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Nov. 24, 2009 - Life Lessons from Children's Books

     Reading aloud to my kids  is one of the joys  I have from homeschooling them.  I love  reading to my kids  and  exposing them to wonderful words and thoughts.  Read alouds  are the anchor  to our day.  If we miss reading,  then our day  sits  a bit lopsided.

     It has amused me, of late,  to recognize  that these  read alouds  have not only  entertained my children  but they have given me  much food for thought  for my own life.  Who knew  that The Little House books  could teach you how  to live your life  in a way  that inspires joy?

     We have recently finiished  These Happy Golden Years by Laura Ingalls Wilder.  This is the book where Almanzo  courts  Laura.  I have learned  a few things from reading this book.  Laura  is 16 yrs. old  and is old enough  to teach school now.  Her first  school  is 12 miles away from home.  In those days  that is quite a distance  so she needed to stay  with  another family during the week.  She stayed at the Brewster's  home.  This family was quite an eye-opener  for Laura, who was used to a quiet, happy and joyful family life.   Mrs.  Brewster  was the  complete opposite of Ma Ingalls.  I found this  very interesting.  Ma did not like  going off to parts unknown.  I don't think she really wanted to leave her family, initially,  but she agreed to it  because her husband had a yearning desire  to see what was further west.  Every time  her husband  decided to root up their family and move farther west,  Ma  quietly agreed.  She may have voiced her opinion  but she went along with her husband.  She did this  with  a happy  and quiet spirit.  She did not  conitnually  rail at Pa  that  she did not like  the uprooting.    Many people  would see Ma  as a doormat.  I don't.  I see her as a woman of strength.  She  was able to trust that her husband  knew what was best for her  and her family.  She trusted.  What is even more important,  she was able to extend that trust  into  joy  and happiness.  Quite simply,  Ma made the best out of a bad situation.  Wherever she was,  Ma made a home environment  that was full of peace and quiet.  But  Ma did have her limits.   In These Happy Golden Years,  Pa starts to get itchy feet to get travelling again and Ma very quietly but  strongly  says  that she will not move anymore.  Due to her  lack of nagging spirit,  Pa knows  tjhat Ma  means business so he drops the subject.   Ma's quietness  speaks volumes for her.  There is much strength  in her quietness.

       As I said before,  Mrs.  Brewster is the complete opposite.  She does share her dislike for moving with  Ma, but there the similarity ends.  Mrs.  Brewster  is what I call a fishwife.  She is a nagging,  bitter hearted  woman.   She hates  her life  and she is bound and determined  to make everyone hate their's  as well.   She is a sullen, angry woman  that takes every opportunity  to rail against her husband  and the mistakes he has made in brringing them to that God-forsaken land.  Her  bitterness travels on to her child, who is always  crying and screaming.  Mrs  Brewster's  husband  stays away in the barn  as much as he can  to get away  from  her berating  nature.  Mrs  Brewster has created an unhappy  family life  and it all stemmed from her.   Mrs Brewster  didn't have the inner strength  to turn things around for her.  She didn't try  to make her life better.  It was easier  to just  rant and rave.   I felt very sad  for her.  So did my kids.   Even  Mia could recognize  that  Mrs  Brewster's  husband  wanted to be anywhere else  but with her.

      I thought this portrayal of both Ma and Mrs.  Brewster  was  a powerful example of how we should handle  misfortune  and life bumps.   Life does not always   happen in the way that we would like  but  it is in how we handle those bumps  that is telling of our  character.  In dealing with them  in a Ma Ingalls  way,  those life bumps  don't seem as bad  and they have a tendency to work themselves out.  But when we handle life  from a Mrs. Brewster  point of view,  problems  and crisis'  multiply  and everyone becomes miserable.    This was a good lesson for my kids.  We had a few discussions  at Mrs.  Brewster's expense. 

      Another lesson we learned  was from  The Wizard of Oz.   We are reading that book now.  Yesterday,  we got to the part where the Tinman  and the Scarecrow were deciding what would be more valuable to have:  a heart or a brain.   I asked my kids what they would rather have.   I thought for sure that they would say  a brain  as we have had  conversations, of late,  as to how well a good brain  can serve us.   All of my kids said that they would rather have a heart, over a brain.   In Missy's  words, "You need a heart  to love others.  If you doh't have that, then you have nothing."   I thought that was pretty good for a 6 yr. old. 

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Nov. 22, 2009 - Quote on families and their importance

"Christian
homes and churches are the only institutions in which our children will learn to find themselves in God's story. When they are united more by the trends of pop culture than by the faith and practice of the whole church in all times and places, our youth become victims of our sloth. We should not be surprised that over half of those reared in evangelical homes and churches today do not join or even attend a church regularly when they go off to college. If we are going to see our children grow up into Christ instead of abandoning the church, our
spiritual life at home and in the church must incorporate them into the teaching and fellowship of the apostolic faith. They can find "ministry opportunities" through United Way, the Peace Corps, or Habitat for Humanity. They can find friends at the fraternity or sorority. They can find intellectual stimulation in class. And they can find a sense of meaning and purpose in their vocations. If their home churches exchanged the ministry of preaching and teaching the apostles' doctrine for a variety of ministries and activities that they could find legitimate versions of in the world, then it is difficult to come up with a reasonable answer when they ask, "Why do I need the church?"


--Michael Horton, The Gospel-Driven Life: Being Good News People in a Bad News World

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Nov. 21, 2009 - Awesome giveaway!

5 Minutes for Mom is giving away an INCREDIBLE HP TouchSmart 600 computer for Christmas!  Check it out here!

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Nov. 21, 2009 - Change # 1

     I have always  been a girl who likes structure.  I like  knowing  what is going to happen and when it will be happening.   I have previously been of the thought  that I was a flexible  person.  I mean,  my goodness,  I used to be a pre-school teacher,  you need to be flexible  in that line of work.   Something happened, though,  from that life  to the life  that I am inhabiting now.  I think maybe  it is  old age  or,  gasp!  peri-menopausal related.   Whatever the reason,  I do not like going with the flow  anymore.  I am just not good with it.   Surprises  are not my best friend.

     This love of structure  carries over into our learning time.   Now,  when I say structure  I do not  mean every subject has its own handy-dandy  time slot  (I am not that far into OCD land,  not yet anyway.)   My version of structure  comes in the form  of rhythm.  Our  learning time has a flow to it minus the timetable.  Our days start with  Morning Time,  math, reading  and writing,  lunch,  a big break then more learning time.   This was our day  BC  (Before Cancer.)

     Since our little life bump,  I am not finding  comfort  in structure.   Structure is no longer my friend.  Structure  is stifling to me now.  Structure has become  synonomous  with suffocation.   I don't want structure anymore.   I want freedom.   I think that just might be my word  for 2010:   freedom.

     I want the freedom  to start my day off with doing yoga  without those niggling little voices  whispering that this is really the time  for Morning Time, not Mommy Time.   I want the freedom  to be able  to play a game with my kids in the middle of the morning  without  those blasted voices  reminding me that we should be really doing  reading right  now,  not playing around.    

     I have been thinking about this for awhile.  Two weeks ago when I was told that the drama was all over,  I mistakenly  thought  "Yay,  we can go back to the way  life used to be."   That week we went back to our structured days  of learning  and I thought  my head was going to explode.  It all seemed so foreign to me.  By the time  lunch time arrived,  my head was pounding  and I was knee-deep in frustration.  

     i attempted to  do this again the following week  but I bailed after the second day.  I knew  that I could not do school like this  anymore,  well,  not for awhile anyway.   I spent the rest of that week  figuring out  how I was going to manage this.  I mean,  the kids had to learn.  I was definitely not going to send them to public school,  so I needed to come with a plan  on how  to loosen up our days.

     I think  we may have figured it out.   I told the kids  that  each day  they can decide when they want to do school.  If they want to do it in the morning,  then we will do it then.  If something pressing  pops up in the morning, then we can have our learning time  in the afternoon.   We can even do it in the evening if that would float their boat.  Our new  motto  is that learning has to be done every day  ( that will never change)  but  when they do that learning,  that  is up to them.

     Now,  we are fresh into this new motto  but, so far,  it is working out very well.   It has finally dawned on me that we are not morning people.   I have tried so hard to be a morning person  but it just isn't flying.  The kids  do not do well in the morning either.  They need some time  to ease into their day.  So the last few days  have seen them  starting  out with playing  (both inside and outside)  and then  we  spend a bit of time  with our Morning Time.   Mia has been starting  math  just before lunch and then the learning has been continuing after lunch.   

     The neat thing  about this  is that  our days  will not always  look like that.  Everyday  will be different.  Every day  will be fresh!  new!  alive!   I will never know  what to expect  from one day to the next.   You would think  after our rollercoaster ride of the past four months,  that  this kind of life  would scare the liver out of  me.  Quite the opposite.  I find it very refreshing.   I am looking forward  to this coming week  and to all of the surprises  that await us.   I am looking forward  to  next  week's  freedom. 

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Nov. 20, 2009 - Praying in Colour

     I was talking to a friend on the weekend  about  how my life  now seemed like an emotional rollercoaster ride.   She  suggested  that I start 'drawing my prayers."   She said that she had begun to do this  and it  had added depth to her prayer life.

     This concept  comes from a  book,  Praying in Colour.   I looked at the website and was immediately intrigued.  Drawing your prayers  just makes them more visual and is a creative way  to pray for those that are important to me.In the simplest form.  This could just be doodling  or,  for those who are creatively hinged, they could be masterpieces.

     You can use this concept  to pray for one person  and include all of your concerns  on that one drawing,  or you can  bring all of your prayer needs  to that one creation.  It can also be used in helping you to memorize Scripture,  as a visual aid.

     As always,  I am drawn  to the  'next new thing.'   I know,  I am fickle.   But  this idea  intrigues my creative side.  Right now,  that side of me  is aching to break out and I think  praying in colour might help, at least for now.

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Nov. 19, 2009 - Relaxed

     I have been thinking during the last few weeks about  how I want  our schooling day to turn out.  I know,  this is nothing new.   I have gone through this thinking process  a few times (understatement)  in the last few years.   My problem is that I know  how I want things to go  but  the voices in my head (or other people's  voices)  make me  go back to our original way of schooling.  The simple and plain truth  is that I am not happy with how we have been doing school for  quite awhile now.   I will explain how  I want things to change at a future date.  For now,  I just want to tell you about our day yesterday.  We had a great day  and it went smoothly  without me having an overwhelming urge to pull out my hair.  

     For starters,  I let the kids sleep in yesterday.  They were all up  by 8:30  and watched  a video (we just got them from the library) while eating their  breakfast.   After the video, we read  Hamlet,  A Christmas Carol  and These Happy Golden Years (Wilder book.)  Then the kids decided that they would like to watch another video.  Crazy woman that I am,  I let them.  By this time  it was 11:30.  Mia and Rocky did their math lesson then we had lunch.

     After lunch,  we did some fraction things with Rocky  then the two older ones  did their reading and spelling.   We read The Sword and the Circle.  Afterwards,  we looked at a Janice VanCleave experiment book  that I had found at the library.   Mia decided that she would like to do some chemistry experiments.  I went  down into the deep abyss (aka the basement) to get all of our chemistry books ( I just can't let the experiments stand on their own,  we have to have spines  as a jumping off point.  It's  just ingrained in me.)  We looked at a few pages of the books then we did three experiments.  The kids  then  wrote out one of their experiments  a la WTM. 

     That's it!   That was our day!  It was so relaxing  and  calm.   This is how  I want our days to be all of the time.  Now,  we didn't get to grammar or  writing.  We have to work on that.  Anyways,  I thought I would just share  what  a great  Prairie school day  looks like,  at least, imo. 

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Nov. 17, 2009 - At A Crossroads

     Last week was a rough week for me.  I would have to say  that last week was the worst week that I have had  since the whole cancer thing  began.   It was rough  because I couldn't understand  why I was feeling the way that I was.  I couldn't  understand  why I was crying  all of the time.   My cancer was gone.  I came away from it relatively unscathed.  I should be delieriously happy.  Why, oh why,  then, was last week  a week of endless tears.  

      In addition to the tears,  I felt  at odds over everything.  I knew that I was at a crossroads in my life.  The cancer  has changed me.  How could it not?   I have been changed on many levels--physical,  emotional and spritual.   I knew  that I had a choice:  i could either  ignore the changes and go on with life the way that it used to be  or I could take the steps  toward  changing things  in my life.  

      If I ignore these changes,  then  the cancer was all for naught.   There was no purpose  for  these last four months.   It would all have been a waste.

      If  I go down the valley of change,  I have no idea  what those changes  will look like.  I know  that I have changed,  but I don't know how that will all look in my life.  I don't know what to do first.  I am at a loss  and that scares me.   I don't want the last months to be for nothing.  I want my experience  to mean something,  not just for me but for those around me  but I don't know what all of that means.   Hence, the tears and  pleading prayers of last week.

      I was feeling pretty desparate  last Friday.  I felt all alone.   God, in His extreme Grace,  sent friends  to show me the way out.   Three friends called me that day  and the  clouds  started to lift.  I began to make sense  out of  my craziness.   The next day,  I talked to a friend that I hadn't  talked to in  2 years.  Another friend came out to the farm  to visit.  These talks  were like being covered in a warm blanket  on a dreary cold day.   God  gave me a pillow Sat. night  to rest my weary head  by  having another friend  call me that night.  This friend  had gone through cancer  last year.   Talking to her  soothed my soul.

      It seems that what I went through last week is normal.   Who knew?   I'm not insane after all!   The more my friend  talked about her cancer,  the more  I relaxed and could feel myself getting  stronger.  All of my  tears  and sense of unknowing  is part of the cancer experience.  I am learning  that regardless of how major or minor  your cancer is,  you are obligated to go through  all of the experiences.  It seems to be mandatory.   

      This past week  was just another process of grieving.   I still don't know  how this is all going to play out in my life.  I don't know in what form  these changes  are going to take,  but I do know  that I do not want  these last four months  to be for naught.   I want them to mean something.  I want, need,  for there to be changes  in my life.   I still have that scared feeling  but now the excitement is starting to edge it out.  I am looking forward to see what God  has in store for me.  

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Nov. 16, 2009 - Book #48 -- Catching the Fire

     I read the first book ( Hunger Games ) in this trilogy  in September.  I went into that book thinking that I would not like it as it was set in the future  and I just don't like those kind of books.   I was pleasantly surprised by how much I actually liked it.   That  book caused me to think about it  for days after I turned the last page.  

     Now the second book in the series is out.  Catching the Fire  by Suzanne Collins  was just as good as the first one.  In this book,  there is an uprising  of the people against  the Gov't.  This uprising is all because of Katniss  and her ways of rebellion  that were shown during  the Hunger Games.  Before  the uprising  turns into a full blown revolution,  Katniss needs to be taken care of,  controlled.  

     I feel little let down, though.  When I finished  Hunger  Games,  I knew that  the next book was already out  so I wouldn't have long to wait to read it.   But  who knows  when the third book will be published  ( 1 or 2 years?)   That is a long time to wait.   A very long time. 

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Nov. 9, 2009 - Dickens-isms

     Mia and I are reading  A Christmas Carol  by Charles Dickens this month.   I stumbled upon this site yesterday  and decided  that I would use some  of Dickens'  quotes  in starting a commonplace book for Mia.    I think I have talked about this type of book before.   It is a book solely for quotes,  songs,  poems,  or Scripture verses  that  speak to you.   Some people use a Commonplace book for figures of Rhetoric,  others use it for  examples of  the virtues  or the Great Ideas.   For now,  I just want Mia to use this book to put in quotes  that speak truth,  beauty and goodness. She will use these verses for copywork  and use her best writing.  I  haven't decided if I will have her do it incursive (she is still a bit shaky with this)  or printing.  I am hoping that if I get her started well,  she will be able to do this on her own  without any prompting from her mom.

     Anyway,  I want to use the Commonplace Book for  some  quotes from Dickens.  There are many  to choose from so we might do a few a week  until we are done  his book of Scrooge.  Here are some  interesting ones  that I copied.

A wonderful fact to reflect upon that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.

An idea, like a ghost, must be spoken to a little bit before it will explain itself.

A day wasted on others  is not wasted on one's  self.

I never could have done what I have done without the habits of punctuality, order and diligence, wihtout the determination to concentrate myself on one subject at a time.

In the little world in which children have their existence, whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt as injustice.

Life is made of ever so many partings melded together.

Whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried I have tried with all my heart to do it well;  whatever I have devoted myself to,  I have devoted myself completely;  in great aims and in small I have always thoroughly been in earnest.

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Nov. 8, 2009 - Book #47 -- Tell Me Pretty Maiden

       I think I have found an author  who is fast becoming  a favourite.  Rhys Bouwen  is author of many books.  These books belong to  three different series.   I have read books from two of her series  (Her Royal Spyness  and  Molly Murphy)  and have enjoyed them all.   I keep picking up Bouwen's books at the library,  meaning that I stumble upon them,  I don't order them.   I always feel like  I have just met up with an old friend when I come upon one of her books on the shelves.

      The most recent book that I have read of Bouwen's  is  from  the Molly Murphy  series'  Tell Me Pretty Maiden.  It is set in the 1900's.  The main character is a female detective  with wildly boisterous  friends  that always help her  to solve her cases.   This book, as with all of Bouwen's  books,  is chock full of action  and is all tied up in a neat bow at the end.   These books are definitely full mysteries  but, oh!  they are delightful fluff

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