Ordinary Time

[Sometimes old posts enter my awareness and when I glance through them I hyperventilate a bit. Instead of deleting this post I am leaving it up because it definitely highlights the journey I have been on for over a decade. I will just say 2023 Me heartily disagrees with 2010 Me. We were in for some extremely difficult years as a result of this extremely consequence based parenting mindset. Reading anything past 2012 will give you a much better sense of our parenting lives now. ] I find when I have had a stretch of being preoccupied that it's as if I wake up one morning and realize that my children have become hooligans.  Because of my preoccupation, this time with getting M. off to her mission trip and B. leaving for scout camp and then figuring out how life is going to work without these two very capable people, I don't parent quite as actively as I should and our home life starts to look a bit like Lord of the flies.  This is particularly true with the younger boys.  In...

I'll just pause here for a moment so that those of you who have seen my house can clean-up the coffee you just spewed all over you computer.  Perhaps I should have said, "I wish my house had more usable space."  Is that better?  Marginally?  For those of you who haven't been to my house, it is big.  Really big.  Embarrassingly big.  But we really only use a fraction of the space.  What I wish is that we had the resources to turn much of the unused/unusable space into something useful.  We have an entire third floor which could be turned into bedrooms, both for some of our children and for use as guest rooms.  Right now, it is three rooms and a bathroom, all of which are completely unusable, and an over-sized play room.  Yes, I know having the huge playroom up there is nice, but does it really need to be this big?  It just invites monster-sized messes. And then there is the attic above that... Anyway, why am I thinking a...

I have found a new book that I am loving so much, I want to share it with you even though I'm not done with it yet.  It is Keeping House: the litany of everyday life by Margaret Kim Peterson.  Here is a little excerpt:      "Although my husband and I hardly had two nickels to rub together, we agreed that I would not seek paid employment for those few months and would instead devote my time to getting us packed and moved.  I would in other words, be "just a housewife."      Around that time my friend Donna gave birth to her second child.  Lily turned out to be severely affected by Down syndrome.  She spent the three months of her brief life in a pediatric intensive-care nursery, and for those three months Donna practically lived at the hospital with her.  I sat and visited with them for a couple of hours two or three days a week, sharing with them in that searing experience of love and loss.  Lilly died just a...

That's the happy sound of canning lids sealing.  A sound one wants to hear after having spent a good portion of the day in the kitchen making and canning jam. Our house guest and her daughter went to Michigan yesterday to pick cherries.  And pick cherries they did... to the tune of nearly 100 pounds of cherries; half sweet and half sour.  When you've spent that much time driving and picking, you don't want the cherries to go bad.  We needed to do something with them. Today.  And to add to the fun, (and because I'm a tad bit compulsive) I went to the farmer's market this morning hoping to find the last of the strawberries and brought home 6 quarts.  I really do think they were the last; they were very sweet and very ripe.  Waiting to do something with them was not an option either. As you can see in the picture above, we ended up with 6 1/2 pints of sour cherry jam.  (This was new for me and I have to say I'm pretty proud of...

This has been the question du jour recently.  I know everyone means do we stop doing "school", but each time I am sorely tempted to ask, "Stop doing what?  Living?'  At the root of these two questions lies the fundamental difference between those of us who teach our children at home and traditional schooling.  At this point in our homeschooling journey, I find it nearly impossible to separate what is just "life" and what is "school"; there is very little difference between the two.  We may take a break from doing intense grammar lessons in the summer (sentence diagramming and stuff), but we certainly do not take a break from reading, or discussing what we've read, or talking about how words work, or writing stories, or... It's just a part of how we live.  We do not take a break from working on math books, because to do so causes such distress (on the part of both parent and child) when it comes time to resume that it isn't worth it...

it just depends on your perspective.  J. just called me and told me that M. is safely on the plane.  So she is off on her big adventure.  Now, the alert reader is asking herself, why did J. have to call E. to tell her that?  Wasn't she at the airport, too?  In fact, I was at the airport.  I was at the airport for several hours.  But when we were checking in, we assumed that we would both be able to get security passes to go to the gate.  We assumed wrong.  We could have one.  I decided to let J. go to the gate since he is a bit more emotionally stable than I am at times.  I said I would go wait at the coffee kiosk until J. saw M. onto the plane.  So far, so good.  I ordered a coffee and sat and alternately people-watched and prayed.  And then my cell phone rings at about the time the plane was supposed to be loading.  I think it must be J. telling me he's seen her off.  I was half right; it was J.  ...

Today is our 19th anniversary.  I am so blessed to be married to my best friend; a man who is a wonderful husband and father.  The past 19 years have been a fantastic adventure and we have done things we never dreamed of when we first married.  (For instance, we both thought that having four children sounded just about right.)  God has continued to work in our lives and I am excited to see what the future brings. Though, currently, the future is taking our oldest daughter on an airplane in the morning.  And while I am dreading her being gone, I am also very excited for her to have this experience.  I'll be okay.  Really.  For times such as these, one of the pluses of having many children is that there isn't a lot of down time to obsess.  I know the seven weeks will fly by and everyone will be home again.  I will be hovering around the mailbox on the lookout for letters. The past few days have been a flurry of last minute packing ...