Wednesday, October 26, 2022

Gratitude Attitude

 One of the problems with having people around the house all the time is that you can get on each others' nerves because you never get a break from each other.  In the Bible, one third of the verses on why God gets angry are about ingratitude. We get angry at ingratitude, too, don't we? Having a family culture of gratitude can lift your whole family.

How do you that? The easy thing is to start by teaching your children to say "thank you". We are accustomed to telling our children, "Say, 'thank you!'" We need to start by saying "thank you" ourselves! Every habit we want to instill in our children starts with us. That means we have to be a good example. Saying "thank you" never gets old. Everyone appreciates it.

Another way to grow an attitude of gratitude in your family is to have "thank yous". As part of our family's prayer time we go around the room and give a public "thank you". It is a "thank you" to God. 

We also do "loves" which are when each person shares some loving thing that they have observed someone else doing. It is another kind of "thank you". 

You can come up with your own methods to train a gratitude attitude, but that one thing lifts everyone's spirits and helps them get used to appreciating one another and everything around them. 



Thursday, October 20, 2022

How Do I Keep My House Clean With All These People in the House!

 Yup. You go to visit your friend who has two children in school and works and has a cleaning service come in once a week and then you look at your house. Four kids, you homeschool and the only time the kids are out of the house, you are, too. How can you possibly have a clean house? 

I'm not that great of a cleaner. I'm a tidier. I can't think if there's a lot of clutter, but clean is a matter of taste for me. I dust once every two or three years. But as my mother told me when I had five kids under the age of seven, "You have little kids; people who stop by expect you to have a certain amount of toys and dirty socks lying around. But you want people to feel safe eating your food and using your bathroom." That was a gift from my mother: have a hygienic, not sterile, house. 

So, yes, my kitchen and bathroom get a going over pretty regularly, though I'm a little blase about mopping the floors; but what about the rest of the house?

First, let me tell you that I used to clean the rec room with a broom. I don't mean I swept it up, I picked it up. I would sweep all the toys into the center of the room and put them away from there. I know what a dirty house looks like, so please do not be intimidated by what I'm saying here.

Don Aslett, the cleaning guru of the 80s and 90s, said the best way to keep your house clean was not to let it get dirty in the first place. In light of that, your main entrance for the family should have three things:

1--Doormats indoors and out to allow four steps as you enter. That gets off most of the ordinary amount of dirt on the shoes and boots.

2--Have storage for shoes, coats, hats, and backpacks (if that is important for you) as close to the front door as possible. You want to keep them from getting dumped on the floor because that will make it harder to sweep or vacuum. In light of that--

3--Keep a broom/vacuum as close to the door as possible so you can clean it easily. 

Along those lines, keep your cleaning tools as close to the things they clean as possible. If you have carpet upstairs and downstairs, have two vacuums. You can alternate years on getting new vacuums so you don't have a big expense all at once. If you have a long ranch house, keep the broom or vacuum as central as you can. 

Each room should have a wastepaper basket with a plastic liner. It should be easy to throw away the trash! I use disposable grocery bags whenever I get them, and put three in the bottom of the basket for the future and use a fourth to line the basket. The liner is important. For one thing, it makes it less of a mess when there are pencil shavings or used gum in the basket. Secondly, an under-two-year-old child can participate in cleaning the house by pulling up the handles of the grocery bag and learning how to tie them in a knot, or just throwing them into a big trash bag you are following him around with.

Each wet place should have its own cleaning tools--a set for each bathroom and the kitchen. 

Choose cleaning products that limit the number of tools you need. Our pastor and his wife had started two Christian camps and knew how to clean and keep down the expenses. They cleaned everything with either bleach or vinegar. You may pick your own, but it will be easier to teach your children if you don't have to explain five different cleaning products to them. Another possibility is having one product for everyday cleaning and a stash of serious products for periodic cleaning, like getting the rust stains out of the toilet. If you are a duster, keep a cleaning cloth or Swiffer-ish thing tucked away in each room so it is easy to do the dusting.

Cleaning is something we just have to do. We don't have to like it, but our families need it done. Remember, they can help!


Wednesday, October 12, 2022

Decluttering--Everything!

 Last week, on the way to homeschool group, we were driving through the countryside and I saw my favorite picture in the world: a freshly mown field with the haybales still there waiting to be picked up. I don't much care for late summer. Everything gets messy--the weeds get bigger than the flowers, which have gotten all leggy and lost their blooms, you can't get through the vegetable garden, the crabgrass is growing over the walk. Harvest time--the autumn--everything gets cleaned up. The plants die back and the fields are shorn, their crops organized and tidy and there is abundance in the barn. 

It made me think of decluttering a house. We need to do that, don't we? Right now, we are dismantling our kitchen and I had to sort out the--oh, no!--junk drawer! It took longer than any other drawer as I divided everything in it among Put Away, Give Away, and Throw Away piles. I do the same thing whether I'm clearing out a bookshelf, a closet, a cupboard, or a drawer. Everything in your house has an emotional claim on your life, and most of us have enough demands on us; we don't need garbage claiming us, as well. So everything needs to have a home. On the other hand, just because it has a home, does not mean we need to keep it. Choose wisely! Once we have decluttered, we find we have more elbow room emotionally as well as physically. Abundance!

God declutters us, too. In the Old Testament, the Israelites would regularly add stuff to their worship of the Lord--idol worship, child sacrifice, and the rest. So God would send the mower through, decluttering their lives by showing them how useless those extra things were as their fields were barren or their crops and animals and children stolen by enemies, and they would turn back to the Lord, simplifying their lives, getting back to the fundamentals of worshiping the Lord. What did God give them after they had repented and turned back to Him? The crops grew, they could by their children back. Abundance!

When our lives get leggy and overgrown with extra stuff that isn't him, He does the same thing for us, pushing us to where we know we have to get back to just Him--less running to meetings and get-togethers, turning down the music and turning off the TV and the phone. What does He give us? An abundance of time and focus on Him and on our families.

Tuesday, September 27, 2022

Mom's Job

I recently got back from a thirty mile wilderness backpacking trip with four sons and I realized that the job of mom doesn't really change over time; it's the same job with different details. 

What is that job? Just two things: 1) Organize, and 2) Cheerlead! 

Mom is the organizer. She can't do everything--there's just too much to do. She shouldn't do everything, either, because those four year olds are going to grow up to be adults and need to be trained up to it. Mom needs to organize to make sure it happens; she doesn't have to do it all.

She is the cheerleader. Her kids need to believe that she believes they can do whatever it is she is asking them to do, and even more. Each one will need a different kind of cheerleading and even different kinds at different points in their lives. 

What did that look like when we were hiking on Isle Royale National Park? I was the organizer. Everyone had a load to carry for the sake of everyone else and I was the one who parceled out the loads. What happens when Mom doesn't organize? Everybody suffers! Listen to what happened to us:

We were on our second day out, only one day left. I had divided the food up in two bags, one of which I took down to the beach for us to cook over a campfire. The other was all rolled up tight in a bag and I had left it on the picnic table figuring it was too heavy and a camp fox couldn't smell the food through the bag. Boy, did I figure wrong.When we came back from the beach, we looked everywhere and it was nowhere to be found. The camp fox was stronger than I thought! That left three six foot-plus men, and five foot Noah and me with nothing to eat for our last day of hiking but one chocolate bar, a quarter of a bag of marshmallows, a bag of potato chips and a single summer sausage. They handled it well, but was I embarrassed!

The Cheerleader. Each one of these young men needed a different kind of cheerleader. Mick, who had hiked Isle Royale twice by the age of eighteen, was suddenly, at the age of twenty-nine, surprised to find that it wasn't as easy as it used to be. After the first day of nine miles, he was afraid he would need to turn back. However, it would just mean nine miles back through through the same terrain, would cut off only one third the distance, and the fact was, we couldn't split up. We had only one tent, and one stove. Wherever some of us went, all of us went. I pointed out to Mick that AJ and Jesse wanted to finish what they started (13 year old Noah would go wherever the adults led) and that this was a big undertaking and we should expect some pain; every great undertaking results in it. He went along with us and finished spectacularly. 

AJ, the sixteen year old, was our Beast of the Trail. He led, even taking an extra mile and a half detour before a ten mile day to get a rock from Rainbow Cove for his niece. He was just awesome and I acknowledged it.

Noah, at thirteen, was asked to do what few thirteen year olds are asked to do: hike an average of ten miles a day for three days with twenty pounds on his back. He needed to know that I was impressed with him and that I understood this was a tough thing to do and that it would transform him.

Jesse, my son-in-law, was a different case. He's the macho man, and doesn't take compliments or criticism very well. I got him to leave a few things out of his pack, but he still carried sixty pounds! He got terrible heel blisters on the last eleven mile day and his strides got shorter and shorter. He went from being hot on AJ's heels on day one to being way behind on day three. Except, I kept behind him. It was hard to walk as slowly as he did, but I knew he needed to not be the last person into camp. I wouldn't shame him by having the fifty-seven year old grandmother beat him into camp. 

So Moms, we organize our households, and encourage our children that they can make it to the finish line.That job never changes, it just looks different over the years.


Friday, July 15, 2022

It's a Whole New World!

 The Badgers are embarking on their twenty-eighth year of homeschooling. With ten kids, the look of our school has changed over time. We went from what was essentially a preschool to a one room schoolhouse and now we have a tutoring service with only two kids, thirteen and nine. We have had to adjust our systems along the way. We have gone from school around the kitchen table (it was the only way to keep track of everyone!) to school lounging around the family room. Our field trips have gone from visits to the petting zoo to trips to the salvage shop and three mile hikes/climbs.

Homeschool groups go through those transitions as well. Groups start because moms with kids the same age tend to hang around together. They have play dates when their kids are five, plan art classes when they are ten, and do biology labs together when they are fifteen. Then, they graduate and leave homeschooling behind them. The groups often follow this pattern, dying out as the highly involved parents graduate out.

For those of us with a wide age range in our children, we've seen these patterns. It can be discouraging to see a vibrant, highly active homeschool group fizzle out. But what we need to do is what we do as moms: adapt to the needs of the next generation. Our homeschool group has gone from STEM and art and gym classes to US Government, Chemistry, and "Pride and Prejudice" to potlucks and hiking club during COVID. But many of us have graduated and there is a new generation that needs the wisdom of the older moms (Titus 2, ladies!) and the encouragement of other soon-to-be-homeschooling moms in the trenches to know that they can do it. Let's do it, ladies!

Tuesday, March 15, 2022

Why Do We Have All This Junk?

 No answers today, just observations.

This post is from when we moved six years ago and is pertinent today because we are renovating the house, which requires a lot of clean up and sorting.

"I have been packing to move for two months. In the process, I have pitched or given away bags and boxes of stuff, found projects that needed finishing and things that needed cleaning. Why did it take moving to deal with all of the extraneous stuff around the house?

The first homeschool conference we attended in 1993, the McKim family was speaking. They had fourteen children. Mrs. McKim had a workshop on home organization that was a squooshed-down version of an entire weekend of home organization talks that left me feeling breathless and inadequate, even accounting for the fact that I was expecting my second child and she had six adult children living at home to do her massive list. it included daily chores (vacuuming), weekly chores (organizing the kitchen towel drawer) and monthly chores (cleaning the garage! Monthly!)

Now, my dear husband doesn't clean. Anything. Except himself. And emergency child cleanup. But, he is very grateful when I do clean. Well, he doesn't like my process (think angry tornado) but he likes the result and tells me so. Personally, I am more of a project person than a maintenance person. If we could afford someone to clean our house regularly, I would hire them simply because I like a clean house but don't enjoy the process of keeping it clean. I just do it because I am so overwhelmed when I let the house get away from me. Since I am the only one moving the house away from chaos, the garage has been cleaned perhaps three times since we moved in thirteen years ago. Maybe.

I have come to love Swiffer dusters. When I have a Swiffer duster in hand, I dust the top of the door frames. I dust lampshades. I dust table legs. I dust the carpet under my bed where the vacuum doesn't reach. Unfortunately, cute little statues, like Precious Moments figurines, and "vignettes" that my Romantic Country magazine advocates, don't take Swiffing well, so there are some places that just don't get dusting. A year ago, I dusted a shelf in the rec room for the first time since we moved in and my sons' naval models were so dusty that the battleships looked as though their decks were covered with tiny people.

However, I can declutter! It makes everybody very tense. They never know what they're going to have left after I get going. I have a guitar that has been rescued from the trash four times and hidden in various kids' closets until I find it and throw it away again. I cannot convince them that the guy at the guitar store twenty years ago told me it was a lost cause. However, decluttering falls in the project category, not maintenance.

A lady at church when we first got married had been such a terrible housekeeper that she vowed to her ladies' bible study that she was going to put together a home management program and start teaching it. If she could figure it out well enough to teach it, anyone could do it. Her system was, never have more than three items on any flat surface. It makes them much easier to dust. That sounds great. In our next house, I will follow that rule religiously. That also means, large collections should be behind glass. I have a teak storage unit inherited from my father that we call "the Beast" and it has some glass display cases. That's where the plaster models of my ten kids' feet as babies will go so they won't get dusty. Behind glass really works in the fight against dust.

I discovered Prairie Style magazine. Only been about four to six issues were published, by the same people who publish Romantic Country. Now, we would call it modern farmhouse. It is upscale country without the romantic fru-fru. One woman said, "I don't have anything that doesn't have a use or a meaning." That was convicting! How many things do I have because I thought they were "cute" or "cool" but they don't do anything and no one I care about gave them to me. Now, I just need to get on Pinterest and find a project that can turn all the three dimensional $2 tchotchkes my kids gave me into one amazing art piece!

Tuesday, February 22, 2022

Ode to Motherhood

 I love being a mother.
It is my pride,
My point in the universe.
The babies grown up to be
Men and women
Without me.
The baby given away,
The babies died a-borning
Grown up without me
Or gone ahead without me.
They have found their life in me
And gone on.
Whether before birth,
At birth,
Or in grown-up-hood,
They don't need me anymore;
And I am left behind
To wonder
What to do next.
But they have made me
More than I have made them.
Nothing lit up death
More than baby-life.
Nothing brought me lower
Than being scolded by my children.
The paradox of utter self-absorption in pregnancy
To give birth
And then
Utter self-sacrifice in growing up babies
Throws me back,
Stunned.
Being a mother
Has made me
What I am
Without children.

Sunday, January 30, 2022

Here I Am to Worship

This summer, I climbed up the tallest "M" in the world built by the School of Mines at the University of Wisconsin, Platteville. The School of mines is gone, morphed into the Engineering School which still comes out to tidy up the "M" every fall. I sat on the crown of the hill above it and saw no sign of the "M" from my lawn chair. I came here to worship God because the "M" is on the Platteville Mound, the tallest hill rising from the midst of the surrounding gently rolling farmland. If it were clear, I could see across the Mississippi River to Iowa. I came because my daughter Sarah, who died a year ago, would have loved it. She would have looked out across the kind valley to the soft hills lost in the haze, listened to the wind in the few trees and bushes on the mound and the sound of blackbirds, felt the cool, humid air, and she would have called God great.

How she loved to worship God! She danced for joy in the Lord, and told stories to children, and played the flute at lunch for the residents in the nursing home she worked at and strove to serve and honor her husband as the church is supposed to honor Christ, and she delighted--delighted--in nature as showing His glory. We know from her journals that she wanted to please God in all she did because He is worthy. 

These days, when we talk about worship, we equate it with the music portion of a Christian service, as if prayer and teaching and testimonies are not worship. I don't know when or why that happened in American history. However, singing is one area of a worship service where emotions are acceptable and it now carries the spiritual burden for the whole hour. 

There is a reason for that. As a music education major in college, I learned the value of music in the lives of human beings. It combines the intellectual, physical, and emotional aspects of every performer, no matter how inept. Since the spirit is defined as the mind, will, and emotions, we can legitimately claim that music touches the soul and that is a primary reason that worship is still found in the music of churches, not matter how otherwise spiritually dead they may be.

What is worship? Most people are surprised to find that in not one single verse of the Bible are worship and singing put together--except when Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego would NOT bow down before the giant statue of Nebuchadnezzar when "all kinds of music" played! All possible forms of the word "worship" in the King James Bible number one hundred ninety-six, and yet no one is singing; so what does "worship" mean?

Noah Webster's 1828 dictionary says our word "worship" comes from the Saxon "wyrth-scype"--worth-ship. "Chiefly and eminently, the act of paying divine honors to the Supreme Being; or reverence and homage paid to him in religious exercises, consisting in adoration, confession, prayer, thanksgiving and the like."

Adoration, confession, prayer, and thanksgiving can all be done with music, but there is no requirement that they be. Praise is another matter.

Of the three hundred two references to praise in the Bible one hundred seventy-nine of them are found in Psalms alone. Psalms is, of course, a hymnbook. This doesn't mean these are the only places where praise is associated with singing, but you get the point. While we as modern Christians read the Psalms as Scripture or as personal prayer, they were originally meant to be sung.

When we talk about Psalms, there are two sides to our approach to them: one is as prayer and the other is as song. In "Life Together", Dietrich Bonhoeffer said that as prayer, the Psalms are really only completely absorbable if we understand Christ to be the person praying. Not all of the Psalms are pertinent to us. However, we are part of the body of Christ when we believe and on that account we can pray or sing the Psalms with Christ or for a brother in need. Musically, singing together centers all the singers' minds on one thing, uniting our prayers so that each one's entire spirit (mind, will, and emotions) are aligned with his neighbor's. Jesus said "If two of you agree on earth concerning anything that they ask, it will be done for them by My Father in heaven" (Matt. 18:19); so singing together intensifies our prayers--we are agreeing in prayer with all our souls.

Is there an order to worship? Any specific requirements? In both Old and New Testaments, we are commanded to sing and the Old Testament goes so far as to say the the earth will sing, too. Paul does say in I Corinthians 14:40 that services should be carried on decently and in order, everyone taking turns and that "God is not the author of confusion, but of peace" (I Cor. 4:33). Aside from that, the last thing that Jesus did with his disciples at the Last Supper, His last time sitting down with them for organized teaching, was to sing a hymn (Matt. 26:30).

Let's get back to the idea of worship. How does the Biblical or Saxon idea of "worth-ship" connect us to praise and singing? 

I began singing in children's choir, much to my surprise when the pastor's wife dragged me there, when I was ten years old. By eleven, I had played the flute with the adult choir, one of the top five in the city of Chicago broadcast over the radio every Sunday. That led to singing in youth choir, playing in bell choir, leading Sunday school music, leading singles group worship with five chords I remembered from ten weeks of guitar class in college. I have participated in crusade festival choirs with two hundred people, led children's music with a guitar, led Sunday worship with a piano and organ, brass or a worship band, or no instruments at all. 

All of these musical arrangements were in the service of bringing praise to God, but what else did they have in common? Only one thing: a willingness to serve because God is worthy. Participants might be as young as three or as old as eighty-five or more. Sometimes, it was electrified, sometimes not; but above all, people were willing to serve because God was worthy of our praise. We didn't have to have degrees in music or even ever had a lesson. We just had to be willing to serve and willing to be used, to be God's instruments.

In I Chronicles 25, David was organizing his musicians. He chose three men and their children, both male and female, to serve in two week stints over the course of a year to play music in the temple. The three men, all of whom wrote Psalms, were Asaph, Jeduthun, and Heman; but listen to how they are described.

Asaph "prophesied according to the order of the king" v. 2.

Jeduthun "prophesied with a harp to give thanks and to praise the Lord" v. 3

Heman was "the king's seer in the words of God, to exalt his horn" v. 5.

Their service with instruments and music was called prophesying (v.1). Prophets brought a message from the Lord. They weren't simply workmen skilled in the use of musical instruments and poetry, but prophets bringing God closer to man and man closer to God. These were no court musicians; they were ministers of God.

They also taught their children all the songs of the Lord (v. 7), which I'm guessing were the Psalms they were writing, and to play on cymbals, stringed instruments and harps. When they divided responsibilities, they were put in groups of twelve and the Bible says they all served, "the small as well as the great, the teacher with the student" (v. 8). No auditions for David!

We lead singing at church because of the ministry we are called to, not because we are professionals or passionate for it, but because God is worthy. He is worthy of our humiliation when we don't do well and our glory when we do. We are not playing or singing for a congregation, but for an audience of One. We lead the congregation to meet with God, to bless them so that God will be blessed and it doesn't matter if the congregation or even one person in the congregation thinks we did well or poorly; our service was as a guide for people to the presence of God, prophesying with voice and instruments, worshiping God in spirit and in truth. 

So again, what is worship? In the Bible, when people worshiped, they bowed down before the object of their worship. In America, we don't do that in public and rarely in private; but we can bow down in our hearts and minds before the Lord to acknowledge His worthiness; and when someone asks you to sing or play, or run the media, or if you are moved to share a song that has touched you and shown you a great truth about God don't hesitate to volunteer. It is a tremendous honor and a means of great humility and a gift to the God of the universe.

Sunday, January 23, 2022

"Life in the Trenches" is for Everybody

Being a homeschool parent isn't just about teaching reading and math; it's about life and who we are as parents and who our children are becoming. Even if you are not homeschooling, do not have kids, and are not even married, this book is about applying the Bible to every area of your life.

 My book, Life in the Trenches


Monday, January 3, 2022

Old-Fashioned Lessons That Never Go Out of Style: Cursive

 Who writes in cursive, anymore? Mostly people over the age of thirty-five. Why is it important? Is it important?

I mentioned to our local postmaster once that I homeschooled and he looked at me very sternly and asked, "You're teaching them cursive, aren't you?" Taken aback, I said, "Yessir!" It wasn't until I left the post office that I realized that you can't work for the post office if you can't read cursive! There are too many people who still use it and too many young people who can't deliver a letter!

But why should we teach cursive to our children? In my book Life in the Trenches, I address the development of the right and left sides of the brain. As I have said in previous "Old-Fashioned Lessons", the more you stretch your brain, the more it can do. The more you use both sides of your brain, the faster it can work because you have laid pathways across the divide between them. Cursive does this astoundingly.

We usually think of writing as being on the left side of the brain, the verbal side. However, the left brain doesn't just do words; it does details, it does trees. The right brain does forests, global thinking, and spatial skills. How does cursive work? It writes words, spelling them out letter by letter, which are left brain skills; but it forms them spatially, with the pen changing direction, more drawing the word than writing it, and it forms the entire word, not letter. letter. letter. And don't get me going on crossing your T's and dotting your I's!

Nothing works like cursive to train the brain every day to work holistically, to stretch the ability of the brain to jump from one side to the other. While it is a strain to learn, it actually changes the brain in a way that is more effective than any other everyday activity.