

So this year hubby and I sat down and brainstormed like crazy pasting and copying subject time slots until everything that we wanted to do meshed with everything that we needed to do. This was no small task. This is the most packed, structured schedule we’ve ever been on. I’m not going to lie, the day before school started I was trying not to have a mini panic attack at the thought of sticking to a schedule. Just ask my husband. I am NOT good at following schedules. I just love to make them. I adore planning for them. And they always seem so ripe with promise every year. And then I immediately deviate and forget I even made one. I like my rabbit trails and interest-led learning that takes place and I’m not sure if there is any room for that this year.

But I also know that more important than my need to have fun and go off on learning tangents, is the need my kids have for structure. The need I have for structure. There are too many of them and only one of me. They all need my time and each of them is equally important. So a structured schedule it is. And even though there is a small part of me that cringes at using a clock and a timer, the bigger part of me loved that we got to all our stuff and started on time every day.

Here is what we are learning this year.

Math – Teaching Textooks (2nd, 3rd, 5th) and Khan Academy (7th)

Phonics – Bob Books, Starfall, YouTube (Pre-K)

Literature – list varies for each child (All)

Grammar – First Language Lessons (2nd, 3rd) and Rod & Staff English (5th)

Spelling – Rod & Staff Spelling (2nd), Abeka Spelling 2 (3rd Grade)

Writing – Basher’s Creative Writing and Writing with Skill (5th and 7th)

Cursive – Kumon Cursive: Letters and Kumon Cursive: Words (2nd, 3rd)

Latin – Songschool Latin (2nd, 3rd) and Latin for Children, Primer A (5th, 7th)

Spanish – Rosetta Stone 1 & 2 (5th and 7th)

History – Age of Exploration and Early American History (All)

Geography – United States & Capitals (All)

Science – Zoology (All) and History of Science (5th & 7th)

Art – Technique: Drawing in Color and Drawing Animals in Nature (All)

Art – Appreciation: Baroque, Romantic, NeoClassical, Pre-Raphaelite

Music – Theory: Basher’s Music: Hit the Right Note (All)

Music – Appreciation: SQUILT Technique with Baroque, Romantic, and Classical styles; Composer Studies

Bible – Chronological Study Bible (5th, 7th), Child’s Story Bible (K, 2nd, 3rd), Awana (All)

Philosophy – Little History of Philosophy (5th, 7th)

Logic – Argument Builder (7th)

Physical Education – Aerobics & Weights (Girls), Boxing & Weights (Boys)

I am hoping to write a separate post for an in-depth look at each subject. That may or may not happen. I can’t promise anything. I always have way more blog posts floating around in my head than I ever get the time to sit down and write. But I can give you a glimpse into our year and our week. I’ve uploaded my Relational Subject Comparison 2014-2015 for the year to give you a small taste of what we are going to be studying for each of the 36 weeks.

History is the peg we hang our year on. It is the rudder that is driving everything else. We follow a chronological 4-year history cycle and literature, geography, art, music, and sometimes science are all, somehow, related to what we are studying for history. So this year I created the above 36 Week comparison sheet and wrote the key historical peg we’d be studying then, during my planning, I used that to determine which week we read or mapped or did what activity that correlated in a different subject. It makes the year flow better and allows me to pre-plan some rabbit trails without overburdening our schedule down. I can use this as a quick-glance guide for each week’s planning to remind me during the nitty gritty weekly planning, especially for pre-requesting library books. This style of planning also helps us to cement information in our head when it is presented in different ways throughout the week. This year we are on year three of the cycle which covers from Columbus up to the Civil War (1492-1860’s).

Here is a blank Relational Subject Comparison for anyone else who is interested in planning this way.

Some people look at the above list of subjects and can’t imagine how we get it all done in a week. Here is a small taste of what our Sample Week looks like so you can see how we make this a doable reality. Remember, we don’t do every subject every day and this is fitting in essentially 5 different grades into one week. Not every grade is doing every subject on the above list. And it is especially important for new homeschoolers of younger children to remember that our schedule was not always this full. We started out with years of 2-3 hour school days and lots of extra time for library and field trips, lots of nature walks and outside play and, most importantly, LOTS of interest-led learning. Enjoy your little ones. Enjoy the slower pace. There is a time and season for a busier, more challenged schedule but the early elementary years is not that season!

So, how did our first week go you ask?

Find out here.

PAYSON ACADEMY

2014 – 2015

 

Homeschooling while in the Winter Rut

We’ve all felt it.

Is he ever going to learn to read? Will she ever be able to grasp this grammar concept?Are these narrations ever going to lead to productive writing? Will my child ever learn how place value works so we can finally move on to double digit addition? Will my child ever do this chore right? Will my child ever go in the potty by himself?

Even I, a homeschooling mom of 7 years, still face these questions daily. I get frustrated, discouraged, and sometimes even panic especially as high school draws ever closer for my oldest son.

Will a dark winter season of homeschooling ever bear the hopeful sight of spring shoots?

This question weighs heavy as I wait out winter for the first signs of spring. Even as I sit here and type in the darkness of the last of winter mornings, I hear a bird chirping and my heart unexpectedly swells with joy. SPRING! The days may still be cold, the mornings may still be dark but hearing that first chirp is a very tangible reminder for me that darkness will quickly wane into the light of the sun kissing me awake and the feel of fresh breezes caressing my sleepy cheeks through open windows left open at night.

It is the same in homeschooling. It is in small, unexpected moments that I see growth, new shoots of understanding, and full blossoming of ideas that make my heart swell with joy as the tiny buds of learning unfurl.

I found this poem. Just randomly penned in the middle of a notebook as I was looking for paper to write down some notes of my own.

Winter

Winter

With its cold, black claws

It freezes your face into nothing

And on your face

It feels like a saw

I sat there and read and then reread these words written by my, then, 9 year old daughter. I didn’t teach this. We didn’t have “poetry day” that ended up with this sweet little poem in her language arts notebook. I didn’t plan a day on reading winter poetry (although that does sound nice, come to think of it) and then have a creative writing session.

This poem sprung up on it’s own out of the fertile soil of her own mind.

I’ve watched this play out with other children too. This week I’ve watched my eight year old son finally make a leap with reading that I thought might never come. I heard about my twelve year old son talking logical fallacies with the elders from his pop’s church and have them flabbergasted that he could carry on an adult conversation on a topic they did not learn until college. My three year old boy is finally getting this whole potty thing. To me this is not bragging, it is celebrating. It is recognizing those moments when we see our kids blossoming into the fruit of our labor.

It is good for each of us homeschool mothers to search this out in our kids…to look for those tender shoots to emerge from the minds of our children.  Simply Charlotte Mason reminds us that,

“Children learn in order to grow, not just to know. And just as a winter woodland scene can appear to be bleak, so we go through some seasons with our children when we don’t see evidence of growth.”

But how do we remember this in the midst of our own seasons of winter?

Consistency. We hear this word all the time right? With parenting, potty training, schooling, disciplining. But it’s true. A little bit consistently over the year will do more then the most planned out, well put together pinterest board on anything. This is true because we are there for them over and over and over again. It feels rough because being there everyday means we see all the mistakes, all the failures. Sometimes I like to beat myself up about not finishing that perfectly planned out pinterest – onenote- evernote board. We didn’t get to all the books. We didn’t finish all the assignments. We didn’t watch all the movies or youtube clips. But I sometimes (okay, a lot of times) forget that we did DO. Everyday. And all this doing adds up to a lot of fertile, nutrient-dense soil for learning to grow in.

Strewing. Strewing allows us to continually put a feast of ideas in front of our children. This is a natural carry-over of being consistent. It is not bad to plan. Planning allows us to allow for strewing. We may not have read every book I wanted to read by week’s end but one of my children will have, unprompted, picked up some book from some basket and read just because. Sometimes we don’t get to all my video clips I’d like to watch but one of my children will have picked up something just from me previewing during my planning stage. One day your daughter will walk downstairs and request the next Life of Fred book because she just finished the first and is dying to know where the story went and you didn’t even know she was interested in the Life of Fred books, let alone reading them. But here they were sitting around our house waiting for a child to discover their wonderfulness. While we must continue to set goals and design the track we want our school days to run on, I find that strewing sometimes blossoms into the most beautiful moments of unplanned learning.

Look at Past Growth Patterns. Simply Charlotte Mason reminds us that we don’t panic when the trees drop their leaves and appear to die in the winter. The reason we don’t is because we know from past experience that spring will come again.

“Just as we have grown accustomed to the cycle of the seasons in nature—spring turns to summer and fall and then winter,— so we must grow accustomed to growth seasons in educating.” 

Growth will reappear and always when we are least expecting it. Ever watch your children walk outside on a cold, bleak winter’s day and go completely ecstatic over finding the first sign of spring grass poking through the bleak, barren, brown landscape? Then walk outside the next day and almost, as if overnight, the whole yard is dotted with the first signs of green. The growth appears almost instantaneously.

Rest is Required. We must also remind ourselves that winter is a season of rest. We may not see growth but that is because resting provides the perfect environment for absorbing. We only have to look at nature for this.  Consider what the Colorado State University Extension has to say about roots in the winter:

The root system of a tree performs many vital functions. In winter, it is a store-house for essential food reserves needed by the tree to produce spring foliage. Roots absorb and transport water and minerals from the soil to the rest of the tree. Roots also anchor the portion of the tree above ground. It is important to keep the portion above ground healthy to ensure an adequate food supply for the roots to continue their important functions.”

Did you catch that? Winter is a time to store up. When we are consistent, we daily feed our child with the academic nutrients that they need. But they need time to be absorbed and sometimes that is best done during seasons of rest. For us as homeschool moms that means we need to ensure two things. First, that we don’t get discouraged during what seems like a season of not getting it. We need to be confident that they are still absorbing and all that information will be used in a season of spring growth when everything will just click. Second, we need to remember to give intentional times of rest. This may be a much needed school break for the holidays, the summer, or just because. It can also come in the form of taking a break from a subject that has been causing stress. I’ve had to do this with two different children who were struggling with reading. Even just a couple of weeks break provides a jump in their ability that forcing twice as much studying never would’ve done. REST. It’s okay!

Enjoy the current season. One of my favorite things about homeschooling in the winter is the ability to enjoy its beauty. If I’m not having to get my children up in the dark of the morning, rush to get something warm in our bellies, bundle kids up and scrape icy windows or shovel driveway snow then I can look around me and appreciate the softly falling snow or the perfectly formed ice crystals on the window pane.

Not only can we very tangibly enjoy the actual season of winter (can anyone say pajamas and hot cocoa while doing phonics?), we can choose to see the beauty in our own seasons of winter for a particular child’s learning difficulties. Instead of sweating over the fact that this child is working on the same phonics sound for literally the 100th time, focus on the fact that he is home with you snuggled on the couch feeling safe and secure in his mother’s arms. Instead of getting frustrated over your child’s blank stare at the same math concept you’ve been studying for weeks upon weeks, focus on the fact that you get to be the one to build her up with words of encouragement. Or focus on you, the mother, who knows your child SO well that you get to slow down, speed up, or stay put as needed because you have the freedom to decide as teacher. Enjoy library days, field trips, arts and crafts and the fact that you can kiss, hug, snuggle, or high-five your child without a school administration sending you the memo on inappropriate teacher-student contact!

The homeschooling season, in and of itself, will be a short season of your life’s journey. So let’s get out of our winter rut and start enjoying the process again. It will be spring soon enough. You WILL see growth…new life…out your cold window pane and inside your child’s warm heart.

♥ Considering Love

♥ Updated and reposted February 2014. ♥

As Valentine’s Day approaches we immediately set out to “do” something for our significant others. And, within reason, there is nothing wrong with this quaint tradition. We all long to give to those we love. Some say it with flowers, some with chocolate, some with jewelry.

At this house, we’ve never been much of a giver of traditional Valentine’s gifts. Don’t get me wrong, I love flowers and chocolate…especially chocolate…but it has never seemed prudent to spend our money on temporary things that don’t last.  Some years we dine out, other years – when tight on money – we don’t. Some years we buy cards, some years we make, some years we go without due to a season of busyness. We do try to make it special for the kids with activities and a small gift and much love through food and feast, sugar and sweets.

This will mark the 18th year our marriage has celebrated this special season. Our marriage is better than it ever has been and keeps getting sweeter every year. As I was reading in bed I came across this marvelous passage that struck me as utter truth and reminded me of why our marriage has sustained its sweetness.

I think that as the years go by, the same love would enrich any marriage as the love which builds and enriches a community of celibate monks; and that is the love which is pledged to lay down its own wants and preferences for the sake of the other. The marriage that was built on natural affection, and had nothing of such love would, in the end, sour, however promising its beginning, I think…if their love has not that Christ-like quality of humble service, then neither is it built to last for ever.      ~Peregrine’s conversation with Clare in The Dove and Hawk Trilogy (Boldface my emphasis)

We have learned on our walk together that serving the other is when love truly grows. As I aim to meet my husband’s needs (an ironed chef coat without asking, making the bed, picking up the house before he gets home, making sure I always have something I can make him to eat after he gets in late at night) without worrying what I will get in return, it is that precise moment through the humbling of those acts of servitude that my needs are fulfilled. I give out so that love may increase. And as he seeks to serve me (doing a load of dishes without being asked, making us breakfast whenever he is home, working three jobs to support our family’s vision) without seeking a need in return, he is blessed with his needs fulfilled. It is this beautiful ebb and flow created through our perfect Father and perfected through Jesus Christ.

Some days the yoke of Christ does NOT feel easy and light. But it is precisely those days when I need to stop and ask myself if my heart is truly serving the needs of my family. It is easy in this world of technology and information to become self absorbed. The moment I step away into myself, even an inch, love slips away and is replaced with selfishness and wanting to gratify my needs. It is only when I turn back to serving others and laying down my life (my wants, desires, needs) to lift up their’s, it is only then that love returns and the peaceful yoke settles around my neck like a breath of fresh air.

So on this day of love, may we remember an oft heard verse but read it with fresh eyes…the eyes of a willing servant.

Love is patient (even when you’re right), love is kind (even if you’ve been wronged). It does not envy (even if there is righteous cause to be jealous), it does not boast (for it understands that there will be low days too), it is not proud (for that is the perfect foothold for the enemy). It is not rude (even if they deserve the comment), it is not self-seeking (no matter how many needs you have that are not being fulfilled), it is not easily angered (even when you have every right to be angry), it keeps no record of wrongs (even if those wrongs are grounds for divorce). Love does not delight with evil (even though your friends want you to join in with the complaining of your spouse) but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres (even when the relationship seems dead and lifeless for love is a choice, not a feeling).”  ~I Corinthians 13:4-7 (amplified interpretation all mine)

So, if any of you out there are saying to yourself that is impossible, you don’t understand, shouldn’t marriage be about give and take, fifty-fifty split? May I just offer you this small token of advice. Put down the Love Dare book. Look at your significant other and forget EVERY SINGLE one of your needs. Look at his (or her) needs only and find how to serve. I promise you the impossible will happen. God’s grace will grow love where you never thought possible, will spark desire where you never knew it was missing. Miracles will happen…jealousies will subside…hearts will soften…forgotten prayers will be answered!

Happy Valentine’s Day, my precious kids whom constantly teach me how to love!

Happy Valentine’s Day, my best friend, soul mate, and most cherished companion!

♥ Happy Valentine’s Day, World! ♥

♥ XOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXO ♥

Christmas Perspective

I wanted to share a beautiful poem this Christmas Day that was shared with me via our MOPS winter newsletter. In this particular season of motherhood this poem touched a chord that I think will also resonate with many other mothers I know. Read it. Print it. Frame it. Display it where you can reread daily and let’s start practicing love to our families this Christmas!

1 Corinthians 13 Christmas Style

©By Sharon Jaynes

 If I decorate my house perfectly with lovely plaid bows, strands of twinkling lights, and shiny glass balls, but do not show love to my family – I’m just another decorator.

 If I slave away in the kitchen, baking dozens of Christmas cookies, preparing gourmet meals, and arranging a beautifully adorned table at mealtime, but do not show love to my family – I’m just another cook.

If I work at the soup kitchen, carol in the nursing home, and give all that I have to charity, but do not show love to my family – it profits me nothing.

If I trim the spruce with shimmering angels and crocheted snowflakes, attend a myriad of holiday parties, and sing in the choir’s cantata but do not focus on Christ, I have missed the point.

Love stops the cooking to hug the child.

Love sets aside the decorating to kiss the husband.

Love is kind, though harried and tired.

Love doesn’t envy another home that has coordinated Christmas china and table linens.

Love doesn’t yell at the kids to get out of your way.

Love doesn’t give only to those who are able to give in return, but rejoices in giving to those who can’t.

Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things.

Love never fails.  Video games will break; pearl necklaces will be lost; golf clubs will rust.  But giving the gift of love will endure.

Christmas 2013

Merry Christmas friends and family!

May your day be merry and bright!

xoxo

The Silent Advent

Advent and Christmas time is notorious for being filled with busyness. We are all subject to it and it is hard to escape even if we wanted to.

The malls are decorated and ready and waiting for shoppers not even a day after Halloween. We skip right over Thanksgiving and learning to be content and rush right into a season of the gimmies.

Pinterest abounds with ideas, ideas and more ideas. Delectable ideas, to be sure, but so many that we are either paralyzed into doing nothing or we try to be super moms and take extra lengths to crowd into every day an activity that will spark creativity, grow the minds of our child, inspire character growth, bring home the “reason for the season”. We advent our kids to death in the hope that this year our child will get it and not be duped by this Santa fella.

And when we are not using Pinterest for this, we use it to wow those around us. Surely our neighbors will be envious over our lights, our tree, our decor, our china, our food, our community gift-giving efforts. We do this all in the name of family and Christ. We are sure that this year we did Advent right. This is the year we will wake up December 26th full of soul satisfaction at a job well done.

But I know us. I know me. And we won’t. Ever.

Not unless we slow down. Not unless we stop doing. Not unless we allow God to pull us into forced silent retreat.

This was my Advent this year. My lights still aren’t all the way up. Parts of my home do look beautiful but among that is the mess of moving rooms around, school not put up for vacation, and boxes of Christmas decor still sitting in my living room that I walk past daily completely in denial and convinced that the last few things will get put up even if tomorrow is already Christmas Eve. My advent calendar never got put up. I did not get to do the Christmas Story Advent countdown. We didn’t do the Jesse Tree. We barely made it most nights to carols and quiet advent time as a family. There was no special activity for each day. No marathon of special Christmas cookie baking to hand out to neighbors or take to family gatherings. We missed the hometown Christmas-y stuff. We missed sitting on Santa’s lap or making Christmas lists or writing letters to the North Pole. Our Netflix box sits full of Christmas movies that we haven’t watched.

But it’s okay. At least that is what He is whispering to me. God chose to equip me with something more beautiful this year. A forced silent retreat. {I sense a reoccurring theme here.} And I panicked at first. I wanted to be a part of all those special Christmas events. I wanted my children to carry those memories. Instead I was graced with being forced to socially retreat. And during it I was blessed to have found this Advent book to read during this time of silent night, holy night. The only Advent devotional book available for me to check out at the library. God’s Advent gift to me.

Silence and Other Surprising Invitations of Advent.

And daily (mostly) I read and wept and prayed. The focus was not on Mary or Joseph or baby Jesus but instead on Elizabeth and Zachariah and their forced silent retreat. God needed them both to stop, listen, prepare and to do this they were taken out of the busyness of life. Okara’s take on how God used them is beautifully, breathtakingly simple. Every day I took something very powerful away to ponder. And while I encourage you to pin this book to your Advent board to remember for next year, I’d like to leave you absorbing a few of it’s treasured nuggets for yourself this Christmas week.

Part One – Surprised and Silenced By God

Traditionally when we think of Advent we immediately call to mind Mary, Joseph, and the angel Gabriel. But in the Gospel of Luke, Zechariah and Elizabeth are the first two people we meet in the Advent narrative. Much as John the Baptist was the forerunner to Christ, his parents Zechariah and Elizabeth seem to be the forerunners for the holy family. The angel Gabriel comes to them first to astound them with good news. Yet, Zechariah and Elizabeth teach us that receiving divine good news can be fraught with all kinds of tensions and questions. It is an understatement to say that Zechariah and Elizabeth are caught by surprise. Their shock dumbs them into silence and seclusion, affording them time to dwell with the news.”

Lamentations 3:26

It is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the LORD.”

Lamentations 3:28

Let him sit alone in silence, for the Lord has laid it on him.”

Day 2 – Lament

In America, we live in a pain-avoidance culture that rarely sees any meaningful significance in sitting with discomfort. When something feels bad, society and corporations have conditioned us to self-medicate with media, food, or shopping. It may take discipline and practice to learn to appreciate the importance of lament for our soul’s and our community’s health”

Day 10 – Silence

What if the silence God bestowed on Zechariah was not fully punishment but also an odd blessing. What if God was offering Zechariah nine months to sit with the news, to ponder God’s words, and to process the stupefied awe in which he surely found himself. What if the time of formal silence was God granting Zechariah the gift of some necessary internal solitude in preparation to receive the miracle and to dwell in God’s faithfulness…”

Day 12 – Divine Preparation

Most of us would consider a silent retreat an unreasonable way to spend our time when our to-do lists seem unending. But carving out space for contemplation and solitude can invite God to speak into our lives and offer us an opportunity for us to sleep in the depth of what God is already doing and saying. Elizabeth has five uninterrupted months of quiet solitude to take in the reality of her growing miracle. Not even her husband’s voice can intrude on this time of reflection. Both Elizabeth and Zechariah are forced into holy retreat to dwell on what God is doing in their lives.”

Day 13 – Holy Retreat

The more we inhabit silence, the better our hearing becomes. When we step back into the noise of our world, our hearing is a bit more fine-tuned and more likely to hear God’s whispers.”

Psalm 37:7

Be still before the LORD and wait patiently for him…”

As you sit with these words of encouragement and wisdom, I urge you to revisit Luke 1:5 – 2:40 and sit with the Christmas Story for a while. Allow it to penetrate your hearts this Christmas.

If you are, like me, in that season of forced retreat (health, kids, stress, depression, life!), consider also reading some more encouraging Christmas Advent posts from myself and other mothers who have been there.

• Perfection Through Imperfection
• Blessings Amidst the Christmas Blues 
• Unexpected Grace
• Advent In the Heart of My Home
• O Night Divine: Advent Reflections
• Preparing Our Hearts for Him, A Reflection on Nesting With Our Lady

A Heart of Thankfulness {A Blessings Photo Essay}

This year season of my life has been hard…really hard. Since last August I’ve been struggling with various teeth and body issues that no doctor or dentist can figure out. I’m desperately trying to stave off new symptoms while trying to maintain life by masking current symptoms. Life has been hard. I’ve had to give things up that I didn’t want to in order to hang on to the most important stuff. (Do you hear the crickets chirping in this here blogosphere?) But despite that, I’m sitting here this Thanksgiving day looking around and knowing I’m blessed. I see His hand all around me and if I don’t look to the little things and count them then those blessings that fall like living rain can roll right off my back soaking into the ground, wasted.

So today I need to count because gratitude needs to be my lifeline during this time of not understanding.

Can I start with the beauty of the season? Just look at the simplicity of the pumpkin above. The shape and color, the contrast against my weathered porch, the complimentary fallish leaves strewn just so. Beautiful. Breathtaking. Perfect.

Then there’s the dying back of the garden that holds it’s own in beauty compared to it’s spring and summer counterparts. Sunlight bouncing off of maroons and mauves in the morning light. Tawny browns of seed heads contrasting against bronzed, dying leaves.

And the mornings. Oh how I wish I could enjoy more of them but whatever is attacking my body seems worst then. The mornings that I do make it to my front porch are like an oasis to the chaos of my day.

Hot coffee.

Living words.

Feeding souls.

And this town…

I’m thankful for this small, midwest town. The community is strong here. The houses are mish-mashed and beautiful, ornate and simple. The business is small, local and cozy. The churches are reaching hearts and building family.

I love that my children can walk to the library or to the drugstore. I love that they can bike to a friends house or walk up to the park. I love the memories they are making. I love the security that a small town affords us for our growing family.

And my heart swells with thankfulness for my children. They are growing faster than the weeds in my yard. I watch them stretching their minds. I listen in on their sibling conversations. I inwardly smile at the first awkward stirrings of teenage years quickly approaching. I treasure the conversations in my heart. I laugh at little hands and little feet stirring up trouble. And I breathe deep baby fat and double chins. These are my legacy…my stories…my beautiful mess.

And as Advent draws near, I am thankful for the Lord that provides. Our dollars are tight. They already have to stretch beyond our means to cover our chosen life-path. This month He provided a new couch set…well, new to us. Perfect in condition, color, and style to nestle into the space of our Victorian living room. A chance stop-in at the Goodwill. Under $100 for the whole trio. As Advent approaches and winter settles in, it means dark mornings, candlelight and the thankfulness of my heater as I curl up with His word and wait for the Christ-child.

For to even open up the door these days invites in the too chilly air. Frost sparkles the world and for very brief moments I soak in the beauty of upcoming winter. My imagination runs wild with thoughts of silver fairies and legends of jack frost. And when I return to the warmth of the house, to the smells of fall cooking and fill my belly with the comfort of potatoes and pumpkin and squash, I am again reminded of how blessed I am compared to most. My house is old and I don’t know if I will ever find the money to make it whole and not broken, but even amidst it’s brokenness it brings me daily joy.

As does my husband whose very heart and commitment to our family sings of his sacrificial love of us. His talented hands feed us, sing to us, embrace us. He is father and still soul mate. I am lucky indeed.

Let them give THANKS to the LORD

For His UNFAILING LOVE

And His wonderful deeds for men,

For He SATISFIES the thirsty

And fills the hungry with GOOD things.”

Psalm 107:8-9

Narrations as Memories

Lily’s Narration – January 9, 2009 

Age: 5

St. George and the Dragron (from The Children’s Hour)

I imagined that a dragon was fighting a knight and then he went under a cave and he got killed and Sabra saved him too cuz Sabra killed the giant pickle who was really a bad guy. And then a big fire-breathing dragon killed the giant pickle and the giant pickle was dead and Sabra, who was his wife, walked along with him. And then they got up on the horse and hoppity, hop, hoppity, hop, hop, hop and they rided through the castle and hided from the dragon. And the dragon went to the castle and then his wife and St. George went out and the dragon went out and they went in and they fighted the dragon and he was killed. And then they were safe and the pigeon and St. George and Sabra were all safe. The end.

This is the note I tagged onto her narration.

At the beginning of this telling I had told the children to close their eyes and imagine the story in their head. I guess Lily took this to mean free license to make up her own story. for anyone reading this narration, there was no giant pickle, Sabra and St. George were not married, Sabra did not save St. George, and they never fought in a castle or hid in a cave.

      

Today as Lily was putting away her history narration of St. George and the Dragon into her book of centuries, she came across a narration she had done when she was five of this same story. She stood there amazed that she had even done this as a five year-old. Then she started cracking up while rereading it to herself prompting her older brother asking for it to be read out loud. I started reading it aloud and, I swear, I couldn’t even finish it as tears were streaming down my eyes. Not in the, “awwwhhhhh, wasn’t that so sweet” way but in that “laugh-out-loud-pee-your-pants” way. I think it took three tries to get it read between all the laughter.

I was reminded that looking back on our Book of Centuries not only helps us review what we learned from history but is a wonderful synopsis of where a child was at a particular age…a scrapbook of sorts. Rereading this particular narration brought me instantly back in time to that day of teaching. It made me realize that my children’s saved work is more than a portfolio for a school board but a treasure box of memories for me and the kids! I see myself as an old lady sitting around in a pile of binders, lovingly turning the pages and sighing over days of old.

Back to School {Weekly Wrap Up}

Back to school already?

Yes, we are doing school already. And, I admit, I wasn’t quite ready to get started this year. Norah Belle just showed up in our lives two months ago. I’m just starting to get my house back in order. But starting early does make sense for us. This will allow us the flexibility to take 2 weeks off in the fall, 3 weeks off at Christmas, and two weeks off in the spring while still getting in a full summer break next year as well as taking everyone’s birthday off and getting a few partial field trip weeks in the mix.

Our Week

Getting back into routine is always hard. This year will be my biggest year teaching. I’m officially teaching four: sixth grade, fourth grade, second grade, and first grade. That said, technically I’m teaching six. Ivy, preschool, is already asking to read and is the most excited about doing school. She wants to be involved and she wants my undivided attention. This will prove tricky since I’m more apt to multi-task between students needing instruction and those needing help or clarification. And Eli is in full-on potty training mode. Then there’s the normal challenges of life like nursing Norah and dealing with Eli’s toddler energy and other learning challenges like attention spans and reading delays.

I knew the only way I could accomplish my homeschooling goals this year was to make a few changes.

One, get up early.

Two, meet with the Lord daily.

I can’t even begin to tell you how hard this has been. I am a night owl. I LOVE staying up late and talking with the hubby over coffee or getting lost in a new Netflix series together. But it was very clear to me that this year I needed to get up by 6:30 and have some quiet time before my other early birds arose. It has been very hard but very worth it. Just meeting with God first thing on the quiet of my front porch swing has allowed me to face each day’s chaotic challenges in much healthier ways. The bonus is savoring a cup of coffee and some first of the morning conversation with my oldest boy. He is just entering junior high and I am enjoying getting to know him as a friend, not just a son. He’s funny, quirky and we’ve had some good heart to hearts just swinging together or enjoying the flowers in the morning sun.

Our week officially started with ART. Every year our schedule is so full and when unexpected life happens it always seems like the fun stuff gets pushed aside for the essentials. Well, this year I am determined to change that. I decided to make the fun stuff a priority for us. We are living life at home and while we do need to cover the essentials, I want the love of learning to stay passionately ignited in all of us. I want our home to ebb and flow with productivity and rest, creativity and logic.

We are starting with the basics of pencil drawing technique. This week we focused on seeing basic shapes in the world around us and translating that onto paper. We emphasized 3D shapes and practiced drawing cubes, spheres, cylinders, and cones. This wonderful youtube tutuorial helped us. I was amazed at my 7 year old’s drawings. He was the only one to listen about how to hold the pencil and how to do the short, light sketching strokes. Maybe we have an artist in our midst! We used our geometric blocks as models which Eli thought was great fun to play with while the others worked.

Reading, reading, and more reading. Reading has been both rewarding and frustrating this year. My oldest two are reading every chance they get including sneaking books to the lunch table. (Brings back memories for me!) And my oldest daughter, nine, has finally discovered Harry Potter.  She has read 3 of the books in the past two weeks and watched the first two movies.

Luc is seven. He is my struggling reader. I pray daily for how to work with Luc. He is completely apathetic about reading and bucks against learning. My gut is to keep pushing but there is a fine line between challenging your child and killing their joy of learning. Luc does love to play. He plays everything he learns. And he would much rather be playing then in “school”. So this year we’ve decided to go with Batman phonics books. He still struggles. He still resists. But after he wades through a page and then practices rereading it a few times, his whole demeanor changes. A smile lights up his face. He can read about one of his favorite super heros and is so proud of himself. I wish I could say that changes his attitude and inspires him to keep practicing. It doesn’t. The next day it is right back to the start of this push and pull reading relationship.

But I’m confident that with enough perseverance we will make some major breakthroughs this year. Just look at that smiling boy reading with his mamma on the porch swing. Beats sitting at a desk, right?

Math for the older two is simple and easy. Teaching Textbooks have been our best friend. The kids LOVE doing their math on the computer. I love not having to teach it. I love that they love doing it and beg to do extra lessons in their free time. I love that it tutors them and grades them and tracks everything for me. The only drawback? It doesn’t start until third grade. That means Pre-K through second grade is still on me.

This year I will be doing all three. Ivy in Pre-K, Lilah in first grade, Luc in 2nd grade. We will be using a multi-level teaching style. I will focus on introducing a concept through a living book. All three will practice the concept through manipulatives at their own level. Each has a dry erase binder with practice sheets of concepts they need to practice. We will also be doing some fun picture mystery math pages. Emphasis will be on playing math to truly understand concepts and LOTS of living books that bring math to life without a textbook.

I’m super excited about science this year and so are the kids. We are using the Max Axiom graphic novel science series as our jumping off point. This is no ordinary science book. Don’t let the comic book style fool you. Each book covers a specific science concept…electricity, magnestism, states of matter, etc…in an in-depth way.  We will follow that up with watching a Bill Nye the Science Guy video and supplement with a hands-on experiment and Magic School Bus books and videos. My kids fell in love with Bill Nye last year and most all of them can be found free on you tube. 

This week we started off learning about the scientific method. We practiced using it with these wonderful printables from Crafty Classroom and used the same experiment they did in the Max Axiom book. In Bill Nye’s Do It Yourself Science we learned that science is repeatable and can be tested again even if you know the outcome. So we retested the experiment in the book of finding out what type of levee keeps more water from flooding a town: rocks, soil, or clay. We recorded our hypothesis and data. This upcoming week the older two will be learning how to share their findings through a science board display.

This year for history we are covering the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Reformation. Adam, who has a passion for history, will be teaching the older two as well as covering philosophy, logic, and the Bible with them. I will be supplementing through a healthy diet of living books, notebooking/lapbooking, and map work. 

This week we started off the year recapping the Roman period and overviewing how the Roman Empire fell and how Christianity spread through Europe. We focused on Constantine and we rounded it out with the story of St. George and the Dragon. Even I learned something new this week. I had heard stories of St. George but, fantastical as they are, they don’t beat the real story of him being a follower of Christ and refusing to bow down to the Roman Gods. He was tortured and martyred by decapitation under Emperor Diocletian for standing up in his faith.

And the best highlight of our week? 

This wonderful pencil sharpener that I bought used for $5 at a homeschool curriculum sale this summer. No more blisters. No more wasting time searching for a sharpened pencil when we should be working. No more pushing off art because the task of resharpening all those colored pencils just seems too daunting. I’m in love with this machine. It is not just an electrical pencil sharpener (had one of those…worked not at all) but an industrial pencil sharpener. My son laughed at me when I took a picture of this. But, to me, it is one of the most beautiful pictures of our week.

Joining up with…

The Weeping of Motherhood

Jeremiah 31: 8-9

See, I will bring them from the land of the north and gather them from the ends of the earth. Among them will be the blind and the lame, expectant mothers and women in labor; a great throng will return. They will come with weeping; they will pray as I bring them back. I will lead them beside streams of water on a level path where they will not stumble, because I am Israel’s father…”

Here is the Word of the Lord pressed upon me. These 2 verses have been ruminating over and over again in my head ever since I read them a few weeks ago.

The Lord is calling back His people. He longs for us to return to Him. He is forever calling our names and pursuing us. I know this. I grew up with this knowledge. I’ve responded to this knowledge. But what has been pulling at my heart is the who of this. We know He calls all of us. He wishes not one of us to perish. Yet this call in Jeremiah is a specific call. He names those He is calling. The blind. The lame. Expectant mothers. Women in labor. Of course He will restore the blind to see again and make the lame to walk again but what I find interesting is the call to mothers in particular.

They will come with weeping.

They will pray as I bring them back.

How many times as mothers have we been in this place? He knew. As newly conceived life flourished inside us, we embraced the weakness of ourselves allowing our bodies to change out of our control. We were the vessels of new life but to have this greatest honor means completely sacrificing ourselves to yield to another. That means pain, uncomfortableness, refining.

So many times during this season of motherhood we find ourselves sick, tired, praying, and weeping for things out of our control. Most of the time we are not coming to our Father with thought-out prayers of specific requests. Most of the time our prayers just bubble up out of the deep of us. Prayers that we can’t even put words to. Repeated utterances that sound more like desperate pleas than lofty words. But He hears. And these prayers are precious to Him as He knows SO specifically what this thing called motherhood has in store for us.

He has heard our weeping. He has heard our prayers. 

♥ The weeping of the expectant mother, head hung over the toilet as she calls out in guttural prayers for the sickness to subside.

♥ The weeping of the expectant mother as her bones shift to open up for the carrying of this child.

♥ The weeping of the expectant mother as her tired body that is not her own wakes again in the night for one more trip to the bathroom, acid reflux, shortness of breath, aching hips, insomnia that turns into overtired fears playing out in a brain loop.

♥ The weeping of the expectant mother as she hears doctors words spelling out her worst fears for this little one growing inside of her that she has come to love with a consuming love never having met yet.

He has heard our weeping. He has heard our prayers.

♥ The weeping of the woman in labor as contractions move from bearable to a level of pain she wasn’t prepared to feel.

♥ The weeping of the woman in labor as she cries out, trying to push away this pain she can’t escape.

♥ The weeping of the woman in labor who enters that quiet place of surrender, breathing into the dying in order to bring forth the living.

♥ The weeping of the woman in labor, body opening up, splitting, cracking like fire as life pushes out harsh and real.

He has heard our weeping. He has heard our prayers.

♥ The weeping of the new mother who lies exhausted, body broken, breathing in the sweet smell of new life.

♥ The weeping of the new mother who struggles to sustain life through breasts that hurt, helping a new one to latch when it seems impossible.

♥ The weeping of the new mother struggling to stay awake to hold and feed this precious being who won’t stop crying.

♥ The weeping of the new mother whose sleep-deprived body still has to function with daytime responsibilities that prevent her from “sleeping when the baby sleeps”.

♥ The weeping of a new mother holding the tiny newborn hand of her baby after surgery, heart desperately praying for no post-operative complications.

He has heard our weeping. He has heard our prayers.

♥ The weeping of the seasoned mother as she yells, again, at her child and has to ask forgiveness.

♥ The weeping of the seasoned mother as she struggles to keep it together getting out the door in the morning, child wearing non-matching shoes, hair still not brushed,  already running 10 minutes late.

♥ The weeping of the seasoned mother whose sleep-deprived body stays up all night rocking and soothing sick children then getting up in the morning to still make breakfast and wash all the built-up laundry.

♥ The weeping of the seasoned mother whose heart breaks as her child struggles to make friends, or has just lost a friend, or is awkward socially, or is getting bullied at school.

♥ The weeping of the seasoned mother who realizes that her child sees through her own hypocrisy.

♥ The weeping of the seasoned mother who has to watch her children walk through the consequences of their own mistakes knowing she is powerless to save them.

♥ The weeping of the seasoned mother whose nest is empty and she feels the loss just as the weight of allowing these children to take on their own adult responsibilities settles upon her shoulders.

There is abundant JOY in motherhood but that joy comes from walking through the storms of life. My dear cousin quoted something very wise on facebook recently.

I’ve watched her walk the storm as a mother. She’s brave. She’s exhausted. She’s in love. She can’t imagine her life without this new person in it. And I’ve seen her strength. I see His hand in that as He calms her through this storm. And I weep with her.

We are asked, as mothers and flawed people, to push through the labor pains of life. This struggle refines us. We are made stronger…better…from it. And He uses these pains that cause us weeping to draw us in. To remind us that He is there if we just turn to Him. That He will lead us gently through it if we allow Him to pick up and carry our burdens.

I understand God more since becoming a mother. His saying no for our own good. His anger and jealousy and protectiveness. And His amazing grace that loves unconditionally no matter what I’ve done. I could never turn my back on one of my children no matter what they’ve done. And I see this in my Savior. In His gift of life for me. In His relentless pursuit of me even when I stubbornly walk away.

One of my favorite verses as a mother is Isaiah 40:11.

He tends his flock like a shepherd:
He gathers the lambs in his arms
and carries them close to his heart;
he gently leads those that have young.

He gently leads those that have young. Everyday as I struggle to stay awake, stay sane, not blow up at my kids I think on this. Everyday, if I allow it, He will gently lead me in this struggle of motherhood. He has a special soft spot for mothers. He called us out specifically as Jeremiah reminds us. He will never leave or forsake us.

I am comforted by this and physically reminded of it during those kairos moments when I lay staring at my beautiful, sleeping child. When I watch my oldest develop a love of coffee just like his dad. When I watch my daughter curling up with a good book. When I see my little one looking under rocks for rollie pollies. When my daughter smiles up at me from under her long lashes. When I am handed a bouquet of weeds wildflowers from the lawn. When I am rocking a sweet newborn and kissing that soft, velvet head and soaking in that sweet baby vanilla smell.

Our weeping and praying go hand in hand with motherhood. If we listen to His call He will be faithful to lead us through this season that will be more rewarding than anything we could ever hope to accomplish!

♥ Dedicated to River and his beautiful new heart! ♥

Norah’s Birth Story {with Mini Photo Shoot}

She’s here!

Norah Belle Payson

Born: May 23, 2013 at 4:42 PM

9.8 pounds, 20 inches long

I can’t believe how in love with her I am already! Her sweet baby fat cheeks, soft dark silky head, tiny wrinkled hands and feet…they all make my heart melt.

And while it’s all still fresh in my mind and I’m still on bedrest, I thought I’d write down her story…beautiful and messy! This I will one day transfer to her baby book in which I am woefully behind still working on baby #3’s! For now it can rest here in all it’s details waiting along with some beautiful pictures that we captured impromptu during a brief reprieve between late spring thunder showers.

My pregnancy with Norah was much more complicated than my other pregnancies. I was now in the “high risk” category of pregnancy due to my age and the fact that she was baby #7 for me. At first it didn’t seem high risk to me. The pregnancy developed normally…severally nauseous, craving protein and salty foods, fatigued, etc. Everything appeared normal and beautiful at her 20 week ultrasound and we were thrilled to find her a sweet baby girl to shower with love. It wasn’t until 27 weeks drinking that awful orange syrupy sugar drink that things started to change. The doctor measured my tummy. “Uh oh,” is NOT what you ever want to hear come out of your doctor’s mouth. “Let me measure that again…oh no.” Ummmm…should I be scared?

She said our baby was measuring WAY too big for this stage of pregnancy. She said it could be due to any number of things but she wanted an ultrasound to check her out right away. She wanted to know how big the baby was and how much amniotic fluid I had. I went home in shock and told my husband. Then I did as any normal 21st century pregnant women does and googled it. Too big a baby probably meant gestational diabetes and too much amniotic fluid could mean complicated medical names that brought high risks of bleeding and brain damage to the baby. Panic set in. I prayed and then decided to get information instead of worry. I figured it would most likely be gestational diabetes so I researched like crazy and then went back a day later for my ultrasound.

Yes, I had failed my diabetes test. Yes, my baby was too big, but still within normal limits. Yes, I had too much amniotic fluid but, again, within normal limits. So I set up the big diabetes test and went home determined to change my diet. Went back a week later for the more extensive diabetes test, sure this was what it was. But, to everyone’s shock, my test came back completely negative for diabetes. So much so that I passed all 4 tests with flying colors. So no diabetes. I just assumed everything would resume normally.

Not the case. Norah seemed to be getting bigger despite not having diabetes and they didn’t know why. After another ultrasound the amniotic fluid was still high and the doctor was worried about this little girl being an over-10-pounder and having shoulder dystocia. I remember lying back on the table and trying to make a joke but my doctor just seemed worried and started talking C-sections. Her words started sinking in on the drive back home. Maybe this wouldn’t be an easy labor and delivery like all my other six. Tears started coming as I started praying. Adam and I talked, worried, then researched again. We looked up everything we could on shoulder dystocia, C-sections, and recovery of C-sections. We talked with as many women as we could about their birth stories. After that we both felt a solid peace about the decision to NOT have a C-section but to try natural measures of breaking my water (I would have to be induced a week early no matter what to compensate for her large birth weight) and see how it went. We weren’t against C-sections in general, more against the recovery of a C-section for me with having to still care for 6 kids right as Adam went into his summer camp schedule at work.

During the last month we also dealt with high blood pressure and excessive edema. The doctor was now worried about pre-eclampsia. I was tested often and put on strict bed rest. No protein in my urine equaled no pre-eclampsia but the swelling got worse. I felt like a tick ready to pop before I went to the hospital and my bones hurt, especially my hands, with an arthritic sort of pain from the pressure of the swelling. The high blood pressure was making it hard to sleep at night due to a racing heart and trouble breathing when laying down. Still, I felt a peace about her birth. I had given it to God and, especially due to the throbbing pain in my hip bones and odd angle they were at, felt He was doing His own magic in helping my body open in just the right way to help her come out unharmed.

We went in for an induction on a spring Thursday morning, May 23rd. The plan was to break my water at 8:30 and see where that took me. Unfortunately, my water was unable to be broken. I was still 3 centimeters, 60% effaced and she hadn’t moved down at all. The doctor could not get under my cervix to break the membranes. She tried and tried and after much pain on my part said we’d have to start pitocen in order to move her down so we could reach the cervix. I was disappointed. I’d done pitocen before and had a very bad experience with it. This was not my plan. Surprisingly, though, the pitocen wasn’t an issue. They started the drip at level 2 and by 12:30 I was up to level 20. I could handle the contractions just fine with breathing even though they showed them as pretty strong contractions on the monitor. My husband and the nurse were impressed. We had a leisurely morning of good conversation between contractions and the nurse even let me eat a hearty breakfast of eggs, bacon, biscuits, and milk.

When the doctor came back at 12:30 to break my water I thought we were in the home stretch. Unfortunately I had only dilated another centimeter and was still only 60% effaced with her blocking the cervix. The doctor worked on breaking my water about 6 times (OH the pain in this! Where oh where was my epidural now?) and only managed to get a tiny tear in the membranes with only a bit of fluid leaking out because her head was in the way. I was assured that this was enough to kick start active labor. And my doctor was right. Immediately the contractions came on strong and sure and painful. Due to my previous fast deliveries, we got anesthesia up there by 1 pm and by 1:30 I had a wonderful epidural that warmed me down to my feet in a blanket of coziness. I dozed on and off for a few hours while Adam read a book on the couch. Every once in a while I would glance over at the monitor and see those contractions getting closer and closer together and peak way off the charts. I would smile and doze off again allowing my body to labor while I rested.

Around 3:30 they checked me and I was 10 centimeters but still Norah had not dropped down where she needed to be. The doctor said she was stuck under my pelvic bone so we would allow me to labor another hour to help her move down so pushing wouldn’t be so complicated. At 4:30 I was checked and she STILL had not moved down even a little bit. The doctor was super worried about me pushing and the complications that would bring on but it was now or never. We set up everything and I pushed 2 times during one contraction and 3 times during the next contraction and she just slipped right out. It was amazing. I was so proud of my aching birthing hips that had turned so outward in order to easily allow my body to do it’s job. The doctor was amazed and everyone was excited to set this fat, white, gooey baby girl on a scale to find out her weight, which was exactly where the doctor predicted it would be. She was here, safe, beautiful and completely healthy!

Recovery has been more painful than ever. Seven babies takes it’s toll. Trying to get to the bathroom in the hospital was excruciating and I remember the nurse saying as she helped me, “Oh honey, you need some medication.” It was then I received Percocet and within an hour my body sighed with relief. Painful still, but normal pain. Recovery was still more than I bargained for. I had horrible gas pains throughout my abdomen and chest that didn’t subside until a day or two after I was home. I thought maybe it was a side effect of the meds so I tried going without but the gas didn’t go away and I really needed those meds!

The excessive swelling and high blood pressure has also not subsided. The doctor warned it would get worse before it got better and she was right. The main thing I was suppose to keep checking was pain in my calves (sign of a DVT leg blood clot) and an excessive headache (signs of post-eclampsia). Imagine my surprise when just a week after giving birth I awoke at 1:00 in the morning with both of these symptoms. After my level-headed husband convinced me to get a bit more sleep before getting it checked out at the ER, he took off work the next morning to take me. I had blood tests done, urine samples studied, and an ultrasound on both legs. The good news was no blood clots in my legs, no post-eclampsia, no postpartum cardiomyopathy. The bad news…I will just have to deal with the swelling, which is causing both the pain and high blood pressure, until it goes away on it’s own which could take up to six weeks. In the meantime, more fluids and put my feet up. Easier said than done with six littles running around!

My family has been so great about helping out, though. The oldest two children stepped up their chores as well as helping out with breakfasts and lunches. Our house is a mess (you don’t even want to see the upstairs bedrooms since I’ve been on bedrest for over a month and am not suppose to be going upstairs – although I get the picture as I hear hubby’s roaring voice as he goes up for goodnight tuck-in’s!) and I want to rip our carpet out right now it is so full of stains. But that is okay. I’m trying to make peace with it as God continues to call me to rest in Him and physically rest and enjoy this new tiny presence that may be our last.

I can see what they say about spoiling your last baby. Since we are not planning for more (this one was more than my 38 year old body could handle),  Nora Belle will forever be the baby of the family. I find myself relishing the little moments more…breastfeeding, cuddling, kissing her soft velvet head, staring at her as she sleeps…because this will most likely be the last time I experience it. The thought makes me sad and happy all at the same time. The thought of being pregnant again is not appealing in the least. But these last 12 years have been a season in my life that compares to no other. I watch my oldest son getting bigger by the day (he’s eating like a trucker!) and I keep thinking how little time I have left with him before he’ll be gone from our house. It’s making me re-evaluate how I want this next school year to go. I want this year’s focus to be about building relationships. I want to look back on my time with my children and spend that time cherishing the memories, not wasting my time wallowing in regrets. I want to live by one of my favorite quotes!

Many people have said to me, “What a pity you had such a big family to raise. Think of the novels and short stories and the poems you never had time to write because of that.” And I looked at my children and I said, “These are my poems, These are my short stories.” ~Olga Masters

The Artist’s Daughter {Book Review}

Having to take some downtime at the end of this pregnancy has allowed me to finish reading Alexandra Kuykendall’s memoir, The Artist’s Daughter. It’s our new theme book for the upcoming 2013-2014 MOPS year.

I must admit, at first I wasn’t sure what to do with this book. Most of our MOPS theme books are non-fiction pieces that you can underline to your hearts content until the book is in tatters. They are full of treasured quotes and ideas to use for the upcoming year’s theme. But this…well, this book was a memoir. I started pen in hand and quickly found that this wasn’t going to be an underline-every-other-page style book. Instead it turned out to be a tapestry of stories. Mini vignettes that I read quickly, devouring each and eager to read the next.

When I finished it in two days time I sat and pondered. How do I use this book for our MOPS group?

Then it struck me. Life stories. We each have one. Alexandra’s was fascinating for sure, but that was not my life story. That being said, it made me hunger for other women’s stories…other mothers stories.  And I realized that even if this was not my story, I related to much of it. Snippets of seasons of life stood out for me as a mother. I could relate to her post-postpartum depression and not being able to hold her baby right away. I could relate to her judging and feeling judged by other moms. I could relate to her unrealistic expectations as a mother and how God humbly dealt with her in each of those flawed areas.

That’s what this Beautiful Mess theme is all about. We are a mess! Our lives as mothers are tangled up in the mundane messes of everyday life. Fingerprints on windows. Sinks full of dishes. Markers on walls. Toys littering floors. Junk piles on counters and desks. Brimming closets full of too much stuff. We, as moms, battle the daily mess in a very tangible way. But our souls…oh our souls. They are a mess too. Bad habits springing up like weeds trying to choke out the work God is doing in us.

This is where our stories reach hearts. As we talk about our very unique and different paths, we will share common threads of hope with one another. We will relate and rally and pick ourselves up again. We will not give in but instead revel in how our own beautiful mess is being shaped by The One who can turn it into His masterpiece.

This year’s MOPS will not be a neat series of topics in outline form but, instead, threads webbing out in all directions, connecting with one another. I’m excited to see where the year takes us as mothers and as growing disciples of Christ. I think Alexandra’s memoir is the perfect segue from last year’s MOPS theme: Plunge! Last year we explored on how to dig deeper, be more authentic, embrace vulnerability. Well, there is nothing more vulnerable and authentic than our own personal story and sharing that with someone else.

Thank you, Alexandra, for stepping out bravely and speaking words of truth even when they’re not so pretty! Thank you for being vulnerable and authentic with us, your dear readers.

{For those of you who don’t know, MOPS stands for Mothers of Preschoolers and is a wonderful Christian support group for moms during those hardest transition years into motherhood. I would encourage any mother who has never checked it out to find a group in your area. Not only will you get connected to other moms in your own community – and how important is that when you feel like you haven’t had an adult conversation in forever! – but you will also reap the benefits of activities and speakers set up just for you specific to your season of life. Please click the MOPS button on my sidebar to find out more about this wonderful organization and find a MOPS group in your local area.}

For more on Alexandra Kuykendall, visit her blog and facebook page!

And in a moment of my own authentic vulnerability, while I was typing this post here is the beautiful mess my littles were making in the dining room with my bigs sitting right beside them obliviously playing DS games. So much for No Chore Day!

Green Pastures {and the gift of waiting}

I’m laying here in bed trying desperately to rest. This 7th pregnancy has been hard, sure, but I figured I was one tough mom and could push my way through it like all the rest. I have a household to run, homeschool to finish, a garden that needs put in. I’m only extra tired because of the other six precious I am mothering.

Besides I am already the mom who lives the slow life, right? I just gave a Mops talk on it. I practice it. My family is not involved in too many activities. I am a “free range” mamma who gives her kids lots of time to just be a kid and use imaginations and allows play to grow brains and hearts. I make room for lots of white space in my life so that it can naturally be filled with those I most love to be with.

But I heard it this past week. He whispered to me through His word…

s l o w      d o w n

We’ve all heard it…Psalm 23. Yet one part I had to re-read about 10 times.

He makes me lie down in green pastures.”

I couldn’t shake these words, especially the word “make”.  Why not offer us green pastures? Why does He make me lie down? I think of sheep and their wondering ways. I think of my littles and forcing them to take naps that they need. And I think of my own stubbornness as a mother. Always working, never resting. Equating my activity with measurable productivity. Hadn’t I just warned other moms about making this same mistake?

So, of course, I totally took that same day to lay aside chores and to-do lists and sit in the newly green spring grass with my kids as they played. Right? Wrong. I did think about it as I pushed a reel-mower (our electric motor is on the fritz) and desperately tried to get this beautiful green jungle cut before the rain came in. I thought about nature sketching with my kids and sitting and reading while they played. It did sound nice but I still had things to do before this baby gets here.

He makes me lie down in green pastures.”

As I went two days later to my 37 week doctor appointment, these words were still swirling in my head. Then I got the news. My blood pressure is up. WAY up. My swelling is abnormal and that is why my fingers feel like they are arthritic. Before I knew it I was having blood drawn and having to collect urine samples for 24 hours and am now on bed rest.

No more chores.

No more walking.

No more gardening.

No more doing.

Only sitting or laying with feet elevated unless I have to use the restroom or eat.

Only waiting.

Waiting to see if this little one inside of me needs to be pulled out right away before catastrophe hits or waiting and resting to make it to that 39th week of induction.

I’ve been given the gift of rest and it feels like torture. I am living that verse right now yet everything in me is still shouting, “But, but, but…”

I am so glad my Heavenly Father makes me rest and gives me Sabbath. He knows that resting is the most “productive” activity I can do right now. So this mother’s day I will desperately try and listen to His wise voice. And when I fail I will remember that my strength is in Him, not in myself and I will lean.

 

 

Happy Mother’s Day!

The First Snow

Don’t you just LOVE the first snow? It’s always so exciting especially with little ones in the house! This is Eli’s first year comprehending what snow is and Ivy (3) is extra excited this year about this white sparkly stuff.

“Mom, mom, mom…..come quick! There’s white puffy sparkles coming down from the sky!”

Can’t beat that!

Even better, since we homeschool this sort of thing weaves perfectly into our day. I quickly grabbed a few well-chosen books and my camera as they gazed out the window and had an impromptu science lesson for the littles while the older two worked on math and history.

 

 

We read “Why Does It Snow?”  (a Just Ask series) and talked about snow crystals all having six points but each being unique unto itself. We discussed and narrated how snow forms in the clouds and comes to fall here. Next we read “In the Snow: Who’s Been Here?” by Lindsay Barrett George which is a fun little book that takes kids through an exploratory adventure through the snowy woods. Each page has a clue of an animal visiting and then asks the reader to guess which animal it was. I let each child take turns guessing then turning the page to see if they were right.

After that we suited up and headed outside with some dark felt to catch snow crystals. I’m pretty sure more snow was eaten than captured but the thought was there. The snowflakes were too small this time to really see the distinction of crystal patterns and my kids lost all our good magnifying glasses. Still, they had a fun 15 minutes running all their energy off.

Now, lest you think this day was shrouded in warm fuzziness because of these beautiful pictures, (And aren’t they beautiful? Just look at that magnolia bud frosted in snow!) just know that we still had our share of school battles today. I spent over an hour arguing and standing my ground on making a six year old little boy finish a phonics lesson that he could’ve finished in five minutes. It was as if his memory was suddenly erased on everything he’d learned phonics-wise so far this year. And his poor five year old sister was every-so patiently sitting next to us waiting her turn while helping me clean flash cards and did finish her’s in less than five minutes when we finally got to her. So never let the pretty pics fool you into thinking our day was something other than what it was…just a day. Beautiful moments captured between ordinary, trying times! In other words, life!

Other books we’re planning on reading today ~

  

An unexpected surprise…

Here we are again!

Bun number seven in the oven warming. As if my life wasn’t blessed enough {wink, wink}, we are adding joy to our numbers. Expected to be here mid June of next year, already the kids are spending every evening meal fighting and voting over names.  So far, Rauga (from Bay Blade) is top pick for boys and Dora is top pick for girls. Ummmm….no?

Names aside, the kids are super excited. Our dinner converstion the week before (I am NOT making this up):

Them: “Mommy, when are we going to have another baby?”

Me: “Why?”

Them: “Because Eli isn’t anyone’s big brother and he needs to be a big brother too.”

Me: “We are NOT having another baby just so Eli can be a big brother!”

Guess the jokes on me!

Kitchen Staples for Healing Naturally

Healing is on my mind today as I sit here, stuck on the couch with a throat that burns and a cough that makes my head feel like it’s going to explode. At least the persistent sinus headache is gone. Everything has moved to my chest. Yeah me!

So what’s a girl to do but take a few homeschool teacher in-service days? My littles are playing outside and getting extra dirty in the morning and vegging on cartoons in the afternoon (thank you Diego and Netflix!). My older two are still doing all the schooling that they can do independently without mamma’s help. We are eating simply…cereal and juice, PB & J and fresh fruit, easy no-brainer dinners. One of my dear friends even brought me an already-made pasta bake and some fruit and veggies that we will eat tonight. Love those moments of provision that the Holy Spirit facilitates in our lives! Small, yes…but huge where it counts!

As I’m making concoctions for myself to desperately make this go away and avoid a trip to the doctor that will end in antibiotics, I thought I would share with you some of the awesome natural remedies that I have found over the years that have been essential for us when the yucky’s hit.

The kitchen is my best friend when it comes to healing us. Everyone has heard of chicken noodle soup as a go-to for healing food. But did you know it’s not a myth? I’m not talking canned soup here. The real deal made with homemade chicken stock from bones. That gelatin is magical stuff. Sauteed garlic and onions adds another layer of immune boosting properties. Too tired to make homemade chicken noodle soup? Try making ramen noodles with your own homemade chix broth instead of water. Tastes the same if you season with salt, pepper, paprika, and garlic powder without the damaging MSG of the packets. My kids LOVE this and it is usually a cheap lunch staple in the winter time for our family.

Another kitchen staple we use often in healing is honey usually added to tea. Any tea is good (the heat is what kills germs on your throat and loosens phlegm) so don’t worry if you don’t have those fancy herbal ones. Although I have quite a fondness for Wellness Throat Care and Celestial Seasonings Echinacea Wellness teas! Throw a touch of lemon juice and some honey (both act as antibacterial agents to kill germs and the lemon juice helps cut through mucus) and you have yourself a soothing cup of meds that are gentle on the throat and uplifting to the tired soul.

You can also use honey as a wonderful basis for homemade cough/throat syrups. (Don’t forget – not on infants under one years old!) Kids love the taste of honey and it makes whatever other ingredients you are adding more palatable for them. Most everyone has honey on hand and even if you are still going to give your kids over-the-counter meds, this works well when their throat is still achy and they want something between doses. From the kitchen means no side effects!

My favorite that the kids love is a ginger honey cough/sore throat syrup that tastes good and I don’t have to force anyone to take it. Just grate a piece of ginger and squeeze the juice from pulp into a bowl. Add a touch of lemon juice and some honey and stir. I take mine and put it back into the honey bear and label for fridge. If you have raw honey it’s even better because of the enzyme action in the honey not being heated. Notice I didn’t give amounts. That’s because this recipe is very forgiving. You will get about a teaspoon to tablespoon of gingerish liquid from the pulp. Honey is about 1/2 to 1 cup and lemon juice around same as ginger liquid. I never measure. I use what I have on hand (sometimes that’s more or less honey) and mix. It doesn’t have to be precise.

You can also try this tumeric honey recipe (just as the video says or combine with recipe above) for a more potent syrup. The spiciness of the tumeric (an anti-inflammatory) will most likely make this a more adult-friendly recipe. I must say, though, this has helped my throat the most. It may be spicy at first but soothes it for much longer than my throat drops did. Combine these with the simple power of a salt-water gargle in warm water a few times a day to help kill nasty throat bugs.  I do the salt water gargle first followed by the honey-turmeric and then wait at least 30 minutes before eating or drinking anything to let them do their job in killing bacteria.

And don’t neglect the power of Vitamin C. Most people get their 100% dose of Vitamin C per day via their foods and juices or vitamin supplements. But when your body is worn down and trying to heal from outside attacks of a virus, extra Vitamin C can really help your body repair itself faster. I keep Vitamin C throat drops on hand for my littles. These are better for sore throats than menthol drops because they don’t sting little throats and give a small extra dose of Vitamin C to little bodies. I use the Airborne for myself which is a mega boost with zinc and herbs to boot.

I also try to get extra Vitamin C naturally in our smoothies. We do smoothies at least twice a week. I take whatever fruit is looking a bit wilty and chuck it in the blender with some frozen fruit (usually blueberries or strawberries) and greens (when I have them – spinach is our favorite), some milk or yogurt (plain, full fat), vanilla, and a 1/3 cup of sugar (not to worry, that covers 8 people). My kids LOVE these and I feel it is a great way to add fruits and veggies to their otherwise picky diets!

My fave is a winter Orange Julius smoothie. Throw in a bunch of oranges (4-6), heavy cream, yogurt, vanilla, a couple of raw eggs, 1/3 cup suger (or honey) and a teaspoon of Vitamin C powder (we keep this on hand to use all winter long – and use calcium ascorbate as it allows you to absorb the vitamin C better). Tastes JUST like the malls except extra healthy for you!!!

My last tip…soak the toothbrushes in Hydrogen Peroxide (change morning and night) to kill germs during the length of this sickness. This is also good for anyone who is struggling with gingivitis.  When the cold/flu passes, throw away and buy new brushes.

Now, if I can just learn to make these:

Honey Cough Drop Lollipops @ The Pistachio Project

Or these:

Horehound Lozenges @ Frugally Sustainable

My next winter projects!!!

Red, White, and Blueberry Waffles {and other Fourth of July Pinterest Stuff}

Don’t you just love the festive color combinations of this creative breakfast my hubby came up with? Okay, maybe the breakfast isn’t that creative…we actually have this quite a bit at our house…but my husband is totally proud of his creative name for it.  Although I must say, it is the best waffle recipe we’ve ever had. Adam has tweaked it over the years to get it just right. No crunchy, overfluffed Belgian Waffles for us. We wanted something old-fashioned, classic in flavor. Slightly crisp but just the right softness when our homemade syrup is poured over top! {See Recipes Below!}

And here is a lovely shot of the one beautiful hibiscus that bloomed in our yard. I didn’t even know we were growing hibiscus! (I’ve always wanted them!) So imagine my surprise as Delilah swooped into the bathroom and showed me her treasure find. I laughed as I remembered my post from yesterday and then turned it over to show her how these flowers first inspired making fairy doll skirts out of flowers. Gorgeous! I see a girlie summer project going on. That is, if we can get the flowers to bloom before being plucked forever out of existence.

My day is pretty mellow today. I’m deciding NOT to clean the house (against all my mom instincts). Who really is going to notice my dirty floor? Besides, little kids running in and out all night with smoke powder on their fingers and feet…who am I kidding? I’d just have to re-do tomorrow! So today is a lazy day. Kids are heading out swimming and I get to sit here and right this post. Later this afternoon we will be watching Independence Day (a no-brainer!) and staying cool in the air-conditioning. Then it’s brats and dogs and smores and yumminess mingled with explosives and lots of little kids. Good combo, right?

One fun project we’re going to try tonight is glow-in-the-dark bubbles. Saw this on Jolanthe’s Homeschool Creations Blog last week and fell in love with the idea! Hopefully I’ll have some fun pictures to show you tomorrow.

Glowing bubbles courtesy of Homeschool Creations.

Speaking of Pinterest, thought I’d throw out some of the fun Fourth things to try. Check out my Fourth of July Pinterest Board. Killer stuff here! I only listed a few so, please, go see for yourself…there’s MUCH, MUCH more!

{ 1 } Sparkler Shield

{ 2 } Fourth of July Punch

{ 3 } Tin Can Windsocks

{ 4 } Cup Cake Liner Bug Protectors

{ 5 } Independence Day Paper Plate Hats

And now, for the waffle recipe (adapted from James McNair Cookbook). We double this recipe for our family of 8 as well as doubling the syrup recipe.

Butter Rich Waffles

• Melted butter for greasing
• 2 Eggs, room temp, separated
• 1 1/2 Cups Milk, room temp
• 2 tsp Baking Powder
• 1 Cup Flour
• 1 Stick Butter (1/2 cup), melted

1. Preheat waffle iron.  Grease grids with melted butter.
2. Beat egg whites to form stiff (but not dry) peaks. Set aside.
3. Combine egg yolks, milk, baking powder, flour, and melted butter till smooth.
4. Fold in egg whites.

Homemade Syrup (cheap and easy!)

• 1 Cup Sugar
• 1 Cup Brown Sugar
• 1 Cup Water

~ Boil 10 minutes, turn to low and stir in:

• 1 pad butter
• splash of vanilla

Have a wonderful, safe, and happy Fourth everybody!!!