(And All My) Work Be Praise

We're trying a new approach to cleaning the house this year. Three weeks in, I have to say, I think I like it. It has some downsides, which I'll get to in a minute. The simple details: we do school Monday-Thursday, so Friday morning is "cleaning day." I wrote down every chore I could think of that 4- to 9-year-olds can do, each one on a popsicle stick, and popped them in a jar. After breakfast, they start picking jobs, and we keep going till it's done, about 30-40 minutes. (Many hands really do make light work!) Three boys and a knight with their popsicle sticks. While they attend to their chores, I hover in the kitchen, answering questions (which cloth do I use?) and cleaning things they can't reach. I also do the sweeping, because I'm never satisfied when any of them do it. Definitely Levi ought to be able to sweep efficiently by now, but . . . I'm allowed to keep a few things aside to assuage my perfectionism, right? Because I'm n...

We have a three-year-old in the house again! (Yes, that's an exclamation point, but it's terror as much as excitement. Three is so much fun and so much pain all at the same time.) Our family tradition: the birthday boy goes to pick out donuts with Daddy. We started the day the way we do all birthdays: donuts and presents. Randomly, it also included a discussion of Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates via speakerphone between Levi and my mom, and live footage of two astronauts doing extravehicular activity on the international space station. Now there's  a little peek into life in our house.  Blowing out his candle, tucked into a banana cream donut covered in powdered sugar with a dollop of strawberry jam. I should have taken an "after" picture of the mess. Donut remains, scattered birthday cards, NASA on the laptop . . .  While we have plenty of toys here, we discovered about a month ago that we don't have any little people or animals. N...

For reasons I cannot quite define, I have it in my head that dads have all the fun while moms do all the work. It's absolutely not true: my mom did a ton to make our childhood fun, and both my dad and my husband are super hard workers both at their jobs and at home. Yet the stereotype lives on in my head, and despite my best intentions, I've been living as if it's the truth. Don't get me wrong; I love my kids. I love laughing with them. I love reading and singing with them. I love that they play independently so well. Yep, there's the kicker. I enjoy watching them play happily, but I'm not usually all gung-ho about joining in. I enjoy doing school (for real, it's fun for me), but after that, I'm ready to check out and do my own thing while they do theirs. I don't feel responsible to entertain them all the time. I don't have any intention of dropping my other household duties every time they want to do something. They are a priority, but the...

If ever there was a year when I ought to have written a Christmas letter, this was it. In its place: a picture year-in-review. January Toby turned two within the cozy but getting-ever-smaller walls of our little rental house.  Unbeknownst to everyone else, I also got pregnant in January, which we announced in . . .  February Also in February, we found a suitable and very reasonably-priced house and left the aformentioned rental behind. The walls are much bigger here . . . as are the cupboards: Master bathroom closet, where at least four children could sleep comfortable. Moving actually isn't very fun at all. March We escaped for a long weekend to Lake Beauty Bible Camp with two other families, old friends from Isaac's seminary days. It was incredibly refreshing to relax, play games, worship (pictured below), and stay up late chatting with people we'd known for more than four months. We were treated by friends from church to o...