All Things Hold Together

Tomorrow is the first day of the new year. I don’t usually do resolutions, but this year I happen to have some life changes that I have been thinking about the last few days, so I thought I would write them out in my blog as a kind of accountability.

The first one is the obvious one I make every year and will continue to. I want to read through a different Bible translation every year. This year is the NIV. Last year, I hate to admit, was also the NIV and I didn’t finish it. This is the year!

Second, I am going to schedule time alone with God daily. No more letting life get in the way. This will certainly help me with number one, but more importantly, I need to focus my prayer life, too.

Third, I need to start exercising every day. This is not the typical “I need to lose weight” resolution. I do, but that’s not the reason for the resolution. I have three active boys to keep up with. Last summer, toward the end, I started exercising regularly and I could finally keep up with them, sort of. Summer will be here again before I know it and I don’t have a baby anymore as my excuse why I can’t do the activities they want to. Little E can keep up with them better than I can!

The last thing is my writing. I used to freelance write before I started homeschooling and I need to get back into daily writing. The first part is that I want to schedule daily blogging time. The second is that I want to start working on/finishing the books I have ideas for or have already in progress.

Not-So-Crafty Daddy bought me a flash drive for Christmas to keep my writing on so I can use either computer. (He’s so great.)

I hope you all have a happy and prosperous 2007!

I had a post a while back with a link to a primer on basic economic principles for kids, which you can find here.

I want to add to that this resource, which was posted on a local hs message board. It contains four online games that deal with investing, saving, and debt. The games are made by the “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” company. I do not agree with everything that guy says, but these games look pretty good. There is also a page for “Teachers” that contains additional classroom materials.

A good foundation in economics is so important for our children’s futures. Too many of us had to learn about debt and other important economic realities the hard way. But, I’m sure you already know that.

Hurry over to this post on Pass the Torch and leave a comment. For every comment (only one per blogger, per day) $1 will be donated to St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital, up to $500. They are only needing 15 more, so get over there!!

(Hat tip: Bringing Good Home)

(Important note added at the end.)

This year for Christmas, my husband got me a new iPod Shuffle.

I said that sometime I wanted to get an MP3 player to listen to podcasts on. When we saw a commercial for this one, I thought it was really cool and said that I wanted one. Meaning, I wanted one in my fantasy world where we are not a family of five struggling to get buy on one modest income. I did not mean that I wanted him to bust our budget by going out and getting me an $80 iPod.

So, when I opened it, I immediately felt guilty.

To make matters worse, his big gift was a Bible. A leather NASB/Amplified parallel Bible. So, I felt really guilty, like I should have gotten a Bible. Which is stupid since he is the one who bought my gift. If anything, I should have felt good about being a more responsible gift giver. But I felt really, really guilty.

A little while later, I decided to look online at what I could download for the iPod.

Then I decided I would open it.

Then - after four hours of figuring out why Windows would not let me install iTunes - I loaded some songs onto it.

Then I went into the iTunes store and downloaded “Living on the Edge with Chip Ingram,” “Enjoying Everyday Life” (Joyce Meyer), and “Focus on the Family.”

Then I realized that I don’t need to feel guilty. This was a gift from my husband to show me how much he appreciates everything I do for our family.

Plus, I have missed listening to Chip Ingram ever since we moved the computer out of our room and into the family area to monitor what the kids were doing online. It’s great to be able to listen to a message while making dinner.

And this thing is cool. Sleek, lightweight, small, great sound, clips anywhere. Very cool. And I’m not even a gadget person.

But best of all, I don’t feel guilty about it anymore. I happen to find it very useful to listen to podcasts during my free time, or while doing housework.

I also got a new Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book. That is by far my favorite cookbook, but mine was 10 years old and falling apart from almost daily use. It’s great to have a new one.

And the kids got me a chocolate melting and dipping set. I wonder if there was an ulterior motive there!

We had a great Christmas, over all. This year no family came over, so it was very mellow and relaxed. And fun.

Hopefully, you all had a good Christmas, too.

Important note: I want to emphasize that my guilty feelings are not a product of being a Christian. It is all me. I have always been this way (but I have not always been a Christian.) I don’t want my hang-ups to poorly represent Christ, so I thought I would add this note. If anything, I have learned to let go of my guilt - a lot of it - through the grace of God, but it is obviously something I am still working on. God doesn’t want me - or anyone - to feel guilty. Guilt is something Satan uses to keep us from being the person God created us to be.

What do you do while your sick kids are watching TV? Check out this week’s Carnival of Homeschooling.

This week’s host blog is one I have never read before called “What did you do in School Today?“.

I hope you are all enjoying your after-Christmas downtime - assuming that everyone does the same thing we do!

I am sorry that I did not get to post more kids Christmas crafts before Christmas. I have been so busy trying to keep three excited and wild boys busy this week. First, we had Big D’s 10th birthday on Sunday and then the pre-Christmas excitement. It has been a hectic week, to say the least.

I thought I would take a little time in between my Christmas baking to post some links and pictures.

Today, I am making peanut butter, peanut butter chip cookies for my sister’s boyfriend, brownies for my mother’s boyfriend, Oreo cookie bark for my mother’s boyfriend’s brother, and a chocolate cream pie (with homemade crust), pineapple upside-down cake, and rolls for our Christmas eve dinner at my mother’s house. That might sound like a lot, but I really enjoy baking.

This week, the kids and I made a lot of ornaments. Here are a few of my favorite.

This one comes from Martha Stewart. The instructions are here. There was a video, but I can’t find it right now.

It is made from strips of paper (or old Christmas cards) and brads (paper fasteners). I like it because you can make it as simple as construction paper and office brads,

or take it up a level with scrapbook paper and fancy fasteners, like these snowflakes that I found in the scrap booking section of the craft store.

We also made these ribbon candy ornaments, also found on Martha Stewart.

Here are the instructions. This one has a link to watch the video. This was easy enough for the 8- and 10-year-olds to do.

Here is one more ornament that the kids made. Simply take a styrofoam ball and wrap it with variegated Christmas-colored yarn. Embellishments, such as sequins and beads, can be added with straight pins. Tie a ribbon around and secure a bow at the top with a straight pin.

Have a merry Christmas!

I know this is really late, but I wanted to put a link up anyway, since Dana did such a great job.

This week’s carnival is over at Principled Discovery, which is found in my blogroll.

Enjoy!

This crafty mama is not feeling so well today, so you will have to wait for another Christmas crafts post. I just can’t get to it today.

To show my appreciation for you stopping by my little corner of the blogosphere, here are some links to some kid friendly ideas I found recently on the web.

Amazing Science Projects, from Kids (Martha Stewart).
Yarn Cards, from Kids.
Printable, customizable Veggie Tales and 3-2-1 Penguins gift tags, from Big Idea.
Veggie Tales Christmas printables, from Big Idea.
Design and print your own Jan Brett Christmas tree, from Jan Brett (This one does not work with Firefox).

I will get some more kids crafts posts up this weekend.

Here is an update on the post I did about Mississippi’s homeschool regulation. The paper that the article in the post came from - The Clarion-Ledger - now has an op-ed on the matter.

It opens:

HOMESCHOOLERS — those who teach their children at home - can boast of dozens of famous people as successes.

They include former presidents George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore F. Roosevelt, authors Mark Twain, George Bernard Shaw and C.S. Lewis, and other notables including Booker T. Washington, Benjamin Franklin and George Carnegie.

So far so good. Then it concluded with this gem:

The state should ensure that kids have a chance to learn. Not every child is a Washington, Twain or Carnegie.

I think it is extremely unfortunate that the paper chose to insult the homeschooled children instead of keeping their insults directed at the parents.

I know that not every kid had the same potential. I have three of them. I am aware that their potentials differ, but that is not the problem the paper has with homeschooling. The problem they have is with the possibility that deadbeat parents are using homeschooling as a cover for educational neglect. As such, they should refrain from insulting the children.

As I said in my previous post, investigate the parents when there is probable cause of neglect. Do not treat all homeschooling parent as guilty. That is not American. In this country, we are supposed to be innocent until the state proves guilt. Not the other way around.

The scenario quoted by the editorial is that of the parent who gets tired of dealing with the school and pulls the kid out to save the hassle. If the principal is convinced that a child was pulled out for that reason, with no intention by the parent to educate at home, then that could lead to a state investigation. There is no need to penalize all homeschoolers for a few bad parents.

My favorite line in the piece was this,

“More is learned in a classroom and school setting than A-B-Cs.”

Yes, that is true. In a classroom, children also learn about the latest pop culture trash, sex, drugs, bullying - how to do it and how to have it done to them, swear words, songs with dirty words in them, how to exclude other kids because they are not wearing cool shoes, and other socialization skills beneficial in the real world.

They also can learn how to sit still in a seat after they are finished with under-challenging busy work, how to stress out about grades as early as kindergarten, and the illuminating fact that teachers don’t always know the material they are teaching, even if they come equipped with a piece of paper that states they had pedagogical indoctrination.

Yes, more is learned in a classroom and school setting than A-B-Cs. That is often the reason many of us chose to homeschool.

We did not actually do any crafts today or yesterday (they painted instead), but I want to keep up with my craft-a-day posts, so I am going to cheat a little. Here are two fun looking crafts from Martha Stewart’s Kids website.

Craft 12: Tree place card

Craft 13: Yarn snowflake ornament

We will definitely be doing this one. They look really neat and fun to make.

I made a really cool snowflake out of a white pipe cleaner (chenille stem). I will post a picture and instructions (hopefully) tomorrow.