Simplifying Life at Home

It is the stuff again, overflowing from every vantage point. There are mountains of work every where - dirty laundry, dishes to be washed, toys to put away, books to find a home for, it could go on and on. The kids, even my husband, have not been cleaning up after themselves, which means I end up dealing with their messes, and I can't get to the heavy load already on my plate. While I may feel like flipping out at my husband and pointing my finger at my children, it really all starts with me. Mom sets the mood and tone for the household. If I want self sufficient cleaner uppers I need to lead by example.

The problem is that trap I mentioned above. After all, how can you clean up or do your chores when the family is making dirty faster than clean. It is not possible, especially if you work outside the home or homeschool. No matter how hard one tidy person works, they cannot make up for four people who do not pick up after themselves. My friend once put her husbands dirty socks in his coffee maker to teach him a lesson, that was brilliant, but I wonder if it only worked for a while. Trust me, I have try all sort so ways - hard as nails, crying, bagging, threatening, and bribing. You can lower your standards, but eventually, if you lower them too much you have ran out of clean dishes, clean clothes and the floor is covered in "stuff."

We are about to start our homeschooling year tomorrow, and this issue of the "mess" and "stuff" was weighing heavily upon my spirit. For the past month I have been asking God for wisdom of how to solve this problem and to show me what we needed to change. Then the Lord used another family's similar struggle to answer my prayer.

It was a blog post on Building Cathedrals titled "Less is More." Basically, you take everything out you can and box it up, donate it or put in the trash. Everyone will find it much easy to pick up after themselves. Then, as you master that level, you can bring some things back up from the basement. Follow the link and read the whole post, it sounds extreme, but I think it will make your household much easier to run. It follows a very basic, biblical principle of stewardship (Parable of the Talents). Focus on one thing, master it and then and only then, move on while reviewing what you mastered. It is so simple, so basic, now we must need to do it.

The photo at the top is a big mess my son made while I was schooling my daughter, below is my repentant son after he cleaned it all up.

January Burn

Does anyone else feel it this time of year?  This year, I feel particularly burned out.  While I am not sure, the cause is probably my heavy load of schooling with a 4th, 1st grader (who doesn't want to do school), and a preschooler.  A person can only work so hard, so long, before they become burned out.  In the past, I have been very unwise by working too hard, so hard that it leaves me with a feeling of never being able to refresh myself again.  In order to do the jobs God has set before me, I need address this problem because when we are burned out, everything suffers.  We are in danger of abandoning our dreams and goals.  Not to mention, it is not a fun place to be.

The reason January is so hard is the lack of sunlight and fresh air, but it is also because it follows December.  A month with filled with heavy demands and a flurry of fun-filled activities. Once it is all over, it leaves us very drained. The chances are if I fill this way, my children do too.  Just as we need that summer brake to restore ourselves, I am thinking we may need a winter break too. 

My first thought at this is, I must be crazy.  Wouldn't I want to take the opportunity of less activities to get a load of homeschooling work done?  Wouldn't spring be a much better time to have off because of the beautiful weather?  The answer would depend on your situation.  It also depends on your children, mind usually happily play between breakfast and lunch with no structured activities, other then a simple daily schedule.  Since our curriculum (MFW) has outside time built into our lesson plans,  I know we will have time outside in spring.  Also, while I do not have co-op, I do still have to take my daughter for violin lessons Friday morning. So, I am wondering if this crazy idea will work?  

One popular break is to take the month of December off, so the household can focus on preparing and participating in the Christmas season.  This works very well for some people. Now, this might sound like a scrooge, but sometimes I get concerned with the overwhelming attention we give Christ's birth compared with attention we give Christ's resurrection.  While I LOVE Christmas traditions, it is my goal that our Christmas celebrations are more symmetrical to our Easter celebrations.  This will not be completely realistic or for everyone, but I would like to try.  Thus, I cannot take off December unless I plan to take off April.

While I cannot try out my idea this school year, I plan to try it next year.  It seems for us that doing school this time of year is such a battle between winter moods and post Christmas fog. Winter is a great time too for getting inside house projects done.  By getting the house tidy, it gives us so much more time, makes our chores easier, and is much less frustrating.  Personally, I find I need those big blocks of time in summer and winter to get my household in order and bust some of those many little sources of frustration.  

One of the things that I truly dislike is not getting to put an idea into action right away.  Ok, so I have a good idea for NEXT year, but what do I do about now?  Since we end up doing 39 weeks of school*, I am going to cut myself some slack and do a week or 2 of light school days. On these days my 4th grader will not do language arts or any of the extras like Rosetta Stone or New Jersey History(this is in addition to MFW social studies), and my 1st grader will stay the same.  This should save us 1 and 1/2 hours a day, but they are still getting 36 weeks of "complete" school days.  Any other ideas to combat winter burn out?

*Here is the brake down of the 39 weeks: 34 weeks MFW curriculum, 4 weeks Co-op, 1 week IWOAS testing.  That doesn't even include field trips!  That leaves me 3 weeks of light schools. Do you know the public school down the street from me calls it a full day if they feed them lunch?  While I do think Co-op and IWOAS count as school days, there are just so many weeks in the year and I want to finish our curriculum. 

Finding the Source of Burn Out

Lately, I have been feeling so burnt out. Perhaps it is being too busy, not having enough help, or unmet expectations. By removing certain possible stress sources, I could see if it made me feel better or worse. We took a week off of school, and that was not it. I took a brake from couponing, and had a week with fewer activities, but neither of those seemed to be the source.

I noticed that I felt better when I was out, but when I was home, I felt overwhelmed and stressed. From here I realized it was the messy build up in the house. There are piles and piles of items to go through, organize, and get rid of. While I am not a neat freak, bad messes bother me. Finding the cause of my burn out helps me figure out my priorities and helps me to focus on the issue.

Also, it helps to learn where I went wrong to get to this point. First, you need refreshment to keep from getting burnt out. Our summer was too busy and our vacation was not relaxing. Second, a homeschooling mother needs help, and I was too cheap to hire any during out summer brake. While I cannot do anything about the last vacation, we are planning our next vacation to be about relaxing and making memories. As far as help, I have decided to hire a sitter and part with my money. You can be too thrifty. What is the use of stockpiling money for our adoption if I have a nervous brake-down in the process. I feel hiring a sitter for 2 or 3 hours a week will give me time to tackle the out of control clutter. Having too much stuff is not apart of the simplistic lifestyle I want to live.

On the bright side, school is going well. Perhaps I will get around to posting about the changes I made this year that have really helped to make a productive and happy school day.

Disaster Days

Bad days. You know, the days where you want to pull your hair out and scream. Things are very NOT perfect, and you feel like a failure. You swear somebody gave something to your children to make them act this way.

You become unhinged, and lose patience. There just does not seem to be enough time to do everything, an overwhelming feeling comes on. If you homeschool, the school up the street looks very appealing to you or you try to calculate if you can afford private Christian school. You search desperately for When Homeschooling Gets Tough.

It is true, we do not have enough patience. We do not have enough of anything. In order to succeed as Christian parents we need God to change our hearts. Since no one is perfect, we all have refining to take place in our spirits. We cannot do this without Jesus. This is not a sign of weakness, but a recognition of the weakness found in all people.

The Psalms that David wrote while he was being chased by Saul remind me the battles of motherhood. I am not alone in my struggles, God is with me. I may feel exhausted, but I can find rest in the Lord. Though as hard as some days can be, I know life can be much harder than not getting my way. I also loved reading the same passages during my husband's strokes and recovery. Our bad days are really not that sort of bad, they are really about our own desires not being meant the way we would like them to. The desires are usually good ones, like having respectful children, but they are our wants none the less.

When I cry out to the Lord, He show me where things went wrong in my day. Here is a list of sure fire disaster day starters the Lord has shown me:

1) Getting up late - You get up late, you are behind all day. If there is not enough hours in the day to start with, making less is really going to make a mess of things.


2) Failure to Pray - Start the day with prayer is a MUST DO. Get on your knees, cry out to the Lord, because the day will be hard, your patience will be tested to the limit, and you need the Lord to give you strength and wisdom.


3) Not Reading God's Word - His Words will refresh you like nothing else. Read it in the morning and at other times in the day. I love reading the Bible before/at breakfast and after putting the kids to bed. Sometimes I need to read it in the middle of the day during my refreshment time - if I get one (that is another blog post!).


4) Scheduling too much in one day - When you say yes to one thing, you are saying no to something else, which may be dinner or laundry or some needed rest.


5) Losing focus - You can only really do one thing well at a time. Multi-tasking is a myth, except maybe if it is listening to an audio book while you do the dishes. If your focus is homeschool, you need to focus on that one thing - you cannot answer the phone, and fold the laundry too. While you are folding the laundry one of the kids will start coloring instead of doing math and the other will reenact the Flood from Genesis in your bathroom. Kids do need to work independently, hovering like a helicopter is bad too, but you still need to check on them (expect = inspect) - which is hard to do if you lose your focus on something else.

I remember one homeschool mom telling me, "I can either clean the house or homeschool, but I can't do them both on the same day. If I do, then I end up feeding the kids cereal 3 times a day."


6) Forgetting to Eat - My husband cannot believe that I could get so busy that I completely forget to eat a meal, but I do. A hungry mama is going to be less likely to have the patience needed for her task.


7) Insufficient amount of rest - This could be staying up too late, and not getting enough sleep. Or it could be not taking a refreshment time during the day. You can't pour from an empty pitcher! If an infant is the reason, it best to simplify until the baby's sleeping habits improve or get some help - both would be better. It is a season, enjoy your baby while you can - they don't keep!

What are some causes to bad days that God has shown you?

Patience to Persevere

We had one of those homeschooling days today. The kind where you just want to put your kid(s) on the next school bus that drives by. No amount of my patience would ever be enough to deal with the situation at hand. Granted, it is not life or death, but a stretching experience non the less. The root of the problem is woven so tight and so complex, that it seems like an enormous task to untangle it all. If I did mange it, I would find at the center heart issues, theirs and mine. While the trials of homeschooling provide a non-stop opportunity for character building, both for the parent and the child, it is not necessarily a pleasant experience at times.

Through prayer, God will show me the solutions to my tangle of problems to lead me onto a less stressful, more positive way of building character through homeschooling. While I may have to just wait some problems out (like my part-time job), He will give me the patience to persevere if I abide in Him. So, when I start to loose my patience, I have to stop and pray. Also, I need to ask others to pray for patience for me too. Sometimes, like today, He has given me a solution, but I just have to have patience while I get the processes up and running. While the heart issues are there, the problems just bring them out, we can head off temptation at times by applying habits and systems into our daily life (i.e. daily prayer and Bible reading in the morning or a discipline chart). These habits and systems also help our children to build character with less of a struggle. If they knew exactly how much work they had to do today, maybe they would not have whined so much. Sometimes the solution is as simple as your child needing some protein to help them to control their emotions.

Many moms tell me they do not have enough patience to homeschool their children, and their right. I do not have enough either. God has to give it to me, God needs to change my heart. I need to go to God with my problems and ask for solutions. Today may have been hard, but trials are hard. It is the trials that we learn from. It is the trials that God uses to fashion our character. What else would you expect to find on the road less traveled by?

Burnout Post

Here is a great post on burnout at a blog called Conversion Diary, which I found from a link on Building Cathedral's blog. Great to know there are other kindred spirits out there.