Joy in the Journey

Sometimes life is just overwhelming...in a good way. I guess I should say that God's grace and blessing is overwhelming. bibleversestogo.com What are you needing right now?  Recently I have had a few personal needs. Well, I guess when you get down to it they are more like "wants" since I feel like "needs" is a pretty strong word (like something you can't live without). Anyway, we had been having a lot of problems with our main vehicle, for one. Because it has a hybrid system, no one in our rural county can work on it so it had to be towed to another county at the beginning of May and we still don't have it back. Thankfully, we still had our old clunky van for the kids and I to use. My husband just  bought himself a car so the van was freed up for us, which is amazing timing.  However, the van has problems. It turns out that if you accelerate too quickly, it will die on you. Right there, in the middle of the street! That really took me off guard the first...

I shared with you recently about how I say "no" a lot to activities and commitments because I just have so much already on my plate that it's overwhelming to do more. I also shared how we "ended" our school year early by putting away the books and focusing on interest-led learning.  The world has been pressing in and it finally got too much and I had to step away. Away from all the pressure I was putting on myself. Away from just doing, doing, doing, going, going, going. I stepped away to focus on the beautiful. To take time for the joy. To dwell in the present, in the good feelings and hard feelings. To take care of my soul, so to speak.  As, I've been doing that: Spending time with friends, eating yummy, healthy food, and focusing on spending time outdoors in the sun. As I've been doing all these things, I realized it's not the activities, commitments that matter, as much as it's about how  those activities give or take from me. One of my recen...

Some moments of motherhood are almost magical. photo from guideposts.org I took the kids camping again, this time with friends. Three other mamas and I spent the past five days and four nights at the river. It was a very enjoyable time. One of my favorite parts was a memory that I will cherish forever. All of my 4 older children were very cautious of water when a toddler. Two in particular wouldn't even start really playing in the water until they were four years old. And we go to the creek or river at least once a week throughout the summer, so it's not as though they didn't grow up around water.  But my almost-two-year-old is a totally different creature.  When I first waded into the water this week he started complaining from the shoreline. "Oh dear," I thought, "He doesn't want me in the water because he is scared." But it was actually the opposite. He didn't want me to leave him on the shore, he wanted to go in the water with me! So I spent ...

I talked to you in my last blog about facing homeschool (and life) burnout! Today, I want to share how I decided to move forward. So, I made the decision to end school early for the year and told my husband. Kudos to him for not freaking out, he knows me well enough to know how I work and that things will be just fine. But, I didn't just decide to end school entirely, I decided to change what we were doing. My kids need structure and focus and purpose, without it they get restless (that's why we only take a 6 week summer break before starting school back up each year) so I knew stopping completely wasn't a productive solution. I had already decided to change things up in the upcoming school year and add in an element of interest-led learning. My children will have their main required subjects but after that they got to choose for themselves what they want to learn based on their interests.  I decided to start it, IMMIDATELY. As soon as I decided to finish up our school boo...

A few weeks ago, I was feeling pretty depressed.  Most of you know about my pain journey. Long story short: I've been in pain for 8 years now. I'm tired of all the details so wont share them. Back in the fall I was referred to physical therapy again, but as I literally start hyperventilating whenever I have a mask on, exercising while wearing one was something that I just didn't think I could handle. So I tried to do my exercises at home, but over did it and felt worse and just let myself get plain discouraged. Every once-in-a-while I would do a yoga video or try to go for a walk. The videos usually helped, the walking did not. Well, a few weeks ago I decided I was just going to bite the bullet and commit to doing the yoga videos consistently (I highly recommend Caroline William 's Christian yoga videos). Even if it was only a 12 minute one, I decided that I would do a video every day I was not planning on some other activity that I knew would be taxing to my body (like...

I shared last week that I've been working to be gracious within myself, another way to say that is to be gracious to  myself.  What happened before that resolution to be gracious to myself was a breaking point. Since January, I had been putting a lot of pressure on myself to do one-on-one school with my eldest everyday. Everything in my morning routine revolved around that goal. My wake up time, whether I skipped exercise to start school on time or not.  It started out fine and I was feeling successful, but then things went downhill. No matter what I tried my two youngers (11 and 2) could not manage to hold their attitudes together (mainly the 11 year old) for the duration of school. I'd hit a breaking point and reached out for help.  My mother-in-law gracious offered to watch the younger two while I helped my eldest. That was wonderful! But then she wasn't able to do it for awhile and I found my internal pressure returning and rising and rising. My frustration and a...

image from butterflyinthespring.com Another camping trip, more lessons learned. This time, we camped on the coast in a State Park. There were some good low tides and we chose this location because it was close to the place where we like to dig for clams in the bay (excellent for chowder or fritters). It was also close to where I needed to be for an early appointment the next day, so very convenient. What was not convenient was my OCD son's reaction to the campground. He's used to more rustic camping. I didn't think to prepare him for the fact that we wouldn't be in a location where he could just explore or build forts wherever he wanted. And, although we chose one of the larger campsites, he was finding the boundaries rather confining and distressing.  "I want to go home!" He sulked, "I hate this place. Why would we even camp here?" I calmly explained to him that we weren't leaving for two nights and he never had to come back to this campground i...

In the silence... Now, that's a rarity with kids.  I'm been driving a short way off to do my Bible and prayer time lately. My eldest is 13 and my youngest is getting close to 3 and everyone can survive just fine without me for a little bit, and I can have a quiet moment. Then I sit, overlooking some grass and the street beyond. I sip on my coffee and talk to God, or just sit with Him. In the silence lies all the things I don't have time for in the noise. In the silence my heart gets time to be heard. In the silence I sit and tell God the real thoughts that I usually don't want to think about, but need to. In the silence comes the pain that I've been running away from. I've shared a few things recently about getting my daughter tested and getting some confirmation about the differences in her school and communication skills that I've seen... But since then I've been wholeheartedly pouring my energy into "fixing", into trying to make things bett...