Not Your Average “Real” Blog Post

When I first thought about blogging, I was uncertain of it. Mostly, I couldn’t see myself coming up with the kind of consistent content a blog requires. I mean, how many times can a person write about what they did that day or what they had for dinner. Aside from food bloggers, that is. They always write about what they had for dinner.

I stand in awe of bloggers—“real” bloggers. I read other blogs, written by stay-at-home moms, homeschool moms, working moms (I’m assuming real moms) and they’re filled with these deep spiritual insights or clever life hacks. Me, I got nothin’. Okay, I have a turkey pot pie in the oven right now, and I think that’s pretty awesome, but you know what I mean. I’m the one reading about their insights and life hacks. Meanwhile, I have only rare insights, and absolutely no life hacks. 

I have a pot pie in the oven, and that's pretty awesome.

Even when I start a post, it often fizzles. I started one last week, full of medium-to-shallow insights, but then I got interrupted—kids do that to a mom—and I was never able to return to that train of thought or that message I was trying to communicate. It was an Advent message, so it’s a little late now.

I really, really wanted to write a blog post about light in the darkness.

The hard truth is, it was a rotten year for me. I touched on that in that never-finished post. I wanted to write about light. As a year, 2018 has had a lot of dark places for me.

I lost a sister. The tenth anniversary of the death of my other sister is approaching; she would have been 51 on Christmas Eve. My husband lost two uncles and a cousin, and we suffered with prayer and fear through the diagnosis of leukemia for another of his cousins. We had a miscarriage. Then there were the small, day-to-day mishaps of car trouble, financial trouble, family trouble, even dental trouble, the “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.”

This year, 2018, has been an excruciating year. As we approached Christmas, my biggest wish is to see the backside of this year and never have a repeat.

Not the most inspiring blog material.

In the last few days since Christmas, though, I felt like I finally exhaled after the suspense of Advent. I wallowed in pajama-clad idleness for a couple of days, and then—woke up. I’m ready for 2019. Not ready as in, “Do your worst, 2019, I’m ready for you.” I’m not feeling quite that cocky. I’m just ready to begin again.

Calendars are pretty random, if you think about it. January 1 doesn’t fall on a solstice or follow the lunar cycle or align with a significant festival. It simply is. Yet it offers a very real opportunity to consider, reflect, and to start anew.

Today I had the pleasure of watching a video Tauna Meyer over at Proverbial Homemaker did on starting the new year right. She doesn’t have a blog post about it, but you can watch the video on Facebook here. She said several things that impressed me and put a little wind in my sails, but the first and most important was the idea of a Yahweh Yireh box. (We pronounced it Jehovah Jireh when I was growing up, but I suspect her pronunciation and spelling are more accurate.) Yahweh Yireh is one of the names of God and stems from Genesis 22:14. It means “God will provide.” The idea is to record blessing, answered prayer, and every other act of God’s provision throughout the year and then read them at the next new year to remind yourself of all God has done. It stands as an Ebenezer to all God has done. (I know we’re close to Christmas, but I’m not talking about Scrooge. The word comes from 1 Samuel 7:12. “Then Samuel took a stone and set it up between Mizpah and Shen and called its name Ebenezer; for he said, ‘Till now the Lord has helped us.’”

I love that idea. I have a feeling that if I had a Yahweh Yireh box this past year, a symbol of how God has provided and helped us till now, it would be easier to see the light. I wanted to act on this idea. I didn’t have a wooden box, and I’m about 70 miles from the nearest Hobby Lobby or other craft store, so I used a jar I had on hand. It’s not fancy, but it doesn’t matter. It’s there, sitting on my counter so that, moving forward, I will look for the light, for the moments of gratitude, for the Ebenezers in my life.

My Yahweh Yireh box is more of a jar, but the idea remains the same.

I guess maybe this turned into a real blog post after all. However, my children are fighting, and my five-year-old is crying, so it’s time to dole out hugs and kisses and pull that pot pie out of the oven.

Have a blessed and happy new year as you look forward to new beginnings—and look back to celebrate all Yahweh Yireh has done for you.

In Threes

They say bad things come in threes. That’s what they say, but I don’t really believe that piece of folk wisdom really covers the way life throws things at us, sometimes in barrages that leave us staggering.

It’s been a rough week. That doesn’t really cover it, either. It started on Sept. 11. Not on that day of modern infamy—no blog post I could write could ever cover that day—but just on that date in this September, a normal Tuesday. That was the day my oldest daughter started complaining that her ear hurt. We looked at it, gave her ear drops, and waited. Surely it would get better…or worse…or something. But it didn’t. It just hurt, not enough to keep her up at night, but enough to make her uncomfortable and distracted during the day. It went away. Then it came back.

(I think that was also the week an automatic payment from a creditor was mistakenly ten times the correct amount, and left us with a negative bank balance and an unhappy bank until we got it sorted out. That was also the week another creditor tried to charge a late fee for a supposedly unpaid balance--in May--and we had to dig up the cancelled check to prove them wrong. See where I'm going with this?)

That weekend, she came down with the sniffles. Then my youngest daughter came down with the sniffles. (My son was fine. I think he eats enough germs that he’s developed an immunity.) Finally, on Sept. 20, I took my eldest to the doctor, who confirmed an ear infection and started her on antibiotics.

The following Monday, I came down with the cold. (My son was still fine.) It wasn’t bad. I dropped some of my normal routine, got lots of rest, and started feeling better quickly. By Wednesday, I figured I was out of the woods. At least, that’s what I thought.

Wednesday morning, my husband called in sick. Not a cold, oh no. His was a stomach virus that left him curled in the fetal position in bed—when he wasn’t curled around the toilet in agony. I started doing double, triple duty, Mommy and Daddy and nursemaid in one, and felt my own health decline again under the strain. My son started complaining of tummy troubles, and I spent nights stretched out next to his restless sleep. One day stretched into two. The presumably 24-hour bug turned out to be a 48-hour bug, and then morphed into a 72-hour bug.

Friday, I left my two sick guys home together and worked the last day of the year at the local farmer’s market. The girls seemed fine. By the end of the day, my throat was sore and my cold was back in full swing.

Saturday morning, my husband finally crawled out of bed and took up position in a living room chair Also Saturday morning, my son and youngest daughter started vomiting. My husband held heads and wiped faces, while I…cleaned. That’s right, I frantically scrubbed floors and countertops and sprayed disinfectant in an attempt to stem the viral tide. Meanwhile, there was another chore on my mind.

The thing about livestock, or any animal in general, is that they don’t stop needing care just because you’re sick or busy or tired. They need what they need, when they need it. And I knew that I had two beehives that weren’t strong enough to make it through winter without intervention. They needed to be combined if they had a hope of making it to spring alive. I had already, because of business and sickness, put it off too long. So, about four o’clock yesterday afternoon, I went about the messy business of combining those hives.

To make it through winter, this frame should be covered with bees. They won't generate enough body heat if I don't combine them with another, stronger hive.

 It was so much worse than I thought. The hive in the worst shape, the first of my hives to lose a queen to an August swarm, was all but dead. The queen was there, but she had failed her colony. Eggs and larvae were sparse, population was low, and the hive was open to attack. Wasps and other bees were robbing honey with abandon, and even earwigs had infiltrated in numbers and were taking what they wanted. I could have cried.

Regardless, I completed the task. I squashed that royal figurehead without mercy and used the honey, brood and bees to supplement the other, more healthy hive. Dusk was falling as I went to put away my gear, and I missed the little hitchhiker on the sleeve of my bee jacket.

She didn’t miss me. In fact, for maximum torture, she couldn’t have picked a much better target. My wedding ring was already tight enough that I had difficulty removing it. Now my ring finger looks like a sausage bound with gold, and my lovely ring is digging into my skin. I feel like Eustace in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, when he turned into a dragon and had that darn bracelet digging into his foreleg—there’s not a hope of getting it off, but I can’t help trying. 

The bee sting right next to my wedding band made it a little painful to type this post.

 And I have to tell you, it really hurts to type.

As I sit here typing—painfully—I don’t know what tomorrow will bring. My husband hasn't even tried to eat solid foods since Friday. My youngest vomited an hour ago. My son seems fine. I don’t know if my oldest daughter and I will be the ones writhing in pain and losing our lunch tomorrow, or if we will somehow manage to dodge this malady. I’ve cancelled my plans for the next few days, just in case.

There’s no point to this post, really. I know things could be so, so much worse, so I’m not complaining. Okay, maybe a little, but not that much. I guess I just wanted to get it out there. What. A. Week. What a month.

What a year.

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And, you know, I was looking for a really special way to end this post, an inspirational way to tie it all together and give it meaning, and my computer randomly restarted and cost me a couple of paragraphs. So, this is me, signing off. I wish you a blessed, illness-free week.

First Day of School, Homeschool Style

Today was our first day of school for the 2018-19 school year.

I know a lot of public and private school parents look forward to this day as a certain form of liberation. I confess, as a homeschool family, the atmosphere is a little different. I suppose my feelings might be more like the average school teacher than parent as I run through my checklists.

Do I have my curricula?

Do I have the basics covered for all three children?

Do I have my science supplies?

Do I have craft supplies?

Are there any No. 2 pencils in this house?

I set this start date when school ended in June, but there were days I was afraid I wouldn’t be ready—or that, at best, I would get here by the skin of my teeth.

It was a crazy summer, one made hectic by grief and gladness, family gatherings, birthdays, and several small crises. A glitch in curriculum ordering meant I was trying to create math worksheets from scratch for my seven-year-old only last week. A wedding reception Saturday (joyful and fun as it was!) meant I was down a day on last-minute prep time.

So, going into this first day of homeschool for the year, the only thing I could do was pray, relax, and try to steer through the tide.

What does that look like?

I was up at 6:30 a.m. I grabbed a cup of coffee, read my Bible, and prayed, because I knew those were the best possible preparations I could make for this day. Then I cooked my family a special first-day-of-school breakfast of sausage links and blueberry muffins. Then…well, at 10 a.m., two out of three kiddos were still in their pajamas. Don’t get me wrong; they’d already listened to a chapter in a biography of Christopher Columbus and done their math. However, those first-day photos I’d envisioned, with them in cute little outfits and holding those cute little signs? Not gonna happen. Besides, it was raining, for the second time since May.

My kindergartner was adorably eager to go. Our internet was out—probably for the second time since May—so the easy internet course I’d planned to use was out with it. But there were still math manipulatives to…manipulate…and alphabet worksheets to color. She was good to go.

My first-grader’s binder was present and accounted for in the school room this morning…right up until I needed it. The children helped me search the house, but it has vanished. If it were my fifth-grader, I would suspect sabotage, but my son loves math far too much to stand in the way of his education. All the same…we’re still looking. We didn’t really need the binder till tomorrow, anyway.

All three were dressed by lunchtime, by the way.

While I was making lunch, my son walked down the hall, humming to himself. I realized with some chagrin that he was humming the instrumental portion of the Phantom of the Opera theme. At least he has good taste in musicals.

After lunch, I remembered that I intended to start each day with memorization. Maybe tomorrow. Also after lunch, I told my daughter we needed to start grammar.

“Can’t I do XtraMath instead?” she pleaded, referring to the math practice website we sometimes use.

“That’s a great idea, but the internet is still out,” I replied.

“How about reading?” she begged. “Can’t I read to you instead?”

“That works, too,” I said. “But you know you will have to do grammar sometime today, right?”

Apparently, that worked, as long as it didn’t need to be right now. I never realized she hated grammar so much.

After grammar came science. They had all been with me when I bought the science supplies, so they were stoked. I mean, there was bubble gum in that box. In the end, they were disappointed. It turns out that proving something has volume isn’t nearly as exciting as making something blow up. Yeah, they’re still pulling for that kind of experiment. Or the bubble gum. Or the one that uses marshmallows. Whatever.

At the end of the school day, I was walking my oldest through her math practice (public schoolers would call this homework). One task was to write a three-digit addition problem in six different ways. She paused to count how many ways she had written the problem.

“Four,” she noted. “How many do I need?”

“Six,” I reminded her.

“Six! Why did it have to be six?” she lamented. Which wouldn’t have been funny, except she used the exact same intonation Indian Jones used when he said, “Snakes. Why did it have to be snakes?”

We were done with school by 3 p.m. No tears today. No hair pulling. Lots of goofiness, lots of giggles. Now my daughters are playing with Legos. (“Mommy,” my five-year-old says, “I’m building a kennel. Never build a kennel. It’s soooo hard!”) The scent of slowly simmering marinara and meatballs fills the air, a special treat for my half-Italian family tonight. My seven-year-old, who has seen a few too many episodes of Nailed It!, is crafting his own culinary creation for our dinner “competition.” I will help him out a little, suggesting some bread crumbs and salt to go with those sautéed onions.

Not every day will be like this. I know from experience that there will be days with tears. There will be days with hair pulling. There will be tired days and stressed days and sad days. There will be days when internet trolls target posts like this. But today was one of those days when I remember why I homeschool. My children get to ease into their day, stay in their jammies, eat home-cooked meals. They don’t have to deal with peer pressure, bullies, violence, or hostile philosophies. I get to cuddle them, giggle with them, and watch knowledge blossom in their minds and hearts.

And that makes it all worthwhile.