Written here from the perspective of a homeschooling mom of many with a good memory of the early years of parenting.
Her emphasis is on training early. I appreciated her focused approach, gently and realistically sticking with the basics of loving and modeling.
All that is important to us– truly important to us– will be shown in what we do, and this is wise to remember as we “just live our lives” for the audience of our children.
Love is no assignment for cowards.
Ovid
*Being married is like having somebody permanently in your corner.
It feels limitless, not limited.*
Gloria Steinem, upon marrying for the first time at age 66
There is no greater happiness for a man than approaching a door at the end of a day knowing someone on the other side of that door is waiting for the sound of his footsteps.
Ronald Reagan
To keep your marriage brimming,
with love in the wedding cup,
whenever you’re wrong, admit it;
whenever you’re right, shut up.
Ogden Nash
*Find the good — and praise it.*
Alex Haley
Let the wife make her husband glad to come home, and let him make her sorry to see him leave.
Martin Luther
Spoil your spouse…..not your children.
Unknown
You don’t marry one person; you marry three:
the person you think they are,
the person they are,
and the person they are going to become
as a result of being married to you.
Richard Needham
*Anyone can be passionate, but it takes real lovers to be silly.*
Rose Franken
Married love is like a garden—there’s no shame in saying it takes work to maintain; that’s what distinguishes it from the wilderness.
My own (as far as I remember.)
*A good marriage is a contest of generosity.*
Diane Sawyer
Being in a long marriage is a little bit like that nice cup of coffee every morning – I might have it every day, but I still enjoy it.
Stephen Gaines, documentary filmmaker
There are a hundred paths through the world that are easier than loving. But who wants easier?
Mary Oliver
*My Favorites* :)
In addition to the scriptural directive, if anybody important to you ends up there, it will be easier to visit him/her if you’ve been before with someone who knows his way around.
And I more-than-half believe it’s true.
January 5th I’ll be giving my first story “concert” in, I think two years. It’s half an hour, so I don’t honestly know if that’ll count as a concert, but it is at least a collection: four tales set in a framing story (Glimmers in the Darkness, from this new page I just put together).
Everything I’ve done in-between has generally been a single story here or there.
Do check out the new page and tell me what you think. I was very excited to see how many stories I have.
Several of these you may recognize from Tuesday Tales (I didn’t link all that I could). What do you think of the one-liner explanations? Do they “give away” too much or over-simplify in a distracting way? Do they make you more interested in the story?
~
And just because we all know this blog isn’t eclectic enough, I’m planning a little two- or three- post series on my experience living in, then parenting in, a fostering family.
In the meantime, if you want a more experienced voice, I’d like to point you toward Mommy Monsters Inc., the blog of a foster-adopting mom.
I especially appreciate her latest post, Adoptive Family Planning: A Wise Choice. Very thorough and thoughtfully written.
Blessings on your day!
Yes, we call this cold, even in Alaska.
My public service announcement (for families living with cold winters and pre-schoolers) via WFMW:
As part of your cold-weather emergency gear in the back of your car, include a sled big enough to haul all of your littles. This will help save your neck (back, fingers, toes…) if your car breaks down.
I don’t know about any of your pre-schoolers, but one of mine is a molasses child: she moves slower in the cold– complaining of her agony and how much she wants *out* of the cold.
There’s a sled in the back of my car because if we ever were stuck in temperatures like these, her pace would be a literal safety hazard, since there’s no moving faster than the slowest member (and I can’t carry two kids very far).
~
And, for people whose minds move to fun faster than mine, you’ve already realized keeping a sled in the back means you can stop and go sledding whenever you find a good hill. And that’s worth a lot too :)
I was thinking this weekend about how passionately I’ve heard some bloggers (and especially their commenters) discuss children and birth control. Generally polite, these people– myself included— still feel strongly enough about the topic that we’re not afraid to risk offending someone.
But when was the last time I stuck my neck out, risking offending someone, in order to talk about Truth, or speak Hope? Introducing the name of Jesus and his power over sin?
The fact we can even have these discussions (I am thinking specifically of birth control here) is evidence that our conversation is being spent with other Christians. Where are the unbelievers? Where is our risk-taking with them?
Wouldn’t you know, God planted this idea the day a family member would call and challenge me to take that risk at once.
I used to think that rejection of the Gospel– the power of Jesus to save us from everything wrong we’ve done– just came out of ignorance or blindness.
I was convinced that if someone could just grasp the magnitude of what Jesus did, how much God loves him or her, how much He is already involved in our daily life, I thought, surely s/he would welcome this worthy Savior with open arms.
But now that naiveté has been swept sadly away.
Because now I’ve seen, even knowing all this, clearly hearing and recognizing the call of God, one may still choose to reject it: living nakedly in one’s own righteousness; morbidly content in filthy rags.
It seems all that’s left to me is to pray he grows disgusted of them before he runs out of time, as he himself has agreed he is utterly without excuse.
So I got a painful chance to “offend” with the Gospel someone I can’t scare away. And I am still praying about finding the right words for the next opportunity God gives me.
In a sense my faith has been shaken, and that just proves my faith was in the wrong thing. I have too strongly relied on persuasion: words, stories; feeling the right one would *finally* make the difference, seal the deal.
But it’s not about me getting it right. It’s about God and that person. Only those two: the Holy Spirit drawing, and the human spirit responding. The human must want to believe.
And as helpless as that makes me feel, I still have the responsibility to speak out and take risks. I still need to be driven to my knees, believing that in God’s economy faithfulness will somehow make a difference.
God grant me the courage to take up this quest.
As Karen Edmisten did, I wish to respond to this woman’s 40 Reasons not to have Children with an equal number of reasons to have children.
I appreciated that Karen chose hers to respond to the original 40 complaints. It freed me to simply examine myself and make this personal.
For any who protest that some of these are benefits rather than reasons (I can’t imagine I’ve the only personality that would make that quibble), I’ll point out that when enough benefits accrue they tend to become reasons, and the dividing line becomes a bit hazy. So here they all are.
I first saw this on Sarah’s blog, love meaningful lists (I’ve already done a couple– like those about about my husband and someday-dreams), and thought this was a beautiful opportunity for reflection and encouragement.
My 40 reasons to have children.
Not all chaos is created equal.
Take, for example, my current chaos.
Right now my chaos is one of abundance. We spent almost three hours shopping yesterday (and I am an efficient shopper– even with littles along) and replenished our supplies that have been lagging since the anticipation of our trip over Thanksgiving week.
First big shopping trip in about a month. And it was big.
I now have produce in the the house again. Scratch-meals on the mind and *options* for dinner!
I also have two young chickens to cut up and steaks I got a great deal on to learn how to cook. (Sorry, don’t mean to hijack the blog to domesticity for long.)
This chaos is exciting and stirs my energy and creativity.
The Chaos of three days ago– a chaos of scarcity– sapped my mind and made me tired, even though I knew what to do with myself (which is not always the case).
With a moratorium on movies until the girls lifted their own strike, little clean laundry, and little in the refrigerator (coming on the heels of three days without milk– a bizarre experience that threw us all off-balance), I felt as much *lack* as maybe a middle-class home can feel.
Which, admittedly, isn’t much, but was still hard for me to function under.
But contrasting today with that day is intriguing. That day I didn’t even have the energy to blog or play EQ2 with my husband (we just re-started, and usually play over his lunch-hour while the kids nap). Today I’m writing while I brace myself to dive in. My lovely family’s actually getting a three-course meal today.
At least, I think that’s what it’s called (not really my realm, so I’m not sure). The steaks (I’ll figure something out), cream-of-cauliflower soup, and biscuits. There will be some green stuff too, but since I don’t do anything with it, it hardly counts as a “course,” right?
And the kids were adorable when I picked up the on-sale cauliflower. “What’s that?” (distrustful) “What do you do with it?” I explained it by saying you can do anything with it you do with broccoli. One of the girls gushed, “You can make soup with it!”
So that’s where dinner came from.
At the book store last week Elisha met a little girl his size who was there with her father.
Both kids were dinging around (not-listening) and after a while I had to round up my three and take them to the bathroom for a diaper change (not going to leave anyone unsupervised, of course).
The dad (he seemed young to me) saw me herding them all and shook his head saying, “And I thought my hands were full!”
Smiling at the new thought I told him, “You’ll find that your hands grow.”
I am so proud of my husband.
This weekend, for the 3rd or 4th time, Jay went out to his cousin’s house and fixed her computer.
That machine’s got *issues.*
And as soon as he got there, K started some chocolate chip cookies to thank him for his work.
Well, Jay did his thing, got it all functioning properly again.
Had a brainstorm and *Tip here:* asked them to take a picture of the screen the next time the computer does something dorky. This way he won’t have to spend time trying to recreate the problem in order to fix it.
As he was ready to leave K gave him a gallon ziploc of cookies.
And I thought, How perfect. Here is a lovely example of, well, two things. First the willingness to help out family without regards to reward (I think Jay’s chocolate-chip cookies are better than anyone’s, so it’s not like he needs her cookies), and second, it was a way of seeing all time as equally valuable.
They both spent an equal amount of time (exactly this round) in their efforts to bless the other.
Frequently, because our modern system of payment measures one job as more desirable or more scarce than another, the time of those doing that job is treated as more valuable. (This is where/why I guess the time of SAHMs is valued so little).
But an hour of my life is not less than an hour of the President’s, and all time should be recognized for what it is.
Watching my husband help another SAHM, honoring her time as as valuable as his own, I was proud of him. I can’t say (not knowing) if this is an accurate application of the term, but this is one reason I heartily praise him as an honorable man.