It All Started with a Check

Posted on April 16, 2009 by Barb

I’m still going through stuff from the storage unit, and am embarrassed to admit that I have boxes and boxes of bank statements with cancelled checks dating from the year we got married. Considering that we’ll be celebrating our 30^th anniversary this summer, that’s a lot of checks!

My defense is that I was too busy raising kids to go through all this financial detritus sooner. Whatever. The fact is that I have to go through this stuff and shred the checks because our SSNs and credit cards numbers are all over them.

Yes, it’s time-consuming. But I’m determined to get rid of all this before we move again (which may happen this summer, but that’s another story).

One good thing about doing this is that it’s like a walk down memory lane. I’ll find a check for the ob-gyn from when I was pregnant with one of our children, or the big check we wrote for the down payment when we bought our first house, and it’s like reliving those wonderful times.

Today I found a check that really got me thinking about how we can do something very little or ordinary without knowing that the repercussions of that action will be enormous in our lives. Here are the details from that check:

Date: 3/1/84

Amount: $25.00

Pay to the order of: Moore Seminars

Memo: Homeschool Seminar – Wheaton

Who knew that my curiosity about homeschooling would still be affecting our lives 25 years later?

Holidays, Families and Breaking the Chains

Posted on April 14, 2009 by Barb

Just got back from a four-day road trip that included an Easter visit with relatives in Chicago. One highlight for me was Friday night, when our immediate family got together for dinner: my husband and me, plus all four kids, our daughter-in-law and our daughter’s boyfriend. It’s so nice to have everyone together! I’m sure grateful that we had all those years of homeschooling. My memories are a comfort to me now that my adult kids live in other states and it takes planning to put us all around one table again, if only for a few hours.

If you’ve read The Imperfect Homeschooler’s Guide to Homeschooling, you’re aware that I came from a pretty messed-up family. Lots of dysfunction there. In fact, when my husband and I were raising our own kids, I chose to maintain a certain distance from the chaos of my family, in an effort to keep the latest generation on an even keel.

My relatives can take the most innocent holiday plans and turn them into a fiasco, even before the holiday arrives. That happened again this year. While most of the fuss occurred before I arrived in town, and all of it happened without my participation, it did change some plans I had made.

When I tried to explain the dust-up to my kids, they didn’t get it. That’s a relief! That tells me that they’re still not used to the dysfunction, that it doesn’t make sense to them. We may not be a perfect family, but at least we don’t operate the way my birth family does.

Many years ago, I heard someone say that a person who’s been abused as a child has to “break the chains” of abuse by making sure they don’t abuse their own children. It really struck a chord with me, and it was only due to the grace of God that I was able to break those chains. I’m not a perfect parent by any means, but I do believe that God enabled me to keep from doing what my parents did. He did so by bringing people and books into my life that gave me a vision for what to do.

He’ll do that for you, too. Just ask Him! That’s what I tell the homeschooling parents I meet at conventions or who write me and ask how to break those patterns of the past, the ones you don’t want to repeat but somehow find yourself doing just the same. Ask for help. You can’t do it alone.

Worth the Wait

Posted on April 9, 2009 by Barb

It’s exciting when you teach your children how to read or do math and then watch them do so successfully as part of their schoolwork. But to me, the really thrilling part is seeing them sprawled out on the floor with a stack of library books, reading for pleasure, or calculating on a piece of paper how many weeks’ worth of allowance it takes to buy a certain much-wanted toy. Using what they’ve learned in “school” to help them in their daily lives is what counts, as far as I’m concerned.

With my older kids, those “thrilling parts” came fairly early, probably when they were six or seven at the latest. But with our youngest, I found that he could learn to parrot back to me what I taught him, but he just didn’t seem to take the initiative to use those skills in real life…..until the past few years.

I first noticed it with video games. He began to figure out in his head how many more levels he needed to get to, or how many more of something he needed to catch. We know this because he mumbles these things (or shouts them if the game is going really well) as he plays.

Then he began pausing his favorite movies as the credits ran in order to write down the names of his favorite characters and the actors who played them. This only works when there are photos or footage with the credits, of course, but he knows just which movies have those and enjoys making long lists of the characters in them….with carefully printed letters.

This past year he began writing items down on the grocery list as we ran low on them. Now, I’m not sure how old my other kids were when I finally got them to do that with any kind of regularity. But at 16, Josh is a growing young man, and he’s hungry a lot of the time. Food has become pretty important to him. So I now find “orange pop” and “applesauce” and “Swiss rolls” neatly printed on the grocery list we keep on the refrigerator door.

And just in case I don’t buy enough of those things, he makes sure to put a quantity after the items (one day I saw “Cheetos-7”) on there. Every time I pass the fridge and see his careful printing on the list, I just have to chuckle. I’ve waited a long time to see him putting his learning into use, and I get a big kick out of it.

Random Thoughts While Going Through Our Storage Unit

Posted on April 6, 2009 by Barb

I spent a good chunk of last week (Spring Break) going through boxes from our storage unit as we try to pare down our possessions, part of the downsizing exercise we began nearly two years ago when we moved from the five-bedroom house where we raised our kids to a smaller home in another state.

I thought I’d gotten rid of my two big kids’ schoolwork before we moved, but I found more boxes last week, including one full of Peter’s workbooks and notebooks from age 5 on. (Boy, I sure spent a lot on A Beka in the early years of homeschooling!) And I think it’s ok to get rid of all his schoolwork, LOL, seeing how he graduated from college two years ago. I think he proved he knows a few things. But it’s hard letting go of the past. I’m forcing myself to only keep a few notebooks and other papers with his writing.

Even with some of the stuff pitched already, it stunned me to look at all of the books and papers and realize that this was the evidence of what I’ve been doing for the past twenty-some years. We moms are accustomed to having what we produce disappear: folded stacks of laundry and racks of homemade cookies evaporate soon after we produce them. So to see even just a portion of the work we produced over all those years of homeschooling kind of takes my breath away….and makes it that much harder to pitch things. But I was strict with myself, and we overloaded the garbage man last week.

Of course, old schoolwork isn’t all I’m finding in these boxes. I’ve been addicted to newspapers for almost my entire life, and as a result I’m the queen of clippings. Seems like there’s always something interesting in the paper that I need to tear out and save because I might want to read it again sometime. This explains all the clippings stuffed in boxes (along with old magazines I kept meaning to read). Not a good thing years later when you need to go through it all.

I can’t possibly read all of that stuff now, but as I sorted, I kept the articles I just couldn’t resist, and reread them all at night, when I was tired of going through boxes. And I learned something interesting: the articles found in the newspapers and magazines of the 1980s and 1990s are a lot more useful than what you see these days. There were plenty of solid, informational articles, as opposed to the tidal wave of celebrity worship and high-priced decorating ideas seen in recent years. No wonder newspapers are dropping like flies these days.

Book #5: Money, Possessions and Eternity by Randy Alcorn

Posted on April 3, 2009 by Barb

From the fifth of five books that have had a major effect on me: Money, Possessions and Eternity by Randy Alcorn (from page 297):

“After feeding the five thousand, Jesus told his disciples, “Gather the pieces that are left over. Let nothing be wasted.” (John 6:12). If ever waste wasn’t an issue, you would think it would be when the provision was miraculously provided! We should remember Christ’s words, “Let nothing be wasted,” when we look in our refrigerators and garbage cans and garages. Can you imagine the disciples sitting in a small circle and Jesus multiplying the loaves and fish in their midst until they are buried under piles of it while the multitudes go hungry? Unthinkable, isn’t it? God provides excess not so it can be stored up but so it can be distributed to the needy.”