Strict Discipline breeds fine Habits!!!

Actually, I hope we finish our study of walnut trees and ginko today.  But that’s not what this post is about….just want to keep you “posted” on the school stuff, Hee Hee.

This post is about planning food for my family.  This like so many things is a battle for me, and it seems God tends to answer my prayers by making me desperate.  If I did not plan our meals then we would go broke, get fatter than we already are, be more chaotic than we already are….and so I do it to keep sanity.  For a few years there, it was an ideal, a dreamy proposal that never got lived out.  Now it must be done or I am failing in many things, many ways.

What I start with is this little alliterative device…

• Mexican Monday
• Tomatoey Tuesday
• Wild-Card Wednesday
• Thrifty Thankful Thursday
• Fancy Friday
• Soup & Sandwich Saturday
• Simple Sunday

This helps with my “writers block” and gives me a direction, but not a straightjacket.

Mexican Monday is anything from tacos, burritos, tostatas, salsa chicken, nachos, etc.  Many new recipes fit here, like white chili.  (which could also go on soupy saturday!)

Tomatoey Tuesday is anything italian/tomato based.  Chili, stew, lasagne, spagetti and meatballs, etc.

WildCard Wednesday is usually newer recipes I’m trying out like quinoa salad; leftovers, or whatever doesn’t have another category

Thrifty Thankful Thursday is anything that is inexpensive and I’m positive everyone will enjoy.  :)  You can’t always count on that here.

Fancy Friday is just like it sounds.  Steak, Salmon, expensive in time, cost, or both.  I also use this night for training in table manners/nicer placemats, etc.

Soup & Sandwich Saturday (or sometimes Salad)is so I can spend time doing other things, and is usually something that goes in the crockpot, a fancy sandwich (cilantro salad, anyone?), or both.

Simple Sunday is usually burgers in the summer, but often we eat out on Sunday noon; we just find what there is to eat in the evening before or after the church service  :)

Once I have planned the meals, then I make a list of ingredients needed that I know I don’t have; often I choose a meal based on what I know I do have; and then I purchase the food and am set for a week, in theory.   Unfortunately I don’t live in theory, I live in Wheaton.   As I said, this is often what happens but sometimes it doesn’t.  Also I said before, the categories are just to get my recipe idea juices flowing, not hard and fast at all.  I have a few tools that have helped over the years, and the newest is the  Cozi Family Calendar.   I can add Supper as a repeating event every day, and then instead of “where” I type “spagetti” or whatever is for dinner that night.  Then when I print the weekly calendar everyone, including me, knows what to expect.  Another helpful site, though not free like Cozi, is Meal Mixer.  I like this one a lot too, and it also computes calories and nutrient info for the meals you plan, as well as prints the list for you!  I will try to figure out a way to display the cozi calendar for our family for a week, as well as the meal mixer list, but until then, if you are desiring to be more scheduled/routinized than I am, you can check out Courtney for some really great stuff for all areas of life.  She was so kind to tag me at the bottom of her post, but she has much more to offer than just scheduling meals, so I suggest you visit her for some soul food ideas too.  Click on the wreath below for ideas specific to fall.

Blessings!

So what’s been happening is this:

Summer has come to an end, and I am now going to be  homeschooling Chad and Ryan, …. and Eden will be home as well.  Honesly I am so excited about ending up like this, even though its not where we set out to go.  I am confident that she will be blessed from her studies this year.  More on that later.

I’ll let you know the schooling details when our schedule is done.  In preparation of this, I have been spending time here:

http://31daystoclean.com/

because I feel like the last 7+ years with the twins has taken a toll on our order around here.  :)  Charlotte Mason says education is an environment….and we need ours to be, well educational and not deconstructing to the mind.   In addition to this, I read  What is Woman?  and I was dumbfounded at the truth of it, in my own life and in the women around me.

http://circeinstitute.com/2011/08/what-is-woman-a-re-examination-of-feminsim-the-church/

It’s explaining to me why I am making the choices I make.  Furthermore, I am so encouraged by some websites I have found, not just by the site obvioiusly but by the people and hearts and minds and kingdom work that they represent:

http://circeinstitute.com/2011/08/saint-paul-and-christian-classical-education/

http://www.memoriapress.com/articles/10-ways-destroy-imagination-your-child.html

http://www.lifeingraceblog.com/2011/08/why-i-still-homeschool.html

http://classicalhomeschooling.com/classical-homeschooling-first-issue/a-philosophical-call-to-renew-american-culture-the-homeschooling-renaissance/

Will keep you posted.  :)

I remember learning about how the verses in the bible were created long after the text itself.  I have been returning to a certain text lately in my struggles as a mom, worrying about my children. (Look around this post for examples of things I might tend to worry about…though this is surely one of the least!)  As I went to really meditate on this verse after thinking I had memorized it, I discovered that the verse number actually cuts off a sentence.  The sentence is:

The Lord is at hand; do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.

The Lord is at hand! I had memorized Philipians 4:6-7 beginning with “do not” but without the REASON!   The Lord is at hand.  He is on his way here physically, and in the mean time he is near and available to me by his spirit!   This is why I need not be anxious.

Then I looked at what to do instead of being anxious: prayer and supplication.  Aren’t these the same things?  Well yes and no.  Other places in scripture they are used together, showing that there is a difference.  If you look it up you will find that supplication is an attitude of prayer marked by humility, earnestness, and repentance.   Earnestly making your requests known, yet with thanksgiving and an attitude of repentance & humility is the recipe for supernatural, protective peace.  If only I could just whip it up in my kitchen!  I am so often helpless to even pray accordingly.

“Prayer cannot truly be taught by principles and seminars and symposiums. It has to be born out of a whole environment of felt need. If I say, “I ought to pray,” I will soon run out of motivation and quit; the flesh is too strong. I have to be driven to pray.”  So says Jim Cymbala and I agree!  Here’s another one where I live:  ”I discovered an astonishing truth: God is attracted to weakness. He can’t resist those who humbly and honestly admit how desperately they need Him. So I begin with simply, “help me.”  Lord please keep your promise to send that peace-guard to my heart and mind!  Thank you for being “at hand.”

But you were unwilling, and you said “NO! We will flee upon horses”;  therefore you shall flee away; and, “We will ride upon swift steeds”: therefore your pursuers shall be swift.  A thousand shall flee at the threat of one; at the trheat of five you shall flee, till you are left like a flagstaff on the top of a mountain, like a signal on a hill.

Therefore, the Lord waits to be gracious to you, and therefore he exalts himslef to show mercy to you.  For the Lord is a God of justice; blessed are all those who wait for him.

Today I am going to try to choose repentance, rest, quietness and trust instead of fleeing on my own swift steed.

Hogan: aka Critter, Hogie, Hogie-Bogie, Bogram, Crit, wolf

Favorite Food: pizza, cheese, ham, carrots, clementines, ice, gingerbread houses (see slide show)

Favorite Places: under the dining room table (his den),  the back of the couch, mom & dad’s bed, anywhere near/touching a member of the pack

Unique Traits: greeted everyone in the family in the morning upon rising, or when they returned home; stood on hind feet for extended period of time & waving hands to beg; while riding in the car, barked or growled only at people wearing hats or sunglasses; always stayed “up” until mom went to bed; “super-dog” jumps from the couch to a visitor at the door or passing dog; recognized the sound of Thomas’ jeep at a very early age; recognized the places we would go in the car, and if pack members were not there as expected, whined!; thought he was a wolf; thought he was a person; waited by the door whenever anyone picked up some keys….hoping to go along wherever we were (obviously, with the keys) going; gave hugs, both full body and nudge style;

Tragic Flaw: amazing bolt speed, and propensity to exercise this skill whenever the opportunity arose to greet another dog

FOUR FEET

by Rudyard Kipling

I have done, mostly, what most men do,
And pushed it out of my mind;
But I can’t forget, if I wanted to,
Four-Feet trotting behind.

Day after day, the whole day through –
Wherever my road inclined –
Four-Feet said, “I am coming with you!”
And trotted along behind.

Now I must go by some other round, –
Which I shall never find –
Somewhere that does not carry the sound
Of Four-Feet trotting behind.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Do You Feel Broken and Fragmented? by Ann Voskamp

God has only one loom.

You wouldn’t think so by the fragmentation of our lives. Our days look like the scrap floor of a studio, frayed bits of work, remnants snipped off family, a heap of countless fabrics—ministry, creativity, worship, volunteerism. We’re ripped into pieces, and putting our lives together again is like turkey stitching a crazy quilt—driving us a bit crazy.

We’ve sheared the textile of our own lives. And it’s time to put down the scissors. Why cut up 100% pure avodah?

That’s what God’s weaving. God doesn’t experience a disconnect between our screens and our sanctuaries, between the people on our street and the paintbrushes on our desk. We have these labels for the bits and pieces of who we are and what we do. But God takes up the all the threads of being and weaves them into a seamless silk. He calls it avodah.

The Fabric of Work

He began the weaving in the beginning.  “The Lord God took the man and placed him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it” (Genesis 2:15). We read the translated word “work” and think that is what God meant for us to do. The Hebrew word is avodah. It is the same word in Exodus 34:21, in the writing of the Ten Commandments, “Six days you shall work….”  Six days you shall avodah.

The Fabric of Worship

But we know we’re meant for more than work. We know we’re meant to glorify God, to worship with our lives.Exodus 3:12 speaks to God’s serious call to this life of worship: “When you have brought the people out of Egypt, you will worship God on this mountain.” We read “worship.” In Hebrew, the word reads avodah.

The Fabric of Service

And yet God Himself calls us to even more than work and worship. Deuteronomy 10:12 records the question and answer: “So now, O Israel, what does the Lord your God require of you? Only to fear the Lord your God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul.” We read the English translation: to serve—to minister unto God, unto his people, unto the needy, the seeking, the hurting. The Hebrew original: avodah.

The Fabric of Creativity

We work. We worship. We serve. But there’s another integral element to our identity as human beings, the part that we’ve inherited from our Father who can’t stop creating, producing designs, dreaming beauty. 1 Chronicles 28:21 refers to these innovative, imaginative efforts: “The divisions of the priests and Levites are ready for all the work on the temple of God, and every willing man skilled in any craft will help you in all the work.” The text renders it as craft—creative acts, the arts—and God whispers again: avodah. He emphasizes his singular loom by whispering avodah twice in this one verse: work and craft are both expressed as avodah in the original Hebrew.
The ancient Hebrews even used the term avodah to describe the sacrifices offered in the temple.  And that is the key. To live a fully devoted, interwoven life, we must see everything as a sacrifice to God.

Nearly four hundred years ago, a man peeling potatoes as an act of worship, Brother Lawrence, said, “Our sanctification does not depend as much on changing our activities as it does on doing them for God, rather than ourselves.” We don’t need to change activities from monetary work to missionary work to be devout. That very construct is false. All Christians are in full-time ministry. So we can stop tearing our lives into the categories of worldly and spiritual. We can put away the scissors of selfish ambitions and self-seeking comfort and self interests. If our lives feel fragmented, it’s because we are tearing up God’s one-piece fabric.

We wear God’s seamless silk when we mindfully offer everything we do as a sacrifice to God.  Paul explained this clearly to the Romans: “So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering” (Rom. 12:1 MSG).  When we see our lives as a sacrificial offering unto the Lord—avodah—our work becomes art and our art becomes ministry and our worship becomes serving and our serving becomes work.

Just as the “LORD our God is one LORD” (Deut. 6:4), so our God weaves all of life on only one loom, and there is only one word for the whole of lives rightly lived in sacrifice to Him.

100% pure Avodah.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

picture, which lost its caption somewhere, is of Chinese & Chocolate Cake with Heidorns, RayRay, & Tim…..a Wednesday night tradition.  :)

So as you can see I READ blogs more than I work on my own…..but this blog is my fav in the whole world and you will learn so much, be so inspired, and have so much fun checking in with Edie, and making “hadicrafts” (for all you Charlotte Mason fans…  :) )

Not sure if this button will link to Edie’s blog or not, so just in case you can click HERE to experience the 12 days of handmade Christmas.  MY Edie and I will be following this Edie and we hope you can join us!  Blessings!

A little update: we are having a wonderful fall and enjoying the weather with chicken-nugget picnics.  You should try one!

The horror of the Same Old Thing is one of the most valuable passions we have produced in the human heart—an endless source of heresies in religion, folly in counsel, infidelity in marriage, and inconstancy in friendship.

The humans live in time, and experience reality successively.

To experience much of it, therefore, they must experience many different things; in other words, they must experience change.

And since they need change, the Enemy (being a hedonist at heart) has made change pleasurable to them, just as He has made eating Pleasurable.

But since He does not wish them to make change, any more than eating, an end in itself, He has balanced the love of change in them by a love of permanence.

He has contrived to gratify both tastes together on the very world He has made, by that union of change and permanence which we call Rhythm.

He gives them the seasons, each season different yet every year the same, so that spring is always felt as a novelty yet always as the recurrence of an immemorial theme.

He gives them in His Church a spiritual ear; they change from a fast to a feast, but it is the same feast as before.

Now just as we pick out and exaggerate the pleasure of eating to produce gluttony, so we pick out this natural pleasantness of change and twist it into a demand for absolute novelty. This demand is entirely our workmanship. If we neglect our duty, men will be not only contented but transported by the mixed novelty and familiarity of snowdrops thisJanuary, sunrise this morning, plum pudding this Christmas. Children, until we have taught them better, will be perfectly happy with a seasonal round of games in which conkers succeed hopscotch as regularly as autumn follows summer. Only by our incessant efforts is the demand for infinite, or unrhythmical, change kept up.

—C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (reprint: HarperOne, 2001), pp. 135-137.

G.K. Chesteron:

A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life.

Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony.

But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony.

It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun: and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon.

It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them.

It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.

The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore.

—”The Ethics of Elfland,” chapter 4 in Orthodoxy.

Reflecting on these visions and principles as I try to nail down our home schooling schedule…..a routine but not monotony.  Variety but stability.  A glorious rhythm and encore of education and discovery. Sorry for not posting for so long!!  This is why.  Also been doing some work to a free desk….it matches another that we have perfectly, so I’m going to paint  them to match for the twins.

Just the primer so far!

And, we celebrated Eden’s believer’s baptism this weekend…it was glorious.

My blog friend Courtney over at Women Living Well has issued another challenge….and can I just say I love these reminders!  Sooo, as for soft music in our home….My family and I all went to the Andrew Peterson concert in Chicago on Saturday night and can I just say it made me high. Not physically, but just so full of worship and ready to handle anything in this life because of Jesus. Here is a sample of the least soft music he offers, but even this quick tempo of his is soothing.   Soooooo,   this is currently our soft music of choice, and in fact I painted the whole desk you see in tomorrow’s post while listening to his two most recent albums, Ressurection Letters and Counting Stars.   They are truly soul music….in that they minister to your inner being.

Another great option instrumental bluegrass, which allows the kids to focus on math or to read, but puts a skip in your step and helps me work faster. A good album to start with is Ultimate Picking, or More Ultimate Picking. Here’s a sample. See if doesn’t just make you want to finish your homework, make homemade meatballs, and scrub the floor with a smile, while being relaxing all at the same time.

"strepped"

Joining in at Emily’s “Tuesday’s Unrwapped”….. a few night ago as I was going back and forth between sick beds at about 2am, (Eden, 13 and Chad, 6) I came up with the following “poem.”    So, here goes!  Hope you get a laugh (at the poem) and a smile (at the meaning.)

Breathe your strep on me, I don’t care

I’m your mom, I’m always here,

even when, unceasing, your wimpery moans keep me awake

and bleary eyed I hear you cry “I’m sooo sick…”

Yes, you are, little one, who’s not so little anymore,

Oh you can breathe your strep on me, anytime, anywhere.

For there will come a day when I will say,

“remember when we slept so close she could breathe her strep on me?”

Breathe your strep on me, as we journey to your bed, from mine,

put your soft squishy arms around my neck and off we go, so

I can cherish the chub,  lessening all the time.

Breathe your strep on me, a small price to pay

for absorbing your love and need,

in a tiny step

along the way as you slowly, quickly,

grow from boy to man;

breathe your strep on me while you still will, and can.

Breathe your strep on me,

its part of the gift and reward,

reminding me I’m dependent on Him too, to help me care for you;

as your infected breath,

warming my face,

is colonizing my fallen heart of compassion,

and maybe my throat too.

Would I give you to heal another?

Like he gave His to heal me?

I’m glad for you to breathe your strep on me.