Understanding and Asking Forgiveness

As children, we're never fully aware of the pressures the adults in our lives are facing. This is as it should be - our homes should be a safe haven, a place of trust, love and communion. The adults may not always act or react "just so", but often work to shield their kids and do their best to improve on what their parents did.

As a child, it is rare to consider who your parents were "before."

Lessons Learned While At Tea

Buttercup wanted to have a tea party with a neighborhood friend before we leave for our new home. So we invited the friend over once she returned from her summer vacation with her family.

I go out to a teahouse with Spinster Beth and Slick once a year for a birthday celebration. At our little teahouse, we have goodies like finger sandwiches, fruit, scones and little desserts to go with our high tea. I had a slightly toned down idea of this sort of tea for Buttercup and her friend, but being that I'm still packing and moving I didn't make it to the store to get the goodies to serve. On top of that, it occurred to me that perhaps the friend won't like actual tea so lemonade might be a better option.

The Game of Not-My-LIFE

Chef loves when we have game night - he loves the challenge of trying to beat Papa, even if it is only in a game of chance rather than skill. But the problem is that sometimes, lots of times, he either wants to play games that are out of his league (and thinks he is top-of-the-line at them) OR he wants to play a game that everyone can join in but that is so mind-numbingly boring that we sometimes question why we ever brought it into the house! This past weekend, the choices were "LIFE" or "Super-Scrabble". We love Scrabble, but it is a four-person game and every one of the kids wanted their own piece of the board game pie, which would have dragged it out waaaaaaayyyy past bedtime, at the least!

So Scrabble was set aside for another night and we cracked LIFE out of storage. We started out by taking our little $100,000 bank loans to go to college and rolled downhill in our opinion of the game from there. Now that we're looking with more scrutiny at our lives and what values we endorse through our actions and possessions, we notice more than we might have before.

Requiring Respect in Children

As a young child, my mother taught me that children should respect adults ... just because they were adults. That my respect was simply a requirement of my very existence. As an early teen, I had some friends convince me that "adults should have to 'earn' my respect." Actually, I had some adults who believed that as well. I carried some of that "earned respect" belief right up into adulthood.

Then my first child made it to five years old and decided to show that he didn't respect me as his mother. *ahem* His military Papa didn't agree with my earned-respect philosophy and our precocious boy got into trouble. In our sometimes heated discussions about this issue, he pointed something out to me that hadn't occurred to me before - something that I suppose should have been obvious:

A child's respect has already been earned!

Birthdays Abound - Bruiser Turns Seven!

This time of year is "busy" for almost everyone, I know, but we have the added benefit of birthdays and our anniversary in between all of the holiday fun! So by now, we've run through Maestro's birthday, our anniversary/Thanksgiving (they are often within a day or two of one another), and Buttercup's birthday last week - this week is Bruiser's birthday. Our boy turns seven and is already so very excited! His excitement is infectious. He has asked about having a "pre-birthday" dinner, a birthday party with his friends, and (several) "after-birthday" get-togethers.

We American Hoarders...

{Let's face reality, shall we?}

Many. Americans. are. hoarders.
{and there's a good chance you're one of them!}

There have been a few posts on my little bloggety-blog here about decluttering and getting rid of stuff. Of curing "stuffitis" - and my struggle with it. Well, this is another one, but one with a twist as opposed to more pics of my house-in-progress (as much fun as that can be!)

Surrounded by "School"

Maestro - motivation for several blog posts lately - has mentioned a curiosity about classroom-based education a few times over the years. It seems his primary motivation has been because of the social aspect: a mistaken notion that going to school will mean being able to talk to and interact with his friends more often. As a result, I've tried to point out where things that we're doing anyway are things that I can frequently "count" as part of our schooling. My intention is to get him to think more along the lines of a "count your blessings" mentality, as opposed to a "count your curses" mode of thinking.

One of our many "alternate" home school activities

Giving "Permission" to My Mom

This is a post of a story told backwards. It begins at the end... and ends at the beginning of the story. It is the story of Mini-Haha and my attempt to give the story back to my Mom.

Now on our fifth child, and having had a chance to reflect on my own childhood, I see now that children are God's way of giving us a chance for redemption. And of teaching us to laugh at ourselves. As children, we did things that hurt our parents, whether intentionally or not. Now as parents, we are no more perfect than our parents were.

The youngest photo I have access to that is digitized. About 11 or 12 here. 

One of the things I used to get so angry with my mother for was her delight in telling a story of my earliest years. We parents love to catalog the foibles and amusing events of our children's lives, don't we? Already I watch my own children and find myself telling others of this or that amusing thing that they've done. God bless them  - but I can't help it, they're so often just so funny! And in another five or ten years, we won't be laughing together over the events in question. Instead, I'll be wondering what happened while my child gets angry at me for sharing stories we'd always laughed at together in the past.