So I really wanted to go to the MFA today to do their morning homeschool art class. It’s only $9 per child, both Noah and Abby are eligible and would be in the same class, and it’s a whole hour and a half and includes a tour of the museum! And the accompanying adult is FREE! Talk about a great deal. Did I mention they do this almost every Friday, TWICE a day??? I wish we lived closer to Boston. I’d totally be there every Friday. But since this wasn’t something I had planned on, but rather stumbled upon this week and even though today they happened to be focusing on our particular art focus right now, we didn’t go. One thing I’m really trying to stick to during this homeschool journey is staying home at least one day every week. That means, not even going to the grocery store. It’s for all of our sanity. To have one day each week that we just. stay. in. Even going to the library with all three kids is more complicated than it sounds. So we all need just one day (if not more, depending on the week) where we just stay home and be. We play with play dough, play outside or go for a walk if the weather is nice and just hang out together. Today was that day. And yes, though I am a little disappointed that we didn’t go to the museum, I’m very grateful to be sitting on the couch in my yoga pants right now and feeling relaxed because we didn’t rush through anything today. We played some reading games, played with play dough, had snack and lunch when we wanted and talked about patience (which I’m sure I wouldn’t have had much of had we ventured into Boston).
Which brings me to the point of this post, PEACE and PATIENCE. I figured I’d lump them both in the same post since they both begin with “p” and I wanted to catch up. 😉 Last week we talked about peace and our corresponding fruit was peaches. (Not exactly in season, but it worked.) We read the story about Jesus calming the storm with the disciples in the boat a couple times and even acted it out. It’s fun to role play every now and then. Meaningful activities don’t always HAVE to be crafty and involve crayons, scissors, and glue. Yes, we do other things, too! 😉 What I really wanted the kids to pull away from the story and our week was that peace comes from God (Jesus). Once we talked about the source of peace and what it is, we read and memorized the second part of 1 Peter 3:11 which says, “Look for peace, and go after it.” To accompany this sentiment, we played “find the peach” and I hid all 5 peaches we had in the living room and the kids had to find them. I kept telling them to “look for peace and go after it.” We also had peach smoothies with lunch one day and them painted the peach pits the next day to look like jewels for necklaces. Daddy says he will drill holes in them so we can peace peach necklaces. 🙂
This week our fruit was PATIENCE. I usually introduce the fruit in the beginning of the week, maybe read a verse or two, and then we do more of our focus activities on Thursday or Friday of that week. This week our verse was from Proverbs: “Anyone who is patient has great understanding. But anyone who gets angry quickly shows how foolish he is.” Proverbs 14:29. I made a poster of the verse and put all of our names in it so it would become more personal. (Another idea from the blog I follow. She’s really awesome, so if you haven’t yet, check her out!) Our Bible story was the story of God’s covenant with Abraham and how long he had to wait to have the son God promised him! The fruit was kiwi–rough on the outside, but sweet on the inside. Kind of represents the contrast we find in our verse–the difference between being patient or getting angry quickly.
To practice patience, I had the kids try to remove as many of the little black kiwi seeds they could from a slice of kiwi. Can’t take credit for that idea, though, it comes directly from my good friend, Lindsey, who gave it to me when I told her I was lacking in the activity department for this week. Abby had the patience to remove 27 seeds with tweezers. Noah removed 14. Then they were done. haha! Not a whole lot of patience runs in this family. Daddy probably has the majority of it. Noah was quick to point out that Emmalyn is NOT patient at all, so I explained to him that since she’s a baby, she HAS to cry for things in order to get her needs met. I don’t know if he understood that, though. haha!
To come back around to our art lessons for the week, I had Abby work on a couple self-portraits so we would write about how patient and wise she is. This was a fun focus! Now I must go tend to my (apparently very impatient) 10-month-old who always seems to test MY patience right around dinnertime. 😉 Tonight we’re carving a pumpkin so I bet we’ll need a bit of patience for that activity, too! Peace and patience, peace and patience I bid to you, everyone!
Our 
I have to remind myself sometimes that what I’m doing with my kids now is planting seeds. I shouldn’t expect them to walk away from a mini-lesson or discussion completely changed. But I hope and pray that I’ve planted a little seed that will grow with them as they grow and learn. This means I can tell my kids that their joy should come from the Lord but that doesn’t mean that they’ll never get upset when a toy is taken or they don’t get their way (just as we adults don’t learn that quickly, either). Hopefully they’ll remember these lessons and discussions and I can build on them more easily as they get older. So we did make a list of the things that make us joyful and then talked about things that make us upset and how we can try to remember to find our joy in God and not in things.
After we read the verse a few times, I handed Abby and Noah each a red heart I had cut out of construction paper and told them to draw things they love on the heart. Noah drew Randy and I. Abby drew her bunk beds, Noah, Emmalyn, her friend, and a few other things. Then we talked about why we love these things which led to the questions “what is love” and “how do we show love.”
I LOVE my cast iron pans (a gift from my MIL)–cooking with them makes me feel like I’m living at a farmhouse or something. Do you know what I mean? haha
A good bowl of ooey, gooey homemade mac & cheese! (Which I happened to make during our “love” week for lunch since I knew my kids would drool over it and since we made Daddy a pie, it’s only fair that they got a special lunch, too!
I introduced the “unit” (verse/ Bible study–whatever you want to call it) by showing them the verse that I had written out on a poster board. I left each “fruit” in bubble letters so they can be colored in with the color chosen to represent that fruit. We talked about how trees bear fruit and recalled how last year we learned that Jesus is like our “tree” and we are the “branches” and if we have Him in our lives and hearts, we will bear fruit like listed in this scripture. I told them that each word would be represented by a real fruit and we were going to talk about them during the next several weeks. I made them each a paper with the real fruits drawn on them that they could paint. An idea I loved from the blog’s unit was using scented paint for the fruit–what better way to make things stick with our kids than to incorporate as many of their senses as possible?! So we painted with sugar-free flavored gelatin! It was really neat and they loved it! The next week we repeated the verse and focused on LOVE with our projects. I’ll save that for another post. 😉
So we had Abby’s 5th birthday party last weekend and it was a huge success. And although I posted pictures and did the whole Facebook/instagram thing with the cake and party pics, I almost didn’t and here’s why. For me (and maybe it’s just the social media circles I’m a part of) I always feel like kid birthday parties are such a source of tension between parents, or specifically moms. If you don’t throw big birthday parties for your kids, or make the cake yourself, it can be easy to feel like a failure (which is not my opinion, but I can see how social media helps people feel that way). So then to compensate, people say things like, “It’s pointless to give your kids a big party or a homemade cake because they won’t remember it anyway” or “I’m sick of all these moms posting their cakes or parties on facebook like they think they’re better than us or something” or “What a waste of money to do all that just for a kid’s birthday” or “You know your kid doesn’t love you more just because of a party, right?” Yep, I’ve seen or heard all these comments–not on my own photos, but in groups, on articles, in general reference to birthday parties for kids, and even in personal conversations (though not with friends–my friends rock!).
For the love of... 