A Prayer

Lord

Help me to remember that he is small—that his very life began inside my body, and that being close to me is his source of comfort.  Help me to remember that every time he says mama, it’s because he trusts me, needs me, wants me, loves me.

Help me to remember that he feels safe with me, and I can destroy that sense with a look, a harsh word, or a strike of my hand. Help me to keep my head, but when I err, help me to say “I’m sorry.”

Help me to remember that his heart is tender, and to be honest with him. Show me what he needs to know without corrupting his innocence. Our world is such a perilous place for the mind as well as the body—help me to teach him to keep his mind pure and his body safe.

Help me to remember that I am his parent, and that he needs me to be strong. Help me to set clear boundaries and be consistent in discipline, so that he will not question my authority, for this will help him to be obedient to you when he is a man.

Help me to remember that I, too, have limitations and will never be perfect. Help me to look to you for strength when I feel I have no strength left. Give me grace to be gentle when I don’t feel gentle, and wisdom when I don’t have the answers.

Help me to remember that his future lies ahead of us, and that our home is the soil in which his roots will stay. Help us to teach him by our example to be honest, wise, kind and gentle, and to season the world around him with goodness.

Help me to remember that someday, he won’t be small anymore.  Give me the wisdom to let go when the time is right and to joyfully trust that you have guided us in raising him into a godly man.

© Kelly Mine 2014

What I'd like to Think My 2014 Resolutions Are...

I don't make new year resolutions. I send Christmas cards, sometimes late, but I do not make resolutions. My experience has been that they are typically an exercise in human striving against a perceived failure or flaw, and battles taken up against myself and in my own strength are rarely won.

As I sit down to write this, I am in the middle of a frantic tidying of my house in order to make it presentable for friends who will come and hang out with us tonight. So of course it is the perfect time to sit down and write a fairly thoughtful blog post.

I came down with a fairly miserable flu-type virus last Monday, two days before Christmas. I had a fever and from there developed a horrible cough. I had not wrapped even one present yet. I had cooked nothing, baked nothing, and the house was dirty. This was not my idea of how Christmas was supposed to unfold. It has taken me over a week and some antibiotics (which is a huge admission of defeat for me) to recover from this. But God had one of the most restful Christmases in store. He blessed me with a concrete reason to say, "I quit. I refuse to do anything." And I didn't. I slept a lot. I didn't exercise once. (This is also a terrifying reality because I will be in agony when I go back, but that's a different story for a different blog.) I enjoyed being with my kids. I didn't care that the house was dirty. I didn't mind that meals weren't perfect. I just wanted to get better, and resting was what was required.

A lot of thinking came of my week of quiet nothingness. My thoughts (not resolutions) about this year have so much more to do with what I am going to do less of rather than what I am going to do more of. It boils down to worry less, enjoy more.

1. Worry less about cleaning, enjoy playing with my with family. 

2. Worry less about money, enjoy doing things with it. 

3. Worry less about school work and what the kids are learning, enjoy setting the kids free to learn what they want and yes, see resolution 1.

4. Worry less about no, enjoy saying yes, whenever possible, even if it's messy (back to #1).

5. Worry less about comparing my life to other people's and enjoy making mine what God means for it to be, in His strength and in his time.

I've always said that stress is to the mind and heart as pain is to the body. There is good pain--the kind that lets me know my muscles are growing and getting better and stronger, and there is acute pain, the kind that says, "Stop and let me heal." There is good stress--the kind that means I am growing as a person, and deeper stress that says the very same thing that acute pain says, "Stop and let me heal." When Christmas came I had reached that point, and it was time to stop and heal the body and the soul.

The first night I felt better, I suggested to my husband that we take the kids on a surprise family date. We told the kids to dress warmly and be ready to go when we said it was time to leave. We refused to give them clues as to what we were doing, which drove my son crazy, but in a fun way. We took them to the city (or just outside, actually) and took them to our very favorite burger place. Then we took them to an outdoor skating rink and went ice skating together along with three-quarters of the population of the state. They played Christmas music and "snow" drifted down on the rink making the perfect Christmas-card scene. Little Girl fell and banged her knee, so we took a break and snuggled close and sang a song...then skated some more, hand in hand. We came home with happy kids who were thanking us over and over for such a fun night together, and this made it all worthwhile.

I want more moments like these, so I'll try to keep it simple this year...

More yeses, fewer nos.

On a lighter note, I have some other things I want to do in 2014:

1. wax my eyebrows more often so it's not so painful every time.
2. buy new bath towels for my bathroom (been saying this for years)
3. do laundry every day instead of all weekend (been saying this for years, too.)
4. plan the weekly menu better so we're not asking "what's for dinner" at 6:00 p.m. (yup...years in the making, also.)
5. buy some new makeup (makeup just doesn't make it high on the priority list with me.)

And that is about it. These are the resolutions I may or may not get around too. I'll probably be sitting here next year saying, "yeah--that eyebrow thing didn't happen..." It's only a priority when they are actually ripping my face off...then I quickly forget.

Here is to a low-stress 2014. May all of your priorities be where you need them to be, and may your family be blessed because of it. Happy New Year.

Wordless Wednesday: Pixie, The Flying Squirrel

Week 9: In Which we Define Normal and Enjoy the Classics

This week was about as normal as we get around here, which isn't saying much about the meaning of "normal." We did our school work, got in our usual CrossFit WODs and had a wonderful afternoon of art and listening to Black Ships Before Troy in anticipation of our study of Ancient Greeks, The Iliad, and The Odyssey. (I have also been listening to the Great Courses presentation on the Iliad, and plan to listen to the one on The Odyssey as well.)

I have linked above to the Audible resources I am currently using. I have thoroughly enjoyed listening to a modern, unabridged translation of the Iliad. Sadly, in my own educational journey I have missed out on the depth and intricacies of Greek mythology. I never really enjoyed it, so I did only what I was obligated to do in school and skipped the rest. Now however, I am seeing it through the eyes of my son, who has always been fascinated with Ancient Greeks, their mythology and history. He has no fear of the classics and has embraced them with the energy and enthusiasm that every kid has for thrilling tales of heroism, monsters, and adventures in which the heroes defeat the monsters! On another level, I am cashing in on my graduate work in intercultural studies and understanding how the Greeks as a people understood life, the gods, and the concept of fate. All synapses are firing, here, and we are thoroughly engrossed.

One of the beautiful things about Audible is that I can enjoy being read to, right along with the kids. There is such value in reading aloud, but I have to confess, I do not always enjoy doing it. While we listened the other day to Black Ships Before Troy we did art! We all enjoyed the story and painted at the same time. It was wonderfully theraputic for me, as the week had been very busy--I had needed a day at home to just focus on lessons and the kids. At the end of the day, I was so happy to have had that time with them.

We are approaching week 9 and the end of the first unit of Tapestry of Grace Year 1. We have learned quite a lot about ancient Egypt and the beginnings of ancient Israel, had some very good discussions about the origins of our own faith, and have even gotten crafty with clay and lap books.

Molly completed a lap book displaying different gods of Egypt and the 10 plagues that God sent upon the Egyptians. While it would be impossible to examine all the different gods of Egypt, we chose 10 of them, discussed what they represented, and talked about how God undermined them through miraculous plagues designed to influence the pharaoh to let the Israelite slaves free to exit his land.

Molly's lap book on the ten plagues

The older dialectic students are working on models of the tabernacle, following discussion of the Israelites' wanderings in the wilderness. This has brought on interesting discussions of what it means to worship a holy God and what he expects from those who follow him.

building the tabernacle model

In non-academic news, I cannot resist the urge to brag a bit on my son. He and I entered a competition series at our CrossFit box in which we will do a different "classic" CrossFit WOD every Friday evening for the next four weeks. Everyone was welcome to participate, so he decided to do it with me. This week we did "Helen": 3 rounds for time, 400 m run, 21 kettlebell swings, and 12 pull-ups. Matt completed all of that in 12:45, WON the men's scaled competition and got 20 bucks for it! Booyah!

I on the other hand did not win, but I am okay with that. I had hoped to complete Helen in under 18 minutes and preferably in 15, and my time was 15:28, so I met my goal.

"Band of brothers" except they are sistahs...

This is me with three of my dear CF buddies who completed the WOD with me. The blur at the bottom is my son, attempting to photo-bomb the picture!

After the fun of Helen, friends from CF came over and celebrated our one-year anniversary of CF with us. It was a perfect night for chili, hot dogs, s'mores and a fire in the fire pit. The kids ran around outside and the adults wisely stayed inside and enjoyed some good laughs.

Saturday evening we went to Belvedere Plantation and enjoyed another bonfire, more s'mores, and lots of harvest-fest activities, not the least of which were pig races. I've never seen such a cute and funny event--little piggies running around a track, jumping over, running around, or crawling under little jumps. The kids enjoyed zip lines, giant slides, corn mazes and running around together.

All in all it was a busy, fun, exhausting "normal" week! Today we are resting and recovering from all the activities and late nights.

Week 8: In Which We Have a Bye Week

Like every good team, we need a bye week once in a while to recuperate. This was a good week for a break--everyone was starting to feel less than fresh when it came to school work, we still had Dad home due to the government furlough, and we had a scheduled field trip. I required only that the kids keep up with their history and science readings so that we would be prepared for next week's co-op.

On Monday our CrossFit Box had holiday hours which translates into huge crowds for workouts. We stayed home and did a workout (WOD) together. You can read about that at the Accidental CrossFitter, if you are at all interested.

If you are wondering how to get your kids more active, how to find time to exercise, or are looking for a sport that everyone in your family can participate in, consider trying CrossFit. While memberships at a box (what CrossFitters call their gyms) can be spendy,  we have made room in our budget for them because fitness has become such an integral part of our lifestyle. If you cannot afford it for long term, many CF boxes have shorter-term contracts where you could get the coaching for the movements and techniques and then simply follow the CrossFit and CrossFit Kids websites, which post WODs every day. I can honestly say I have never been this fit, this strong, or this confident in my own skin. Even when I was involved in athletics, I was only trained for that sport, and I was never involved in any given sport for very long, as I have never really considered myself an athlete. I just played for fun. Now, I am playing again for fun, but life is the game and being fit makes it so much better!

Enough about that...On Wednesday we went to the Kennedy Center for National Symphony Orchestra Youth concert, "Music is a Language." Both kids and I enjoyed it immensely--it's the NSO--how can we not? I appreciate the fact that we live in a place where there are so many opportunities for rich cultural experiences. I do not, however, appreciate the traffic we get stuck in going to such events. Inevitably we come home completely wiped out--not from the event itself, but more from whatever traffic jam we got stuck in, or from having to drive in the city, which fries my neurons horribly. Minivans in the city are just wrong. I need a Mini (without the van part)!

Now with the furlough behind us (until the next government crisis), Dad will return to work tomorrow and we need to get back into routine. I will miss having my best friend around. I will miss having the laundry caught up--he is the best at keeping that under control! While some moms may have been thrown off by having dads around unexpectedly for two whole weeks doing who-knows-what, I was not...at least not much.

Weeks 6 & 7: In Which we Bend and Stretch and Remain Flexible

I haven't posted the past two weeks because life has been a little less-than-predictable, and ever-so-interesting. Last week we were blessed with completely unexpected house guests. Thankfully they are also folks who homeschool, so we still got work done, but not the usual amount and I certainly didn't remember to take photos.

This past week has forced us to flex because of the so-called government shut-down. Dad is therefore home with us for the week, with no apparent notion of when he will return to work. It's wonderful having him home, but there is that small bit about getting paid--he isn't. We can't do much but hang out at home and enjoy being together, or go to CrossFit since that is not an out-of-pocket expense. Hubs has done a ton of yard work, and it all looks great. I'm ready to fill in my flower beds with pansies and mums, now...just as soon as he goes back to work. How long until an election? 

But this week was wonderful, and since my husband was home, and we carried on and made up for last week's loss of routine with a concerted effort to get back on track. So we...

refreshed Mrs. Chicken's salts

Set goals

Turned into grammar ninjas

just keep diagramming...

Oh, he is hilarious, alright!

did a little science-for-fun

caught up on TOG reading

enjoyed the beautiful weather on the patio

did a tough WOD together

Then last night we had the most amazing supper and friends over to enjoy it with us! Truth is, I would rather eat food like we had last night with good friends than go out to eat any day of the week...

I am finally reaching the point in my homeschooling journey where flexibility and loss of time spent on books does not upset me. I am learning to take all of life as it comes and not separate out schooling as being an entity different from life. Here I reiterate the point that I have made before--I want whole individuals who are trained to live life and be learners in every situation. I think these goals have been well served the past couple of weeks. It appears that we will have about one more week to bend and flex...Maybe Congress should take some lessons...