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The Greatest Obstacle
Do you want to know what my biggest parenting challenge is? Let me start but telling you what it is not. It is not determining which homeschool curriculum to use or even the decision whether or not to actually homeschool these children at all. It is not preparing daily breakfasts, lunches and dinners with variety and healthy eating habits in mind. It is not balancing the demands of six children, a messy house, overflowing laundry, marriage and friendships. It is not determining the best course of discipline appropriate for six different humans. No. It isn’t any of those things. My biggest parenting challenge is this . . . With five…
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Afternoon
This past weekend Riley volunteered to help at a local Farm Day with her classmates. The farm was beautiful. The barns and the mountain views made me miss sweet Virginia. The smell of the hay barn even made me miss the dairy farm on which I grew up. London, Mosely and Bergen passed around bunnies that were so cute I almost wanted one. Almost. Because I had bunnies when I was a kid. My little brother and I had matching white fluffy ones. Trapper and Whatever-Douglas-Named-His. My cousin Mark jumped into their pen once when he was visiting. He landed on Trapper, my bunny. Hard. It died. Since the bunnies…
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seriously.
Oh Man. After this morning’s Bible study, I had a small window of time to get back to our house, grab a quick lunch for everyone (and by “grab” I mean “Mommy has to assemble”) and get everyone back in the car and headed in the opposite direction to the afternoon’s art lessons. It was raining. Time was limited. I had five children with me. I knew it was a recipe for disaster. But I had no idea how violently it would all break down. The kids got corralled in, stepping in each puddle and muddy inch in the yard and splash their wet selves across the sun room floor.…
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One Thing Leads To Another
Ups and downs. Highs and lows. This and that. A chain of events that connects one thing to another. We were in the car on the way to the bank. Piper threw up in the car again. (Is this a pattern?) I turned the car around, errands never completed. I unbuckled the entire car seat, with the sticky, smelly two-year-old still buckled in, and set it all on the driveway. I left the car seat outside and carried the little Finnian directly in to the bathtub. I forgot about the car seat. Magnus did not. Riley (or as our kids call her – Girl Staff Riley, not to be confused…
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London Elizabeth Scout Keigley: The Interview
Based on the popularity of my last interview with a young man about town named Bergen Hawkeye, I thought I might ride the coattails of that success and present another interview. This interview was a bit easier to attain, as this child is less inclined to bolt midway through a sentence. This small one is a thinker, a philosopher, a leader of her many young siblings and just a darn cute little gal. She is prone to unusual proclamations such as the one that was pronounced during last evening’s bath time. She had a rather large scab on her ankle from a fall across asphalt. As she was bathing and…
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Speaks For Itself
I’m not sure I run a great homeschool. Although I don’t think I run a bad one. There are a lot of things I do poorly. (It would be too detrimental to my psyche to list them.) But I think I do one or two things pretty well. (Probably because they are my favorite so they’re easy for me.) This is what we do well. We read. A lot. And a vast variety considering my homeschool’s median age is probably four. (Math is not something I do well.) I love Charlotte Mason, a British educator whose philosophy I have snagged as my own. A major part of her educational foundation,…
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I Knew Her When
A gifted student. A kind junior high girl (more a rarity than it should be). A godly young lady. Our favorite Virginia babysitter. A great soccer player. A dedicated worker. A faithful finisher of assignments. A considerate friend. A joyful spirit. A reliable actress on the high school stage. Jamie Newton. What a good kid. That’s what we used to think. And now we can say . . . What a great grown-up. It was so much fun for our family to load up the Suburban this weekend and drive a little bit into the North Carolina hills to meet Jamie and her equally cool husband of four months, Cole,…
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Constant
Really, this post is about chaos. And I think the photo demonstrates that fairly well. And it’s funny. And Leanne said she will only read my posts if they are accompanied by a photo. Our house is lived in. It’s comfortable. And we like that. But comfortable can ooze into cluttered faster than Bergen can ride a bike down a hill. And cluttered can morph into chaos with a speed faster than Riley’s fingers can text. Last weekend Kevin and I looked around our home. And it looked like chaos had settled in. I was tired of messy children’s rooms where a child could not play with any particular item…
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Remember When?
This is a recent photo of the Little Willow. The “bigger” kids dressed her up one day. For no reason. And yesterday was Halloween. Which, at the Keigley house, did not imply anything out of the ordinary this year. Kevin and Riley ran a race. The rest of the kids and I had a less-than-financially successful yard sale. We relaxed in the afternoon, went to the store, had tacos for dinner and watched a movie with friends. You know – the regular. But this Halloween made me think of last Halloween. And that made me laugh. And since yesterday was so . . . . normal, I thought I might…
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No Longer
No longer will I look scornfully upon you when I notice your child walking down the street wearing only one flip flop. Maybe your daughter just tripped on her left flip flop, took it off and used her teeth to try to “fix” the problem, thus creating a new problem – a completely unwearable piece of footwear. And maybe you were only a block or so away from your car anyway so it just made more sense to walk back to the car with her one shoe-less than to really address the problem on the street with four other children in addition to the one-shoe-wonder walking down the street.No longer…
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I Didn’t Know
I am constantly learning new things. Sure, plenty of those things are powerful, spiritual and perspective-altering. But some of them are not. For example. I didn’t know that size 6 jeans for six-year-olds are already $15 even at low-cost stores such as T.J. Maxx. (I just visited Ye Olde Good Will Shoppe to cure that one.) I didn’t know that petite clothing has very little do with your overall size. I always thought those clothes were for very tiny people so I sidestepped those racks. I recently found out that petite is actually talking about your height! As a relatively short person, why hasn’t someone, anyone, told me this before?…
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Calls It Like He Sees It
Bergen likes to call things by the names he thinks are best, even if they are not correct. These delicious little peanut butter kiss cookies? Needle Tips.
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Are You Sure?
I find myself always asking, (repetitively, yes) How can I best serve God? (Right now. In this life. In the present.) And the answer seems to always be given (repetitively, yes) softly in my mind, boldly in my life. By serving the people living at this house. No, no, no. Can’t I do something glamorous?Something big?Exciting?Cool?Highly visible?Dramatic? God,Don’t you need a writer for a really popular magazine?Do you need me to work at a theatre like Flat Rock Playhouse?Do you want me to sell all of my possessions and travel across the country with my family in an RV for you?Do you want me to sequester myself away in some…
