It’s 3 a.m. and I am writing this quietly in our office while listening to my husband softly snoring in bed.  I spent the last three hours studying the word of the Lord… okay, I was watching mindless T.V.  I mean if we are going to be honest with each other – let’s just say this is as real as it gets.  Some nights I am a shining example of biblical motherhood and others… well, you caught me on one of them.

Last week, my family and I sat down to watch the T.V. movie called, “Volcano”, about a volcano erupting in Los Angeles.  Now, I actually laugh my way through that movie (being from southern CA) but when my daughter did not surface from her ocean of pillows for fifteen minutes… we decided to turn off the movie.  Concerns over volcanic activity in Montana were all we heard about for days.

So, being the ever clever, brilliant, full of great ideas, SUPER (catch my sarcasm?) homeschool mom, I decided that we were going to learn about volcanoes.  I got books from the library and found a recipe for volcano eruptions online.  The recipe actually works and “homemade Lava” or “Llama”, as my kids mistakenly called it, bubbled out of our clay covered glass bottle.   Go ahead and picture the “red hot llama sliding down the side of the volcano”, I know I did.

But, while prepping our “quaint” project, I learned something about myself.  Making a volcano with your kids is pretty cool and I am glad I did it.  But, spouting off like a volcano about how great it is that you are making a volcano with your kids is like spewing lava bombs everywhere you go.  Other great moms, who may be having an “at least my kids are fed and sort of clean” week, can get burned.  And I am VERY guilty of exploiting (or exploding) my success… at the hardware store, the grocery store, the summer program, um, right now??

While I may have great ideas occasionally… seriously, how often do those great ideas pan out?  Did I tell you about our… Sea Monkeys – dead.  Our weather station – it’s still in the box.  Gardening - I grow weeds.  Our ABC Scrapbook – we got to letter F.  All those books I bought at the homeschool convention… where are those, anyway – honey?

At the end of the week, it is not about how much time I devoted to scrapbooking meticulous pages of memories or whether I taught the kids the art of hieroglyphic origami… it is really about just spending time right now with my children.  

They do not always need the volcano projects in life.  Most of the time, my own kids just want me to be there with them – whether they hit a home run or get their fingers smashed by the ball while batting (the latter of which happened two nights ago).  Whether your volcano works or explodes all over your fine china… no one else, but the Lord, needs to know that you are loving your child in the way he or she needs.

And on that note... just how do you do hieroglyphic origami anyhow?