how-to – Page 13 – Home's Cool!

Click “Undo” – 2

Posted on June 25, 2013November 28, 2015 by Katharine

Yesterday we began a series about how to begin home educating a child who is acclimatized to the collective school situation and may be reluctant about this big change in his life. You may want to catch up, here.

The second step is somehow to teach your child also to care more.

Unless your child has begged for rescue from the collective system, he may not see what you see or care about what you care about (his welfare).

He may not be comfortable with the idea that his education or his life is worth caring about.

He may not realize that it is now safe for him to care about life.

Affirmations of thankfulness and celebration about his new presence in your daily affairs will help him see a glimpse of it. As your actions follow your words, he will begin to believe it, and to feel some of the same, himself.

The third step is to help your child understand what is happening in his life.

Even if he begged to home school, he is accustomed to a regime of bells jangling and other buffeting noises, dependent upon someone else telling him every move to make, and missing his old friends.

Now someone (you) must deal with this regimented, buffeted, dependent, and friendless soul who is moping at your kitchen table.

How do you explain? You start with God. If you have not had much time to minister God to your child, take it easy—you do not want to overwhelm him and you cannot force him.

You will have a long time to get your whole school right, but you have only now to get now right. Proceed humbly. Pray without ceasing.

If he does understand the concept of knowing God’s will, you can tell him that you are obeying God, and that sometimes that means changes that do not feel comfortable. There always is some other way that seems right to us. (Proverbs 14:12, 16:25)

Confess that you could not or would not hear God, before, which is how you both got to where you are now. Yes, confess. Apologize and ask for forgiveness. You, dear parent, have wasted a portion of the life of this child, who was at your mercy, leading him to learn to enjoy the world’s ways; you have seen the coming consequences; and you have repented. Now you must woo a child of the world to see the light of God’s glorious way for His people. Your humble, repeated apology will help him see that the old way was wrong and that when he longs for it, he too is wrong. Do not expect him to see it at first, but do tell him, often, how sorry you are and do not merely tell him. Show him. Make amends, somehow. Often.

More tomorrow.

Free Spa Day!

Here’s how to get yourself a free spa day, local to you, wherever you live.

Take the money you would have spent on paying a spa and use it to buy a really good push mower.
Crank ‘er up on a warm, steamy day, like today.
Go at it for at least a half hour.

Here’s what all is included in this package:

Aerobic workout, coupled with weight training.
Tanning session that’s safer than using a tanning bed.
Ozone-treated sauna session.
Cool shower. (Well, I assume you’ll go for that, just inside the door, right?)

Some precautions:

If you burn easily, or if it’s your first-ever venture into the great outdoors for any length of time, use sunscreen.
Wear a broad-brimmed straw hat, preferably one with vents in the crown. If your hands are tender, you might want to wear gloves, also.
Wet a small towel, such as a hand towel, somewhat drippy, and double it, lengthwise, over the back of your neck. Wear this the entire time you are outdoors, as a sort of coolant.
Take breaks every half hour. These breaks can include swapping out the washer/dryer, because you love multi-tasking. These breaks must include being in from the heat and using a fan to cool off a bit, drinking a huge glass of water that is not too icy, and resting in a seated position.
You may want to limit how much you do the first time out, depending on your age, sun-sensitivity, and tolerance to exercise. Check up on all that are appropriate from this list: pulse, blood pressure, blood sugar, even temperature, if you’re not sure.

That’s it. It is such a great workout! Have FUN!

Home School, Inspiring, Scripture, Who's the mom here?, Wisdom

Click “Undo”

Posted on June 24, 2013December 3, 2015 by Katharine

Train up a child in the way he should go and when he is old he will not depart from it.

(Proverbs 22:6)

Now you’ve done it:

You have finally brought your baby (who happens to be fourteen years old!) home to live happily ever after with you.

You have planned and dreamed and now you are so excited.

The trouble is that now you do not know what to do with this child you hardly recognize and you have to deal with the years he has spent away from his loving home.

Is that how it is for you? How do I know? We have been there, is how. Because the laws in our state had not always protected home schooling, our oldest had spent six years in the public system and nearly two in a similar private system. He had much to unlearn, since children can acquire many ideas we do not want them to learn, and miss the important things.

Why do they pick up things we do not desire? It is because we have not been bringing them up in the ways they should go, according to God’s command. I can say that because if our children have been in any type of collective institution, then we have not been bringing them up much AT ALL.

Someone else has.

We only greeted them as they passed through our lives, doing the bidding of those who were bringing them up. It is so sad and so wrong that the wisest man ever, Solomon, himself, made a special judgment regarding such things. He knew that the real parent would really care. (1 Kings 3) Maybe that is one reason God commanded us to bring them up, not to send them away to someone else. The assumption is that we would truly care.

If we have missed this mark until now, what do we do?

How do we make it right?

Where do we start?

The first step is already done: Bringing your child home is the first step.

Something inside you is waking up and beginning to commit to caring for him more. You have made a good start, already, and do not forget it, because many would like to make you think that this excellent start is really the start of all your problems.

Actually, you already had problems; you are just now beginning to see them. Finding and facing the problems is a great first step.

More tomorrow.

As a farmer waits for growth and ripening, so we must wait for progress in our lives.

Home School, Inspiring, Wisdom

Overheard – Patience in Affliction

Posted on May 27, 2013January 12, 2018 by Katharine

Be patient, then, brothers, until the Lord’s coming. See how the farmer waits for the land to yield its valuable crop and how patient he is for the autumn and spring rains. You too, be patient and stand firm, because the Lord’s coming is near. James 5:7b-8

Faking patience. Our own thinking tells us, of course, the lack of affliction causes us to act patient.

That is true.

And as long as all we are concerned with is acting the part, a lack of affliction will suffice.

True patience. The Word of God has a different take on it.

God says we need affliction, troubles, problems, even suffering, in order to learn true patience.

Fake patience will evaporate in any trial. And trials will come.

You know it, too: No pain, no gain, right?

James uses the farmer to illustrate the necessity of waiting and the reward for patience.

When a farmer plants his seeds, he knows that he will have to work and wait before he will see the fruit of his labor. First he tills the ground. Then he plants seed and prays for rain. In a few days he sees something coming up through the ground.

What would you think of a farmer who harvested his crop after those few days’ growth? Would he have anything worth eating or selling?

No, he needs to wait more, be patient more. He wants a strong, mature crop. That takes time. He has to work—tilling, weeding, irrigating—and wait until the process is complete. If he harvests too early, he will ruin it.

Parents must be patient too.

The first nine months seem to go forever. It’s a difficult wait, but a good chance to do the work of accumulating baby supplies. The next few hours of working and waiting for delivery to be over can seem like forever, too. We do warp time, don’t we!

But immediately after that all waiting is over, right? Wrong.

It’s time for a different time warp.

Parents work for years, caring for a child and instilling in him the training, discipline and encouragement he needs to mature enough to survive on his own.

Sometimes it seems like one step forward and two steps back. After all, they DO say we spend two years teaching a child to walk and talk, and the rest of their lives teaching them to sit down and hush. Heh heh.

It’s that way for every parent. Do not think for one minute that if you ditch your child, you will relieve yourself of the waiting, of the work of learning patience. You don’t really know patience unless you’ve waited for a prodigal.

Yes, child-rearing takes patience. In the same way, our Father is patiently training, disciplining, encouraging, and maturing us—through our afflictions—to be more like Jesus.

Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything. James 1:4

As we anticipate the rewards of patience, we can endure whatever happens in our lives. We can cope when we remember that heaven is forever and earth is passing. When the ground is shaking all around us and we are tempted to despair, we know God loves us and is with us. We can be patient because we know Jesus will come again and all bad things in life will finally be set right.

We do not merit any blessing from God, regardless of our personal right-doings. All blessings come from God’s mercy, and without God’s mercy and compassion toward us, we would be at Satan’s pleasure all the time and life on earth would be like Hell.

As it clearly is, for some people.

Same for our children. We love them and show them compassion, supplying their every need, for no reason other than our loving mercy. When we do not, their lives are like hell.

Never forget that.

If we want the blessing of whole adult offspring, we must humble ourselves and patiently endure the working and waiting.

The masses…

Most people today are characterized by impatience and love of ease. They are motivated by immediate and shallow rewards. They seem unwilling to work and wait. They are lured by lottery, credit card debt, and get-rich-quick schemes. They look to preachers who will feed this attitude, teaching Godliness as a means of gain. They have itching ears.

Quitting seems easier.

We should work and wait for the autumn rains. Really.

Don’t quit.

Especially do not quit on your family.

Home School, Inspiring, Pre-schoolers, Scripture, Wisdom

Overheard: Filling Your Bucket

Posted on May 22, 2013May 22, 2013 by Katharine

The preacher said:

Let’s think about a bucket, some rocks, and some sand.

Let’s say the rocks illustrate our priorities, our bucket list, and the bucket represents our life. The sand represents all of the other things in life that we have to do.

What happens if we put the sand in the bucket first?

We cannot fit all the rocks in, can we?

Our priorities find themselves crowded out.

However, if we put the rocks in the bucket first, the sand sifts around the rocks. They fill in the cracks or the time we have left after our priorities are accomplished.

Let’s apply that to our “how-to” ideas about home schooling, shall we?

Our priority must be that each human being on this earth should learn to read. Why? Because of Habakkuk 2:2 “[…]the Lord replied: ‘Write down the revelation and make it plain on tablets so that whoever reads it may run with it. […]’”

It is recorded forever in the Word of God, that He expects reading to happen. The very fact that He inspired men to write to us, logically leads to His expectations that we read.

Learning to read does not always happen in some educational settings. The child who is slow to read might never learn in some settings.

We, however, in our own homes, have the privilege of customizing the curriculum to fit the child who needs his schoolwork to come at him from a unique angle. We can drill one phonic concept for two days, if needed. We can read while pointing to allow “sight reading” to materialize. We can try glare management, page masking, and many other techniques, at will. No matter how good a teacher might be, she can hardly do this when she is dealing with 20 new readers at once, can she?

So we prioritize reading.

As the student ages, the obvious may surface, that the child is unable to learn to read. “Unable” is not the same as slow. After a couple of years, if reading is not happening at all, no matter what, then it is time to dump the bucket out and rearrange priorities. The new priority is to make sure literate content reaches this child’s mind through whatever means it takes.

Any writing can be found or created in the audio format.

It becomes the teacher’s duty, then, to provide this input. Although this is a big job, it is not too difficult for one mom with one child, but imagine a teacher of 20 handling it. It’s unfair to her, right?She wants a life, right? But you can do it. In fact, these helps become your priority: They are your life. So at this age, we insert any learning that is age-appropriate, especially Bible, math, and science, always in the audio format. Often, this is how our greatest minds have emerged to benefit mankind. Often, those not programmed to read well, find far more capacity in other disciplines than a good reader does. Although we never stop trying to impress reading skills upon our students, and although they may learn to read as adults, we insist they learn the essentials through whatever means necessary, always looking for that one thing that will be the spark for your own child’s chance at brilliance.

Make a list. Prioritize the big rocks to go into the bucket first.

Yes, you can make a child live happily ever after. That’s a good goal for a life, don’t you think?

Homemaking, Photos, Womanhood

Weekly Photo Challenge: Pattern

Posted on May 10, 2013May 10, 2013 by Katharine

This is the table arrangement for a wedding I helped cater not so very long ago.

The task, here, was to seat 30 for the rehearsal dinner, in a rather smaller dining area, while the bride’s helpers prepared the larger dining area for the reception the following day.

I was totally pleased with how it turned out. The wedding colors were brown and yellow and I love how the walls cooperated with this plan. The centerpieces are simple tissue paper flowers, homemade, but exuberant and joyful. The entire theme of the wedding was whimsical and fun, so these fit in with all the rest of the laughter.

In fact, the entire setting seemed to fit the pattern for this wedding: relaxed, inexpensive, whimsical, inviting, joyful, and at the same time, calm. The symmetry I think helped to anchor all that explosion of yellow.

We began with little idea of how it would work, although we had measured the room, and figured the dynamics several times.

I think it worked.

Believe it or not!, Inspiring, Scripture, Wisdom

Overheard: Forgive!

Posted on April 29, 2013 by Katharine

The preacher said:

Forgiveness is not a feeling.

What an amazing statement. How often we get hung up, seemingly crippled about forgiveness, thinking we cannot do it because we do not feel it!

And how liberating to realize it is not a feeling!

No, forgiveness is a command.

We must forgive, just as we must honor property rights. I don’t always FEEL LIKE allowing my neighbor to keep his lovely flowers, but I must leave them in his yard. Digging them up is stealing.

I also do not always feel like forgiving, but I must. Holding someone in unforgiveness is sin, just as theft is.

For insight on how to forgive, look here.