kids Archives - Page 13 of 29 - Kristen Anne Glover

100 Beautiful Days of Motherhood: School {6}

When I first started homeschooling my daughter, I had no intentions of making it a thing. I was a mom who happened to be homeschooling, but I was NOT a homeschool mom. There’s a difference.

In the beginning, I was organized and creative and a little smug. I had a daughter who, at two, could spell her name, count in Spanish, and sing the order of the planets. At playgroup, she said words like otoscope, marsupial, and impertinent. At age five, she informed me that her favorite book was The Swiss Family Robinson. Unabridged. I proudly displayed her beautiful handwriting on the fridge and plastered gold stars all over her work.

Fast forward a few years and a few more children. I am no longer smug. I am no longer organized. I don’t even have stickers because someone stuck them all over the cat. I have no idea what I’ve taught to whom or if my third child even knows there are planets.

The counters are covered with suspicious jars of things for science and toilet paper tubes for art, which is ironic because the old me would have sworn toilet paper tubes could never be art.

I am a homeschool mom. Not just a mom who homeschools, but a bona fide, tried-by-phonics homeschool mom who teaches not just one advanced child, but five children of varying degrees of talent and ability, attention and cooperation, desire and will. I am not just a patient, creative, enthusiastic teacher but a distracted, tired, and sometimes frustrated teacher who hopes the grocery clerk won’t ask the kids any difficult questions like “What grade are they in?”

I am a homeschool mom, and the dirty truth is, I don’t really like it. At noon on most days, I am on my second pot of coffee and my first pair of pajamas. Even on the best days, when everything is clicking right along and no one has cried over math even once, I sometimes stare out the window and indulge a fantasy about a big yellow bus that makes house calls.

I’d like to quit. I think about all the other things I could be doing instead of teaching long division again. I am convinced that if there really was such a thing as Purgatory, it would involve teaching long division. Or beginning reading.

Every few months, when a new math lesson results in mass hysteria or cursive practice threatens to be fatal, I have a little breakdown. I go up to my room and cry and think about the fact that there are worse things than raising five illiterate children.

Of course, that’s an exaggeration. Only two of them are illiterate.

There are also worse things than doing something you don’t like. No one will tell you that, but it’s true. We want to believe that we were put on this earth to feel good and serve our own dreams and desires, but that’s a lie. We were put on this earth to glorify God, and that sometimes takes a different road than I would have guessed.

I think about this often on the “I Don’t Wanna” days. Like it or not, homeschooling is the best option for our children for now. I’ve done the math. It always comes out the same. That means that God is in this. He has led me here and He has called me to this trial challenge opportunity for His time and for His purpose.

If God has called me here, He will provide the strength I need to stay here. I realize I have an unparalleled opportunity to see God work. And do you know where He tends to work first? In me.

That is the awful beauty of homeschooling. It gets at the stuff I tend to shove in the corners. It gets at the cruddy parts and the broken parts and the parts that should have been refined by now but aren’t. I am impatient, still. I am selfish, still. I am lazy, still.

No matter how many times a big yellow bus stops at my house, it is not going to take away all that stuff that lingers in my heart. Only God can do that, but God will only do that if I am obedient.

So on this beautiful day, I am thankful to be where God is. It just so happens to be in a living room sprinkled with flashcards and library books. It just so happens to be in my own home teaching my own children. It just so happens to be in the refiner’s fire.

It just so happens to be right where I need to be.

100 Beautiful Days of Motherhood: Sickness {5}

My little sickie

I knew something was wrong when I heard the doorknob turn. I opened my eyes when the bedroom door creaked open and I heard a little person whimper. “What’s the matter?” I asked, looking through the darkness and trying to find my wits.

“I threw up in my bed!” It was Kya. “I threw up all over my green blanket!” she wailed.

“Oh dear,” I said, thinking about how cozy my bed was and how much I didn’t want to wake up to vomit. “Go hop in the tub. I’ll be right there.”

Sure enough, Kya was sick. She threw up in the bathtub and again on the couch and once more while the older kids started school. The twins didn’t know what to do without their mini-matriarch so they hovered near, bringing her stuffed animals and books and asking if she felt sick.

She did feel sick. It was one of those mothering moments when I felt a little sick too, not just because I turn into a paranoid hypochondriac when there’s a stomach bug about, but because one of my little ones was suffering and I couldn’t do anything about it.

But I was thankful too. When I saw her little body cuddled up under a blanket, I was reminded how healthy she is normally, how healthy all of my children are. Not every mother can say the same.

Jonathan at Children’s Hospital, May 2007

I remembered a day when this was not true. We were out in the warm spring air. Jeff was pushing Jonathan and Faith on the swings, high up into the bright blue sky. I held the baby and laughed at their delight. Suddenly, a rope broke and my three-year-old was hurled high into the air above my head where I could not reach him. I ran but I could not catch him. He was on the ground too quickly. His little body crumpled into the winter-hard earth head and shoulders first.

“Don’t touch him!” I yelled as we ran to him. My mother-in-law and husband and I gathered around, all three of us who had been right there but could not stop it. All I could think about was what might be broken inside my boy—his neck, his back, his skull.

But it was his femur that sent him to Children’s Hospital in an ambulance and earned him five weeks in a spica cast. I stood next to his hospital bed and looked at him. I could not believe he was alive. I could not believe he broke his leg and not his neck.

Still, I was grieved by what I saw and heard. He was in so much pain and his lips were dry and cracked because he couldn’t have any water before his surgery. The doctor said his leg might never grow properly. He might walk with a permanent limp. He might need surgeries in the future.

Waiting for surgery

The first day home

Just beyond the flimsy curtain on the other side of the room was another child, about Jonathan’s age. His mother stood by his bed too, but it was not the same. Her boy’s head was wrapped in white bandages. His skin was all at once pale and dark. It was a brain tumor, I heard, and her boy might not live. There was only so much they could do, the doctors told her, and most of that had already been done.

I went into the hallway and cried.

This is how he rolled

I thought of that little boy today when I looked at my child suffering through a sickness with a bowl by her side. I have long since forgotten his name and I’m sure his mother has no idea how much her son touched me. I’m just the mother on the other side of the partition, the mother with the healthy boy. But I see his face today when I look at my daughter, curled on a couch with a bowl by her side.

And I am grateful for this stomach flu, for her body which is healthy enough to fight and was designed for that very purpose. I’m thankful that these symptoms stand in contrast to the ordinary days and are not a definition of them. I am thankful that she is already asking for food and needing to be reminded that sick girls can’t chase brothers.

It is a grace to be able to hug my children at the end of the day, fully expecting to hug them again tomorrow.

On this beautiful day, I am thankful for sick kids.

100 Beautiful Days of Motherhood: Wonder {2}

Snow falling in the neighbor’s backyard

Yesterday, it snowed. The kids were having breakfast when it happened. The drizzly rained turned into fat white feathers that floated softly down from the sky and clung, for a moment, on the evergreens.

All five children dropped their spoons and rushed to the windows, wonderstruck. The twins, who have not seen very much snow in their four years of living, ran to the sliding glass door and looked out on the deck. Jonathan took pictures. Kya asked about sledding. Everyone insisted that we were going to have to take a snow day.

Jonathan can’t help but capture the moment

It was beautiful, to be sure, but somewhere in the course of days, I have wearied of snow. It covers the roads like it did the day my father died, and I worry. It blows up in my face and burns my fingers and makes the chicken water freeze over. It falls in my shoes and freezes my feet all the way to church.

But my children did not know all these things. They were simply captivated by the magic of it. Their faces shone with wonder. Even though snow and I are not on the best of terms, I couldn’t help but be swept up by the wonder myself, like a child.

Wonderstruck

I wondered, as I stared out the window, how many miracles I overlook each day because I have become too old to see. I wonder how much I have missed because I have ceased to wonder. I wonder how much I have missed of God because I have taken the miracles for granted, like the Israelites who grumbled against the manna that fell from the sky and kept them satisfied enough to complain.

I remembered a time some years ago, when I had an opportunity to crawl up on Jesus’s lap like a child and stare at his face in wonder. But I was too big and stood off in the crowd with a frown on my face and a to-do list on my mind.

It happened on a Sunday, and it was all John Paul’s fault.

John Paul is a grown up boy who comes to church every Sunday in the same suit. He is older than me on the outside, but not on the inside.

John Paul lives with his married brother because he can’t quite live on his own, and he walks to church in cowboy boots and a baseball hat because he can’t quite drive. He has a bike which sometimes gets stolen and sometimes gets lost, but he doesn’t mind walking and he doesn’t mind hitching a ride.

Every week, he counts the number of Volkswagen Beetles he sees so he can report the number to me the following Sunday, although I’m 99% sure he inflates the stats because I’ve never in my life seen 15,000 Beetles and I’ve been to junkyards.

If you talk to John Paul for any length of time, you will hear about his favorite football team and the latest movie he has seen. And, you will hear about his mother who killed herself when John Paul was not old enough to understand. He will never be old enough to understand.

But one thing John Paul understands is Jesus.

One Sunday, I was having trouble focusing on the sermon. Was it just me or was this going longer than usual? Was it just me or had I heard this all before? When the pastor launched into a “Come to Jesus” message, I stopped talking notes and started thinking about what to make for lunch.

The cat remains unimpressed with snow or anything else

The pastor’s voice filtered in as I considered whether or not I had tomato soup to go with the grilled cheese. All the parts about sin and a holy God and a perfect payment washed over me without making me a drop wet. “God is a gentleman,” the pastor was saying, “and a just judge! If you don’t want Jesus to pay your debt, you are welcome to pay it on your own. But the debt must be paid. The question is, who is going to pay it? You? Or Jesus?”

From somewhere in the sanctuary, John Paul’s voice rang out, “Pastor, I choose Jesus!”

Astonished, I looked over at him. He held his hat in his hands and he leaned in to hear every familiar word. His face wore the wonder of the gospel, his eyes were wet with tears that came from knowing what had been done for him.

My face burned with shame. John Paul is just a great big child whose heart is still young enough to hear the same story over and over without growing old in the hearing. But I was not. I had lost my wonder. I had grown weary of the miracle.

But God, in His mercy, has given me five pairs of new eyes. He has given me ageless hearts, like John Paul’s, to remind me of the ordinary, astonishing miracles of earth and eternity. He has given me a thousand new opportunities to hear the same story with new ears and to be humbled, felled, and wonderstruck at what has been done for me.

I am reminded when I read the Easter story to my boys and Paul begins to cry. I am reminded when Kya prays almost every night, “Thank you, Jesus, for dying for my sins.” I am reminded when Micah’s voice comes down from his perch on the toilet where he’s singing “Holy, holy, holy!” in his loudest voice. I am reminded when Jonathan wants to give all his money in the offering or when Faith asks when we’re going to adopt a child who needs a home.

The beauty of these days is that they are full of newness. Awe. And wonder. I am given a chance to be a child again, and that is something I need.

“Truly I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child will not enter it at all.” –Mark 10:15

Awed

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