September 2007

September 30, 2007 :: Rainy Days and Sundays... Just another rainy Sunday afternoon. I’m sipping tea and mulling over my busy week. I spent the better half of last week at a learning styles seminar. I am now officially certified at level one....which means nothing really except that I can read my learning style profile and that of my family’s and make heads and tails of them. That and I can make a pretty graph about it. Beyond that though, I came away with a sense of newfound purpose. Not because the Learning Success institute ladies Victoria and Mariaemma converted me to a new way of thinking but because in so many ways this week my instincts and intuitions were validated. Don’t get me wrong, I was challenged in some areas. But, overall, my underlying belief that the best way for me to facilitate Ethan (and Finn’s too) learning is to back off, find the path of least resistance and in general let them be who God created them to be. This is much much harder than it sounds. I must constantly remind myself what is at stake, how I will defend my position, and in the end, to whom I truly answer if I get this wrong. Last year was our first year of homeschooling. I put a lot of pressure on myself to set up school at home and although we made progress last year - we reached all our milestones and then some - I will freely admit that neither Ethan nor I were estatically happy with how last year functioned. That’s not to say there weren’t some shining moments. There were. I just can’t really remember very many. We decided this year should be different. We discussed a number of options. Tutors, full time school, Montesorri. I spent hours asking myself, asking God, asking anyone who would listen which one was the right one for E. And then, just before school started this fall, it came to me. Just leave him alone. Really. See, there are three ways to ripen a tomato. You can pick it early, put it on the counter and it will eventually ripen. You could get all scientifically fancy and spray it like the mass produced tomatoes you get at the super market that are suspiciously hard and pale. Or you could, YOU COULD just leave that tomato on the vine and have faith that it will ripen all on it’s own when the time is right. After this last week, I have absolutely no doubt that my vine ripened tomato will be the far superior product in the end. September 28, 2007 :: What If... What if today I stopped thinking that my kids were out to get me? What if I stopped thinking that they were trying to make my life difficult? What if I started to take the time to engage them first instead of last? What if I started remembering what it was like to be a kid? What if I remebered how it felt to be yelled at? What if I started to think about how it felt to be lectured? What if today I tried to imagine how I would want to be treated if I were a kid? What if I was the one who tried to change instead of trying to change my kids? What if.....