January

We've been in the swing of things around here since I was two weeks postpartum and returned to full time babysitting. With lil miss here we have to be on a routine so that I'm not trying to nurse my baby, bottle feed her, and feed my four big boys all at once. It's nice.

Lil baby is about to be 3 months old in 11 days. He's a fantastic baby. He's slept through the night since the night he was born. Seriously. Now, my definition of sleep through the night is 10-4. Pretty good no? There has not been one night that he has not had that routine. OK, sometimes he wakes at 3:30 instead of 4. :) Then he goes back to sleep until between 6:45-8.

When he's not sleeping he's happy. He likes to just lay in his rocker or swing and just watch the chaos. There's always a brother talking to him or trying to carry him around. He nurses well and is growing fast.

So, I'm not sure if it's something having to due with January (bored from not being able to go outside? Feeling cooped up?) but I've been on a huge purge spurt. Maybe it's a postpartum thing. Regardless, I'm going room by room, digging in dark corners, cabinets, drawers, etc etc and purging. It feels SO GOOD to take bags and bags of stuff to Goodwill and to the trash. I want to take a complete inventory of every single thing in the house (no, not written, just mental) so that "every item has a place, and everything is in its place". That is so important to me.

These days the minimalist lifestyle is huge. You can't scroll through Facebook without seeing ads for the "tiny house" or the recycled "shipping container house".  The funny thing is how grand they try to make them look on the inside, because even if we're living in a shipping container we want to feel rich and spoiled. But, I read THIS fantastic article on why the minimalist lifestyle is a TERRIBLE idea for a large family. I was so relieved to have words for the uncomfortable feeling I had whenever I was tempted to "go minimalist". The thing is, as responsible and frugal parents, we can't afford to just run to Goodwill for an appliance and then donate it right afterwards. People try the "own 100 things" challenge, but what they don't tell you is they are constantly paying for things they use once and then get rid of.

So while minimalism will never have its place in our 7 member family due to finances alone, I do insist that if an item does not have a place, it shouldn't be here.

So, we're cleaning, purging, reorganizing, and really enjoying a much cleaner house. The work is never done. By the time I get through the whole house it will be time to start right over again. But, if my work were ever done, I would have no vocation. Work is constant and that is good, it is good to set our hands to work, it keeps us humble and repenting as we fight against the dirt, decay, dust, and broken things in our lives. It reminds us every second of why we need Jesus.

On that note, it's bed time. Christ keep you.

Trucking along.

I wrote the title to this post feeling pretty positive today but then had to laugh out loud. There is nothing organized, orderly, or emotionally stabilizing about home schooling 4 boys 8 and under and being pregnant with a baby while also watching an infant full time. There just isn't.

But somehow we keep trucking a long. I'm learning that less is more. I'm learning that we should have very few things that we order our day around in order to keep from getting so stressed out that I literally accomplish nothing and instead end up a huge crying mess.

So what do we order our days around? Breakfast, Bible/Catechism/Hymn time, Lunch, quiet time, Dinner, and Bible time with Daddy.

I've also embraced the fact that my oldest is now very capable of being independent in his lessons. He has a math book he is mostly capable of doing alone with short moments of guidance from me, he is interested in learning cursive so I bought him two workbooks that complement each other and he's working through those, and we're working through two different chapter books right now in addition to an audio book series he listens to every day and narrates to his dad when he gets home. We have multiple other things we pick up when we feel like it, social studies and science type books, but it's so nice to be able to, between all the above things we schedule our day around, say, "Hey, I see you're looking for something to do, go grab your math book and I'd like you to do three pages please."

We have a motto in our home, "We work before we play." My kids know that just like the daily household maintenance chores I ask them to do, school work is part of their whole duty of a child which means that it enables them to better serve their family, which is their current vocation. Of course, the typical amount of time they are asked to do anything from curriculum is very small right now because most of the day they are so full of questions of their own and are buried in our books, reference books, and having me look things up online for them. I am much more inclined to watch them hungrily devour knowledge they are pursuing on their own until they are of age where they will be working hard towards a goal that will enable them to pursue their new vocations as adults.

The hard part, for me, is not losing it in the chaos. There just is no perfect way to feel complete order and control when one is managing education, home, meals, outside of the home activities and friends, etc. So, I'm sticking with less is more for now and trying to enjoy these last 10 weeks (!!!!!!) of pregnancy and the baby kicking the daylights out of my ribs.

Homeschooling Real life style

It's 8:15 at night and it feels like 10...maybe 11. My neck hurts, my back hurts, and I can hardly keep my eyes open. Today was a good day. God has made me rich in my vocation. Notice I did not say it was a good day because anything particularly fun happened today or because I got to DO anything fun today, but it was good because what God ordains is always best. It was good because it was a day of love and service and God has given me so many ways to serve. Here is one day of many (today):

6:15am: 2 year old wakes up and begins calling to his three brothers in his room that he needs to go potty. I kick my husband and ask him to go help said 2 yr old so his brothers can sleep a little longer. He very graciously obliges and I fall back asleep.

7:05: get up, kiss children good morning, head down to basement to work out.

7:45: dart up the stairs, drink a glass of water, do strength training in the piano room with kids climbing on me and mimicking me.

8:00: kiss husband goodbye, open front door for drop off of baby we are watching full time.

8:05: put on educational show for kids, baby secure in bouncy seat with the kids in the living room, jump in shower.

8:20: Make bed, pray.

8:30: change baby's diaper, put her down for a nap, take kids into kitchen for Bible study. This is probably my favorite time of the day. All four boys gathered coloring supplies and sat down while I opened up to today's readings in the Treasury of Daily Prayer. I am so thankful for the Treasury because just like in Divine Service we get a daily Psalm, Old Testament, and Gospel/Epistle reading (so unlike DS we only get one, either Gospel or Epistle). Then there is a church Father Writing and we also know if there is a specific commemoration that day with an explanation of who the person was or what the commemoration is about.

Devotion time is one I have really struggled with. I grew up in the Baptist belt where one's "personal relationship" with Jesus was emphasized over and over and over. "Devotions" were all about "listening" to Jesus, trying to hear some personal message for you through His Word, some whispering in the wind meant just for you that day. It was all about feelings, emotions, metaphysical gobbledygook. I shake my head now that I ever felt so guilty and so pressured into thinking that was correct. I still fight that mentality today. For the longest time I have made my children sit with nothing to do during our entire 45 min of Bible study, questioning them repeatedly throughout to make sure they were PAYING ATTENTION. But lately I've realized that while there is nothing wrong with helping children learn to sit still, and training them for church on Sunday is good and well, perhaps there is no harm in letting them color and scribble quietly while we read...after all, if I truly believe God's Word does what it says, that it is Living and Active, sharper than any two edge sword, then is it really about them? No. It is not. So they colored. Between readings we pause and youngest to oldest they get to share what they heard, or nothing at all. Questions come up, I try to hold off interruptions until the end of the reading but sometimes we pause. Today the OT reading was David and Bathsheba. You can imagine the questions that brought up. I have never been so thankful to be home schooling where we can age appropriately discuss adultery. I love that there is nothing we won't discuss with our children, they are learning from the earliest age that communication is always open in our home and there is nothing to be ashamed of or embarrassed about even when we must discuss hard things.

After the readings we did our hymn study. We are working on "The Church's One Foundation" and "A Mighty Fortress". We go over when it was written, who wrote it, who composed the tune, etc and we sing each hymn in its entirety. Well, I do. Voices ebb and flow and I don't force it. They listen, hum, tap on the table, sing a line then fall silent. But my favorite thing is when I walk by them later in the day and while they are deep in play they are singing the hymn all on their own.

After hymn study we read our "Follow and Do" book for the week. This week we are working on the 10 commandments. Those Follow and Do books by CPH have made learning the catechism so simple and beautiful with their sweet illustrations but complete sections of the chief parts.

Finally we close in prayer by saying Luther's Morning prayer and sometimes extra petitions for other things. Lately the children have been praying that our church will open the Lord's Supper to them so that they might be strengthened too by Jesus' Body and Blood.

When devotions were over the children showed me what they had drawn during Bible study. My oldest showed me a drawing with landscape of a bald eagle. He made a point to show me that there were things in the background, middle ground, and foreground. He of course did not know these titles so we discussed them and I explained the purpose of each in a piece of art work. My second oldest, who is often very quiet about his faith and often very unexpressive and almost non interested (another time I am thankful to not be non-denominational or Baptist where my trust in his salvation would be in his own works, or lack thereof) quietly and almost embarrassed showed me what he had been drawing...page after page of beautifully designed churches. I smiled privately and whispered to him how beautiful his drawings were. The two year old proudly carried his OWN color book back to the cabinet and put his crayons away and the 4 year old asked me questions about the wolverine he had colored from his Alaskan Animals coloring book.

9:35: heat baby's bottle, get baby up, go into living room to feed baby and read stories to the kids. First we read "The Mitten" and "Goldilocks and the Three Bears". In keeping with yesterday, we spent these two books looking for the "ch" "th" "sh" and "wh" consonant digraphs. Each time we found one we would pause on the word, say the digraph together, then sound out the rest of the word. My 2 and 4 year olds are getting really good at spotting them before we even get to the word and then excitedly pointing them out. The 8 year old and 6 year old are a little tired of me pausing in the story to point out something they already know and yet they are very patient and get excited to see their brothers learning. When each story ended each child got to dictate back to me some of what they heard, ask questions, and answer questions I thought of.

10: baby is done drinking bottle, burp her, change her, put her on play mat while kids grab snacks. The snack choice for today was handfuls of pretzels. The giant tub we got from Costco was limited edition pretzels shaped like footballs, football helmets, and football fields. The kids were very excited about these shapes and I explained to them that they are only "limited edition". We discussed what this meant, why it was smart advertising wise, and what limited edition shapes might be next (Halloween? Christmas?).  We sat back down on the couch with baby playing next to us and read "Mouse Tales". We talked about the homophones "tail" verses "tale", how they are each spelled and what their different meanings are. Then we read the stories in the book. We also ended up discussing what a "tall tale" is due to the  nature of the stories in the book.

10:40: kids ran to play.

10:40-11:30: My oldest folded a load of laundry for me while the two middles took our dog out for some exercise in the backyard. I vacuumed and mopped the kitchen floor, checked my yogurt that I started yesterday, wiped the counters down and the table, and laid the baby back down for a short snooze because she was rubbing her eyes.

11:30-12: played outside with the boys. My oldest began asking questions about our read-aloud "The Secret Garden" from yesterday. We checked our garden, looked at the progress of our apples on our apple tree, watched some airplanes fly over, and the boys showed me some traps they were working on building.

12: lunch prep, lunch, lunch clean up. The boys all help, they all clear their spots, and they all take turns getting drinks, getting plates, getting out dips, etc.

12:35: get baby up, feed her second bottle, change diaper, fold a load of laundry with her playing next to me and the boys playing around her and talking to her.

1pm: put 2 year old down for a nap, a friend of the kids' comes over to play.

1-3: kids play hard outside. Baby plays then goes down for a nap at 2. I fold laundry, straighten house, check email, and begin dinner preparations.

3: get baby up, feed, change diaper and get her ready for pick up. Baby and kids' friend leave at 3:30.

3:30-4:30: give kids snack, sit down on couch for our read-aloud. 2 year old wakes up, I take him potty and he joins us for read-aloud. We read two chapters of "The Secret Garden" and discuss any new words. The kids guess the definition of the word based on it's context, sometimes we look up words in the dictionary and try to come up with new sentences for the word, and when we are done each kid, youngest to oldest gets to dictate back what they heard. Again I ask questions to prompt them or keep them moving.

4:30 kids go play with toys upstairs while I change into a fresh shirt (too much baby spit up) and finish dinner prep.

5:30: welcome Daddy.

This is what our day looked like today. Tomorrow it will look completely different. Some days we do math pages and play with math manipulatives. Right now each kid has their own math book, either Singapore or Rod and Staff. We do it when we feel like it, and I try to make sure that is at least 2-3 times a week. But more and more I feel comfortable teaching through life. I don't need a curriculum to point out all the words that start with "th", "wh", "ch", or "sh" in a book. And starting this young gets kids really focusing on words while we read...it teaches them HOW to read without some hyper time consuming "curriculum". But even more important, it teaches them HOW to LEARN. By observation. By asking questions. By talking to others. By looking in a book.

It has taken me a long time to get this comfortable with real life learning. I still freak out on a very regular basis wanting charts, control, "100 easy ways to homeschool a child into a perfect child".

But here's the thing: when I feel like that I want to ask myself, "You crazy girl, what are you thinking imagining that teaching your children in a way that revolves around real life (family, meals, service) will actually prepare them for REAL LIFE?!" Oh, wait...it will. :) And the other day, when one of the boys came running inside with a question about the sun as he observed it in his play out doors, we grabbed a nearby ball off the floor, tilted it, and spun it around while I held it up over my head by our chandelier that is over our kitchen table. In about 10 minutes the kids all understood orbit, why a day is 24 hours and one full revolution of the earth, why a year is 365 days and one full orbit around the sun, etc. No text book, no graph or diagram, just a ball, a light, and kids running back outside to look up into the sky.

Our life is not organized, it is not super structured, it is messy and chaotic sometimes, and every day at day's end I look back and see opportunities I missed to teach them that one more thing or to have structured that one other moment better... but every day we have breakfast, Bible time, lunch, dinner, and Daddy (and another Bible/prayer time led by Daddy in the evening) and every day my kids have more questions, more energy, and we keep on rich in our vocations of mother, father, husband, wife, brother, son, neighbor, and friend. We live to serve and love. And tomorrow is another day to be rich in our vocations.

Planning

I loved school when I was a kid. Nothing excited me more than that back-to-school shopping list and filling my new back pack with all the perfect supplies in all their brand new perfection. I loved perfect college-ruled notebook paper with it's perfect red and blue lines and spiral bound notebooks without a single thing written in them yet. Perfection.

Sigh, then I had to write my name on it. I have awful handwriting. Every one of my teachers cheerfully told me I would make a fantastic Dr one day because of my illegible handwriting. I tried, the Lord knows I tried, but alas, I inherited my father's handwriting instead of my mother's.

So, I don't know if it's the time of year that draws up in me a desire to plan and organize and categorize or if it's the fact that I had an energy burst today or both, but I began to have one of those days where I suddenly felt the need to micro manage the home.

I once bought a book that encouraged planning every 15 minutes of every family member's day for the entire day on a massive wall chart with sticky notes.


HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

ahem.

But the reality is, micro managing has two major downfalls.

1. It takes away the opportunity for initiative.

Example: A few days ago I was standing in the kitchen and my four year old wandered out into our huge half acre backyard. At first he just wandered around and then I saw him go back into the garage and emerge with the dog poo rake and scooper. I watched him spend about 30 minutes scanning the entire backyard and cleaning up every last pile of dog poop, which was considerable since it had been two days since we had cleaned up. You better believe I went out there when he was done and praised him for his initiative along with rewarding him. And I had to wonder...if that job had been assigned to someone for the day and if he had a list of jobs already assigned to him, would he have done that? Now I am certainly not against giving kids chores, but this gave me a whole new idea of how to manage chores in the home that I'll share later.

2. It forgets that the real moments of life are the interruptions. C.S. Lewis said it best:


“The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one's 'own,' or 'real' life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one's real life -- the life God is sending one day by day.”


― C.S. Lewis, The Collected Works of C.S. Lewis

So, my goals now are to focus on the real things and simply use organization as a tool to help only in the areas that really need help. AKA: IF IT'S NOT BROKE, DON'T FIX IT. 

It's so tempting to want to control and perfect, but it's never going to be perfect and, really, I think it's such  a joy stealer to see life's work as something that needs perfecting and controlling instead of viewing it as something that can constantly remind us of Christ. Example:

Laundry. (I can hear the collective groan right now throughout cyber space.) IT. NEVER. ENDS. EVER. This reminds me that all of creation tends towards the fall. But the redundancy of our work humbles us. In the drudgery, in the relentlessness, in the dirt, we may sigh, but we don't sigh as those that do not have a release. I need to put a crucifix over my washer and dryer so I can see in the drudgery my glorious release. Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again. 

So, as I sat at the table today so tempted to begin the micro managing that makes me feel more perfect and makes me feel like maybe, maybe this time I will be able to control this mess that is our sinful world and life, I looked at the crucifix over our kitchen table and lectured myself, "only fix what really needs fixing"..and even that is such meager attempts. And yet, I feel pretty proud of the managing that has worked out!

So the planning I did accomplish was for our school year. My 2 year old will begin learning his letters and numbers and already knows his colors. My 4 year old will begin "4K" at home and we are using Rod and Staff's ABCDEFG books. I'm also using "Beginning Reading at Home" which is an old, out-of-print set of 10 kits that introduces letters and words in a multi-sensory way. My 6 year old will be using the "Beginning Reading at Home" as well as our CLE readers and for math will be using Singapore math. And my 8 year old will be using Singapore math, finishing his CLE readers, Story of the World, Apologia Science, and Spelling Power. We are not doing any further work in Language Arts this year because next year we will be using Classical Writing's upper level books...the primers just seem too much a waste of time. I really want him to focus on lots and lots of free time reading to get him reading proficiently enough to tackle Classical Writing and Latin next fall. 

The way I play to get through all of this each day is as follows:

Every day we will do: 

Morning: Catechism/Bible/Hymn study with all, 15-20 min per child of math instruction.

Afternoon: 15 min per child of reading instruction

In addition:

Monday: Writing for 8 year old (whatever I assign, no curriculum). 

Tuesday: History for 8 yr old: Story of the World

Wednesday: Science for 8 yr old: Apologia

Thursday: Piano. He practices every day but Thursday he will practice double the time. 

Friday: Dad's day off. 

And that's it. We keep it as minimal as possible so that the rest of the day learning can flow from all the interesting things we do, see, and talk about. And, if at breakfast someone asks a question that flows into a rabbit trail of learning as often happens with curious little boys, well, so be it. 

My comfort, when we don't stick to curriculum, comes in a handy print-out for each child's grade from wordbook.com that gives a list subject by subject of each thing they should know by the end of the year. Whenever I begin to worry whether my kids are actually learning I begin to go down the list for each child and see how ahead they actually are. This also allows me to watch for gaps or areas I wouldn't think to cover. 

I've also been doing some further planning in the area of chores and housework and meals/cooking but I'll save that for another day. :)