Jodilightful!

I love my life and find joy in mothering by…

Having fun with my kids!

I don’t know about your kids, but my kids are *totally* nuts.  They’re crazy! Some days, the crazy is hilarious and I embrace it and enjoy it.  Other days the crazy just makes me… well, crazy.  I’m slowly beginning to realize that it isn’t the craziness that varies from day to day, but the way that I handle it that makes all the difference.

My girls have incredible imaginations, and they could play dress-up or role-play with stuffed animals all day long.  Sometimes they even want me to play a character.  Sometimes… I’m not that into it.

But one thing that I’m beginning to see as something of a golden rule of parenting (I believe I stole it from this lovely family) is this: say yes to your kids whenever you can!

Now let me clarify what I am saying (or rather, what I am not saying).  I do not mean that you should never say no to your kids.  I say no to my kids *a lot*, and I think it is absolutely necessary and right to set firm boundaries where safety or obedience issues are concerned.  But because I want it to really mean something when I say  ”No, you may not go stand on the roof of the playhouse outside in your panties” or “No, you may not jump from the coffee table onto the sofa because you’re pretending it’s a swimming pool”, I want them to have confidence that I will say yes whenever I possibly can.

So while there may be a dozen reasons why I *want* to say no to the question, “Mommy, may you please empty the laundry basket so we can throw guysies into it?”  (A makeshift basketball game we once played as part of our pre-K homeschooling), I try to pause just for a minute to consider whether I have a *good* reason to say no.  On a good day, my answer will be, “Sure, as long as you clean up when you’re done.”

Sometimes it’s hard for me, as a grown-up, to spot the difference between behavior that is in need of correcting, and behavior that is a healthy expression of childlike creativity and fun.  When put on the spot, I can be too quick to assume the former.

If I find I’m having a day filled with more correcting than enjoying my kids, it may be because I’ve been forgetting this bit of advice from Ephesians 6:4:

“do not exasperate your children; ”

When I, for my own selfish purposes, refuse their every request  for fun and attention, they know it, and it hurts.  When, on the other hand, I indulge some of their harmless ideas for a bit of silly time or for an activity that might not be my first choice, they feel loved and appreciated.  And the kicker is: they behave better for it!

Of course there are days when this is less possible than others, and then we all have to make do with finding the fun in whatever situations we find ourselves in (I’m still looking for a fun angle on the Post Office that they’ll buy, if anyone has one!)  As a rule though, laughing together, and maybe even being just a little bit silly, improves any situation dramatically.

It occurs to me that I haven’t really said much about our homeschooling adventure since this post before we had even started.  The short version of the update is: we loved it, and we’re doing it again this year.  Pippa’s kindergarten curriculum arrived this week and we’re starting school on Monday.

I had been viewing Pre-K as a trial period, after all, many children don’t do any formal schooling at all before kindergarten, some even later.  How much damage could I do?

As I look back on our trial year and assess, I am amazed at the year we’ve had.  At the beginning of the year, Pippa really had zero interest in or patience for coloring.  Her early perception workbook exercises were scribbled and hurried, usually just in one color.  By the end of the year she was staying in the lines, carefully choosing her colors to be accurate and attractive, and more importantly she was *enjoying* it!

This same attention to detail and pride in workmanship extends to her “writing”.  There was no official handwriting curriculum this year, but Pippa has always loved writing her letters, so at every opportunity she would write cards for friends or sign her name and her sisters’ on everything.  She can clearly write all of her capital letters now, though I know we’ll have a few bad habits to break as we start a more formal writing curriculum this year.

I was, at first, skeptical of Sonlight‘s wait-till-they’re-ready approach to teaching reading and writing, but I am so thankful now that we didn’t push these things this year.  After a year of just enjoying books together and writing only “for fun”, I can tell she is ripe and excited to learn to read and write now.  I feel all at once overwhelmed and incredibly privileged to be the one to get to teach her these things.

The Bible stories and other read-alouds were a joy.  We found so many opportunities to talk about them and continue learning from them throughout our days together.   At least once, Pippa told her Sunday school teacher how the story was going to end.  We quote from Milly-Molly-Mandy, The Twins, and other stories all the time and laugh together as we see similar situations arise in our day-to-day-lives.  (Billy Blunt and Milly-Molly-Mandy ate their lunch so early on their fishing expedition that when they rushed home for dinner, they found the family just finishing up their lunch – those crazy kids!)

Despite all this, it was with a little bit of sadness that Pippa first agreed to homeschool again this coming year.  Some of her friends are starting “real” kindergarten, and I know there was a part of her (and me!) that wondered what she might be missing out on.  We wanted to include her in the discussion, but recognized at the same time that it would be foolish as parents to let a 4-year-old have the final say in such a crucial decision.  We used a little bit of propaganda (Boy, we sure would miss you on Wednesdays at Grandmom’s and zoo days with our friends if you were in school…), and she conceded that maybe one more year at home would be okay.

All of that hesitancy vanished this week when our box of kindergarten supplies arrived.  Math manipulatives, science supplies, big kid workbooks… she can. not. wait. to start school!  She has already asked if she can do “the next  thing” (first grade is beyond her realm of experience) at home, too.  We were going to wait until after her birthday and Labor Day, but one of the beauties of homsechooling is its great flexibility.  We’re going to strike while the iron is hot and get stuck in this Monday, and I might be just as excited as she is.

Romilly should technically be two years behind, so I shouldn’t even start Pre-K with her until next year, but, well… she might just be doing some Kindergarten with us this year.  Yet another reason why homeschooling’s flexibility is a great bonus for our family.

(Jocelyn, I realize all the dresses you gave us were for Beatrix.  These two, on the other hand, had a harder time accepting that fact.)

For more Wordless Wednesday, click here.

A dear friend and I have been dialoguing recently by e-mail about the joys and difficulties of being at home with several little ones.  It’s such an intense stage of life: one one hand I want to soak up every moment with my girls while they are little, because I can already tell how quickly time slips away; yet on the other hand, I must constantly fight the temptation to live for the next nap, the next bedtime, the next break.  The pace can be brutal, but the rewards are rich and many.  It’s an interesting place to be.

My friend suggested I do a series about why I love my life and how I find joy in mothering (mothering joy… MoJo… get it?  That part was totally my idea!) Fabulous idea, I thought, not least because it will force me to flex my blogging muscle more than just a weekly Wordless Wednesday!

Mondays seemed like a good time to focus my heart and mind on finding joy in the week lying ahead, plus, you know, it starts with M.  So here we are!

To start from the very beginning (a very good place to start…), I love my life and find joy by…

Remembering How I Got Here

Becoming a mother, of course, all began with a boy and a girl falling in love.  If I lose myself in a moment thinking about this, I find I wake up back to my real life feeling just a little bit warm and fuzzy to see where I am today.

Moms of little ones, try it with me: take yourself back to when it was all new.  You’re crazy about this guy.  Is it too soon to start thinking he might be the one?  Yes, probably so, but you can’t help it.  You look into his eyes and you wonder if he just *might* be the one that will someday be the father of your children.  You hope so, but who knows?  Anything could happen… it’s all such a long way off.

Now WAKE UP!  You’re here!  You are living your fairytale, and it’s a dream come true.  It may not be quite how you imagined it would be, but it is amazing what God has done in your lives to bring you to where you are now.  Celebrate the fact that you are spending your days with the incredible little beings that flowed out of your love for each other!  Isn’t it marvelous?

It’s all too easy once little ones arrive on the scene to forget who your true love is, but I’m slowly learning that if I keep my focus first on God, then on my marriage, the mothering part ends up being a much easier and more joyful experience.

Titus 2:3b-5 (ESV) says this of the older women of the church (emphasis mine):

They are to teach what is good, and so train the young women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind, and submissive to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be reviled.

Do you know what this means for us younger women? That we need to learn to love our husbands (and probably to submit to them as well, but that’s a topic for another post)!  I am so guilty sometimes of putting the girls before Trevor.  It’s easily done, after all, he can do a lot more for himself!  But there are two things that I know I can do each day to be a help to him: make his lunch for work, and send him an e-mail just to say hi and chat about our days while he’s there.  These are simple things he has told me really mean a lot to him, and yet I still manage to neglect one or both of them several times a week.

Becoming a student of my husband and learning to love him better serves my family in so many ways.  Not only am I serving him in the most direct sense, but I am giving my children a sense of security while modeling to them what a Godly relationship should look like.  It’s totally win-win.

So, as is always the case when I set out to give words of wisdom here, I have ended up preaching to myself more than anyone else.  Tip number one for having joy in your days while mothering?  Remember how you got here, and love on the one who made you a mother!

I’m not in the habit of posting (or watching, for that matter) Saturday Night Live videos, but I came across this one and found it too true and too funny to pass up.  It speaks for itself, and I can really add nothing to it.  Enjoy!

(Non-US readers, sorry!  It’s only streamable from the US.  You can click here to watch a mock-up version on YouTube from the identical script, but it’s just not that funny without Steve Martin.)

So, we made the *slight* error in judgment of telling the girls on our way to church a couple weeks ago (that is, our church in Scotland that we hadn’t been to for three years) that it was Romilly’s “half birthday” and she was “three and a half today”.  Two hours later we collected her with a birthday card in hand and a God-loves-me pencil as a gift.  Apparently Pippa saw another child receiving a birthday card and alerted the teachers that it was also her sister’s birthday.  There were some tears afterwards when Pippa realized that half birthdays aren’t usually acknowledged with such fanfare, and maybe just a little bit because it wasn’t *her* half birthday.

For more Worldess Wednesday, click here.

Did you miss me?  We have just returned from two weeks in bonnie Scotland, and I’d say I spent about a week of it trying to figure out how on earth I was going to begin to adequately blog it when we got back.

I considered posting my top ten photos, but it turned out I had more like a top one hundred.

I thought about proposing a new reality TV show called Extreme Parenting.  It would have featured a family with four children under five.  The youngest still nursing, and the second youngest right in the middle of potty training.  Each episode this family would be placed in a different situation.  Episode one,  say, on a seven-hour flight following a four-hour-delay in the airport.  Then on a hike up an 823-ft hill with no bathrooms anywhere in sight.   Or on a one-hour boat ride with a tour guide and almost no other children on board (oh, and also no bathroom).  Sprinkle in a couple of fancyish restaurants for good meausre.  And did I mention there would be no naps at all and bedtime about an hour later than usual each night?  It would not have been a stretch, I kid you not.

But despite (or maybe, in part, because of) the rigorous pace, it was just the perfect holiday.  Just perfect.  We cannot begin to express our gratitude to Trevor’s parents and family for making this trip happen (and to my mom, for watching our dog and for driving to the airport twice!)  It was very possibly the loveliest two weeks of my life.  I could think of no other way to share with you the richness of time spent family and friends and the beauty of God’s world that we saw than to show you.

So grab a cup of tea and join me for an eight-minute whirlwind tour of our past two weeks.  I apologize for the length, but if a picture really is worth a thousand words, and I’m about to show you over a hundred of them… well, I figure I’m actually saving you time, right?

Scotland 2009