The Birthday Gift

Posted by Peggy | 0 comments

It’s somewhat of a family tradition – my mother was born three days before my grandmother’s birthday and I had hoped one day that I would have a child I could call my ‘birthday present’.

He came the day before my birthday and he is the child most like me – in his temperament and his ways. He has a deep love of animals and nature and sports – though unlike me he’s pretty good at sports. He has a thirst for knowledge that is seldom quenched for long at the time – he is the questioner, the seeker.

And he struggles, as I did and do. We clash at times because we are so much alike but he is the one who brings the cold cloth for my head when it hurts and tells his brother’s to knock it off if I’m feeling under the weather. He’s the one in tune with my feelings and the nurturer.

I never wanted to send him to school – I had no idea he had autism until after he’d started in school. His symptoms were so different than his older brother’s and his younger brother was but a baby then. He seemed too tenderhearted to throw out into the world.

He can be painfully shy one minute and the life of the party the next. He is the who announces with excitement most mornings – ‘Time for School!’. He’s the one who eagerly is reading about the land where Moses walked with me as the other two come along for the ride a bit grudgingly. His struggles with math mirror my own when I was in school – the difference is that he has time – all the time he needs – to learn it – to understand it. He spends hours pouring over the Apologia Elementary Science series.

His name is Hebrew for ‘Gift of God’. He has lived up to his name and then some. I thank God every day for the privilege of being the mother of my children but I thank Him even more for the unspeakable privilege it is to be their teacher.

I may have started this home school journey reluctantly but it is his enthusiasm for learning – which I had lost by his age – that encourages me and helps me know I am doing what God has called me to do with my kids.

Peggy Dalley has been married to her best friend and husband for 14 years. She uses the eclectic approach to homeschool their three sons, 12, 10 and 7. Her interests include writing unit studies, Bible study, history and she is working hard to become a Proverbs 31:10 woman instead of a Proverbs 21:9 woman.