The Way They Should Go

Well, we made it.  Babchie kept the girls for the weekend - and they had fun even if the weather wasn’t conducive Babchie’s big beautiful pool.

Scott and I went to HEAV (unfortunate acronym isn’t it) which stands for Home Educator’s Association of Virginia.  I was there last year, but this was Scott’s first time. 

The first thing you have to know is, this thing is HUGE!!  The vendors and Used Book exchange take up the whole large convention hall.  Then we use all the individual rooms in the main building, and many rooms in the 2nd building for speakers.  There are 3 time-blocks of speakers on Friday and 4 time-blocks on Saturday - not including the key note speakers - and there are 18 different sessions in each block!  So that’s roughly 54 sessions on Friday and 72 on Saturday.  Yipes!! 

In the end we ordered the whole conference on MP3 and should get it in about 2 weeks - there were too many conflicts where we couldn’t go to everything we wanted.  Plus, by the end we were a little brain dead.  It’s like getting information from a fire hose during some of the sessions - and inbetween we’re debating “does this science curriculum look indepth enough to keep her interest - but still on a 1st grade level?  Is this “Christian” to the detriment of hard science?  Or “Hard Science” to the detriment of honesty about the unknowns and doubts of some of our knowledge?  Ok, next is math…  timelines… maps…  whew!

I went to one session I thought was really interesting.  It was by Andrew Pudewa and was titled “Spelling and the Brain”.  I was not (and am not) the best speller and so have laughed a little at the idea of me teaching my daughter to spell.  He is a very good speaker and excellent at giving example of what he means so you understand.  The big take home point is that spelling is the sequential retrieval of virtually random information (his own definition).  It is very tough to teach spelling in a read/write format because when you look at a work you don’t take in the individual letters in sequence to store in your brain, you take in the whole word.  (Have you seen that email that goes around where all of the words have all the right letters, but not in the right order - but you can still read it?  Same idea.)  So then it doesn’t reinforce the order of the individual letters in the child’s brain - especially since their brains are still developing and they have more trouble than adults with seeing proper letter order anyway.  SOOOO… teach spelling like the old-fashioned spelling bees.  It’s Auditory/Verbal.  You HAVE to spell a word out loud in an order - so if you do it in the right order, it is stored in the child’s brain IN ORDER.  Practice like this with them.  That’s my poor condensing of the seminar.  You gotta google him, it was interesting.

I tried to be very kind to my dear hubby.  He hates to shop.  He hates to shop like I hate stupid party games - which has lead to a marriage saving compromise in our home.  I don’t make him shop.  He doesn’t make me do stupid party games.

But this is one of those cases where I need his input, so he went into the lions den with me - being the vendor fair!  I had done a fair amount of research, so I knew I either wanted to continue with Horizons Math or switch to Math-U-See.  We watched the Math-U-See demo DVD a few nights before the fair and were impressed (he used these blocks to demonstrate factoring trinomials - I think it’s the first time I understood what that was doing!) but had a few questions about the long-term use of the curriculum.  Plus, I planned to do our own Life Science course this year - but then heard about Apologia’s Exploring Creation through Zoology I.  It’s the study of all winged-creatures - being Birds, Bats & Bugs.  This is only her absolute 3 favorite catagories of animals!  So we wanted to check that out. 

Hubby went with me when the doors opened on Saturday morning.  We made a bee-line to the Math-U-See and asked questions, then went to Apologia to go through the book and ask questions.  Then his responsibilities for shopping for the day were done.  Ok, Actually I also made him come with me to the Miller Pads and Paper table just long enough to take a huge stack of construction paper out to the car.  But besides that I would do the work of tracking down what we needed and comparison shopping.  He did come back in with me on Saturday to help me decide on a timeline and maps for History/Geography.  We got the timeline, we nixed the maps to see if we could find something closer to what I want.  Who ever heard of an “Ancient Times” map (this was wall sized we were looking for) that didn’t include ROME!!  Italy was completely bumped off the left side of the map.

Can I just say that I LOVE Rainbow Resource??  If they had a book that I needed, they had the consistantly lowest price.  They also have a really wide variety of products, so I got science, handwriting, history, Bible & Art materials from them.  AND if they didn’t have something on hand that was in their catalog, you could place an order at the fair and pay no shipping.  Whoo-hoo!

In the end I got our Math and Science curricula.  I got the last Draw Write Now book I was looking for as well as lots of practice paper.  I was able to get a lot of our history books, but still have to search down a few of the readers. 

I got First Language Lessons of the Well Trained Mind, the Big Picture Bible Timeline, Greek and Roman times “newspapers”, DK phonetic readers still shrink wrapped, and a book that is like an Usborne book of Bible History - but another publisher - all at the Used Book Swap!!  I was very excited.

And I found a really cool series of books called Art in History.  They are 30+ pages each, medium-large print and are each a different culture’s art.  So I got Ancient Egyptian, Greek, Roman and Chinese Art.  They take you through examples of the cultures Art, talk about materials and methods used, changes that occurred, and even have at least one “try it yourself” project in each book - all on Elementary level.  Exactly what I was hoping for!  Of course this was through Rainbow Resource - who also had a “make your own Papyrus” kit I bought too!  I had fun. 

Overall it was a really good trip.  We ran into 4-5 couples from our church there, and we had only known 2 would be there.  Maybe the funniest was running into a woman and her husband who are in the Thursday morning Bible Study I teach, and I hadn’t known she would be there!

That’s all for our weekend.  Hope you all had fun too!!

Meg.

So now, I’m back to planning it out for next year.

“I don’t understand.  I asked God to take away all of my sins, and I pray again and I ask Him to, and then I do it again!  I don’t understand that.”

Those words from a 5 year old will stop you dead in your tracks in the middle of the kitchen, washed grapes dripping a puddle on the kitchen floor.  They were complete with teary eyes and a dramatic reenactment of how fervently she asks God to take away all of her sins.  Yes, she had just come out of the corner for pestering her sister at the dinner table.

There are moments I feel like God just peels open the soul of my daughter and lets me see what is really going on.  When He does, I see there are deeper thoughts than I expect.  That she wrestles in her mind and heart with things that seem out of place in a 5-year-old.  This is a question not to be answered flippantly or with a stern reminder that she still has dinner to eat.  So many things tumble over each other in my mind.

Oh honey, this is just the beginning of this struggle.  It brings tears of joy to my eyes to know that you are already desiring to rid your self of sin.  That you have been doing something about it - and the right thing - in talking to God and asking Him to take them away. Your heart is broken by your inability to try and try and by your actions live a life fully pleasing to God.  Just that it bothers you is so beautiful.  But that’s a little too big to try to explain to you at the moment. 

At the same time I’m sorry you see this struggle already, because this is going to be life long.  I don’t want you to be frustrated or overwhelmed by the battle.  Defeated by your own nature.  I know I’ve felt that way some times.  Are you starting this road so young?  Can’t we take big thoughts like this from you for a little while longer?  Your little ears aren’t quite ready to hear this yet either, I suppose.

It was last summer that she said the “official” prayer asking Jesus to forgive her sins (no-nos) so she could go to heaven (and give Him big hugs and say thank you very much).  It was sparked by her questions about a funeral at our church (we weren’t even attending, we were just in the parking lot!).  She asked if the man was going to rise from the dead… which led to asking what happens when we die… which led to asking if we would all be in heaven together… etc.  In the end she asked if she could ask God right now to have Jesus take away all her no-nos.  Since she is a child who asks many, many, many (did I mention many?) questions without necessarily intending to do anything with the information immediately, I was suprised she wanted to do this right now.  I was again surprised (and amused, and touched, and teary-eyed) when she didn’t see any need for my involvement, but bowed her head and prayed out loud and fervently on the spot.  Right there in the carseat as I was driving down the road.

I know there is doubt about how much a four-year-old can understand at that age.  But given her five-year-old questions I’m not about to question her understanding to much.

Her bedtime prayers are sometimes rote, and sometimes laughter-supressingly long, specific and outlandish.  Several times, mostly because of very tough-on-both-of-us discipline days, she has prayed in the evening for God to keep her from doing wrong things.  I have smiled at this and loved that she thought of it.  It was never a specific request or suggestion of mine that she do it.  I never realized she really expects to get up the next morning sin-free and perfect.  And that she hurts when she is not.  Why would God entrust such a beautiful little soul to me?!  He knows me, I would think He would think twice about that.  And yet He did.

I beckoned her over to me for another hug (the first coming after her apology for disobeying).  Then I held her little face in my hands.  “Mommy struggles with that to, sweetie.  I haven’t stopped sinning either.  It’s frustrating, huh?”  She nods in agreement.  “And you know what?  You are probably going to keep sinning even when you don’t want to.  When you asked God to forgive your sins, He forgave them.  And that means He will never, ever be mad at you for them again.  It doesn’t mean you will just stop sinning now.  But - the important thing is that when you do, you go to God and tell him that you did.  You say you’re sorry and ask Him to help you do better.  If you need to apologize to Mommy, or Daddy or Lydia you do that to.  And you know that God forgives you for every sin you ever do and loves you very much.  And so does Mommy.”

That’s as close as I can come to exactly what I said.  I want to go back and refine it.  I want to deal with the forgiving and God being mad thing more clearly.  I want to clarify that God does already know what she did, it’s just good for her to acknowledge it to God.  I want to tell her I still struggle with it - and the struggle is good.  Resigning yourself to it and giving up is not.  I want to hold her there and talk about it more.  Keep her in that moment so I can soothe her heart, address every concern and perfect every doctrinal point.  Alas, that is not how these moments work.

I got one shot.  I had only the moments contained within a 5-year-old’s mid-dinner attention span to do justice to this topic.  Maybe that’s why God gives us as long as he does with them under our roof.  And maybe that’s why one mentor of mine told me of waking up in the middle of the night thinking of one more thing she had to tell her son in the 12 months before he went off to college.

Afterward as I stood there watching her finish her organic fruit bar I was again amazed at how much God has taught me about Him through my girls.  How many ways I see my relationship to Him reflected in their relationship to my husband and I.  How much He must want to hold me on the couch with my Bible and pen, but my Mommy-sized attention span has already moved on to dishes, dust and diapers.  And all the times He uses my daughters questions to gently remind me of how I am to handle my sin - or to use my own words to remind me of His total forgiveness and how much He loves me.

All that in just moments this evening.