If you know me, then you know that I like to have a plan! I need to be able to see where I’m going before I start heading there. As a crafty person, I never take on a project without having a purpose for it in the end. (Some people like to craft or make things “just because” but I’ve never been able to do that.) Maybe this is why cooking appeals to me so much–I can visualize the outcome. I always know exactly what I want to serve and I have fun making it happen. And perhaps this is why homeschooling is so scary. I don’t know how long we’ll do it for, God hasn’t shown me the long-term picture yet. He is teaching me to trust Him and let Him lead completely which is not easy for this over-planner!
So my “plan” when starting our fruit of the Spirit unit was to do a trait a week. 9 weeks certainly seemed long enough for a unit like this! It’s not easy to balance our regular curriculum with this supplement, plus everything else we have going on in life! Well, in week number 5 we hit a snag. Things just caught up with us and I had to decide whether or not to rush through KINDNESS to the point of practically skipping it, or make it run into 2 weeks. The Lord is doing a work in me, friends, because it wasn’t as hard as usual to step back, slow it down, and throw the “plan” out the window. (Okay, so adding a week isn’t exactly throwing the plan out the window, but for someone like me, it feels pretty close!) So kindness took 2 weeks and we did a little review of our fruits up to this point.
Our fruit was orange and I’m not sure what the correlation is, but the good thing is that with young kids, it doesn’t matter! Neither one asked me “why” an orange stood for kindness. They just accepted it and asked when they would get their orange-flavored chapstick and scented marker. (Ok, I may be losing them a little to the glimmer of the “gifts” rather than the point of these lessons…) 😦
Colossians 3:12 basically says to put on kindness like you put on your clothes. Made me think about doing an armor of God unit at some point… in the distant future. 😉 So Abby and Noah flipped through magazines looking for pictures of clothes to glue to our KINDNESS poster. Then I hung it on the wall by their bureau as a reminder when they’re getting dressed every morning to “put on kindness.” For our Bible story, I read the story of Ruth and the kindness she showed Naomi, which was returned to her by Boaz. Then we made a list of the ways we can show kindness to the people around us. I like to try to name actual people in our lives and real-life scenarios when we do this. Then we try to remember when we’re about to enter that scenario. For instance, before dropping them off at a friend’s house, I’ll ask, “What if your friend doesn’t want to play the same thing that you want to play? How can you still show kindness?” (Hmm… what if your friend didn’t vote for the same person you voted for? How can you still show kindness??? Not sure why that question just popped into my head!) 😉
There’s a Veggie Tales video called “Lyle, the Kindly Viking” which we watched (along with about 2-3 other Veggie Tales that night). I had hopes of making orange-cranberry scones but that didn’t happen. Instead, we ate oranges for snacks several times and just kept talking about ways to show kindness and even role-played using kind words (maybe another activity for some adults in light of recent events?). We made a card for a sick family member and practiced other little “kind” things. This whole unit has been filled with “little” things we do in an attempt to drive home what it means to live out the fruit of the Spirit. I’m not naive enough to believe that in the end, I’m going to turn out a completely changed 5 year old and 3 year old. But I do believe I’m planting seeds and can only pray that God takes it from here…
So what kind thing have you done or said today? 😉
Here are some tasty recipes from Saturday:
This recipe is tried and true in the Dattolo house. I’ve made it for special occasions for years and it’s super easy! It makes a lot, though, so only make it if you really want leftovers (it reheats nicely, almost better the next day) or are feeding a crowd. Eggs, sausage, bread, cheese, leafy greens… what a great combo!
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. 🙂
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!
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!).
I chopped up my herbs (mint and dill are strong herbs, so I used a little less of those than the basil and parsley, but overall my quantities were pretty uniform). I sliced the cucumbers and tore the lettuce and arugula. I tossed my greens into a glass bowl and crumbled in about 2 oz of feta cheese. I drizzled over a little extra virgin olive oil and instead of distilled white vinegar, I chose champagne vinegar (basically white wine vinegar) and sprinkled in some salt and pepper.
Mixed everything together, and this made a perfect burst of freshness alongside our creamy 
Raising Little Seekers 