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Saturday, December 11, 2010

You Can’t Change The Wind, But You Can Adjust Your Sails!

With the new school year starting, there is excitement in the air. Kids are excited to get new school supplies and see their new curriculums. Parents are excited to get back into a routine and have some normalcy back after a hectic summer. With all this excitement and familiarity beginning, there is a heavy air of what’s to come. The days will unfortunately take a bit of a turn. The excitement begins to die down as the kids struggle to learn new techniques & get discouraged with tedious lessons & boring worksheets. The liberties they have had over the summer are now lost and the restlessness starts to settle in. Moms may feel the strain and the frustration of feeling inept and inadequate as they struggle themselves to teach on a daily basis. Not to mention still taking care of a busy household full of chores and it’s own separate demands. Tired, trying to teach their kids to be disciplined as they themselves battle their own apathetic, comatose and lifeless self. It’s inevitable for the tide to turn and the winds to change direction. The storms will come, the waves will rock your harmonious new school year and if your not careful, smash you into emotional pieces. You may be thinking right now, how uplifting this article is and how it’s encouraged you so far. But the reality of this article is not for encouragement purposes, but to prepare us all for what’s to come. If we are aware of our history we can use it to make a better future. In other words, if it didn’t work the first time it’s utterly fruitless to repeat it a second time. Personally, history tells me that meals during our school year are a bitter pill. So to change that this year, I have implemented a weekly meal plan. For the month of September we will be having Meatloaf Mondays, Spaghetti Tuesdays, Hamburger Gravy Wednesdays, Stew Thursdays and Baked Chicken Fridays. In October it will be Enchilada Mondays, Potato Soup Tuesdays, Tetrizini Wednesdays, Spanish Rice Thursdays and Pizza Fridays. Did I mention that on Mondays and Thursdays the food is made in a crock pot to further my ease? History also vehemently screams at me, concerning our learning styles. I’ve realized that if I mix into their school time, things they are actually interested in, then the things they don’t care so much about are really no big deal and get accomplished with less hassles. I’ve become less concerned with what grade they are in and more connected to the enjoyment of learning itself. Weekly Library visits geared towards the questions they want answered fills this bill perfectly. This helps foster healthy appetites for learning and not only do they enjoy the investigation process but will feel a certain dignity that comes with self-education. I can here it now, the not so silent shrill of a frustrated mother trying to be somewhere on time. My history has repeated itself one to many times in this area. This assuredly needs to be nipped in the buttocks of procrastination. This starts by getting up earlier and waking our kids up as well. This sadly has destroyed my tranquil, undisturbed and peaceful mornings, but I get a continual Holy Spirit reminder that God did not put me here for me. On Wednesdays, lunch will be packed and clothes lied out for gymnastics the next day. I will incorporate the children in this new venture as well. We will do a similar thing on Saturday Nights. Cause we all know how peace-loving Sunday mornings can be, not! On days that they have sports, they will come home and put the clothes in the wash themselves, that way when I do laundry or should I say, if I do laundry they will be loaded and ready to wash. So forget the encouraging article you may have thought this to be and get prepared. Let’s make this new school year excitement last just a little longer then usual. We can ride these waves instead of being pulled down by them, we can attempt to be secured and ready when the storm hits instead of being surprised and pummeled by it, we can be the ones to turn the tide, instead of it turning on us. Together, lets all ease the main and spill out some wind.

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