I can’t stand it anymore. The WordPress/HomeschoolBlogger set-up has finally driven me to Blogger.
CAN I SAY….
OH
MY
GOODNESS!!!!!!!
Blogger is so much easier and fun to use! I almost wept when I transferred my entire blog to Blogger in less than 3 minutes. My eyes were bugging out when Blogger uploaded a YouTube video to a post for me.
I’m so happy.
I love Charlotte Mason, and I love Copywork and Dictation. My biggest frustration, though, is choosing copywork and dictation passages. That’s just one more thing that I don’t have time to do. My daughter, Lydia, loves Shakespeare’s plays, so I thought some lines from his plays would make great copywork for her. I went online to look for something and found a great site called enotes.com Quotes abound, as well as literature study guides, lesson plans, discussion, and on and on. The great thing about the quotes is that they come with a recap of what’s going on at that particular point in the play. Love that. You can also look up the quotes by play, the person speaking and theme.
Before Darin and I felt led to allow God to decide the size of our family, I would look at those large families and imagine the parents of all those kids in some sort of mindless bliss, cranking out kid after kid. Now I am one of those parents, and understand there is no “mindless bliss.” As with anything that God leads in, there are tough decisions to make, and many prayers and petitions to be said. It is not always easy to hold on to the vision that God gives because life has a way of hijacking the vision before we realize it.
Darin and I were recently hijacked. We have been struggling. Parenting a large crew is not easy. I don’t know if we were trying to recover from the busier holiday season and not doing a very good job of it or what, but we have felt completely unable to do the job that God has given us with our kids and we wondered if we should even leave it open for God to give more. We felt ineffective as parents. Unequipped, over-worked, worn out. The phrase “no rest for the weary” was playing itself over and over in our minds.
What a crossroads-kinda-place to be. We have never struggled like this before and this was new territory for us. So we agreed to pray about it. As I was praying about it one morning while waiting my turn in the shower, God reminded me that it is, indeed, all about me. I knew it all along. 
It’s all about my response to the kids when they’re bickering.
It’s all about my response to the chores that never end.
It’s all about my response to the school planning I want to get to but never can.
It’s all about my response to the kid’s when they choose to disobey.
It’s all about my response to a tight budget.
It’s all about my response to zero “me-time.”
It’s all about my response to Darin having to work late.
It’s all about me. It’s all about my response. It’s all about me remembering that when I take all of the hassle personally, and truly make it all about me, I become miserable. I’ve got Kathy Troccoli’s song, “My Life is in Your Hands” going through my head and it really resonates with truth for me these days.
First verse:
Life can be so good
Life can be so hard
Never knowing what each day
Will bring to where you are
Sometimes I forget
And sometimes I can’t see
That whatever comes my way
You’ll be with me
Second verse:
Nothing is for sure
Nothing is for keeps
All I know is that your love
Will live eternally
So I will find my way, yes
And I will find my peace
Knowing that you’ll meet my every need
The whole song. 
Something has finally become clear to me. An acquaintance of mine told me that she and her husband had decided to put their son in public school next year. Her only real reason was that when she saw the work her son did in his local co-op class, compared to the work he did at home, there was a huge difference. He made really good grades in the co-op classes, which were challenging. His work at home….not so good. So she decided that since her son did so much better in his co-op class compared to the school he did at home that he obviously “responded better” to others. “Somehow,” she said, “he just doesn’t put out the effort for me that he does for his other teachers outside the home.”
I’m a thinker, and I’ve been mulling this over and over in the weeks since I chatted with this friend. There was a time in my thinking process when I thought I also needed to be alarmed because I too, have noticed that my son seems to put out a little more effort for his Biology class at co-op than for some of his work at home.
I’ve also been talking with Darin about it. We’ve come to the conclusion that the work attitude reflects the heart attitude. It boils down to whether or not our son is truly honoring his mom and dad as God asks him to do.
Honor your father and your mother, as the LORD your God has commanded you…Dueteronomy 5:16
When Darin and I put work down in front of our son, he should do the work with all his best efforts as a result of his desire to be obedient to God by honoring his dad and me.
It would be nice to be able to lay all the problem at Ben’s feet, but that’s just not the way it works with parenthood. Darin and I also realized in the same conversation that it is our job to make sure Ben knows what his proper response to our requests should be.
Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord. Ephesians 6:4
It’s a two-way street. If we are being clear as day about God’s expectations, then we have every right to expect honor in return. So once again, we’re humbled. Of course Ben has heard us repeat Ephesians 6:1 and Exodus 20:12 about a million times, but I don’t know how much we had ever practically applied it to his life. Ya know, things that seem crystal clear to us, the adults, are not so clear to the kids. It’s our job to teach it and live it.
I have a cold, and all I want right now is some hot chocolate, but I’ve finally taken the last step into Dairy Freedom. I have cut milk out of my diet. I am so glad I did because it was the final thing needed to help Grace make “stinkers” (as we call them at our house) even easier than she was after I cut cheese and other processed dairy out of my diet. Now to work on the other kids. Specifically Lydia and Henry. These are my two milk-lovers, and not surprisingly, both struggled with withholding their “stinkers.” Henry still does to a point. I think that when they were babes, the processed dairy made their “stinkers” so hard that they began holding it in because it hurt to come out, and then it became a habit.
That's me...Cheese...I want some cheeeeeese!
Ben is a cheese-lover and is having a hard time admitting that since I’ve stopped using cheese/cream cheese/sour cream in my cooking that his allergies are better. He says, “I didn’t have that big of an allergy problem!” How we forget so soon. He and I struggled the most (his and my favorite lunch was cheese tortillas which we ate 2-3 times each week), and this past fall, being cheese-free, neither of us had ANY allergy issues. Given the chance, he eats cheese still. I hope to get him fully on board with Dairy Freedom. I need to pray about that one, I guess.
I remember a few years ago reading about a famous actor and how she didn’t eat dairy. I thought, “What a freak!” (Yes, I am so kind) It’s funny how time changes things. My favorite quote is by Harvey Bluedorn, of Trivium Pursuit. Well, this is a paraphrase…my copy of ”Teaching the Trivium” is where Grace is sleeping right now, so I can’t go get it….anyway, it goes something like this: ”if I’m supposed to be in New York, but you see me in Chicago, don’t judge me. I’m on the road to eventually get there.”
We are all on a crazy, one-of-a-kind journey, aren’t we? I enjoy the peace that Harvey’s words gave me. I don’t have to get all worked up because I hear a story about my best friend’s next door neighbor’s cousin that proves she is ”obviously” on the “wrong path.” Nah, I can give her Grace (not my baby, Grace, but you know, GRACE) knowing that she may not be too far behind me on the journey and just maybe I can encourage her through prayer or a word spoken at the right time.
I feel that Grace every time I talk with a friend from high school, or college….really, any of my friends from those early years. I look back and just cringe at some of the things I said or did and wonder how I still have those friends. How do I still have the love of my husband and children, for that matter? Ever see that movie, “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”? The characters in the movie erase memories that become distasteful to them. I would like to do that to everyone around me first, and then me, so we can all forget the time that I picked a fight with Darin because he vacuumed BEFORE dusting, or the day that I forced the kids against their own better judgement to re-enact “Peter and the Wolf” as we played it in the CD player…it seemed like a fun idea until I wigged out because they weren’t as “into it” as me. I would also like to forget the day that I had TWO venti chai teas from Starbucks, but that’s going to take more than a mind-erase. More like several workouts…
Sometimes the biggest things I want to erase are the things I know now. Like the whole dairy thing. Wasn’t it so much easier to just eat cheese/sour cream/cream cheese/milk? Recipes with these yummy products are easy to come by, and easy to eat, and no one looked at me sideways for being that ”freaky dairy free woman” that throws a wet blanket on their pizza party. Ignorance is bliss – but then so is life without Claritin, nose spray and a baby who can make “stinkers” without stress, ya?
Becca
