(And All My) Work Be Praise

A picture is worth a thousand words, they say. This one covers at least that many for me. See, this is the first time Silas has played the piano in almost four months. He's first and foremost a violinist, quite talented for seven years old, if I do say so myself. But he's also a gifted musician in general. I've shared his compositions on Facebook in the past. He taught himself to read music and understands musical patterns intuitively. For most of 2019, he'd been spending hours at the piano, figuring out music. It was amazing. Recent violin recital. But one evening four months ago, life was crazy. This is not an extraordinary event. I have six children. The boys are not quiet, especially right after dinner when they run laps around the first floor and at least one of them is playing the piano. Four months ago, Tessa was still failing to thrive, and I was spending some eight hours a day on the couch or in the rocking chair, nursing and pumping and n...

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...

I am in the beginning stages of creatinv systems to help my kids be more independently responsible. With so many little people underfoot, I'm finding it very difficult to check up on kids in a timely fashion to make sure they've completed assigned jobs. I don't have an answer for that yet (except, perhaps, just give everyone another year to get older before I stress out over it), but I do have one  system in place for Levi that seems to be working. Several years ago, I followed a blog called Life as Mom . (I don't regularly read blogs anymore, except for this one .) I vaguely remembered her posting about their " morning high five " -- five chores to be completed before their homeschooling day began.Without even referring to the original blog to see what hers contained, I made Levi his own "morning high five" chart with the five responsibilities he needs to take care of before coming downstairs in the morning. Nothing fancy: just the two minute...

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...

My dear Levi, Meeting the Mississippi River for the first time at age 6. This has been an incredible year for you. Together we set goals, some driven by me, some by you, and you achieved them all. You finished elementary school math. You read the entire Bible in exactly one year (and we celebrated with rainbow pancakes at Perkins). You completed Mensa's Excellence in Reading K-3rd grade reading list, plus a host of other classics besides. Over the course of three months in the spring, you made a list of twenty piano pieces you could play from memory at a moment's notice. Then your piano teacher moved away, and you spent the next two weeks transposing The Happy Farmer into every key imaginable, major and minor. You have made individual friends here in Minnesota, something we hadn't quite managed in Ohio, where all of our time with friends was done as as a family. You learned cursive and got your own library card and proved yourself a worthy opponent in both  Settlers...

Fact: we have probably watched more TV in the past nine months than in my children's entire lifetime up to this point. Once upon a time, my littles-who-are-now-the-bigs watched one episode of Daniel Tiger (that's 22 minutes on Netflix) once a week. Once a week! Man, I had it together back then. Well, then third child came along, and we settled into one episode of Daniel Tiger every day while Mommy made lunch (and took a breather from the morning). Then , we discovered that all of the Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood seasons are on Amazon Prime, and they started watching a show in the afternoon sometimes, too. Not every day, maybe, but more weekdays than not. This is the period of time in which I felt guilty over screen time, but 1) not enough to cut back, and 2) not enough to feel judge-y of other parents whose kids watched TV. So here we are now. It turns out that having four kids under seven years old, and moving twelve hours away from home, and being pregnant again, altogeth...

I have no doubt that nearly everyone reading this is just as heavily involved in character building their little ones as I am. Seems like a never-ending battle, doesn't it? No sooner do you get them finally  putting away their shoes the first time you ask than they're grabbing toys from a sibling. You eventually negotiate a semi-lasting peace, and then they're going crazy at the dinner table. You get everyone pleasantly through meal time and then you completely lose patience at bedtime. Oh wait -- that's my character, not theirs. Well, the same principles hold. My firstborn son is, I suspect, pretty similar to most firstborn children (though certainly not all, I've discovered). He's generally pretty compliant, when it comes right down to it, but MAN, does that kid like to argue his point of view. I find myself sucked into dialogue when I know -- and he knows! -- he just needs to obey, and quickly. Since this usually isn't direct defiance, I forget, somet...

We're having a rough time with obedience in our house these days. I'm not sure if it's the new baby, or the endless hours trapped inside by snow and cold, or everyone hitting a developmental issue at the same time, or all of the above. Whatever the case, my two big boys and myself have all been a mess of frustration and yelling and overall grumpiness. Isaac and I have talked once or twice in the past week about rewarding positive behavior, but I have to be honest: the thought of keeping track of their good decisions on top of their bad decisions seemed totally overwhelming to me. Never mind that my main goal in mothering these little sheep should be, well, the shepherding of their souls, following through on yet another thing seemed impossible. But mothering is sort of about doing the impossible, you know? And after yesterday, something  had to be done. So this morning, when Levi went to put his shoes on the first time I asked, without any whining or complaint, I took s...

You're probably wondering where my usual Friday-or-Saturday school week recap is. The answer is simple: we didn't do any preschool* last week. We're skipping most of this week, too. Why? Because I had other things to do. Because I'm tired. Because we hit a patch of life in which specific and immediate discipline for repeated infractions was more important than phonetics. Sticking letter magnets on the borrowed canning pot while I peeled apples. I've been thinking a lot about our little preschool, though, particularly with regard to this blog. I post about our activities for a few reasons: because I want to remember these days and blogging is easier than scrapbooking, because I enjoy searching for fun activities to do and want to share my resources, because it's an easy way for my husband and my parents to see what goes on in our daily lives. But it occurs to me, every time I hit "publish," that by making our weekly happenings public, there...

I spent my junior year of college in a tiny town in west Wales. It was a year that would, as I imagine most study abroad years do, forever shape how I saw myself: capable, independent, confident. There are days when I still get a little nostalgic, missing my dorm-window view of sheep-studded hills and the familiar call of the chapel bells ringing, summoning one and all to the Anglican services I grew to love. I could write about half a dozen different facets of my year abroad, but there's one I want to focus on particularly today. Towards the end of my year, a friend and I traveled northeast to the big(ger) city of York, England. I (very briefly) considered graduate school in Britain, and the University of York had a fascinating music program, the title of which I can't remember now. While we were there, we took in the sights, which included the local cathedral. Now, I grew up in a very pretty medium-sized stone church, but by late junior high, my family was involved in ...