Baby is 18 months now, so naturally it’s time to start planning and prepping for school right? As we begin to move closer to the two year old stage, people just expect we have full plans established on schooling, pre-schooling, saving for college, and getting our little genius ahead of all the other kids. Does he know his colors? Does he know his shapes? Can he count at all yet? You know it’s never to early to start working on his letters and spelling his name. Am I the only one that just wants everyone to chill the heck out?! And before I get another lecture on how I’m not a planner, let me just get it out there.. I’m a huge planner. I don’t take pride in it because there’s another thing you can call it…a control freak. I live my life trying to keep my planning in check. The reality is, God is in control, not me, and my planning typically robs God of credit, builds my anxiety, and prevents me from living humbly by faith in his perfect plan. So I try to have ideas not plans. We have established and idea of how we want to school, but ultimately our plan is God’s plan and we don’t know where he will take us. Just because we may not have definitive plans like everyone else, we still do care about our kids education. We have ideas. We aren’t flippant at all with it, but we’re definitely attacking it differently than the world. As we are apparently rounding the curve to preschool, I find my protective mama bear arms wrapping tighter and tighter around Danny’s sweet little childhood, and everything in me is bucking and fighting anything that may rob him of those precious quiet early years. Right now we’re in the early years where life is quiet. Not quiet in the sense of the sound, I mean he’s a 18 month old boy, let’s not be delusional, but quiet in the simplicity of life. We’re in the stage where we don’t have to do anything. No sports. No activities. No school. No have-to playdates. And he’s fine with it. He can be perfectly happy with a dryer ball and empty box, add in a roll of packing paper and you’ve made his day. These days won’t last. Someday he will need friends and we will have things going on. Those days will come so I’m not going to rush them. Someday I will look back and miss the days when all we have to do is build block towers on the rug or chase the chickens. I can cut off these precious years at two, put him in school and start drilling him on his numbers, but why push it? The gain of writing his name by three means we sacrificed something along the way. Am I willing to sacrifice his childhood to be ahead in kindergarten? Push him now so he can get more gold stars and smiley faces than little Johnny? Is it all really worth it in the long run? A year ago I didn’t have much of an opinion on when to start school. I figured we’d slowly ease into it as years went on, but as I am watching this overdrive in our culture to be “ahead,” to think you can’t be successful if you aren’t reading and speaking three languages by three, to push and push and push our kids until they are burnt out by five with no love of learning and shattered curiosity, I am fighting it all full force. Right now, we plan to not start school until Danny is 6. Gasp! Yeah, I know, we’ve gone completely insane. The kid loves learning, exploring, tinkering, and can sit and read books for 45 minutes. He’s fine. He goes to BSF twice a week, which is run better than any preschool I’ve seen, is developmentally appropriate, AND teaching him God’s word. That’s plenty. We count eggs every day. I draw and write with him and we read book after book after book. We play, explore, discuss, and learn together every day as we just live life. It is the joy of childhood. We walk through the woods and I tell him the names of the birds and point our their different calls. He loves mimicking the chickadees and woodpeckers. We dig in the dirt, plant flowers, and have our veggies already growing. He picks the herbs and sniffs them and we talk about the types of flowers and colors, while he stuffs them into his pockets. By fall he will know the different fruits and veggies, how to water them, how to pick them, and what they taste like. He’s learning so much. We don’t need flashcards and worksheets, or classes, because this is his short precious time to just explore life. He’s learning, always learning. We forget to give kids credit for that. In this time of extraordinary pressure, educational and social, perhaps a mother’s first duty to her children is to secure for them a quiet growing time, a full six years of passive receptive life, the waking part of it spent for the most part out in the fresh air. Charlotte Mason {Vol. 1, p. 44} So yes, my chid will not start kindergarten at four knowing all his numbers and letters, but in the scheme of life does that really matter? Yes he needs to learn to read and write, but there’s no research showing that kids who learn at 6 are at any great disadvantage over the kids who learned at 4. Hopefully as we continue to encourage and build his curiosity he will naturally take an interest in learning his numbers and letters, but I’d rather wait and have a natural interest than burn him out. Just because there isn’t a great way to measure his learning doesn’t mean it isn’t happening right now, and if I want measure and base my success as a mother/educator on his performance, then I should just put him in school. The resourcefulness which will enable a family of children to invent their own games and occupations through the length of a summer’s day is worth more in after life than a good deal of knowledge about cubes and hexagons, and this comes, not of continual intervention on the mother’s part, but of much masterly inactivity. Charlotte Mason {Vol. 1, p. 193} I know we’re the weird ones, but I’m sure there are other likeminded moms out there, wondering if they too are crazy. It would be well if we all persons in authority, parents and all who act for parents, could make up our minds that there is no sort of knowledge to be got in these early years so valuable to children as that which they get for themselves of the world they live in. Let them once get touch with Nature, and a habit is formed which will be a source of delight through life. We were all meant to be naturalists, each in his degree, and it is inexcusable to live in a world so full of the marvels of plant and animal life and to care for none of these things. Charlotte Mason {Vol. 1, p. 61}
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May 15, 2017 After missing it every time it came up, We finally dedicated Danny at church on Mother’s day this year. He is truly and gift from God and such a wonderful blessing in our lives. We’ve had his verse picked for him way before he was born. I stumbled across it when I was pregnant and it is my prayer that it becomes true in his life. When I read it two years ago, I couldn’t come up with a better way to express how I want Christ and the word of God to be in the hearts of my children. I’ve never heard anyone else use it and thought it might be weird to others, since it didn’t fall into the normal verses people pick, but it was so clear that this was to be my prayer for my children. As his dedication day approached, I happened to mention to my mom that we picked an abnormal passage in Ephesians three and she knew exactly which one. I guess years ago that was the very same set of verses she picked for our family and has prayed them over us throughout out lives. Even though she never told me about it until now, God has been instilling these truths in my life to the point that 25 years later I settled on the same passage for my baby. Is his word living and active or what?! I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power though his spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have the power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge – that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen. Ephesians 3:16-21 I have been struggling with continuing the blog because I didn’t want this to be the first post back, however I can’t pretend it’s not apart of our lives and I don’t ever want to. So this is not a happy post, but if I’m not willing to be honest about when life completely sucks, I am also not opening the door for God to be glorified. Despite all the pain and sorrow, I have seen God’s merciful love through it all. Many friends and family already know where this is going and for some the ache may be to much. Don’t feel bad to skip past. I don’t mind and won’t even know if you do. Right before I left for Florida in March we found out we were pregnant again. We were surprised and overjoyed with the news and this time I was excited. A little over a month later we found out I miscarried. To say its been a rough several weeks feels like a callous understatement. That little baby brought us so much excitement and joy even if it was only a short period of time. I know this isn’t the way we are expected to deal with it all. Its not something people want you to talk about, but it’s our baby and will always be, and I’m not going to pretend it never existed. I remember hearing a pastor say that people love to say God is good when things go wrong, but when someone can still say it in the middle of a storm, you know they really believe it. I used to wonder would I believe it? Could I truly say that in a trial? In my past the answer was a definite “NO!” But now, for the first time I can. I don’t like what happened, I hate it with everything in me, but yet, God is still good, and I find it encouraging that I can say that. I don’t like what God did. If I could change it I would. However, I can see his sovereign hand and love through it all. So where’s God through all this? The morning of April 10 I heard a heartbeat, by that night it was gone. Although we didn’t have an ultrasound until two days later, I now understand why I could no longer find it. In my mind that was the day we actually lost the baby, even though it was confirmed two days later. April 10, was the date 16 years ago when my grandpa died. The very best day of his life was the day he began the rest of eternity in the presence of Christ, and God graciously picked the same day for my baby. God could have picked any day. He was the one that reminded me I had a doppler and to check for a heartbeat that morning. He was the one that put it on my mind to do it again that night. He graciously had my baby get to meet him exactly 16 years after my grandpa. And just like all those years ago, Easter was the following Sunday. It was a reminder that my baby wasn’t alone and was completely loved. Not only is my baby in the presence of God but also getting to meet all those who have gone before. I like to think that just maybe, my baby got to meet our Creator and Lord holding the hand of my grandfather.
Danny is still a big brother and we still have two babies, but we are heartbroken to not get to know all that entails this side of eternity. I have the peace that my baby is joyously dancing through the streets of heaven, never to knowing the pain of this world, and living life in the perfect glory of God. But here we just are left to grieve the loss and missing what will never be. |
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