Warning Label

WARNING: prayer walking around your driveway in circles until you get so lost in communicating with the Lord that you have no idea how many circles you've made (100 times?) when it's pitch-black outside can cause breakthroughs to happen, as well as becoming instantly addicting.  Symptoms include an unwillingness to go inside, having to force yourself to stop walking, and a worried husband wondering where his wife has been.  It is perfectly normal to have  no concept of time, allowing an hour or more to go by without even realizing it.

Highly reccommended by the Holy Spirit.  

However, the enemy has criticized this practice in the form of busy schedules, housework, laziness, fear, condemnation, guilt, self-hate, and the like.  If you experience any of these attacks, standard procedure is to rebuke the enemy by calling him a jerk and a liar, then marching your happy butt outside, whether he likes it or not.  This could cause your heart to form a target in the weakest areas, to which he can aim his flaming arrows.  If this happens, start singing praises and repeating truths of scripture repeatedly until the words penetrate your heart.

This could form a more serious addiction to the above mentioned practice of prayer-walking.

Don't say I didn't warn you!

Love This!

I love cheesy videos about parenting :)
This one even made Neil laugh by just listening to it from across the room.
Fabulous!

Hymn Time

My kids sing worship songs all the time.  Lately their favorite is from Kari Jobe- Light of the World.
But there is something amazing about hymns.  They are so rich with Scriptural depth, understanding, and wisdom.  They are songs that last forever in our hearts because of that depth.
The praise songs of today are wonderful, but even in the past 10 years or so they have changed so much.  Most just don't last in our hearts the way that hymns do (and I'm a song-writer!).
At BSF, the kids have Hymn Time and the adults sing hymns together in Worship before and after time spent with our discussion groups.
Hymns are a fabulous in helping to build a solid spiritual foundation in our children.

Because of this, we have Hymn Time during our "circle time" every morning.  Each month we will learn a new hymn.  We will work to memorize ALL of the verses because skipping verses skips over so much significance to the song.

This month our Hymn is Holy, Holy, Holy.  The kids sing at least the first verse at BSF, so I figured starting with familiar territory was good.  In teaching them, I am learning myself, and I am cherishing some of the words in this hymn for the first time.

Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty

Early in the morning our song shall rise to Thee
Holy, Holy, Holy, Merciful and Mighty
God in Three Persons, blessed Trinity

Holy, Holy, Holy, all the saints adore Thee

Casting down their golden crowns around the glassy sea
Cherubim and Seraphim, falling down before Thee
Who wert, and art, and evermore shalt be

Holy, Holy, Holy, tho' the darkness hides Thee

Tho' the eye of sinful man Thy glory may not see
Only Thou art holy, there is none beside Thee
Perfect in pow'r, in love, and purity

Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty

All Thy works shall praise Thy Name in earth, and sky, and sea
Holy, Holy, Holy, Merciful and Mighty
God in Three Persons, blessed Trinity.

School Rooms and Organized Insanity

This week has been a serious "do it to it" week.  Most of it has been gearing up for starting school this week.

Since we worked through the summer, we're already about halfway through Kindergarten, but I still wanted to get ready to hit the ground running next week (we decided to get serious about school right after Labor Day).  We'll be adding Science, as well as Art and Music appreciation, poetry, and some other little fun stuff.

Bella doing some Math work with place value

...and she built it, said it, and then wrote it...correctly :)

We have (almost) totally rearranged the entire house.  Seems that way anyway.
We put all 3 littles in the same bedroom:

Definitely not "put together" yet, but it'll get there eventually.

 Then we moved the school room to Isaiah's old bedroom, and made our Dining Room an actual Dining Room again:

We have missed having people at our house!  With things set up the way they were, we just didn't really have room to put anybody if we invited them over for a meal.  We have an expandable breakfast table in the kitchen, but expanded it always feels cramped, and when it is not expanded it only sits our family.

Neil and I would want to invite a family over for dinner, and then we'd get really stressed out trying to think about how we could make it work and everybody be able to sit down!  We decided to do what we had to do to get our dining room back.  Isaiah is old enough now that we figured it wouldn't be too hard of a transition to put him in with the older two.  The nice thing about having the school room just down the hall from their bedroom is that the bigger kids can go play in the school room when they wake up, so Isaiah will *hopefully* get a chance to sleep a bit longer.  Balian hasn't quite gotten down how to be quiet when he wakes up, but we're working on it. These things take time.

I'm really liking the school room where it is now.  Even though it's a smaller room, I feel like we have so much more room to work with.  First of all, no piano.  That stayed in the dining room.  Secondly, I can put anything on the walls that I want without sacrificing our "wall-o-pictures".  But really, let's be honest.  My favorite thing about the new school room is the fact that I now have an entire walk-in closet for school storage!!  Amazing!!  So I've been organizing like a mad-woman!  The only down-side is no flooring.  it's concrete.  We tore up the carpet, because well, it was pretty gross, and I don't like carpet in the school room.  And we haven't put anything else down at this point, so we have concrete.  But we washed it really well, so it's really clean concrete :)  I miss the wood floors that we had in the dining room, but oh well.

Here's some pictures of the new school room:

At-a-glace from the hallway door

Other side of the room from the hallway

um, yes.  love this!

The closet is seriously amazing.  Art supplies, Montessori activities for the younger ones, all of the curricula, the books we'll be using for Science, Encyclopedias, etc. fits in there!  And the shoe organizer is the topping on the cake.  Lots of the little stuff found homes here, and I can see it and find it all when I need it.

From the closet

Some of our "Read Aloud" books

More "read-alouds"

The kitchen has a new home in the hallway, just outside of the school room.  I think they use it more now.

Have I mentioned how much I love IKEA?  If I haven't, I will now.

I. Love. IKEA.

This is why:

Kid's table and chairs (and the paper reel): IKEA

Storage Bench and baskets: IKEA

Storage shelf/bookshelf and bins (in closet): IKEA

Oh yeah, and our breakfast table and chairs: you guessed it, IKEA.

Not to mention the best kid's step-stools ever for teaching boys to pee standing up (yes, I just said that).  

But as far as the school room goes, to quote Annie, "I think I'm gonna like it here!"

*This is what happens when I type when I can't sleep.  I get random songs from musicals stuck in my head.  Oh, wait, that's me ALL the time! :)*

So tomorrow the fun begins!

If you're wondering how we are going to do school, along with everything else, here's somewhat of a breakdown:

Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday mornings: basic stuff.  Chores around the house, Circle time (where we do our calendar, along with read-alouds, art and music appreciation, hymn time, poetry, etc.), reading, writing, and Math.

Wednesday mornings: BSF.

We do Bible during lunch, but that may change to dinner-time as more of a family devotional.

Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday afternoons: science/nature study.

Thursday afternoon: gymnastics.

Friday afternoon: grocery shopping.

outdoor play, free play, art, and handi-crafts are interspersed throughout the day.

Nap-time everyday.

Quiet time every weekday.

A girl I graduated High School with summed it up with these words: "Fun Chaos".

I can't wait!!  

Just for fun, here's some pictures of Isaiah finger-painting for the first time using Cool Whip.  Seriously the best thing to use for little ones who still want to eat everything.

Ha.  I love his face in this one.  "What?"