... so can I.
Stopping this weekend to smell the flowers. Breathing deep.
Stop {deep breath} and Smell Those Flowers
If Midnight can do it...
... so can I.
Stopping this weekend to smell the flowers. Breathing deep.
... so can I.
Stopping this weekend to smell the flowers. Breathing deep.
Surfing the Sea of Sleep Deprivation
I'm sitting on my back steps as I write this today, enjoying a gentle breeze and a vibrant blue sky. The children are playing or finishing up their last whisps of school work for the week.
Our first freeze of the season zipped through last night then left us just as quickly as it came. November in central Texas is very mild indeed.
I am looking at green in my back yard and marvelling. Two months ago today the wildfire started, and since then we have had one day of rain. Blessedly it really was a whole day of rain, a steady soaking rain, from the middle of one night to the middle of the next .
I can't get over how much grass has grown from just this one day of rain. It seemed like so little in the face of an exceptional drought, but it was enough to make grass grow, and keep growing.
I am in a drought of sorts myself.
A dearth of sleep. Sleep deprivation is funny... you'd think with less sleep you would be able to get more done, what with all those extra waking hours. Instead I find myself staring at walls, forgetting what I am supposed to be doing, drawing a blank when I try to think of what to say or write.
My children are very patient with me. Little Warrior is especially good at keeping me on the meal schedule with his "I'm hungry" announcements. He's like my own personal meal-making alarm clock.
We do a lot of reading together on the couch, and lately our sessions there pretty regularly end with me snoozing for five minutes. The kids are getting used to it.
The Princess is a snuggler and she usually has a bony elbow ready to dig into my ribs when I start to slur the words as I drift off in the middle of a page. But when we are finished, one of them often grabs a blanket to tuck around me, or strokes my hair. Such tenderness.
Sleep deprivation can be amusing too... yesterday I accidentally invented three new words: "homeschoolering" and, uh, well, two more brilliant words that I can no longer remember. Ha! Too bad my genius is inhibited by memory loss.
Why sleep deprived? I suppose you could call it insomnia. I find I can't actually sleep longer than five hours many nights. I wake in the middle of the night and that is that.
I know, "He gives sleep to those He loves." It will come around. Things will even back out. For now I ride the waves of fatigue and try to make wise mouth choices... tired mamas can be grumpy mamas with short fuses.
And I look at our new grass and I am hopeful.
A soaking sleep. Perhaps that's all it will take for this crispy, dry brain to green up again.
{Saturday's note: It was with much amusement that I looked again at the title of this post and realized that I seem to feel I am simultaneously in a drought and surfing a sea. Mix metaphors much? Creaky ol' brain!}
A Homeschooling Fear: What if We Miss Something?
This school year our youngest is five, a big boy in kindergarten-at-home, and quite pleased with himself. No more preschool, now he has his own "school box" with his books and pencils.
The Brown Family Preschool, which has now closed its doors perhaps forever (wah!), had one governing rule: pay attention to the student! If he wanted to learn to read, we read. If he wanted to "do math" we did something with numbers. There were no requirements, no lists, no workbooks that had to be finished. You might say we unschool for preschool.
I am admittedly not a fan of early education in the sit-in-your-seat-and-write-stuff way. Being forced to sit still seems so counter to the design of a preschooler. If you have to use all of your resources to stay seated, what's left for learning new things?
I am however a huge advocate of child-led education in the formative years. If they expressed an interest I jumped on it.
This approach has worked well for us. Our daughter was reading fluently on her own at four. Our oldest was not really that interested in reading, and didn't read well independently until he was seven. At age twelve he read The Odyssey and Aeneid. Unabridged.
When they are ready, they are ready.
When I talk to new homeschoolers the number one anxious cry I hear is
If this is your cry too, then let me set your mind at rest. You will miss something. Just like the public school down the road from you will, and the fancy private school in the nice part of town will.
And I'm not just talking about you missing the opportunity for your child to be terrorized by a bully, or them missing the sweetness of snuggling on the couch reading (though these losses are pretty likely too).
From a purely academic standpoint, in every environment, something will be missed. It's impossible to avoid. There just isn't enough time. I mean, you read Plato and you run out of time for Dante. It can happen! ;-) Seriously though, in God's amazing world we will never, never run out of things to learn. You will miss teaching your students something.
This is true no matter how old they are, but before kindergarten, it just seems downright silly to worry about missing something academically. So take a deep breath and let them play!
Here's the thing... God designed little brains to learn. To learn like crazy! The amount a child learns from birth to five boggles the mind. Just take language acquisition alone. No two year old goes to school to become proficient in their native language. They simply learn because that is what they were created to do.
Young children have no stigma associated with learning. They are excited about their world and they absorb new information and experiences like sponges. Surround them with books and an engaging life, with a healthy dose of outside time, and you may just end up with a child eager to sit down and figure out how to spell words all on his own...
The Brown Family Preschool, which has now closed its doors perhaps forever (wah!), had one governing rule: pay attention to the student! If he wanted to learn to read, we read. If he wanted to "do math" we did something with numbers. There were no requirements, no lists, no workbooks that had to be finished. You might say we unschool for preschool.
I am admittedly not a fan of early education in the sit-in-your-seat-and-write-stuff way. Being forced to sit still seems so counter to the design of a preschooler. If you have to use all of your resources to stay seated, what's left for learning new things?
I am however a huge advocate of child-led education in the formative years. If they expressed an interest I jumped on it.
This approach has worked well for us. Our daughter was reading fluently on her own at four. Our oldest was not really that interested in reading, and didn't read well independently until he was seven. At age twelve he read The Odyssey and Aeneid. Unabridged.
When they are ready, they are ready.
When I talk to new homeschoolers the number one anxious cry I hear is
What if we miss something?!
If this is your cry too, then let me set your mind at rest. You will miss something. Just like the public school down the road from you will, and the fancy private school in the nice part of town will.
And I'm not just talking about you missing the opportunity for your child to be terrorized by a bully, or them missing the sweetness of snuggling on the couch reading (though these losses are pretty likely too).
From a purely academic standpoint, in every environment, something will be missed. It's impossible to avoid. There just isn't enough time. I mean, you read Plato and you run out of time for Dante. It can happen! ;-) Seriously though, in God's amazing world we will never, never run out of things to learn. You will miss teaching your students something.
This is true no matter how old they are, but before kindergarten, it just seems downright silly to worry about missing something academically. So take a deep breath and let them play!
Here's the thing... God designed little brains to learn. To learn like crazy! The amount a child learns from birth to five boggles the mind. Just take language acquisition alone. No two year old goes to school to become proficient in their native language. They simply learn because that is what they were created to do.
Young children have no stigma associated with learning. They are excited about their world and they absorb new information and experiences like sponges. Surround them with books and an engaging life, with a healthy dose of outside time, and you may just end up with a child eager to sit down and figure out how to spell words all on his own...
 |
| Do you think he drew a violin or a viola? :-) |
On Being Relevant
photo by Beth Kanter
It has been a year since I first heard about the Relevant conference. It was one of those events that you read about and your heart leaps, the kind of thing that just feels like a fit. I wanted to go. These were my kind of people. I waited eagerly for the information to be released on the 2011 dates, thinking perhaps by then my writing endeavors would be such that I could justify the expense of traveling from Texas to Pennsylvania.
My heart leap turned to a heart thud when the dates came out. The first day was our daughter's tenth birthday. After a moment of disappointment I let go and lived on. I really didn't think much about it after that. I understood it was not for me. Sometimes God makes things simple.
One day in September, a week or so after the fire, I was driving around town, doing errands and answering my children's questions about the changes in our community. In the midst of talking about the fire relief efforts, the word relevant came into my mind.
I thought of the conference, and the blogging friends who I knew were going, and almost immediately those faces were replaced by the faces of friends here who have lost so much. Again confirmation.
Relevant.
The word echoed in my brain.
Relevant means "pertaining to the matter at hand." And I ask myself, what is the matter at hand in my life?
I love this, love that God knew long ago that where I was going to be relevant in late October 2011 was at home with my birthday girl.
At home where I could still go to our Homeschool Distribution Center. Where I could talk with friends who are fire survivors and continue to find ways to replace the books they lost, and just listen.
At home to pray with my husband as he makes important decisions.
At home to see my youngest ride a bike without training wheels for the first time....
... and be on the receiving end of this victory hug....
Being relevant means being present to the need for now. It means paying attention to where I am.
And living in the right-now means I don't make rules about the future. Maybe some day I will go to a blogging conference. Maybe not. If I am going to live a relevant life, I have to be open to what is most needful at that moment, when it comes.
Alas, I am not only not able to see into the future, but also am woefully inept at making decisions for right now, so I really only one have one option: to seek God constantly. To dwell in His presence.
Only by living in His will can I ever be truly relevant.
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