Growing pains

I remember as a child when I would randomly get pains in my legs. They would be achy and crampy and feel just awful. My parents would tell me they were "growing pains" and that I should eat more bananas. I wonder how many bananas they got me to consume throughout the years from growing pains. *smile* Of course I know they were honestly hoping the potassium would help, but it still makes me chuckle to think of stuffing my face with bananas in hopes the pain would go away.

I wish there was a solution as simple as bananas for every parenting conundrum. This makes this post sound like I'm struggling with a particular child but I'm not. Instead, my children are growing, changing, and becoming complicated individuals with thoughts, ideas, and views on what they have been taught and what they see in the world/individuals around them and in some ways it's thrilling, in some ways it's terrifying.

This journey of home schooling has been the craziest ride of my life. Well, other than venturing off to a city unknown over a thousand miles away from home after my dad died for college. Well, and maybe having all my babies at home with no drugs. ;) I think those three tie.

But this journey is scary, humbling, never ending (it seems), exhausting...and yet the most rewarding journey I could ask for. It is rewarding because I am starting to see that by home schooling them I am not depriving them, I am opening up the entire world to them. I am also opening up the entire world to myself. And some days, I'm not sure I like what I find. And that makes me want to fold my children into the protective and controlled and scheduled environment of school. And yet, we all know that especially today there is no such environment in those institutions. Besides, though I may not like what I find and though I may feel challenged and stretched and confused and uneducated when I open up myself and my children to the vast world around us, how will I ever show them how to be courageous and strong and capable young men if we can't even be brave enough to step out?

I am reading some new books and new ideas that challenge me and scare me. They call into question things I was taught in school and ways I understood the world and our own country and government. I am thankful that at the end of the day, regardless of what the world really is and what our country really is, Christ is before and over and in all.

And when the day is done, my husband and I hear God's Word, pray, and I am so thankful that as long as our home is full of Christ and His love, there is nothing better in all the world that we could give our children.