My Back-to-School Struggle

My back-to-school struggle is one I'm sure a lot of people with kids have struggled with during the pandemic when work moved to the home office and school went virtual.

I'm super-jealous of E's 9th grade reading list.

Someone please assign me books and essays again.

At this point in my homeschooling career my kids don't need me for every little thing.  They are learning to be self-starters.  They know what they need to do each day, but even so, I'm still needed as organizer, conversation-starter, helper-with-math-problems, giver-of-essay-ideas, grader-of-answers, and recorder-of-grades and lessons, not to mention my duties of lunch-lady and janitor.

The struggle that comes with being needed but not needed every moment is the struggle I've always had being home with my kids:  the times I'm needed for intensive help are scattered throughout the day, and the times I'm ready to be an engaged helper, nobody needs me.  This is not dissimilar to the phenomenon of siblings fighting when you have nothing for them to do and playing together having the time of their lives when it's time to start school.  Or the baby never napping well but deciding to take the best nap of his life the one day you made plans that week.  

At the times they need/want me, I've usually just started working on my own project, and I struggle shifting my brain from one line of thought to another quickly.  The mood can so swiftly shift from nobody needing me to people needing me to make decisions and give directions immediately.  This makes it hard to plan.

I always have a long list of things to do, and when the interruption comes, I have to choose again, and all the constant choices and changes of direction make my brain tired.  This can come out as resentment at my family needing me, but the truth is it's the constant decision-making that wears me down.

Interruptions are inevitable, and they are a great way to practice patience, self-denial, and kindness, but I'm also thinking it would help if we decide on a time I can count on being uninterrupted.  Doing that might help with all the inevitable interruptions the rest of the time.  That's the beauty of older kids:  they'll happily cooperate if I just take the time to sit down and decide.  For younger kids, there's always screen time for when you just need thirty minutes to an hour.  For the inexplicable nap schedules of infants, there is only praying for more grace to keep laying your life down for that helpless babe.  One day they'll be able to fend for themselves longer.

What's your back-to-school struggle?  Is it completely different this year because of COVID-19?  

A Tale of Two Mothers

My daughter Ella finished reading Pride and Prejudice for the first time last week, so Sunday night we decided this milestone called for a celebration:  we would show her the first episode of the BBC mini series starring Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle.  

I didn't read P and P until I was 22.  I was so delighted with it that I read it aloud to K.J. on the seven hour road trip between Kentucky and Alabama our first married Thanksgiving.  I was so pleased to be married to him because he laughed in all the right places.  He bought me the DVDs for Christmas, and we spent many years quoting it, but we hadn't watched it together in over five years, so it was so fun to re-visit it and to do it with our newly teenage-d daughter.  

The opening scenes of the Bennet home are filled with the high-pitched voices of Kitty and Lydia arguing over who should wear Kitty's bonnet to church.  Lydia argues that Kitty "is too plain to look well in it."  Mrs. Bennet's strident tones join the chorus as she frequently bemoans, "What is to become of us all?"  Mr. Bennet declares his daughters to be "some of the silliest in all of England."  

When we finished the episode we decided I'd read the beginning of Little Women aloud to E before bed.  She wanted to read it before seeing the new movie, and we've found that sometimes it helps the kids to get into a classic if I start them off with it.  It helps them get the rhythm of older language.  It's also been years since I read Little Women, and after reading the first two chapters aloud I was so struck by the differences between the March and Bennet households.  Both have a household of girls on a journey to find their place in the world, but what a difference between the peace of a household run by Marmee compared to that of Longbourn.  I don't want to judge Mrs. Bennet too harshly, but in one household the only exhortation is to marry someone with money, and in another the emphasis is on becoming women who learn to put to death their selfish desires to become their best selves, to love and serve the people around them. 

Though the time periods and countries are different, there's not a huge difference in what these two groups of sisters can do in life.  They can marry or become a governess.  There's not a lot of choice for their outward life circumstances, but there's all the choice in the world for their minds and hearts, and I love that Marmee focuses on that.

E has been having an inspired week of drawing, and can't you just immediately tell this is Colin Firth's Mr. Darcy?

In the Mom Haze

I'm in the mom-haze this morning, that haze that comes upon all mothers in certain seasons when your main occupation is taking care of a child or children at home and your days and nights are confused by missing sleep in the night and trying to recover the lost sleep during the day with a nap.  In other words, I have a sick child.  And I've never been very good at taking naps.  

It's been a very out of the normal routine sort of week, as I'm sure it has been for everyone who was off work on Monday for Labor Day.  The day off is always nice, but you spend the rest of the week wondering what day it is.  (I just got through thinking today was Monday.) We took Labor Day off school after a busy birthday weekend and because James was running a fever.  We watched The Fellowship of the Ring, and it felt like being reunited with old friends.  K.J. and I used to watch those movies constantly when we were first married, and it was so fun to have our kids finally old enough to watch. 

I feel compelled to say that this picture was from last week.

They're not sharing a bowl of popcorn while James has a virus.

I was up between 3-4 a.m. with James Tuesday morning, and I was awakened at 5:30 this morning by him going downstairs.  I desperately wanted to go back to sleep, but I figured if he was up his fever had probably gone up again and I better check on him.  It had, and I did.  I put him back to bed at 6:30, but by that point K.J. was getting up to get ready to go into the city, and it's that awkward time of deciding whether to try to go back to sleep and just risk being frustrated that you can't or make your coffee and enjoy the quiet before your kids wake up again.  

I chose the coffee and quiet and made myself a version of a Pumpkin Spice Latte using this extract I bought on a trip back to Alabama.  Along with the extract I added a packet of Stevia, some vanilla extract, a splash of cream, and some milk, and it was not too shabby.

Since James was not really able to do school work yesterday I gave Ella a book report assignment.  In talking about what she should include I felt an itch to write a book report myself.  It's been awhile.  I miss writing assignments.  Sometimes I give them to myself.

Here's to Wednesday, even if we're not firing on all four cylinders.  

via GIPHY

Maybe second breakfast will help. 

Mother's Day

On this Mother's Day, I'm staying home from church with a boy and his fever virus.  I don't think this is the first time I've spent Mother's Day home with him.  It's not a bad way to spend the day, snuggled up in bed watching movies.  It also gave me time to pull out a pile of external hard drives and look through the past nearly twelve years of motherhood.

September 2006

This baby girl made me a mother, and I'm so glad it was her.  She was the sweetest baby.

September 2007

One was a golden age of Ella.  She started sleeping.  She was perfectly pleasant all the time.  She was the best of companions.

September 2008

As Ella turned two, I began to think it was time for another little one.

October 2009

Becoming a big sister suited her.

October 2010

We were pretty low-key trick-or-treaters in our neighborhood.  No costume for James, a dress-up gown for Ella.  This was part of the long age that James needed a bib at all times.  It's soaked as you can see.

September 2011

We packed a picnic supper one golden night and went to Capitol Park.  I chopped my hair off shortly after this.  I can never make it past that part of growing out hair that just feels like I have hair everywhere all the time.

October 2012

I took the kids on a road trip to North Carolina when one of my nieces was born.  We stopped in Tennessee, and I took them to Cades Cove, destination of all my childhood vacations.  There's particular joy in sharing your childhood with your kids.

September 2013

I had to search through K.J.'s old phone pictures to start finding pictures of me with both kids.  It reminds me I need to be better about getting in photos with them!  I've spent a goodly portion of the past five years reading aloud to those kiddoes.  

September 2014

I remember this day.  We were counting down the hot and sweaty days before we left on our biggest adventure thus far.  They've handled the past three and a half years with so much grace.

September 2015

The amount of change in our lives we experienced from September 2014 to September 2015 is incredible.  How could it all have happened in one year?  This photo was taken after the first day of school for the autumn term.  We'd moved to a new house the day before, and K.J. had to take the car early the next morning to travel to work, so that left us with piles of boxes and our own two feet to get us to school.  Needless to say we were late.  

August 2016

We're waving at K.J. up on the boardwalk above, wheelchair bound because he'd broken his ankle on our first full day back in America in nearly two years.  Can you believe that?  We still can't believe that happened.  Here we are after his surgery on a weekend away with my family.

October 2017

There were a host of things happening in this picture.  I'm sitting down because my foot is giving me so much pain.  We would find out later this week I had a "foreign object" in it.  But this was a beautiful autumn day despite the pain.  

And just like that, eleven years of mothering goes by.  Mothering rubs off a lot of rough edges, and I couldn't ask for two better little people to do the rubbing.

"Mothering is at once the hardest and the holiest and the happiest."

- Ann Voskamp -

Slowing Down

Last night as I was putting the kids to bed, I felt a gentle nudge from the Holy Spirit to slow down and really focus on James and then Ella, to not rush through the routine of trying to get out the door of their bedroom without having to answer too many questions.  I'm so glad I listened.

I took in James's little seven-year-old face and the way he kisses me and tells me he loves me, the way he snuggles into his pillow and closes his eyes and says, "I'm so tired" at the end of each day.  I washed all the dirt of an afternoon spent playing outside off his feet instead of lazily putting him to bed with them.

I listened to Ella talk through her day, and I wonder if she's an external processor like me because she tells me every detail.  I let her read in bed until 9:00 like I have almost every night of the Easter Holidays and hope that we'll be able to get back into a good rhythm before school tomorrow.

I am often with my kids, but my busy mind keeps me farther away than our physical proximity to each other.  I'm thankful for those moments when my mind feels aware of the present and lets go of worries and spinning thoughts of the past and the future.

Spring Break Treat of a movie in bed

I expected to have a bad day today.

"Mom?  Mom?  I had a bad dream."  

Those were the words slowly pulling me out of the deepest of sleeps around midnight last night.  I was sleeping so soundly that I had to ask James to repeat himself several times before I could understand what was going on around me and get out of bed.  I walked him downstairs to his room, used the restroom, and crawled back beneath my own covers, hoping to slip back into the oblivion of sleep quickly.  But alas, the story of my life in recent years has been one of struggling to go back to sleep once I spend several minutes awake.  I blame it on having children.  Last night I didn't manage to get back to sleep until 5:30 a.m.  

On the positive side, K.J. had taken Tuesday off work to do something fun with the kids who are on their half-term break from school.  On the negative side, I had an eye appointment that I needed to leave the house for at 9:30 in the morning, and the prospect of starting a day out with so little sleep makes me feel so very despairing even with Marilla Cuthbert's voice ringing in my ears, "To despair is to turn your back on God."  She's so right.  

On sleepless days I fear the loss of self-control that leads to a short temper, overeating, and a general sense of feeling overwrought.  Most of the time what actually happens on those days is a sweet sense of God's provision and grace because I am so desperate for Him to provide those things.  I'm so aware of my need on the sleepless days that I don't entertain the slightest notion of being able to do anything myself.  At the end of days like today K.J. always points out how a day that began with so negative an outlook turned out much better than expected. He also has a habit of saying, "Everything always works out for you, Lynn Pugh."  I usually don't like it when he says this because I feel like it makes me sound spoiled, but to paraphrase something I read by Oswald Chambers once, "We're all just spoiled bairns of the Almighty."  And that doesn't seem so far off the mark at all.

I added these things to my thankful list tonight:

• KJ planning to drive me to my eye appointment
• being able to sit quietly and read in the waiting room while KJ waited in the car with the kids
• being able to sit in the theater and watch the LEGO Batman Movie
• all of the creative genius that went into making the LEGO Batman Movie!
• remembering family memories watching Batman with my brothers
• coming home to rest
• KJ going out to get fish and chips for dinner so I didn’t have to cook tonight
• encouraging text exchange with Laura
• making up with KJ after some tense words trying to find a parking place before the movie
• energy to follow-through on cleaning the bathroom (I always feel like I need a medal for doing that least of all glamorous jobs.)
• grocery delivery at night
• reading Nancy Drew to Ella before bed

The Lunar Eclipse and The God who Cares for Us

Sometimes I wake up with worries filling my heart.  

This morning I woke with a gasp just before 5 a.m. and jumped out of bed to check on James.  

He hit his head yesterday and had a goose-egg on the back of it, and I have no desire to relive the moment, except to say it was so terrifying.  And in the following hours, even though he never had any of the symptoms they say you should look for with a head injury, my heart was still a mess of worry and fear, because he's my baby, and I was powerless.  And as James danced around and played the Wii (lots of extra gaming hours last night as we kept him up longer than usual to make sure he was okay), and I talked with KJ in the kitchen, he reminded me that what I felt in the moment James got hurt is really the way things are all of the time.  We're not really in control ever.  We are always in the complete care of our Heavenly Father, and He loves James more than I do.

I jumped out of bed this morning and ran to James' room, making sure he was still breathing.  

I turned on the computer and was reminded of the lunar eclipse happening at that very moment, and when I peeked out my back door I had a perfect view.

I scurried around to find my tripod and adjust camera settings, and just stood out on the back deck watching the moon slowly disappear.

And I thought about how there is a God who holds planets and moons in orbit.
 

I thought about what Clyde Kilby wrote, "At least once every day I shall look steadily up at the sky and remember that I, a consciousness with a conscience, am on a planet traveling in space with wonderfully mysterious things above and about me."

I think the hard thing is trusting in His goodness and care even should the worst thing happen.  But that has always been the hard thing and is not unique to me.

And then it seemed like the moon disappeared, the sky was empty, and there were only stars for awhile.  But this planet kept on moving until you could see the moon again.

I'm thankful for mercies made new each morning, another chance to trust the giver of that good gift.

"Even if I turn out to be wrong, I shall bet my life on the assumption

that this world is not idiotic, neither run by an absentee landlord,

but that today, this very day, 

some stroke is being added to the cosmic canvas that in due course

I shall understand with joy as a stroke made by the architect 

who calls himself Alpha and Omega."

from Clyde Kilby's Resolutions

Ella-Girl at Seven

It's been awhile since I've written about the kids individually, though I update my Facebook status regularly with all the funny things James says on a daily basis.  I'm depending on Facebook to stay around so I don't lose those quotes, but maybe I should write them down the old-fashioned way, too.  I've been intending to sit down and write about what Ella is like at 7 and James at 4, and last night Ella did something particularly sweet that I wanted to remember.

Ella at seven:  

She's friendly.  She makes friends wherever we go when there are other little girls around, and when the girls she was playing with at the beach left, she made friends with a little boy, too.  She likes to play.

She still dances all over the house, sometimes to music only she can hear.  But these days her dancing is interspersed with lots of cartwheels, forward and back rolls, and doing perfect splits.  She likes music with a good beat, but she also likes to do ballet-like dance moves all over the living room while the keyboard plays classical melodies.

Her little hands are always busy with something.  Drawing, tracing, coloring, bracelet-making, painting, playing with paper dolls.  She likes having Netflix on in the background, but she is always busily occupied doing something imaginative and creative at the same time.  We have folders filled with her drawings.  There are always stacks of paper all over her desk that I try to keep sorted.

She is reading up a storm, tearing through The Magic Treehouse books.  She has a Shelfari account where we keep up with the books she's reading, and she's read 32 books this year.  She's so proud of herself for reading more than me.  She's also been enjoying the American Girl books, Junie B. Jones, and Thea Stilton mysteries.  

Netflix favorites have been Paddington Bear, The Magic School Bus, Wild Kratts, Strawberry Shortcake, and Tinker Bell movies.

She complains about starting school on most mornings, but she's a whiz at her multiplication tables, and I've had the most fun studying ancient history with her.

She likes to dress like me.  Whether we're going out or just putting on lounge clothes before bed she often asks, "Can I match you?"  She still thinks I'm pretty cool so I'm going to hang on to that for awhile.

Ella plays well with James, and she's sensitive toward my feelings.  Last night on the way home from church I started feeling so tired.  Plus, James had gotten his wrist slammed in a door, and the kids had the windows down in the backseat, and there was a lot of traffic, and I was ready to end that day.  Ella, per usual, sensed my feelings, and when we got in the house, and I said, "I'm so tired," she wrapped her arms around me and said, "I know."  Then as I wearily contemplated the bedtime routine she said, "I can brush James' teeth for you." 

She's like me in so many ways, but she's better.

Even a Cup of Cold Water

There are moments when I am awe-struck at the kindness of the Lord, when I am reminded that the God of all the universe really is "the God who sees."  

Last week I was reminded of how much it serves my children and my entire household when I am disciplined about planning our days; I was inspired to be more focused and intentional about when teaching and schoolwork happen.  I think my extra-intentionality did make our week better, but yesterday I was discouraged and battling the feelings of, "Is all this worth it?  Who even cares about what I am doing?  Are all of my efforts in vain?"  At that point it was time to begin the day's lessons, which always begin with reading the Bible.  There are daily readings embedded in our curriculum, and we usually read several verses, but yesterday there was just one verse listed to read.  Matthew 10:42, just one sentence.

And whoever gives one of these little ones even a cup of cold water because he is a disciple, truly, I say to you, he will by no means lose his reward.

Oh, the relief that flooded my soul.  Why, yes, it does matter.  There is Someone who sees every little thing done in faith for Jesus.  It all matters, even the simplest of acts, a cup of cold water served up for the 10th time that day.  All the desires to do good for Jesus' sake all matter, and He sees them.  What is even more amazing is that He rewards them.

I would be lying if I said the rest of the day went by without another moment of doubt, but those words of Jesus--so timely--helped me press on and fight the good fight of faith.

A Tuesday Walk and Random Thoughts

Last Tuesday I loaded the kids up so we could take care of some business at the library.  There's always so much drama involved with outings.  You have to decide what everyone is going to wear, listen to complaints about the clothes you picked out and make suitable adjustments, try to make sure you remember everything you need to pack before leaving the house while your thought processes are interrupted every 30 seconds to mediate in an argument about who gets to close the garage door this time.  And I have awesome, pleasant, obedient-most-of-the-time kids; they're just being kids.  And managing kids just being kids is so much work that just the thought of interrupting the normal course of our day with an outing started raising my stress levels.  But you push on anyway because you hope it will be worth it in the end, and you want to give them a happy childhood full of fun memories.

Sometimes all of the effort doesn't feel worth it, but most of the time, it does.

I mean, sometimes your mom wants to take a picture of your sister, too, and life becomes unbearable, but it passes.

As we were loading books in the car I noticed a tree with bright gold leaves, my favorite, so we trooped across the parking lot and then across the street enjoying the blustery day.  It was much colder than we expected, but running and tramping through leaves did us all a world of good.

We had some impromptu races.

Sometimes my mind feels so overwhelmed with all of the things I'd like to do, all the things I feel I ought to do, and I have a hard time coming to the conclusion that I really can't do it all.  I want to do it all, and I want to do it all well. 

It helps to take a deep breath (or several) and walk as fast as you can into the wind, to stop and freeze in time childish delight.

And go to Stonehenge.  Because when given the choice you should always go to Stonehenge.

"It is simply no good trying to keep any thrill;

that is the very worst thing you can do.

Let the thrill go--let it die away--go on through

that period of death into the quieter interest 

and happiness that follow--and you will find

you are living in a world of new thrills all the time."

- C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity -