Heart of the Matter

Everything always seems to be running smoothly until I open my planner to reveal… an appointment. I don’t care if it’s ice skating lessons for one of my children, the doctor or the dentist. I seem to always have the same problem— getting there on time. It’s hard enough just getting myself ready, let alone several of my kids. And when we have to be somewhere it usually gets stressful, such as one of them can’t find one of their socks or a baby is crying when I have one foot already out the door.  Sure it’s fun filling up my calendar: lunch at noon on the 13, we’ll be there! Teeth cleaning at 3 o’clock on the 20th, no problem. Science class this Friday, exciting! But when the time comes to actually go to these appointments, I’m not as excited as when I made them.

One time, I had all 7 of my children with me on our way to the dentist, because my two, older ones had an appointment. I of course was running ten minutes late; turned into the dentist’s parking lot on two wheels, and pulled in front of the building with a screeching halt. I put our truck in park, looked back at all of my children in our Suburban and yelled, “Hurry and get out!” We unbuckled ourselves, the older ones helped the younger ones, and our feet hit the pavement in record time. We all ran in the front door, I tripped over the foyer rug and out of breath exclaimed, “The Pentons are here for their appointment.” The receptionist peered at us over her glasses that were on the tip of her nose, then her appointment book, and looked at me with pity and said, “I’m sorry honey, you’re here too late for us to take you. We’re going to have to reschedule.”

Well, I don’t need to tell you how that effected my day. It’s amazing how even one appointment can be the death of me. Combine that with all my children’s activities and we’ve got chaos! Keeping my children busy and active in the homeschooling community was something I did because I wanted to be plugged-in to all the science projects, field trips, and sports. I thought that was how I was supposed to take care of my children’s education—by being submerged in all the activities. Keeping busy felt frazzled, which I thought at the time, was a good thing. It seemed the busier I kept us in life, the more successful they would become.

Children’s hectic schedules are hot topics everywhere I go and they are talked-up in such a positive, almost arrogant sort of way. At my son’s football games, my daughter’s ice skating lessons and even the dentist. Homeschooling your child definitely does not make you immune to an over scheduled life. There is so much out there to entice you and so many homeschool groups to join, that if you don’t stop and think—you are going to be running to gymnastics, piano, a writing class and be leader of a local homeschool group with one blink of an eye! And you won’t even know what hit you. And not to mention, all the appointments you need to keep, such as doctor visits, dentists and grocery days.

A light bulb went off one day and it became clear to me that I didn’t want to be a part of that busy life any more. I wanted to go back to living and enjoying life, unhurried. Of course that doesn’t mean that I took my kids out of everything, and we never go anywhere. We go and do things all the time, just more at our leisure than by appointment. For us, when we are just running errands, going to the library, or visiting a museum, we learn more and enjoy each other’s company. The mistake was made when thinking they were not going to learn anything unless they were in a structured, learning atmosphere. They do not need to dabble in a hundred different things to be well-rounded children. On the contrary…a relaxed life with time to read, listen, and play, without stress, is what we can take advantage of as homeschooling parents and that is what creates a calm, well-rounded child.

We now focus on that one thing, each child wants to put their energy in. Those kinds of activities I don’t mind doing. They have true purpose. God wants us to live life to the very fullest. I’d rather we all do one thing at full potential, than a dozen things mediocre.

Being free of an over scheduled calendar allows us to learn about ourselves without the interference of time restraints. There are the appointments in life that we must do and keep, such as the dentist. But as far as activities and my children are concerned, I want to be focused on the ones that creates purpose and meaning, rather than always being frazzled to… death by appointment!

“Live each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each.” Henry David Thoreau

Jenny Penton is a homeschooling mother of seven children and loves the closeness that being home with them provides. Un-schooling is how they live and learn and she blogs about their learning experiences at Homeschoolingbelle.com. Jenny also has a passion for inspiring women to become master life planners and that includes menu planning. Check out her sites for life planning and her inspiring recipes on her food blog at plannerperfect.com and plannerperfectmeals.com

We are gardeners. I can say that now, because we actually have a garden in our backyard and we actually work in it. That makes us gardeners. We have a beautifully designed garden with plots that are big enough to hold many plants, but that are small enough to manage. The garden has good drainage, good soil, and lots of sun. It is well-watered and weeded thanks to my first-born who may indeed have a green thumb. All in all, it has the makings of being a productive little bit of land. I can’t say we are good at gardening yet. Only time will tell, and at the time of this writing the jury is still out. There are lots of leaves and flowers, but not much fruit yet. However, it is only early July as I’m typing, so we’ll have to wait for the real harvest time to prove our worth.

But that lovely set of plots is not even the object of my attention and affection today. You see, in our enthusiasm for this new garden (or was it our lack of faith in our ability to keep things alive?) we bought a lot of tomato plants. A lot. Like, 25. They were tiny, and we figured some of them wouldn’t make it (we were right!) and we figured I really did want to can a lot of tomatoes if they all survived. And so we planted many, many tomatoes in the garden proper. But there were two more that just didn’t fit anywhere.

Or so we thought.

My husband stuck two in to our flowerbeds. Good idea. They get a little less sun there but they will be watered, and the thought was that if something died in the real garden we could transplant over one of these out of the flowerbeds. Good plan.

However, the other day, my seven-year old daughter decided to help weed the garden. And she yanked out “this really HUGE weed!” Um….oops. That was the tomato plant. See the flowers on it? See that it is, in fact, growing in a tomato cage? My eldest quickly tried to salvage the thing by replanting it as best as she could and watered it some more, but it looked pretty sickly. Especially disastrous was that this un-rooting happened at the beginning of a crazy heat wave in our neck of the woods. Even the well-established plants were suffering under the taxing heat. Surely this little guy with his roots all broken would never make it.

And he did look pretty sad, pretty quickly. He wilted; he leaned up against the cage instead of standing tall as he had previously. The flowers fell off and no more buds seemed to be trying their luck. We thought about pulling it out and tossing it in the composter. However, it was just seriously too hot to go outside and do anything, so we thought we’d just leave it, watching it, (from the comfort of our air-conditioned dining room, no less) suffer a slow, sad, lonely death. Nice.

Some days, my daughter watered it, if she remembered, but we’d all given up on it. Wouldn’t you give up on it? And if you were the tomato plant, wouldn’t you have given up on yourself?

Well, well, well. Just this morning as we were surveying the flowers giving way to cucumbers and the snow peas almost ready to pick, and noting that there are tomatoes on nearly every plant, we turn around and see that sad little tomato plant is not giving up on itself at all, but is vigorously standing tall again, and putting out some new flowers.

Even after being ripped out of “its comfort zone”, even after being neglected of the water it needed to survive, even after being exposed to long and unbearable heat, this tomato plant held on and not only survived but is beginning to thrive.

Somehow it managed to tenaciously hold on, with whatever roots it still had intact, to the soil and moisture that was still there for its health. It managed to continue doing what tomato plants are supposed to do – put out flowers and grow tomatoes—even in the most trying of circumstances.

This is what I’m learning from this little plant: to keep doing what I was made to do even when circumstances make it nearly impossible to do so; and to keep hanging on to what blessings are present, no matter how out numbered they may temporarily seem.

Jeremiah 17:7-8 tells us “Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord. He is like a tree planted by the water, that sends out its roots by the stream, and does not fear when heat comes, for its leaves remain green, and is not anxious in the year of drought, for it does not cease to bear fruit.”

My tenacity better not be attached to my own ability, or my own circumstances, or to what others say about me. I may be tenacious and persist in my ‘fruit-bearing’ because the Lord is my trust. It is his work in my life that enables the spiritual fruit to grow even in times of spiritual drought. It is Him who wills and works to do His good pleasure in my life. That is why I can hang on. That is why I can keep going.

What is the Lord calling you to keep doing today? What is the thing that is making it hard for you to hold on and keep going? Do you see that the Lord is greater than that thing that hinders you? Trust in the Lord. Rest in the knowledge that He is able, oh so much more than able, to hold on to you, and cause you to flourish, as you obey Him.

Barbara Postma and her husband, as they homeschool their 7 children, are finding out that no two children are alike! Between lessons and lunches, Barbara blogs at Fuel by Barbara.

Do you want to know the one thing that’s helped me save money on groceries? It’s not shopping sales — or clipping coupons — or eating less meat than we used to (although I do all of those things). It’s very simple: I plan our menus.

Before kids, I’d run by the local organic food market and grab enough food for that night’s dinner. I did this every weeknight. As I stood in the market aisle, other things caught my attention. Little add-ins that made their way into my two-handled shopping basket as if by magic. Suddenly the cost of our quick and healthy dinner added up to $40 or more…all because of impulse buys.

I no longer have the expendable income NOR the time to go shopping daily anymore. We go shopping once a week: On Mondays. Each Saturday night I begin browsing through our favorite store’s sales ad and mark the things I want or need — or things I want to take advantage of while they’re cheaper than usual. On Sundays I sit down and plan our our week’s menus.

How long it takes me depends on where I pull from:

1. Online and cookbooks — Searching by ingredient or cuisine is fun, and gives some variety to our meal lineups. But it isn’t always quick. I could spend hours and hours perusing my favorite online recipe sites and flipping through vintage cookbooks. Most weekends I instead use:

2. Favorite recipes and my “menu box” – I have three index card boxes full of recipes we love and rotate often. To further help my quick meal planning efforts, I recently began clipping apart each menu list from the weekly master that hangs on our fridge. I store the entire menus away for later — and when time is crunched, I can choose based on the main dish — the accompaniments are already listed for me!

No matter which tactic I use, the results are the same: A varied menu (that can be rotated depending on how we “feel” or what our schedule throws at us) and a grocery bill that’s less. The concept is simple: If you aren’t at the grocery store more than once a week, you won’t spend extra money on the unnecessary, impulse items.

Less exposure = less expense.

And — There’ll be no more fretting at 5pm: “What are we going to eat tonight?” Just walk over to the fridge and see what’s planned….and start cooking!

Meg Wilson is a devoted wife to her husband, Ken, of 10 years, and mom and homeschooling teacher to her 5-year-old son and 3-year-old daughter. When she’s not writing or creating something, Meg loves to cook for, host and entertain friends and family. She also enjoys reading, the outdoors, eclectic music, yoga, and studying history. You can read all about her adventures (and misadventures) at her blog, Muses of Megret and read her product reviews at Muse Reviews.

Why do I hate socks so much?

• Is it because each sock in a pair has opposite magnetic poles making it violently repel its match, running from its mate, hiding out heavens only knows where, daring me to come and find it, and forcing it next to its mate with a violent twist-roll-and-heave motion?

• Is it because I’ve allotted more hours to sorting them into tiny little cute pairs than I have allotted myself to sleep?

• Is it because my children continue to maintain that socks are actually shoes, and thus wear them alone, indoors and out, frazzling them down to flimsy wisps of fabrics within days of their purchase?

• Is it because they are such tiny pieces of fabric to begin with, barely qualifying with the honorable title of clothing? A shirt. Now there’s a piece of clothing. Pants. Yet another that heartily qualifies. But socks probably use up 1/316th of a yard of fabric. It’s just wrong somehow.

I have hated socks pretty much since I had a family and was forced to wash, dry, fold, sort and generally maintain them (the socks that is, not the family.) They’re so hardly worth the effort. They hide under the legs of pants and the insides of shoes. Only the merest wisp of color peeks out from round about the ankle. Such a tiny, inch-span of exposure can hardly be worthy of such an continual repeated expenditure of energy.

This is probably why I have gone through many an evolution in my attempts at improved sock management.

At one point, I was like everyone else. Bring them out of the dryer and spend forever matching them up. When– as is a rule of the universe, probably found in Leviticus– a single sock would somehow disappear, I now had to find a suitable “holding cell” for the mateless sock. This is where I really did shine (read that…became obsessive-compulsive). I created, out of cardboard, an 8-part partition that slid down into a deep drawer in my laundry room. Each section (properly labeled of course) would hold a particular color of sock until its intended mate would return from the French Foreign Legion to which it had apparently run. I had a section for blue, gray, pinks & reds, black, white/plain, white with stripes….well, I’ll stop here, lest you feel compelled to call the Betty Ford Clinic on my behalf to see if there’s an opening in her Sock Compulsions Program.

There was also a short lived time during which I required my family to safety pin their socks together before tossing them into the dirty clothes. This was met with limited compliance and mixed success. It was eventually completely eliminated when I discovered that safety pins weren’t quite so safe after all, having torn into several otherwise honorable pieces of clothing.

However, a new day has dawned in the Barnier School of Sock Management. It’s a big radical move. But for those of you who may struggle with time management and focus it may just be the move you need. It does require an initial outlay of money that you may hesitate to produce. But I must say, I have enjoyed the change.

This new freedom-from-sock-tyranny began when my youngest made her bi-monthly request for new socks. This request had been spoken by her oft before. Indeed, it rated in frequency with other such common requests.

• Has anyone seen my Barney doll?
• Can I have a playdate?
• Do I have to brush my teeth today?

So off I trudged to the store, looking for even more of the beastly pairs of foot coverings that would add to the work and labor of my daily life.

And then I saw them.
A bag.
A big bag.
A bag filled with socks…all…of…one…type.
Oh my gosh.
I looked around to see if I was being watched.

This must be against some good-parenting law.
Maybe it was a trick.
They put the bag up there and they record who touches it.
Boom. Flash goes the hidden camera.
You are now marked as a less-than-adequate mom, a mom who would deprive her child of the joy of sweet, cute, playful, frilly socks IN PAIRS.
Certainly, a social worker would be escorting me to my car.

As you may have guessed, I took the plunge anyway. Jail probably wouldn’t be all that different from my current laundry room, where I probably spent as much time as I would in solitary confinement.
Besides, in jail, someone else washes MY socks.
I came home with a massive bag of a single type of sock, all of which matched the other.

Now here’s the brave part,
the radical part,
the Thelma-and-Louise part.

I threw out every other single sock that this child owned. No really. I did. They were worn to a frazzle and two sizes too small anyway.  And thus began my latest adventure into improved sock management.

OH
MY
GOSH!!!!!!

I can’t tell you the delight I now experience of just tossing each and every sock for this child into a single pile in her laundry cubby. No matching. No violent twist-roll-and-heave machinations. No storage facility for the sad single sock which is now mateless. (support group meets at 7, next to the dryer lint trap) Just one big pile, heaped with socks, ALL of which match the other.

It’s a beautiful thing to behold.
My schedule load has lightened considerably.
I think on average, I’m getting 3.4 more hours of sleep per week.
With all my new found time I’ve conquered dental decay.
Why…I may even take up exercise.
Maybe not.
It won’t align spiritually with the little poster I recently put up on my fridge, which says…
I don’t exercise. It makes my coffee spill.

Carol Barnier is a fresh, fun and popular conference speaker unlike any you’ve heard before. Her objective is to have the wit of Erma Bombeck crossed with the depth of C.S. Lewis, but admits that most days, she only achieves a solid Lucy Ricardo with a bit of Bob the Tomato. She is a frequent guest commentator on Focus on the Family’s Weekend Magazine broadcast, has been a guest on many radio programs and is a speaker to conferences nationwide. She’s the author of three books about dealing with (or possessing) a non-linear mind in a linear world: How to Get Your Child Off the Refrigerator and On To Learning, If I’m Diapering a Watermelon, Then Where’d I Leave the Baby?, and The Big WHAT NOW Book of Learning Styles. Her main websites are CarolBarnier.com and SizzleBop.com. You can also find Carol at her blog for moms with distractible kids at SizzleBop. And for fun, see her church humor blog at CarolBarnier.

After a ten-year hiatus from serious couponing, I’m back cutting and clipping to save money at the register. While meeting at our local bakery for a Lego/Chess Club, a few homeschool moms started discussing how they do coupons. I learned that Copps Food Store offers double daze where they double five manufacturer’s coupons up to $1 each on Wednesdays. After perusing the Copps sales flyer each week and making my list, I scour the Sunday paper and my coupon box for the dollar-off deals. I also recently discovered coupons.com, where you can click and print the coupons you’ll use.

I kept a coupon drawer for years and only recently looked through the whole drawer with our 9-year-old son. We discovered coupons for diapers (we’ve been diaper-free for several years now), coupons from 2006, and many other outdated coupons. We recycled 90% of the coupons and organized the remaining ones into our coupon box with labels such as canned goods, frozen foods, and meat.

When I receive coupon flyers in the mail, I often pass them along to other moms, especially ones with babies who need those $3 off Huggies coupons.

I’ve only scratched the surface at couponing, subscribing to Money Saving Mom and a myriad of coupon pages on Facebook. Some ladies keep binders with sports card pages. Instead of trading baseball cards, they put a coupon in each plastic slot. Others work wonders on the web and at Walgreens, accumulating those points or rewards to their advantage. Some moms can feed their family of four for $30 a week.

I haven’t reached coupon queen status yet and don’t know if I ever will. However, I try to do my part, saving $20-$50 on weekly groceries and blessing other frugal moms with coupons when I can.

How do you save with coupons?

Lisa Van Dong has been teaching her two sons since 2004 and attempts to incorporate study, work, service, and play into their homeschooling days. She takes an eclectic approach to homeschooling and enjoys reading, writing, editing, and essential oils. Lisa blogs publicly at Pockets of Time and privately at Scooter and B.