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.

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!

Old-Fashioned Lessons: Drills

Fun, huh? Not! But, oh, so important!

Drills are part of memorization. For the Grammar stage of subjects such as playing musical instruments and sports, drills are physical rather than mental or verbal. Drills, once again, form neural pathways. During the Olympics several years ago, they put up a quote: "An amateur practices until he gets it right; a professional practices until he can't get it wrong."

Just as you don't have to think when you pick up a pencil, by physically or mentally drilling you get to where you don't have to think about what you are doing. The more neural pathways are formed, the more capability a person of any age will have.

I started learning my first instrument, the flute, at age 9. I  began my second, the piano, at age 10. Visiting my aunt at age 11, I dabbled with her recorder, which she then gave me. I sprained my pinky finger in gym when I was 12, so I picked up my mother's mandolin and was playing the theme to Romeo and Juliet by the end of the evening. My parent brought me home a mountain dulcimer from a vacation they took to the Appalachians when I was 18 and I play it regularly in church. I then went to college and got a degree in Music Education, learning eleven more instruments.

Here's the thing: I don't believe I had more than a little bit of talent. I had a lot of friends at school who played far better than I did. My college advisor complimented me on how easily I picked up instruments to my junior high supervising teacher. The supervising teacher didn't think I deserved much credit! Simply learning one instrument taught me how to learn the next and each instrument forged new neural pathways, making each subsequent instrument that much easier to learn.

The same thing has been documented in learning new languages.Even just in the skills of housework, learning to clean one type of surface teaches you skills that transfer to other surfaces, both visually -- what does clean look like? -- and  physically -- what does the surface feel like when dirty or clean and what movements are used to clean? Drilling information makes it yours so you don't have to count on your fingers to know what 7 X 8 equals.

A friend's husband was deployed from the National Guard to Afghanistan in September. He would be returning the following September, but his unit didn't leave the country until March! What were they doing all that time? Drilling! They were training for 6 months of the time that they were paid to be full-time soldiers. Drilling would get them to the point that they responded automatically in crisis situations when they didn't have time to think.

Our family does a Doctrinal Drill that is part of the Bible Lessons from Christ-Centered Curriculum for Early Childhood. Along with reading through the major events of the Bible, they learn a catechism that teaches them over 70 verses in support of the main doctrines of the church and for application to life. Since this is our family Bible time, every child in the family studies it from age 2 to when they graduate high school. The drill has made those verses a solid block in their memories. In life situations or in family discussions, we'll ask them what the Bible says about this (whatever it is) and it is wonderful how often they will pluck a verse out of their Doctrinal Drill and apply it perfectly. Awana Clubs do this as well, with review built into every level, and many verses expanded in each succeeding book.

Children (and adults!) complain about drills. But, to make any skill go from short-term, temporary, fluid, electrical memory to long-term, concrete, crystalline, chemical memory requires hundreds of repetitions. No fun, but so helpful!

Old-Fashioned Lessons that Never Go Out of Style - Silence

Time for a new series!

What has been growing on us in our family is that simple is best. In the "old days," they didn't have all the fancy bells-and-whistles curricula that are available now and they produced Shakespeare, Jane Austen, John Wesley, and Thomas Jefferson. How did they do it?

With simple lessons.

Fred Rogers --  yes: Mr. Rogers -- told his documentarian, Benjamin Wagner, "I feel so strongly that deep and simple is so much more essential than shallow and complex." He went on to say, "Spread the message."

I was looking for a unifying theme to my message and God gave it to me through Mr. Rogers.

The first lesson is Silence.

Depth does not come in noise. Simplicity is scattered by trivia like tossing a handful of pea gravel into a pond when the daily auditory clutter is swirling around us through voices, earbuds, and the sound of household machinery. Our current houses are rarely quiet. Even putting aside the sound of the heat or air conditioning coming on, the refrigerator hums, the computer hums, the light on the television NEVER goes off and the video game console seems impossible to turn off without unplugging it. I have to go looking for silence in my own house.

But, God speaks in silence: in Elijah's cave, in Jesus' 40 days in the wilderness, in Moses' isolation near the burning bush "at the back of the wilderness," in Philip's encounter with the Ethiopian eunuch in the desert, in the WWII concentration camp inmate who cleared the drain to the cesspool -- no one came near him for two years, not even the guards. He said he got to know God in the cesspool.

You may have read a post I shared awhile back about Uninterrupted Silent Reading in my public school. The entire school, janitor and secretary included, read from 1:05 to 1:25 every day. There was Silence, a hush over the entire school, a moment of blessed peace. In her video series, The Peaceful Home, Elisabeth Eliot told us about Quiet Time. For an hour every day, each of her eight grandchildren were in their beds, not talking. We adopted this and, to this day, over 20 years later, we still have quiet time after lunch. It is when we do our reading assignments. There is no music, no talking, no interrupting for one hour.

In Silence is where we think. We nap. We cogitate. We daydream. The thoughts we have received in our reading and math and Bible and family talking get sorted out and applied during that time. My second son, Mick has had major experiences with Silence.

As a four year old, he could decode words, but didn't know he could actually read until he was forced to sit for one hour with nothing but books to entertain him.

He took unbelievably long showers and worked calculus problems in his head to design a new style of compound bow. That bow is still in his head, but you know what I'm talking about.

He spent hours and hours out in the woods. His Bible is actually a waterproof Bible that has special paper that won't wrinkle when it gets wet because he spent so much time hunting -- which means, sitting in the woods. It was there  that he learned who God was as he overcame his fear of the dark, thought about what he had learned at Discipleship Jiu Jitsu, read through the entire Bible and prayed.

Depth of learning only comes when a person has had time to absorb what he has learned and fit it into his world view. That absorption only happens if there is nothing to distract. Only Silence allows that.

Why Do We Have All This Junk?

No answers today, just observations.

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 used to be popular homeschool speakers who, at the time, had fourteen children and I think they had more after we heard them speak. I saw one of her daughter on Say, Yes to the Dress: Atlanta a couple of years ago, getting married for the first time at the age of 45. 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.

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 have discovered Prairie Style magazine. There have only been about 4-6 issues published, by the same people who publish Romantic Country and I have decided this is my style. 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.