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Green Spirals and Merciful Days

/ amylynw / Leave a comment

Mom, you never get peace, Jack said to me the other day.  Wait!  You had peace once!  And he went on to talk about when they all went to Grandma’s house.  I laughed out loud.  Or if you’re going to use today’s lingo, I “roffled”.  That is what I say in my head when I read ROFL… rolling on the floor laughing.  No, I didn’t actually roll, or roffle, but I did achieve a small release of stress when I laughed out loud.  Or lolled.  (That’s LOL, btw.)

Tonight was no exception.  I had great fun spiralizing my zucchini into fake noodles and tossing them with coconut sauce and blackened chicken.  The kids watched Daniel Boone so I could spin deliciousness into my pots.  But there is always one who doesn’t get the “peace memo”.  She rolled on the floor crying.  It’s always interesting trying to cook while stepping over a crying toddler.  My strategy was to wait until they were so hungry, they would forget that the green zucchini noodles were not actually made from pasta.  It worked for two of them, took convincing for two of them, and downright failed for the fifth one.  This is when I use every ounce in my body not to take a two-year-old’s opinion of my cooking to heart.  In the middle of our green spaghetti supper, a nameless highchair dweller knocked over one of the herb pots on the window sill.  The walls start closing in when things like that happen.
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I’ve been waiting for a really really good excuse to scrub my kitchen floor.  The successful eaters got chocolate ice-cream for dessert.  The last one… did not.  An hour later, I graciously gave her a banana, because she at least touched it to her tongue.  Elijah said, Mom, you were really merciful tonight! when he saw her eating the banana.  Thanks, Buddy.

Then I remembered these verses I just read.

But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope:
The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases,
His mercies never come to an end;
they are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.
“The Lord is my portion,” says my soul,
“therefore I will hope in him.”
The Lord is good to those who wait for him,
to the soul that seeks him.
(Lamentations 3:21-25)

Even when I mess up, spill dirt, and wreck what He has planned…  He still shows steadfast love, unending mercy, and abundant faithfulness.

So the truth is, despite what is outwardly going on, inside I always have peace.  Jesus has wiped my heart of its spills and dirt.  He has left the calm assurance of His forgiveness and faithfulness in place of the mess.  Tomorrow, His mercies are new.

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And tomorrow, maybe my floor will be clean.

Loads Of Fun: Laundry Room Makeover

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It all started back in April.  I asked for a bigger laundry room, and my smiling husband began the “weekend” project of extending the laundry room and shrinking the powder room.  It has taken… well, a few weekends.  It is finished, minus a new window which is on its way, and a touch-up here and there.  The powder room only has a few more pieces of moulding and a paint job before it is finished.  Here is a look at the before and after pictures.

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The shelves are from Ikea.  The baskets are from Target.  The moringa tree is from Haiti.  The floor was free from a job Matt did almost 8 years ago.  It has moved with us and finally found a nice home in the bathroom and laundry room.  There were only five extra tiles left over.  How is that for perfect fit?  The trim work was done by Weldon Carpentry.  The wall paint was free-cycled and turned out to be the perfect shade.

Each of the four youngest children have five baskets.  From Left to Right they hold: 1-Snowsuits/hats/gloves in winter, swimsuits and towels in summer.  2-Sweaters/sweatshirts.  3-Shirts.  4-Pants/shorts.  5-PJ’s, underwear, and socks.  The top five shelves hold my rag basket, vacuum bags, Matthew’s running clothes and gear, gardening gloves and seeds, and tablecloths.

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I am so very thankful for a laundry room and am thrilled to keep our family clean and clothed!

 

A Three-Minute Tour

/ amylynw / 6 Comments

There has been all sorts of rearranging going on over here.  In all of his “spare time” Matthew basically has gone waaaay out of his way to get two extremely helpful pieces of furniture for our growing family!  The first was a bunk bed for the little girls.  Their room was like a pig pen.  Crooked crib, mattresses on the floor.  Nowhere to put things.  An awful mess.  Bunk beds have been a huge space-saver and it is slowly evolving into a cute girls’ room.  Still not finished, but much more functional.

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I don’t have any “before” pictures here, but our living room underwent another change.  Now please don’t think that taking a photo tour through our home replaces a real visit.  I still much prefer real life.  Then you can see how very non-perfect it is and don’t come under any false impressions.  So please, stop by!

As you walk in our front door you see the “listening station”.  A new addition to our school year, there is a basket of tapes (yes, tapes!), CD’s and earphones with the stereo.  Hours have already been spent here listening to books on tape, Adventures in Odyssey, and music.   I want to make piles of pillows for this spot to make it more inviting and cozy, and the shelf on the floor still needs to be hung.  We gave away our piano, and this is also where I would like our replacement to go when that should happen.  In keeping with “listening”, it will be electric with earphones capabilities so practice can happen at anytime during school or naps without bother to anyone else.

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As you look to the left, this is our living room.  I would love a more neutral couch to blend everything together and not clash so much.  I’m reading about re-upholstering.  (Matthew, don’t read that line.)

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Not so clashy in black and white.

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Moving on to our latest find:  red lockers to feed the soul.  (Thanks, Sarai!  You understand!)  I’m so excited to move some not-so-pretty, but needed school supplies into this beauty.  The doors lock so I can have a prize locker, or keep things locked away which need permission to be used.

 

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The kids keep telling me they’re excited for school to start, which thrills my heart.  It helps that their books are all lined up on the school shelves but they’re not allowed to touch them.  I have a few days of planning ahead of me, but I’m starting to feel like my head is screwed on straight again now that things are more in order.

 

Home is Where our School Is

/ amylynw / 2 Comments

Recently I’ve had a lot of people asking me about why we homeschool, what is our method, how on earth do I manage?  To be honest, it’s been a real challenge this year.  With an almost two-year old in tow, life gets pretty noisy around here!  We are Exploring Countries and Cultures, traveling the world in our imaginations and through books.  I absolutely love reading biographies to the kids, and our favorite so far has been Nate Saint.  Now we are reading about George Muller, as we are in Europe, and Germany is a part of Europe!  If we had the means, we would be hopping on an airplane so we could actually touch and feel and smell the places we are reading about.  In addition to Geography, we do independent reading, write letters, do math on the computer (I am relieved not to teach that this year), and grammar.  In Science, we’re learning about the world’s biomes, or ecosystems.  As to the why we are schooling at home… God wants us to, which equals the fact that He also equips us to follow through with His desire.  So, it is not me having or not having the ability, strength, patience, etc. to perform this overwhelming task.  It is God working through me and giving me what I need.  The days where I fly off the handle (yes, this happens) are most certainly the days where I am depending on my own means and strength to do what’s at hand.  Even in the last couple of weeks, my mindset has changed a lot as to why and how I do this.  I’m learning, daily, to let go of my own agenda, and surrender to the Lord’s plan for our day.  I know I do things a lot differently than many homeschool moms, but I’m a work in progress.  As a friend so encouragingly told me this week, being a planner is something that can be learned!  I’m so thankful for that, because it is something I need to learn more efficiently.

Here is a sneak peek into a typical day at our school:

Betty, our ever-present babbler, has been calling Elsie, Abby, Abby, Abby! for a while now.  Elsie says, She loves brothers and sisters!  She loves to sing and say, The B-I-B-I-B, Bible!  Often I have one of the older kids watch her upstairs while we do one-on-one stuff at the school table.  A lot of the times, Elsie is very capable of keeping her entertained.  Sometimes she just sits on my lap, colors, or plays with play dough at the table.

Elsie has been wearing the same outfit she got from a friend… for three days straight.  Yesterday we sat on the couch and she read four short stories to me.  Just like that.  I think she surprised herself!  She and Jack are both doing the same phonics program.  She shows an earlier readiness than he did, and they work well together.DSC_4054
Jack has turned a corner in reading and small light bulbs are starting to go off in his mind as he unlocks the code of letters and sounds.  He is easily frustrated, so we take many breaks, but he now wants to read, which helps so much in the learning.  My goal was never to push him until he showed a real desire to read.  I really love the books we’re using for phonics.  They are called First Start Reading, by Cheryl Lowe, and I couldn’t say better things about this method.  Each sound is mastered and built upon, not in the order of the alphabet, but rather in the order of how the sound is made.  For instance, since “M, N, P, C, F, S, G, and T” are all sounds made without adding any extra sounds, they are learned first, so there is no confusion.  The approach is vowel-consonant blended with word families.  This means, in the second lesson, they are reading the words “I am…” and fill in the blank with their name.  It’s exciting for them to start reading right away, but words are never introduced that aren’t sounds they have already learned.  I highly recommend it.DSC_4349

Elijah has been feverishly building an intricate crane with his new Erector set.  For two days now, whenever there is a break in school, in meals, or in sleep, he has been at it.  I look at it and wonder how on earth he figured it out.  So many pieces, so intricate, and it actually works!  His strengths are memory-work, science and art.

Nadine sparkles around horses.  She dreams about what she will do with them one day, and wants to help people with the skills she is learning.  We don’t know what that will be, but we love to encourage our children’s dreams.  During the hours she is not in the saddle, she works hard on school.  Her strengths are reading and math.

Today, being Pearl Harbor Day, we stepped out of our regular studies of Europe and delved 71 years ago into history.  They became acquainted with the day that lives in infamy, and were sobered by the reality that is war.  I love this aspect of home-schooling, which allows us the freedom to study pertinent dates and important historical events.   Jack whispered to me during the documentary we were watching, Mom, is this for real?  Yes, it really happened.  I think it’s so very important for our generation of children to know the heroes of their past, to understand there is more to their world than i-pods, video games, and drama.  There were and are real men and women who are fighting for our freedoms.  There is an entire generation who has passed from their view, and with them their memories and experiences.  I really don’t want to forget.

So, that is a small glance at what we are doing.  I am no expert, but I’m working hard to do my best and instill a love of learning to our children.

Curiosity Almost Killed the Cat (If We Had One)

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Curiosity killed the proverbial cat, and in my case, curiosity makes my house look the way it does.  Sometimes curiosity makes it smell the way it does.  This morning when I smelled a hint of smoke, I thanked God for my nostrils.  A child had indeed lit not one, but six matches.  They were flushed down the toilet, said a reliable source.  Not that this happens a lot, because it doesn’t, but at the same time I can say, “Just another day in the life.”  If it’s not matches, it is a great many other things.

The other night as I was about to flip on the lamp beside our bed I noticed that every square inch of it was coated in a thick layer of vaseline.  Oh yeah.  That one is fun.

Soap on the wall.  Marker on the wall.  You-name-it on the wall.  All things I silently told myself, would never happen in my home when I was a mother.  Really?  Sharpie on the piano?  How could any good mother allow her children to do such a thing?

The reality is, I definitely don’t allow them to do it, they choose to do these things.  The other reality is, childish behavior does not reflect our mothering.  I can not be in five places at once.  So unless I extinguish their freedom to explore, and always keep them within eye-shot, these things will happen.  Notice I said “childish things”, because as I am learning, there is a difference between childishness and foolishness.  Childishness is often just immature curiosity without common sense.  As we mature, we may wonder if sticking a screw-driver into an electrical socket will do anything, but common sense (or experience) will stop us from trying it.  Childishness thinks, “I  wonder how this color would look on that white wall?”  Children are naturally curious, but often their curiosity leads to mess, which we as mothers often translate as:  bad, bad, bad.  I’m saying this more to myself than anyone else, but mess doesn’t always equal bad behavior.  Mess means life, learning, and children abound!  That is not a bad thing!  They are learning to clean up behind themselves, but not every shoe out-of-place or smudge on the wall means that they are out to get me.  Every day I struggle to keep our home from looking like a demolition derby ran its way through each room.  I often complain about it.  I often compare myself to others who seem much more put together than myself.  This takes away the joy of all the life being lived within these walls.  So, as I anticipate starting school soon, I know there will be messes galore.  I really want my kids to remember, though, that life and living was more important than a perfectly clean house.

The Law of Disorder

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It’s inevitable.  The messes.  The laundry piles.  The law of physics which says that even when things are left perfectly alone, they will eventually deteriorate.  Order must always decrease.  It should be called the law of home-making.  This is a typical laundry day in our house:

That doesn’t include sheets that have been accidentally wet during the night.  Thankfully those sheets and blankets were already on the laundry room floor when I heard Elijah frantically yelling, “Mom!  Mom!  The sink is doing it again!” The sheets were quick to soak up some of the gallons of water rushing out of our small sink in the bathroom, but the flood was pretty extreme.  The plug will sometimes fall into ‘closed’ position and is very difficult to pull back up again.  Unfortunately, the water was left running at the same time.  So… an extra little mopping was done here today.  Ah, entropy.

Speaking of things being left alone… yesterday we had somewhat of a scare.  Again, I heard a rather desperate call for me from upstairs.  Betty was in the bathroom with the door closed (she can do that too) and she had reached the lock with her little hands and locked the door.  The lock is only able to be opened from the outside of the door with a skeleton key, as the doorknobs are those old-fashioned giant diamonds.  I immediately freaked out and called Matthew.  I needed the skeleton key, which both of us saw recently but couldn’t remember where, or a locksmith.  With visions of disaster speeding through my head, I prayed and then did the only reasonable thing I could think of doing quickly: climb onto the roof.  So, out the boys’ bedroom window I crawled, walking carefully to the adjacent bathroom window, the hot slanted rooftop toasty under my sandals.  I pried open the screen of the bathroom window and gave Betty a startle when I called her name.  She was sitting in front of the door, playing with the other kids’ fingers under the door, looking unfazed by the whole ordeal.  I unlocked the door and everyone cheered.  Jack said, “Mom, that was the coolest thing I’ve ever seen you do!”  I really, really hope that I never have to climb out on the roof again.  The kids all had a crash course on why putting Betty in the bathroom is NOT a good idea, and we are on the lookout for our skeleton key in case anything like that happens again.  Thankfully it was such a warm day, so the windows were all open!

My fourth load of wash is on the clothesline, school happened, and we have laughed entropy in the face by all of our vacuuming and putting away.  I’m desperately hoping to do better than cereal for supper tonight.  Cooking is one thing that does not fall into any law of physics.  This is called the second law of home-making: supper, if left completely alone, will not just happen.