Parenting advice worth passing along…
You can follow the link above to read a short but very profound point on Parenting. My favorite quote from the post was "As I near this final chapter of having kids in the home, I realize more and more that the overall goal in parenting is to emphasize heart inhabitation (a Spirit-led life) more than behavior modification. It’s not about raising “good kids,” but rather “godly kids.”
So true! I am glad I am learning this now while my kids are still fairly young. It is so hard to practice because it does take a lot of effort, and consistency, and love and patience, and on and on and on it goes. Which is hard on the "weak" flesh that we walk in, isn't it? But the fruits of the labor is great indeed! I am still learning so much, and changing so much. I have far to go, but I am on my way :)
p.s. Beyond this article, there are a lot of great resources that help encourage parents to teach to the heart of their children, not just modify behavior. Some of those resources are books like "Shepherding your child's heart", "Don't make me count to three!" and the complete audio series by Steve and Teri Maxwell "Encouragement for the homeschooling family" (which by the way is being offered as a "giveaway" at Miscellaneous Musings of a 5x mom so hop on over there and enter!!)
Parenting advice worth passing along…
A garden perspective.
I LOVE LOVE LOVED this post on children. It also answered the question of "are homeschool children sheltered?". Hop on over to blog "If only everyone thought this way" and read it.
Hope everyone is having a great Sunday! My Sunday is definitely better than my Saturday. Praise the Lord. Yesterday was rough. But as the Word says..."weeping may remain for a night, but rejoicing comes in the morning."
I wept last night, but Joy has come this morning. :)
Tired of homeschooling your little one?
I don't know how you answered that title question, but my answer is a resounding YES!
My son is five, so I don't do an "official" curriculum. We piddle around with this and that, but mostly do Saxon for math and little workbooks for phonics. So here is something simple, and "out of the box" (out of the box= anything outside of what we normally work on, i.e. writing, math, phonics workbooks) we did lately.
This is something I did to help encourage my son to read. He is not a big fan of trying to read at this moment so anything that encourages him to do it, is a bonus in our house.
I took colored linking cubes (you could use anything you have that has lots of colors) and laid them out. Then I took index cards, cut them in half and wrote a different color on each of them. When I was finished with that my son had to read the card himself so that he could place them under the corresponding color linking cube. He loved it, he read them, and it cost me NOTHING! yeah, I love, free, simple, and non-time consuming ideas.
Could you come up with something better? I am certain you could. But from one mom to another, I know I always appreciate ideas, no matter how small and simplistic the idea might be.
A dying breed.
We did this project for Jacob's math. It involved making a graph of all the different hair colors in your family. It was so easy and fun, any kindergartner would enjoy it. Would you believe in all my family we only have ONE blond? Poor Auntie Jamie :(
side note: you can also do this graph with pictures. Just cut out pictures of that persons face (which of course includes their hair), and put them on the graph like I did with the pieces of colored construction paper.
side note #2: Yes my daughter is in her pajamas, we are homeschoolers, what can I say? And YES she is posing instead of my kindergartner because she LOVES having her picture taken. ;)
Stay at home mom
Interesting that sometimes the last thing I want to do is stay at home. Too many years spent in the city. Too many wild days as a teen spent go go going. However today I sampled how wonderful and blessed it is to be ABLE to stay at home. What an amazing gift. I traveled a lot over these last few days, driving to Oklahoma and looking for rentals. We spent hours upon hours in the car, and our little guy got sick (you can tell he is our youngest since he is 5 and a half and I still call him our little guy).
We came home last night and he had a raging fever all throughout the night. I woke up and babied him all day long. The fever continued while I rocked him throughout. I cooked for my hubby before he went to work, folded laundry, and homeschooled my daughter. We all sat around later in the evening, watched movies and played candyland. It was so nice just to be able to be there,with them, ya know? Even when all your doing is giving a sick little boy some Tylenol and teaching your 8 year old about God, the world, math and spelling. Sometimes I forget how amazing it is that I am able to stay home. IF I was forced to go to work, or for some unknown reason, WANTED to go to the workforce everyday, I would miss these moments and only come home to the work part of being a mom. I am not looking down on working moms, I am simply saying, I can't believe how blessed it is to be home. It is so easy to forget, most people do not live this life. Some by circumstance, some by choice. Either way, should we not thank God every single day, He has showed us to live this way and provided an opportunity in which to live it?
It's sad, that most women are told and even indoctrinated by our society to believe, they can't stay at home. They are told "you HAVE to have two incomes or you are not contributing to the family", "You will go crazy sitting home all day doing nothing. A job helps you feel important and more like a part of the society", Your kids need day care and preschool, think of all the new things they learn there"
I have heard it all before. Thankfully I was too utterly selfish to believe any of it. I loved my kids and wasn't going to part from them for all the world. Sadly, women who are more selfless than I are believing the lie that you do your family a disservice by staying home. Unfortunately, just the opposite is true. And sometimes, sadly they have no choice, even when they desire to stay home. However I feel for most of us, we have a choice.
There have been times I was tempted. I was schooled in the ways of this world too, and most of my family, although meaning well, have pushed unceasingly for 8 years for me to go back to college or learn a trade. To become a part of society. Unfortunately if more women don't start returning home to their families we will have NO society.
(OK I warned in the very first post on this blog I may offend some. This is my opinion, and the wisdom I feel I have learned from the Word. Please do not hold yourself to my standard, but only that of God himself. Also understand I would not have written this flippantly, I am passionate about this topic, and only write out of that passion and love for families. )
How wonderful, that this is one of the last things I see at the end of my day..
Pajama day
OK I know this is a little silly to some, but some days I JUST LOVE being a homeschool mom. Sure there are those days where I think to myself I have lost my mind to take this wonderful enormous task on, but most days I am just plain grateful. Today was one of those days. I had a lot to do today, but I got started schooling early (which always helps)and before I knew it, it was noon, I was baking bread and realized we ALL were still in our Pajamas. I declared a full on Pajama day and got our stuff done and totally neglected things like putting on clothes or brushing hair. I however was so busy keeping the house clean (we had to show the house TWICE today) That I stayed in my PJ's till 5pm. There you have it ladies, proof (as if you needed any more) that I am far from perfect. Here are some cute pics of my cute kids in their PJ's.
(p.s yes my son is making a silly face, and yes I do reward with cheeze its from time to time)
