My kid casually mentioned she may want to move out.
That’s okay!
That’s a NORMAL milestone! Hello!? Of course I don’t care!
Click HERE to continue reading.
Thank you for liking me! I like you too! Let’s journey together!
Of course, we all expect our teen children to hate us, be embarrassed around us, talk down about us to their friends, and find every way they can to show that they are rebelling against everything we stand for as the authority figures in their lives.
We wag our fingers at them and say, “YOU SHOULD do this or that!” even though we didn’t do this or that when we were their age, and getting up off the couch to talk to our kids is hard for us sometimes because our snacks and our devices call us to do more important things.
What if there is a different reality to parenting?
Even if we’ve rolled up our sleeves over the last nearly two decades and gotten “Good Parent Points” on our clipboards for throwing balls with our kids, giving them birthday parties, and teaching them to drive, what if even then, deep down, we still expect our teens to be embarrassed around us, spend as little time with us as possible and talk disrespectfully about us behind our backs until they are finally “Free.”
What if the expectations we have of our teens are too small?
It turns out they are.
Check out this NEW1 research.
Lecture 17 of Your Best Brain: The Science of Brain Improvement by John Medina says:
“[The scientist] makes several important observations about the powerful effect of culture [on teens] . . . [He] points to a study . . . looking at adolescent behaviour in 186 pre-industrialized societies. The research did NOT find lots of classic impulsive, obnoxious, get me away from my parent’s teenage behaviour in ALL of them. In fact, they found the opposite. More than half the young males exhibited no rebellious behaviour at all. Teens in these cultures spent most of their time hanging around their parents. They often helped with the chores both in family and in broader social activities”.
We saw an example of this kind of teen culture in reality at the homeschooling conference we recently attended.
It was a culture shock because not all the teens were jerks!
Consider the following:
(1) At the homeschooling family barn dance (Can I stop there?) . . .
(2) In which parents and all ages of family members, including teens, danced in the same big hall (Can I stop there?) . . .
(3) Often a very young child would join in the fray. Partners switched every few seconds sometimes, in a (deliberately) Jane Austen style. EVERY SINGLE TEENAGE BOY that I saw whose turn it was to dance with the 3-year-old, hunched down, smiled and spun the little girl in time to the music. EVERY SINGLE ONE.
Watching teen after teen do this was so sweet – It made me tear up.
(4) These are not the teens skulking in corners, hoping for a chance to get outside and smoke more pot.
Entering this homeschooling culture, even through reading this newsletter, may be enough to destroy culturally low expectations of today’s teens.
Check out this site for teens for another example: The Rebelution – Rebelling Against Low Expectations
So friend, now that you feel empowered to refuse low expectations of your teens, I recommend you go home, yell at your kids, throw some stuff around the house and make your point VERY clear that now you KNOW they don’t HAVE to be jerks anymore!
You’re welcome!
Good luck!
After that advice, consider asking God how you may need to throw out the way that you see that child and see them instead through the glasses that God gives you, the way He sees that child.
God can do anything, you know—far more than you could ever imagine or guess or request in your wildest dreams! He does it not by pushing us around but by working within us, his Spirit deeply and gently within us.
Oh, and by the way, the expectations of the Father for your life are greater than you imagine for yourself, too.
Do you have time for coffee and fresh vision?
Thank you for liking me! I like you too! Let’s journey together!
Photo Credits: Teen by Микола Тонкодуб on Unsplash, Barn Dance From Logos Online School Website
1This book by John Medina is over 10 years old, but “New” is a relative term, and let’s admit that we all have forgotten half the stuff we need to know to do well in life, anyway! Related, consider the following quote:
If you want a new idea, read an old book.
Ivan Pavlov
This quote proves that you have no idea what you are doing, either, as you parent your kids, and any information, whether new OR old, will help you!
Halloween is around the corner, so I thought I’d post about the last time I dressed up.
No, it wasn’t Halloween then or a holiday of any kind. Why do you ask? But this got me thinking:
What if people HAD to love us (no matter what we wore or how silly we acted)?
The good news is that depending on what your friends and family believe, they do!
For example, we homeschool our kids, so we read to them from books that say things like this:
Most of all, love each other as if your life depended on it.
Then, we go to a church where they read the same stuff.
At church, they HAVE to love us, too! If we find people who don’t love us there, we can find some others to love. We’ll all find true followers of Jesus who promise to love us no matter what our personality – even the “unusual” ones – whew!
So we can finally relax and have fun.
We’re loved!
This is good news for me in particular because I figured out what my family REALLY thought about me lately, and it was a bit of a shock.
Here’s what happened.
We were reading an excellent book together as a family.
Caveat: Before you get the wrong idea of us all drinking hot chocolate and stringing popcorn and cranberries by the fire as we each take turns reading aloud together, singing a song between each chapter, aka Little House on the Prairie style, no, it wasn’t like that. It was an audiobook played in the car during our day-long drive to visit extended family. The book just helped us not to want to kill each other.
Setting the mood.
Anyway, the book was excellent. It was called Jesus Revolution. I would highly recommend it*. We all got into the story, and even the child we initially had to bribe to listen to the story with us asked for more!
At one point in the book, the author, Greg Laurie, is described as having something like “deep spiritual depth and a bit of an unpredictable, crazy personality. You never knew what he was going to do next.”
My husband looked at me sneakily out of the corner of his eye, smirking. “WHAT???” I asked. “What are you smirking about??”
“Oh,” he replied, looking away casually, “just something said in the book.”
“What??” I protested. “I’m not…!” And then he laughed, and there was a muffled chuckle, I think, from the back seats.
So I guess my family thinks that his personality describes me!
And this reminds me of what we did last night! I bought a gift for my family – well, sort of. Okay, yes! I did buy it for myself and pretended to give it to the family!
It is called The Adventure Challenge. You scratch off an “Adventure,” and then the family HAS (Yes, teens, that word is “HAS”) to do the Adventure together. Last night, we strung out yarn as an obstacle course through the basement, and we had to go through it as fast as we could, being sprayed in the face with water each time we accidentally touched a string.
It was fun.
And my superhero outfit? Yeah, I am wearing a bathing suit over the top of my leotards. And yes, the big “S” on my shirt WAS made a spur of the moment. It helped me go faster!
I even got first place!
(Before any of the others went, I was ranked first, that is.)
So relax! Make your teens do fun and crazy stuff with you! If you’re unsure how, try making “fun” a prerequisite to “food,” for example! They’ll thank you later! (When they’re old they may thank you – At least that’s what happened to us!)
Your kids are loved, too!
And that was the message of the Jesus Revolution book, actually. It was about a bunch of crazy hippy kids who were overcome, in some cases literally, by the love of God. That love overflowed to others and transformed a nation (Even Time Magazine did a cover article about this movement on June 21, 1971).
So go ahead and be the real you, whatever that looks like.
And then, after you’ve let your stomach fat and the rest of the real you out a little bit, if you’re desperately looking for a way to improve your self-esteem, spend a few more minutes with the kind of people who believe they HAVE to love you!
You’re welcome!
Good luck!
Footnotes
*If bribing your kids to watch a movie with you is less expensive than bribing them to read a book with you, the movie Jesus Revolution can be rented here.
Crumbs of hope that whisper or nudge from God can be found in the oddest places.
Sometimes even through strangers.
It seemed that God wasn’t finished speaking to this clerk at Tim Hortons yet, but I had some pressing paperwork to do. Would I trust Him to interrupt my more essential tasks again? Was I too busy?
My bagel was burned.
I could eat a bagel, slightly dark at the edges. Tell them it seemed God may have been saying. Really?
I already had one interaction where God somehow fed this young man a crumb.
Why did I have to ruin it by criticizing the food? I obeyed, and co-incidentally, perhaps, it was the same young man whose turn it was to speak to me. Several others were working the till.
I showed him my bagel and explained that I recently learned that burned food contains carcinogens, substances capable of causing cancer.
I apologized for the nuisance. “Maybe I should come to you for advice,” the clerk called loudly across the restaurant, as I walked away. I smiled.
He thinks he is drawn to me, but he is drawn to You in me.
May he learn the difference.
As I was about to leave, I thought the Lord said to buy another coffee. But I didn’t want another coffee! “Maybe my life is not entirely about what I want,” I reminded myself.
I stood in line.
Clerks were running everywhere, and many different people were taking orders. Again, I wasn’t surprised when I got the same clerk because this felt like a God appointment. Ask him about his church, God seemed to nudge as I ordered coffee.
“Hey, you said you are a Christian. Have you found a good group of people at a church around here to belong to?”
I wasn’t surprised when he said no. Theology that revolved around the type and frequency of product he smoked, the topic of our earlier conversation, didn’t seem completely orthodox. “Even though my mom is an atheist, I used to go to church. But I don’t have a ride right now,” he said as he gave me my change.
Again, a nudge from the Lord.
Do you have a car? God seemed to ask me, tongue in cheek. I offered him a ride to our thriving church. He declined, and I presumed there were deeper reasons why He wasn’t in a church community.
I walked away, carrying a bagel I was too full to eat.
Use me, Lord. There is so much food here at Your table. I pray this young man’s hunger pains will be satisfied one day.
May he truly know he is accepted and thus seek his next step in a relationship with You and other believers.
May he find another who can lead him to the feast.
Teach us more clearly to scatter a bounty of crumbs from Your voice, and with Your love, we pray.
Why does it always have to start with trust?
Was that a whisper or a nudge from God as we live our lives in the mundane ordinary? Will we listen? He speaks, and it can seem so small and easy to ignore.
Will we obey?
The Father trusts those with big things to those who have been faithful in the small stuff.
Make some for yourself, too, God seemed to whisper to me that day several years ago. God had been nudging me to make fleece pants with my kids and their friends. Now, he seemed to be nudging to make fleece pants for me, too.
So, I was online ordering fleece fabric.
A particular type of fabric seemed to stand out to me as joy bubbled from the inside. I bought the fabric with the golden retrievers stamped all over them (true story). I made my pants.
And now, I will try to convey something challenging to articulate.
These doggy fleece pants are like a key opening a door between another culture and me. Once, someone exclaimed jubilantly that she loved my pants and then recounted a surprising quantity of her life story as I stood listening, stunned and speechless, my to-go coffee cup waiting in my hand mid-air for her to finish. This kind of thing happens often.
It happened today.
The teenage guy working at Tim Horton’s spent five minutes before he took my order telling me he loved my pants, told me a story about his dog, and then spoke with the lady next to him about whether she liked dogs or cats better.
I listened mutely and smiled.
My table was laden with crumbs, so I asked for a napkin to clean it. The young man leaned in to confide that they are understaffed but insisted on cleaning the table for me. As he wiped, he said, “People really surprise me sometimes.”
“How do you mean?” I asked.
He was quiet, so I offered, “You mean how people are always making messes?”
He nodded.
I wondered what I could say in the several seconds left of our interaction that could be like a crumb to feed him just a little. “Well, it’s a good thing that God forgives us after we create our messes.” I looked innocently away, waiting for the metaphor to nourish his soul.
The crumb nourished, and his hunger pangs caused him to sputter forcefully.
“I can’t believe people don’t know I’m a Christian,” he exclaimed. “I don’t smoke.” My brain was overheating as I was trying to deduce the connection between not smoking and being a Christian.
He was in his own world, however, and felt the need, for some reason, to be honest with me, a perfect stranger.
“Well, I do smoke weed.”
Where do we go from here, God? Clearly, he was being nourished, somehow, by the crumbs from Your table. What do I say in the 30 nanoseconds before he departs?
I settled on, “Well, if we can truly understand that God loves us, that’s the important part, right?”
He stared at me, fumbled, and then dropped his cleaning cloth. His hat fell off as he bent over to pick up the fabric. He stared at me a moment before picking that up, too.
He was deep in thought.
Eye contact one more time before he walked away.
Was there a nanosecond of redemption, a glimpse of light lit for a moment, so that You redeemed this ordinary day for the clerk at Tim Horton’s, God? May this generation find messy tables wherever they go, we pray. And may the crumbs somehow, by your grace, be multiplied to nourish the soul.
There is more, there is more, there is more, He is saying to the teenage boy working at Tim Hortons.
I’ll continue this story another time.
I was frothing at the mouth again, spewing words of dissent, grumbling to myself. My husband was sitting next to me in the car, waiting for my spaz to end. This tantrum was my regular 3-month routine.
I had gotten more report cards for my kids.
And I wasn’t happy.
Our kids excelled in some areas, according to these report cards. However, some of the grades reflected ME as a homeschool teacher more than my KIDS as students. I hadn’t been toeing the line again.
And my kids were getting the academic spanking.
However, if, as a homeschooling parent, we TRY to do every little thing that the school system asks, we will end up as blobs of discouragement, unable to get off the couch again. The system is designed for us to fail. As homeschooling parents, we must set sail in a new direction, slightly off-center from the true north the school system uses.
And so our kids may look like morons for a while.
For example, after I exited from the Canadian public school system in Grade 12, I had honor roll status and the coveted knowledge of about 200 years of European settler’s Canadian history, which had been drilled down my throat at least weekly for 12 years. I hadn’t realized that other countries had histories, too! And some of their histories were longer than 200 years!
So, I CHOSE to have my kids learn world history more often from a challenging, classically based curriculum.
Therefore, their Canadian social studies grades plummeted for a while.
However, their social studies grades were assigned assuming they hadn’t done ANY socials instead of reflecting that they hadn’t studied the EXACT socials curriculum recommended in that grade.
Whatever.
And it’s not just social studies that follow this pattern.
Our school systems are based on Greek methods of learning*, where we dissect learning down into thousands of pieces, and they divvy out hundreds of “goals” for a SPECIFIC age level to learn. Check out these PLOs (fancy word for goals) for Canadian students for each grade. Studied astronomy in Grade 4 when your kid was actually interested in it instead of in Grade 3? Zero on their report card.
And so I was frustrated.
We solved this little problem by not telling our kids what report cards were until high school. It’s surprising, in retrospect, how infrequently their public school friends mentioned report cards. So, our kids “skipped” viewing their report cards for about a decade.
After seeing their early report cards myself and having my little verbal spaz that my husband happened to be near enough to hear, I had a nice sugary iced latte (my therapy of choice), and then my husband and I talked about other things. This routine was just another homeschooling rhythm we observed. We didn’t have to discuss the details.
Years later, when our first child graduated from high school, she aced much of the SAT, an average score among her classically trained students. (The SAT is a standardized test taken by, generally the top 30% of academically achieving students. Yeah, I hadn’t heard of it either. I was public schooled, too.)
Dorothy Sayers wrote about this effect almost 80 years ago.
Classically trained children don’t do as well as other kids early on. They don’t have time to systematically jump through every hoop and complete every learning goal assigned to them. They are too busy learning to think.
Later on, they often do comparatively better academically than their peers.
Maybe encouraging our kids to read hard books** and then reading challenging books aloud really pays off in the long term.
And even though our kids LOOK like geeky academic superstars, we all know that academic prowess is not the PRIMARY goal for our homeschooled kids.
But if we do want their brains to flourish to their full potential, maybe encouraging them to look like idiots for a few years is not such a bad idea.
Sugary latte, anyone? (Sugar is one of my coping tactics to help me not follow the crowd. WEREN’T YOU LISTENING earlier in this post when I first mentioned my iced latte?! What? NOT EVERYONE listens to my every word? Oh well. I can feel a bit better about myself because at least my kids are smart.)
Sure, I’ll have a double caramel iced latte, too.
Thank you!
You’re welcome!
Good luck!
Blogpost Footnotes
*Much has been written comparing the Greek and Hebrew educational philosophies. For a brief summary, check out this talk.
**My daughter is reading The War with Hannibal by Livy (circa 200 BC) as I write this. Hey! Flaunting ego is the path to true success, remember!
I wasn’t sure if I could keep the car on the road because I couldn’t see through my tears.
The downpour we were driving through didn’t help, either. “Keep it together. Keep it together. . .” was my mantra until I could get inside, close the door to the world, and let these emotions out.
I wasn’t sure I would be able to drive the car home.
Inside, I collapsed behind a closed door and told my husband the news. His sadness began deep, deep in his soul, in the place where love resides, and found its expression. It was the future we mourned.
A dark cloud had cast a shadow over the future of one of our children. Like a candle in the snow, her joyful little light was sensing wind on the horizon. And the odd pieces of cardboard I found nearby to try to shield her from the wind didn’t look like enough right now.
Heal her, God whispered to me months later.
I was minding my own business, letting my mind wander while in the hot tub.
“Um, what now?” I asked. I sat upright and perked up my ears. “What did you say?”
Silence.
I had heard him. Would I take the next step in faith? Or would I put cotton in my ears and dunk my head under the hot tub, ensuring I could not hear any more of this foolish talk?
They told me this was incurable. Everyone knew that! The best we could hope for was some moderate success with behaviour modification – a few small wins.
And so, which road should I take?
This is where we stumble.
Is that a jewel I just about stepped on along the path of life?
Will we pick it up, inspect it, hold it to the light and find a friend with a hammer to crack it open?
Or will we put it in our pocket to consider later if we remember?
The joys and the sorrows of life arrive, and we hang up our clothes at the end of the day. We forget them there for awhile. When we remember, through foggy memories, that there may be a jewel in our pocket (!), we look again, but it fell out. There are only the singed edges of our pocket to remind us that we were holding a bit of heaven for a while.
But it’s gone now.
What’s for lunch?
And God feels far away, again, even though He just descended from heaven to meet us. We treated His gift like just another stone on the path. Will we catch the next jewel He holds out to us? Will our eyes be open enough to see this time, or will we trample, again, the precious jewel that He offers, His firelight shining in the darkness?
It’s only a sparkle at first.
Time to bow low and fan the flame of His voice in your life, friend?
Come along. Let’s journey together.
Oh. And she was healed, God guiding and then redeeming my pathetic attempts to listen, Him re-directing me and helping me up when discouragement hit. For that is His way.
Jesus said, “There is no need to dismiss them. You give them supper.”
“All we have are five loaves of bread and two fish,” they said.
Jesus said, “Bring them here.” . . . The disciples then gave the food to the congregation. They all ate their fill. They gathered twelve baskets of leftovers. About five thousand were fed.
The Message
We give Him what we have. It’s all we have but it’s not very much. We work with Him, following His direction so that the miracle can occur.
But that is a story for another time.
It’s also a repetitive story found here and here and in any heart willing to receive what He offers.
Ready for an adventure into the miraculous?
When do we jump from a sinking ship and when do we bail frantically to save our lives?
When do we decide that the public school system is broken enough that it can’t be fixed and jump ship to homeschooling? When do we stay in the school system, attend PTA meetings and volunteer as a playground supervisor? When do we put our kids in the public school system and do our best to bail out the ship?
How am I supposed to know?
But who wants to screw up their kids?
When my soul welled up with reasons to seriously consider homeschooling, flooding cultural expectations for my life, this is some of what it said:
1. Before we had kids, I would hear something about homeschooling and a random tear would erupt, sliding slowly down my cheek. What was going on? (If you have a lump in your throat right now, you’re done for. Just sayin’. Stay in your pyjamas today to get used to it because you should be homeschooling soon.)
2. A kid tried to beat me up on my way home from school in Grade 3. What was that about? I was “the kindest, most empathetic person” a teacher had “encountered in a long time” (verbatim wording from my report card). Is there any way to spare our kids from UNNECESSARY pain?
Sure, they WILL experience pain, but if we know they will get beat up with a baseball bat emotionally, spiritually or (even) physically day after day, can we at not, at least, flip a coin to see if there are other ways to learn the alphabet?
3. And there were those times when I would walk home from grocery shopping with my mom, hand in hand. We would sing songs. This was most cherished memory of my childhood.
It wasn’t expensive. It wasn’t complicated. How could we live to have a few more of those kinds of moments?
4. Then I read the parenting classic Hold Onto Your Kids by Neufeld and Mate. Their words were a confirmation, like check marks on my intuition. Maybe we AREN’T supposed to structure society so that kids and teens spend most of their time with people exactly the same age as them.
5. And what if some of the ideas we hold dear as a culture, the general beliefs, are wrong? If another culture’s beliefs are (obviously to us) wrong, some of our culture’s commonly held beliefs WILL BE wrong too. Which ones?
Maybe the way we currently do school?
6. Maybe kids DON’T need the latest cultural clothing styles as defined by other kids their same age. Maybe a second-hand sweater will do.
7. Maybe kids don’t need their own menus of sugar and hyper-processed foods. Healthy food habits WILL get pulled down to an outlandish level in a culture of extreme bizarreness, of kids eating two-thirds of their diet as highly processed foods. As much as we wax on about eating healthily, stepping into another culture, home, where everyone eats a bowl of soup at lunch is a realistic way to instil normal food habits.
Oh, and this may even help heal various diagnoses, as it did in our home, and as science is increasingly suggesting.
8. It’s COMMON but perhaps not NORMAL for pre-pubescents to ideate about sex. If you are ready to be challenged about this, check out The Disappearance of Childhood by Neil Postman, which was written 40 YEARS ago. Ouch.
Schools are increasingly mimicking the culture of Brave New World (so my middle school substitute teacher friend asserts), but it’s our kids who suffer there.
9. The cons of both homeschooling and public schooling swam around my thoughts.
It was time for us to jump ship, to swerve onto a narrower road. How about you? Is it time for your family to jump ship? Do you sense the pull of your heart towards giving homeschooling a try?
We have to wean ourselves off the cultural drugs that addict us to the wrong desires first.
Our status in society may drop precipitously. We will have to pick up a new identity, one others may gawk at. The old identity, defined by perhaps lots of stuff, expensive vacations, and value in corporate America (i.e. a job in exchange for money!) may no longer stick with us.
Welcome to the wild ride!
Prepare to be scared, and to laugh, and to cry. But God will cheer you on from the sidelines, give you food to strengthen, and usher in your transformation.
Because this spiritual journey isn’t just for our kids.
Cmon! Let’s go!
Here’s some food to strengthen you for the journey.
Blogpost Footnotes
Since this post was written, a teen in our community died from a drug overdose. Also, I received a text from a local nurse that youth age 12 – 14 using meth is the new normal. Sheltering kids for a few more years, using whatever resources are available to us, is becoming increasingly important.
Oh, and homeschooling is the cool, new thing, and we should always try to fit in, right?
Someone (who?) once said that a picture is worth 1,000 words. But what do they know? We think the funny things we say to each other are worth thousands of words.
So here you go. Funny things our family said last year in the categories of love, homeschooling, confidence, random thoughts, and flatulence.
Andy to me: “You look pretty.”
Me: Thinking, “After 22 years of marriage I don’t get that compliment every day!”
“Why” I ask him aloud, thinking, “Is it my hair? I just went swimming. My new exercise outfit?”
Me . . . persistent . . . “Why?”
Andy: “I think it’s because you told me to lie down and rest instead of help clean up after supper.”
Me: (!) (!!) (!!!)
Andy to me: “If we didn’t have a dog, where would you put all your affection?
Would you hug and squeeze us to death?”
Me… “Whaaa???”
– 5 minutes later –
Me: “I squeeze you. I squeeze you.” Kiss, kiss to Siri, our dog. Then wait! I remember…
Kyah: “Good morning! I missed you all night long!”
Usual unusual homeschooling moments
There was a homeschooling event a two-hours drive away.
Kyah called her friend’s mom: “Hi. Can you please drive me to the homeschooling event because my mom doesn’t want to because it’s too far and she doesn’t feel like it. So is it OK if you drive me instead?”
First-world homeschooling problem.
Esther: “Ah! I’m going to be late for class!”
– A few seconds later –
Esther: “Ah! I forgot to re-curl my hair after our walk! I’m going to be very late for class!!!”
Kyah, one Wednesday morning after math class: “Hi Mom! I decided what two new languages I want to learn, besides Spanish!” (Braille and sign language)
Andy to me: “You’ll be awesome!”
“Wait, is that snot on your face?”
Me: “How was church today?”
Andy: “I had a big hunk of peanut butter on my face from breakfast the whole time I was at church today. I went and spoke at the front and everything!”
Me: “Oh bummer! How did you know that?”
Andy: “Kyah told me in the car on the way home from church.”
Esther after doing hours of scholarship applications: “I never thought I would get tired of thinking about how amazing I am. I never want to talk about how amazing I am ever again!”
The words in brackets below are what I imagine the owners of the store to say in response to the questions on their street signs.
(Toilets inside)
(Cold showers inside)
I wish I was mature enough to leave out the fart jokes, but alas . . .
Person to remain unnamed: “Watch out for my silent laugh.
It’s usually a sign that I’m going to fart.”
I was using the microphone function to draft a text. Andy said to one of the girls “Who farted? Was it you?”
Those exact words were transcribed into the text to my friend.
Finally, the big news, if you haven’t heard is that Esther grew up and moved out to attend University (We’re very proud of her!). We got both a super cute bunny to play with . . .
and a large houseplant to sit in her old homeschooling area to replace her.
(To find out how I’m actually adjusting to this life transition, check out this post, or this one, or this one).
One last quote to finish off this letter:
Me: “I feel like I have a lot of stuff going on right now.”
Andy: “I do too, but I don’t know what they all are.”
What a great summary of our year!
That’s all. We hope you can read between the lines and feel updated with all that’s happened in our family last year!
Merry Christmas!
May your joy deepen profoundly this season as you ponder and reflect on the true meaning of Christmas.
Blogpost Footnotes
*Does that mean you’re making fun of us?
Today I thought I’d teach you how to bond with your homeschooled kid by swearing at him!
This is a real-world example from my own life.
The weirdest stuff in life is true so that’s how you can be assured I am telling the truth today.
So one day, I found my 12-year-old looking downcast, despondent.
“What’s wrong, honey?” I asked.
“Well, Mom, I’m 12 years old and I don’t know any swear words!”
“Oh, hon! I’m so sorry to hear that!” I said, reaching down to hug her.
“Tell you what,” I continued. “Do you want me to teach you some swear words?”
“Oh, would you?” Her eyes filled with admiration for me and the wonderful real-life wisdom I possessed. She hugged me, unable to contain her emotions. Kids DO want to learn what parents have to teach them! These homeschooling moments are precious!
All that week we planned the best time to have our special mother-daughter date so I could impart my wisdom to her.
Finally, the magical day arrived. We skipped math that morning so we’d have ample time to connect through profanity (Another important benefit of homeschooling). We walked on the beach so the ambiance would be just right, and so we’d remember this special mother-daughter homeschool bonding time.
“So what is one of the swear words?” she impatiently asked.
I found myself spelling out the F-word for her.
She sounded it out in her mind and then said aloud, “FOO-ka?” “Close enough,” I answered.
I’m not sure how she muddled through junior high with friends from all sides of the innocence-experience continuum.
And she may have had a few more black eyes from friends who didn’t think she was cool enough that year, come to think of it, but she got to the other side.
And what a wonderful homeschool bonding experience we enjoyed!
And now, you too, can enjoy this special bonding experience with your homeschooled child! Here’s how:
Since we’ve compiled this long and sorry record as sinners (both us and them) and proved that we are utterly incapable of living the glorious lives God wills for us, God did it for us. Out of sheer generosity he put us in right standing with himself. A pure gift. He got us out of the mess we’re in and restored us to where he always wanted us to be. And he did it by means of Jesus Christ.
The Message
Translation: This ancient text basically says that God already knows you’re a dork!
And since God already knows you’re a bit pathetic most of the time, you can relax and have some fun with your kids!
Blogpost Footnotes
*Bonus parenting wisdom: Check out magician and master of trickery David Copperfield for additional excellent tricks that can be applied with surprisingly little variation to parenting!
You’re welcome!
Good luck!
Restoring Life 