Pull up a chair and laugh WITH (Wait – AT?!) us, friend!
As clearly and thoroughly elaborated in THIS ARTICLE, I require an EXCESSIVE amount of time this holiday season skiing and soaking in a hot tub.
However, given that some of you in the over fifty countries1 who read this drivel (no-STUFF!) can barely function without my constant wisdom flooding your inbox, I will be posting some of our previous Christmas letters here to help you through this season with adequate wisdom and insight to complete the bare minimum of your Christmas activities.
You’re welcome!
Good luck!
We enjoy publishing a letter and sending it to all our friends and family for the Holidays.
You can learn that from me! You’re welcome! Good luck!
The worst, most terrible, awful part about parenting and homeschooling, is that God will want to transform your attitude, heart and motives and that STINKS!
I mean, think about it – you have always wanted to boss someone around, and now you have your little people to line up army style and pull rank on. YOU know what’s going on and YOU call the shots. You’ve been alive longer than they have, and so the world is in perfect order, thank you very much!
Then God steps in and messes everything up for you.
Thank you for liking me! I like you too! Let’s journey together!
At least that’s what happened to me every SINGLE DAY. Yeah, it stinks. For example, consider entitlement.
One day, I was looking down my nose in condemnation at my five-year-old because – WOW!- she wasn’t thankful!1
“How did she end up as such an unthankful little human?” I wondered with fear and trepidation. Would she be an unthankful little brat her entire life? THIS has got to be fixed!
I lectured her for half an hour on the benefits and joy of noticing the little things.
She looked at me blankly and continued to blame me for not buying her a third ice cream cone, stamping her little feet and yelling insults at me.
Yikes!
“What do I do now?” I wondered, finally looking up at God. “Can2 you please help me?”
And He did whisper to my heart that day as a gentle wind passed us.
And what He said was THE most annoying, infuriating and upsetting thing He could have mentioned to me right at that exact moment.
He seemed to whisper to my heart:
And how is your level of thankfulness, child?
His words were not harsh or condemning, but gentle, patient and full of the same kind of love I had for my daughter – I WANT her to find joy, and this is the path to it!
So it is for you, he seemed to remind me, turning the parent-child relationship on its head again.
How had I become the child again?
I wanted to be the parent, carefully explaining truths to my little mirrors of me.
And THAT was precisely the problem.
She WAS a mini-mirror of me on this issue.
Time for me to change.
Jesus held out his hand to me, and asked me to walk with him on this path towards a having a bit less gunk in my heart.
Would I follow?
Will you? He holds out his hand to you, too. Will you follow?
Yeah. I know. It STINKS to follow God sometimes because instead of changing THEM, He ends up changing US! I HATE THAT!
The song below is too humble for my taste. However, it contains some excellent thoughts about gratitude that are worth considering. As the song below plays, consider asking God how He may be a Shepherd to you, increasing joy through gratitude.
God, help us to figure out the (one or two places) where your plans for us are better than our ideas for how to run our lives, we pray.
Thank you for liking me! I like you too! Let’s journey together!
Photo Credit – Someone ELSE (NOT me!) Being Annoyed At God by Icons8 Team on Unsplash
1 It is worth noting that whenever my children demonstrate excellence in virtue, they naturally reflect the excellent teaching, values, and confidence that I instill as a homeschooling parent. But whenever they do something naughty (WHAT?!), of course, that is because they didn’t sleep well or their stomachs were upset, as explained perfectly clearly HERE. (Yes. That article is about my dog, but the SAME THING is true about my kids, OF COURSE!)
2 Notice the verb “Can” which of course makes Jesus laugh and slap his knee, wiping the tears a tear from his eye because he is laughing so hard. The answer “Yes. He CAN help!” A valuable truth to remember, one I often seem to forget. Jesus IS helpful!
If you haven’t read those Newsletters yet, I’ll summarize them for you: Whiny, whiny, boo-hoo, cry, send our kid away… boring, boring. But this is the thing that really bothers me, as I think about it a bit more.
It’s unfair that we are expected to send our kids away just when they become helpful!
I felt joy rise in my heart that day as I took another bite of an apple at the fall picnic.
I lay on the blanket, watching my children frolicking in the water nearby and delighted in another bite of the fall fruit someone had picked from the apple tree above us.
And I offer the fruit of my labor to them, to the world, as I watch my Homeschooled children help the younger ones pull themselves up on the log in the water.
And as their sibling bickers reach me even here, far away, I am reminded that though they are still annoying, as all of us humans are, still, the fruit from this fall season, of a season of Homeschooling has been good.
I delight in this.
We had to live with these humans, so we were forced to prune the trees and apply fertilizer even though it stung them sometimes.
We couldn’t turn aside and try to forget unbecoming behavior in our children because the school bus was coming soon. We saw them again at lunch, and then they were still there right after lunch, an hour later, and into the evening. This behavior has GOT to be dealt with. This rot in the heart has GOT to be addressed, we would finally admit.
Love drove us out of hiding.
“Show us how You see each child,” we would beg our God in prayer, longing for His picture of them, which was the sun and rain they needed to flourish.
One child was like a strong tree that would grow a thick branch in just a moment, but it grew directly into another sibling’s eye, or into my face – Ouch! Jesus would offer us a saw. Prune the tree, He would remind us.
And so, we did.
And then God pruned my tree, too.
A lot of sweat has gone into the farming of my fall crop. We had many seasons of scraping and tilling hard earth under the hot sun. We didn’t make a lot of progress. But sometimes we would delight to find a small patch of rich, dark soil, and we would quickly plant something there in their hearts before they noticed. And some of these offerings took root, though many plants languished or had to be replanted.
But the gardens of their hearts were tended as God tended my heart simultaneously, teaching me to love.
And God quickly planted something, a small plant in a tiny patch of rich soil that He found in my heart one day, soil among a seemingly endless expanse of hard, clay-baked earth. He planted it that day when I wasn’t looking. Homeschool, he bid my heart before this schooling adventure began.
And as another graying hair testifies to a beginning fall season of my life, I remember the fruit in my heart that was not there before this gardening adventure, and I am thankful that God had been tilling my soul all along, too.
And so, I took another bite of that apple, feeling happy.
So let’s not allow ourselves to get fatigued doing good. At the right time we will harvest a good crop if we don’t give up, or quit.
Get going, friend! Start now! The fruit of following Jesus on an adventure is worth all the hard labor of past seasons.
And may you savor many fall apples, explosive in flavor, as God scrapes off the edges of each other, not unlike iron sharpening iron, as love pours from God’s heart through us, through our kids, and then to the world.
And I took another bite of that fall apple.
And I felt love swell in my heart with each bite, love that came with this harvest.
I have already written my best advice on this topic HERE, where I clearly explain that the way to sidestep being a complete JERK is to PRETEND to be someone you’re not.
Today, we continue the same theme with more helpful advice on how to NOT be a jerk when you Homeschool.
Thank you for liking me! I like you too! Let’s journey together!
I learned many of these lessons from my (failed) efforts to train my dog, and let’s face it, we all know that the lessons we learn from shepherding our pets can be directly applied without any variation at all to lessons about God and parenting.
I was running behind my dog, yelling STOP again as the door opened and a visitor stared wide-eyed as our tiny goldendoodle pounced toward him, intent on humping his leg (again). I chased the dog around the yard hollering at him to behave while our visitor watched, which is the usual routine whenever someone knocks on our door. I finally catch the dog and then explain that our dog had a bad night’s sleep, or an upset stomach, so that’s why he didn’t obey today, AS HE USUALLY DOES, OF COURSE.
So yeah, dog training is EXACTLY like parenting.
Which gently directs this conversation very naturally into parenting advice.
An excellent question, and that is the topic of today’s newsletter.
Here are my top three recommendations (with four more recommendations in the following newsletter) containing my best advice on how to have a fantastic time Homeschooling:
Try to be someone else. See HERE or the first few paragraphs of this newsletter. (Note to my editor: Yes! I could edit this newsletter so that all of my advice is in one list, but editing is boring, and I have my Duo-lingo streak to maintain, in addition to this writing! I’m busy!)
Have VERY low expectations. Most people have problems with Homeschooling simply because their expectations are too high. Looking to have a GREAT year (or even day) Homeschooling? We experienced Homeschooling ones are laughing our guts out, and the reason why is explained HERE. When your kids cry a bit, grab yourself a martini and read a magazine for a while until that passes! It’s just another Homeschooling day, friends!
Keep the big picture in mind – This is why you have a manifesto. Then you can remember that playing Snakes and Ladders IS your top priority! (See the last bullet in Point #3 of THIS MANIFESTO for an explanation). She is your best friend, so squeeze moments of joy out of every moment someone isn’t crying, friend!
Join us next time for four more tips on having the best Homeschooling year you can (which means not a perfect year or that every day is fantastic, but we got through it, friends, and that’s what matters most!) Oh! I almost forgot the following quote!
Now that we know what we have—Jesus, this great High Priest with ready access to God—let’s not let it slip through our fingers. . . So let’s walk right up to him and get what he is so ready to give. Take the . . . help.
So enjoy your transformation because you’ll find that many of your sharp edges fall off as you Homeschool because you will have to return to God on your knees, asking for help every day. (Do that too! It helps!)
It might be hard… but let the mother have the courage to do for themselves what they do for their children… and life would go on far more happily for both children and parents. Charlotte Mason, Developing a Curriculum
With an uncharacteristic lack of self-knowledge, I suddenly realized I was still in pajamas, curlers in my straight hair, that day as I yelled at my homeschooled kids to get up, get dressed, and get to their work!
The only problem was that I hadn’t done any of those things yet, either.
Restoring Life 