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And We’re Off!

A new school year has started and we are six days in! After a lovely day spent at the beach while most of the other kids in our neck of the woods had their first day back at school, we began our 2019-2020 school year last Wednesday. Our grades this year are 2nd, 4th, 10th and 11th, and this is my 21st year of teaching my kids at home.

We always start with a half-week of school so that we can all get used to the new grades and new books and can get back into the routine of a well structured day. We sure do enjoy the freedoms of summer, but it does make transitioning back to school a little bumpy! Now we are hitting the books hard and working to stay on top of the schedule I’ve laid out. This way, when it’s time for our field trips, we will have the freedom to go without feeling like we are falling behind.

Speaking of field trips, I have a whole mess of them planned for this year! I am doing a Maryland History course with my younger boys, so we will be visiting every single one of the 24 counties. Almost all of these trips will include a hike of at least 2 miles, so I’ll be counting these as a part of our Physical Education as well! We will be doing some camping, visiting some historical places like St. Mary’s City, a one-room school house and the Maryland State House as well as going to some nature reserves and museums. It’s going to be so much fun!

My boys really love science, so I invested in some magnifying glasses for them to explore around our yard and to use on our hikes. I think that hands-on learning is the absolute best way for kids to learn. They’ve already started collecting different bugs and stuff. I just hope that they don’t decide to let any of the creepy crawly things they find loose in my house!

We always start our day out together with all four students sitting around the table where we have our Bible time and pray for our day. The boys are learning the books of the Bible as well as having weekly memory verses. My girls are pretty much independent with their school work, but we are studying Proverbs 31 together and I am looking forward to all of our discussions about what being a godly woman looks like.

I was able to get away with a good friend of mine for 2 nights before school started, and we were able to have some really good time alone with God, seeking his heart for us and for our families. One thing that I was reminded of, is that one of the greatest things to invest my time in is in the minds, hearts and souls of my kids. While their minds are the obvious investment when you think in terms of school, it is really the hearts and souls of my children that I should be focusing on the most. Everything that I am teaching my children should be able to be used to point them to Christ.

It’s been a long time since I have only had four kids to teach. It’s actually kind of weird, to be honest. I have adult children who have moved out, and other adult children who live at home and work full-time. I am embracing the changes that are inevitable and accepting the challenges that I will most certainly face. I know that God’s grace will be sufficient, His joy will be my strength and that His mercies are new every single morning.

I am really excited about all that He has in store for our school this year!

My Home School Prayer

Dear Heavenly Father,

Thank you for another year to school my children. Thank you for the opportunity to take Your instruction to train them up in the way they should go beyond their physical and emotional needs and being able to equip my children with an education that is based on Your Word and the godly values that we uphold in our home. Thank you that I do not have to shoulder this amazing responsibility by myself, but that I can be assured that You will be with me every step of the way, giving me wisdom as I teach each day. Thank You for being the perfect Teacher and showing me how to teach by Your example all throughout Scripture.

I pray for grace to accept every challenge that I may face this year. Please help me to remember that I am not only helping to grow my children’s minds, but more importantly, I am helping to grow character in each of their lives. Help me to keep in mind that You are present in everything, and that no matter what the subject, I can always point my children toward You.

I ask for wisdom to know when to push my children farther and to know when it’s time to put the books away. I ask for patience during those times when I have to explain something over and over again or when my children don’t want to do their work. You have said in Your Word that Your joy is my strength, so I ask for a measure of Your joy that would be so abundant that it overflows from me and effects those around me. I pray that our home would be filled with peace and not chaos or disorder.

I ask that you give each one of my children a love for knowledge and a desire to expand their minds through learning. Help me to tailor their school to their individual needs and bents that You have blessed them with. Help me to try not to fit them into some kind of mold of my own design, but to remember that You are molding them into exactly who You want them to be.

Please give me eyes to see when I need to correct my own faults instead of trying to always correct my children. Give me humility to admit my sin and to ask forgiveness of them when needed. Remind me that when I face a challenge, the first thing that I need to do is to get on my knees and ask You for help.

Thank you for the flexibility that allows us to take amazing field trips and learn things first-hand by traveling to different places around us. Help me to make the most of every opportunity to teach my kids about the world that You have created for us to live in.

Thank You for making each one of my kids different from the others. Thank You for their unique personalities and the things that make them special. Thank You for blessing me with the gift of children. I ask You to bless all of us not just with teachable minds, but with teachable hearts as well. Help us to pursue excellence in all that we do. Please bless our school year and help us to honor You in all that we do.

AMEN

Our Summer Bucket List

Hey all! It’s been quite a while since my last post, but I’ve been super busy making the most of these wonderful summer days with my kiddos! Once we finish our school year and get back from our family vacation, we like to run wild and do all sorts of things together as well as with our friends.

This year, my older kids are all working hard, so, my youngest three and I made a summer bucket list of all the things we should do during our months of doing anything and everything we want! These last two weeks they’ve been attending their favorite summer camp, so I finally have a chance to sit down and share with you what our summer looks like so far this year.

We checked off the first item on our list with a visit to the boathouse to see my parents where we kayaked and played in the Choptank River. We’ll be going back a few times this summer for sure, since we all have a ton of fun there!

Next, we decided to visit a sunflower maze. It was incredibly hot, but it was really awesome walking through nearly 6 acres of sunflowers towering over our heads. Since the maze was over 2 hours from home, we decided to have a little fun at lunchtime and visit a 50’s diner!

Going to the beach with our friends is always a favorite! We like to go to Towers Beach near Rehoboth, Delaware. They have a great bathhouse complete with showers and changing rooms. We moms sit on the beach for hours and hours while all our kids ride waves, build castles, dig for sand crabs and get sunburned! We pack up around 5 p.m. and then head to the boardwalk in Rehoboth before heading home.

Everyone in my family is a huge Marvel fan, so when we heard that the new Spider-Man movie was coming out this summer, we knew that that absolutely had to be on our bucket list! Marvel didn’t disappoint, and we all had a great time at the theater together. A plus for this activity was that my daughter, Amanda, was able to join us!

The 4th of July is always a blast for us. We get to be a part of a float in the annual parade in Kingsville. We help to represent the Beachmont Corn Maze. The only down side of the parade, is that it’s usually about a million degrees out and we all get REALLY hot wearing costumes and standing out in the hot sun waiting for the parade to start. Once the parade starts, though, we all get to march down the middle of the road waving and smiling and handing out candy and brochures telling people about this year’s upcoming maze.

Our picnic on the 4th always ends in tons of home made ice cream. I posted the recipe last year if you want to check it out. I made a new flavor this year that was amazing! Raspberry Chocolate Truffle. Yummy! Unfortunately, the schedule that week was so crowded that I was on my own making the ice cream this year, BUT everyone definitely got to eat it!

During the week of the 4th, my daughter came up to visit from Florida with some of her friends. We chose this time to check off having crabs for lunch! If you’ve not eaten Maryland crabs, you’ve not eaten crabs. Am I right??? The friends were impressed and we all had a great time picking crabs and hanging out together. I do love me some crabs!

We got to check two thing off of our list last week that has been an annual tradition for a really long time. The first one is dressing up like cows for Chick-Fil-A’s Cow Appreciation Day. We pick up all our kids from camp, slap on some white t-shirts, black spots and pile in our vans to take over the nearest Chick-Fil-A. There are A LOT of us, so when I say take over, I mean literally. Tons of people from Beachmont camp go, and the line is usually out the door!

The second item we check off is going to multiple 7-Elevens on July 11, for free slurpees. This year was especially memorable since we drove through blinding sheets of rain in the middle of a massive thunder storm just to get a free slurpee! What can I say? Traditions and free food were worth it!

The next thing on our list is working at the Harford County Farm Fair next week. We’ll be at the Beachmont Corn Maze booth all week, so if you’re at the fair, stop by and see us!

We still have lots of items to check off of our list. I want our summers to be filled with lots of good times and making wonderful memories together. I only have so much time with my kids, and I want to make the most of every moment. We’re only half way through summer, so we still have many many days to run wild and crazy and to check those items off of our summer bucket list!

Flowers, Weeds and Kids

I spent quite a bit of time this morning weeding the flower bed in front of my house. I’ll admit that this is not my favorite job, but I have found that when my flower bed is flourishing, it brings me a lot of joy. That must be what John Keats was feeling when he wrote, “A thing of beauty is a joy forever”.

I’m not very good at the whole gardening thing. Hardy plants are the way to go for me. I have a few really beautiful rose bushes that my oldest son gave me and I have Jonquils and Hostas that come up every year. About this time each year, I give the flower bed a good weeding, buy some Impatiens and scatter them throughout the bed and call it a day.

Last year, my daughter planted a bunch of flower seeds in there and we had a bunch of sunflowers pop up as well as a few other varieties of flowers that were pretty, but I have no clue what they were. We also had a random vine with four or five pumpkins spring up and take over the entire bed – until I tried to “gently” prune it, and I killed the whole lot of them. Yup! That about sums up my gardening skills for you.

Last summer, I managed to get my hands on some mint plants and transplanted them into my little garden area. They were really scrawny looking, but one thing I do know about plants, is that mint is super hardy and will actually take over your whole garden if you’re not careful. A perfect plant for a non-green-thumb like myself! They did not disappoint, and I now have many fragrant mint plants spring up and I have already enjoyed some really delicious mint iced tea from them.

As I was pulling up all the nasty weeds this morning, I noticed that when I pulled some weeds that were really close to the mint, I pulled up one of the mint plants as well! Oops! I guess I’ll leave the weeds that are super close so that I don’t kill my mint. I also noticed something else. There weren’t actually very many weeds among the mint plants. That is true of my Hosta plants as well. The more the Hostas flourish, the less weeds there are to pull around them. I’m sure that this isn’t news to you avid gardeners out there. This is probably why your flowers beds are so gorgeous! The more flowers, the less weeds!

This made me think of my kids’ lives and how very much like gardening parenting can be. As a mom, I desperately want my kids to grow and bloom into something beautiful that God can use to further His kingdom and will bring joy to Him as well as to others looking on. I try my best to cultivate the soil of their hearts and plant things that will thrive and grow despite any adverse conditions that they may face.

When the “weeds” of this world spring up and try and crowd out the good things growing, I try to be quick to identify them as such and do my best to help the kids uproot them and not let them grow. Sometimes though, just like my mint plants, these weeds grow really close to the roots of the good things in my kids’ lives. Often, it’s hard to tell which root is which and as much as I don’t want to, it is actually better for their spiritual growth and well being that I leave the “weed” there. I couldn’t possibly remove every single bad thing from my kids’ lives any more than I could get rid of every single weed root in my garden. I dare say that I have my share of “weeds” in my own life and only God can remove them without uprooting the good things!

The thought of leaving things in my kids’ lives that might not be pleasing to God was not really something I liked to think about doing. What if those “weeds” start to choke out the good fruit in their lives? What if they take over the whole garden and there aren’t any beautiful blooms left to see? What if they end up walking away from God? What if, what if, what if?

Well, what if, like a beautiful garden full of blooms, there were so many good things planted in my kids’ lives, that there was barely any room for weeds to grow? What if, just like my mint plants that will spread and probably take over my garden, my kids’ faith spreads beyond our walls and begins to dominate their friendships, their school, their work, and every other aspect of their lives? What if revival in our country started with my kids???

This year maybe I will try and plant more than just a few flowers to make my garden look pretty. Maybe I will fill up the bed with so many plants that the weeds that are there won’t stand a chance. Perhaps, I will rethink the gardening plans I have for my kids as well. I’ll concentrate more on what I’m putting into their lives and worry less about trying to weed out every little thing that doesn’t belong.

Easter: A Time to Celebrate

Easter at the Tritt house is full of wonderful traditions! All of us love celebrating the resurrection of Jesus. We have some old traditions that have been around since our first child was born, and we have some brand new traditions that we enjoyed making this year.

One of the first things that we do to prepare for Easter is dye our eggs – all 5 dozen of them. Yup. 60 eggs. Before you start thinking that we must be sitting around dying eggs for hours, you have to remember that we have 7 kids that still live at home. That’s 9 people to divide all of those eggs between, so this way everyone gets a decent amount to color.

My family doesn’t really dye eggs in the traditional way. We stopped doing that once our oldest kids got to be teenagers. We use the traditional egg dye, but we also get out the sharpies, and the creative minds run wild!

Believe it or not, most of the eggs are gone in just a few days. Between the deviled eggs for Easter dinner and people eating them for breakfast, 5 dozen eggs go pretty fast around here!

A new tradition that my girls and I started this year, was to attend the Good Friday service at our church. This was such a sobering time as we reflected on the death of Jesus. All of us came out of the service with a fresh view of just how much God sacrificed for us.

The very next morning, my youngest daughter and I had to be back at church at 7 am to help hide over 6000 plastic eggs filled with candy and other goodies. It took us nearly 2 hours to hide them all and only about 20 minutes for all those eager children to find them all! It was such a great time of serving the community with our church family. Another new tradition that we will be keeping!

My favorite Easter tradition would have to be one that I have kept for as long as I can remember. Waking up early on Easter morning and going to the sunrise service at the camp where I grew up. I’ve only missed two of these in all of my years. Once when my husband served in the Air Force and once when I was giving birth to my son, Mark.

I absolutely love sunrises, and to couple this with the celebration of Christ’s resurrection is one of the best ways to spend Easter morning.It truly is a wonderful experience!

The morning starts off with a short reenactment of Jesus’ walk up the hill to Calvary. For the past several years, two of my sons have had this privilege. They walk to the sound of a trumpet playing “The Old Rugged Cross”.

After this, there is a time of singing, reading God’s Word and a brief Easter message. This all takes place with a beautiful view of the sun rising over the trees.

When we get home from the service, the kids will find an Easter basket in their rooms. We don’t get too carried away, and there isn’t tons of candy in there, but I think that as long as I have unmarried kids, they will get a chocolate Easter bunny from mom!

I like to put other things in the baskets, like a favorite drink, or maybe a clothing item the kids need. I re-use the baskets every year, except for the two little boys. For their baskets, I buy them a new sand bucket and shovel to take on our family vacation. This year, I included new swim suits for them, since they both would need one anyway. They were super excited!

After church on Easter, we have a nice ham dinner together, and then everyone spends the rest of the day enjoying each other’s company and many of us take a much needed nap!

I love all of our Easter traditions. I love spending time with the family, and I love celebrating our Savior together. HE IS RISEN!!!!

Finishing Well

I love this time of year! The flowers are all blooming, the trees are beginning to grow little leaves and the weather is warm enough to put away all of the winter coats until next year! Spring is such a wonderful time of year, but it is one of the hardest times of the year in our home school.

The warm weather beckons to us and thoughts of the upcoming care-free, run-wild summer days distract us all from the school work that we know must be done. As soon as the temperatures reach about 60 degrees consistently, all the kids want to do is play outside and none of us can wait to put the books away for the summer!

All school year we work really hard to keep on track with the schedule that I’ve planned out. We don’t take any of the public school holidays like Martin Luther King, Jr. day, Presidents’ Day or even Spring break. We rarely take a snow day, and my kids have to be really sick to get excused from their school work. The reason we do this, is so that we can finish our school year before Memorial day, and so that we can take our summer vacation before the beach gets crowded! This also gives us a nice long summer break before we get started on the next school year.

So, here we are, with less than 6 weeks of school left, and we are all struggling to finish our school year well. This is not a new struggle. It is the same struggle that we deal with year after year. Can’t we just call it a year and be done already??? Of course not.

The God that we serve is an excellent God, and He calls us to be excellent in all the we do. “And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus…” Colossians 3:17 “Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men…” Colossians 3:23 ” Whatever your hand finds to do, verily, do it with all your might…” Ecclesiastes 9:10

God has given me the privilege of home schooling my children. I do not take this task lightly. It is my belief that any task worth doing is worth doing well, all the way to completion – including getting through all of my curriculum, even if it feels like summer outside! This is why, every morning during our prayer time, I pray that we would pursue excellence in our school work and not just do enough to get by.

Along with this prayer, there are some practical things that we do to help us during this season.

  1. If it’s a warm sunny morning, I’ll send the kids out as soon as they eat their breakfast for 20 or 30 minutes before starting school.
  2. If school work can be done outside, do it outside! (Reading on the trampoline is awesome – as long as no one is jumping!)
  3. Have a picnic lunch.
  4. Plan afternoon outings to the park or the river. This gives the kids incentive to finish their work in a timely fashion.
  5. Take field trips!!!
  6. Count down the school days until vacation.
  7. Plan a year end day trip to the beach!

With just 26 days left in our school year, the end is in sight and we are all ready for summer. As hard as it is with the beauty of the creation calling us outside, we will pursue excellence and finish our year well.

Annual Spring Trip To DC

Every year about this time, pictures start popping up on all sorts of media of the beautiful cherry blossoms in Washington DC. For many years, I talked about going to see them, but when I actually got around to planning anything, I had missed my window of opportunity and the blossoms were all gone.

Three years ago, I FINALLY made it to DC to see these amazing trees in all their glory. I read somewhere that the sunrise is beautiful if you watch it come up from the Lincoln Memorial. Since sunrises are one of my favorite things, and crowds are not, I came up with this crazy plan to leave my house at 4 am and park myself on the steps of the memorial until the sun came up. I would then take a stroll around the tidal basin to see the cherry trees before all the crowds arrived for the day.

Only one of my kids was up for joining me on my crazy adventure. My youngest daughter, Alyssa, jumped at the chance for some one-on-one time with her mom, and gladly got up on a Sunday morning at 4:00 and headed to DC with me. We parked behind the Jefferson Memorial on Ohio Drive SW and hiked a mile to the Lincoln Memorial. The sunrise was indeed spectacular and the cherry blossoms were breathtaking. We made it back in time for church, but we had to elbow each other all through the sermon to stay awake. Maybe Sunday wasn’t the best day to choose to get up so early!

This started an annual tradition for us. Last year, we were joined by another mom and her kids, and another one of my daughters joined us as well. The trees were still magnificent, but it was too cloudy to actually see the sunrise. This gave me a few more ideas to improve my planning for this trip.

This year, I watched the weather more carefully, as well as keeping up with the peak bloom predictions at cherryblossomwatch.com and we chose Monday morning for our trip. Even though it was a chilly 32 degrees when we arrived in DC, the skies were very clear, and I knew we would be in for a spectacular show when the sun came up.

All four of my younger kids went with me. I had a friend and her kids join us as well, and we met up at 4:30 at the local park and ride. They all climbed in my big van and we were off! One great thing about leaving so early in the morning, is that there is absolutely no traffic on the way down! The trip to DC usually takes about 80 – 90 minutes from where we met. It took us 54 minutes – no speeding!

I park on Ohio Drive SW near the Franklin D. Roosevelt memorial for this particular trip. They make it a one way road with free parking available on the left. At 5:15 in the morning, there are ample parking spots to choose from, even for our 15 passenger van. From there, it’s about a half a mile walk to the Lincoln Memorial, and there are a few cherry trees along the way!

Another helpful thing that I discovered, especially when taking this trip with kids, is that there are bathrooms under the Lincoln Memorial! Finding a bathroom in DC at that hour of the morning is not something I look forward to, so this makes our trip a lot easier. Oh, and they’re heated.

After a quick stop in the bathroom, we all climbed the steps and sat down to wait for the sun to come up.

First rays peaking through

Bit by bit, the sun emerged from behind the skyline. There were several photographers at the memorial and a few other observers despite the chilly morning. The view did not disappoint!

Lincoln’s view of the sunrise

First glimpse of the sun
One of my favorite shots of the kids

Once the sun was up and we had gotten our fill of pictures, we headed over to the tidal basin to see the cherry blossoms.

The Tidal Basin
The Jefferson Memorial
The Washington Monument
Me and my girls
My boys and their friends

We entered in by the Martin Luther King, Jr. memorial, turned right and walked by the water until we got to the Franklin D. Roosevelt memorial where there just happens to be another bathroom! We got lots of pictures of the trees and totally enjoyed the beauty of God’s creation before heading back to the car, which, if you remember, was parked just outside of the FDR memorial.

I absolutely love this tradition! I hope that some of my tips for this trip are helpful for those who would be crazy enough to try this! If you can handle the early morning wake up, it is totally worth it!

Our Latest Field Trip

Last week, my friends and I decided that it was time to end our winter home school hibernation and take a field trip. Maybe some of you aren’t familiar with what home school hibernation is. This is the time between January and March when we don’t have any extra curricular activities going on in our lives, so we hunker down at home and work really hard on our school books. We catch up on anything that we might have been behind on and sometimes even get ahead on some subjects.

Anyway, we’d all had enough of the hermit life and we decided to make our first field trip of the spring a really big one. No, I mean REALLY BIG. Like, 620 miles in less than 48 hours big. It was a total blast.

I had done some searching online, and found out that Luray Caverns had a home school week in March. The prices were phenomenal, so we decided to start our trip off there. We met up with our friends at 5:15 on the morning of March 19th, and we packed into two vans and made our way west toward the caverns.

We made one stop for fuel and handing out breakfast along the way, and then our motley crew arrived at Luray at 9:00. There was just enough time for a bathroom break and to pay for our tickets before going on the first tour of the day. I should probably mention that our kid to adult ratio on this trip was 19:4…

The caverns were amazing! Some of the kids had never been in a real cave before, so it was fun to see their reactions to all the different structures down there. My favorite was probably the reflecting pool!


After the caverns, we visited some of the other museums on the property.
The Car & Carriage Caravan Museum, Luray Valley Museum, and Toy Town Junction were all included with our tickets. Toy Town Junction is a museum for vintage toys and I saw a lot of the stuff from my childhood there. Not sure how I felt about that!

I still have this Mandie doll!

We had a picnic lunch and let the kids run around a bit before loading them up for the next leg of our journey. The view was absolutely breath taking with all the mountains surrounding us!

All of us had been studying the Civil War era, so our next two stops would be focusing on events that took place during that time.

Booker T Washington was freed from slavery at the end of the Civil War when he was 9 years old. We visited the Booker T Washington Monument National Park where he was born and worked with his family. After watching a short film about his life we got to tour the farm and go inside a replica of the cabin that Booker and his family lived in. We found out that the ranger that helped us there went to Tuskegee Institute which is the school that Booker founded. That was pretty cool. Our time there ended with a short hike, because we always hike, wherever we go!

By this point, we had really packed a lot into our first day, so we stopped for some dinner and then crashed at our hotel for the night. I may or may not have been in bed by 8:00!

After resting up, we all met for breakfast in the hotel lobby. I don’t think the staff knew what hit them. The waffle maker was on over-load and I think they almost ran out of milk. Despite the breakfast madness, we were packed back up and on the road by 8:30.

In keeping with our Civil War studies, we visited Appomattox Courthouse National Park. This is where Lee surrendered to Grant and the Civil War was officially ended. We spent a great deal of time in the visitor center. The park rangers gave each of the kids a junior park ranger book, and they all worked really hard to find all the information needed to complete the activities inside.

If you’ve never gotten a junior park ranger book which is available at most national parks, you should really try it! It gives the kids a chance to be interactive in their visits and makes learning a lot more fun for them. When they’re done, they get a park ranger badge from that specific park.

We got to piggy back on the tour of another school group that was at the McLean House where the terms of surrender were drawn up. This meant that we got to hear the ranger talk that was given. The rangers did a great job explaining what happened there!

The McLean House

The ranger talk

After another picnic lunch, we surprised the kids by taking them to Dairy Queen for a free cone because it was the first day of spring! This has been a tradition for a few years, and we weren’t going to break tradition just because we were on a field trip! Shout out to Appomattox Dairy Queen for handling our crew like champs!

We were really close to Appomattox-Buckingham State Forest, so before heading home, we stopped and took an hour long hike on one of the trails there. As I said before, it’s not a field trip unless we take a hike!

We were about five hours from home at this point, so we set our GPS for the nearest Rita’s Italian Ice and took off towards home. First day of Spring = free Rita’s, so we planned our dinner time around our dessert! Traditions must not be broken! The closest one was 82 miles away in Fredericksburg, which was perfect timing for dinner and a snack before ending our trip.

Free Rita’s

This was an awesome field trip and an awesome group to hang with. Not everyone can hang with crazy, but this crew definitely can! I am so blessed to have friends like these.

Sibling Rivalry – Stop it or Let it Go?

If you’re a parent of more than one, how often do you find yourself breaking up fights between your kids? Or maybe you don’t actually break them up, you are just constantly dropping phrases such as, “Stop hitting each other”, “Give back the toy”, “Don’t call names” or maybe, “I told you to stop arguing”!

When siblings have a conflict, it’s like a parent alarm goes off in in our heads. Quick! Make it stop! Hurry! End it before someone gets hurt! Why do we do this? Our kids are just relating to each other, and like all normal relationships, there will be conflicts.

Everyone knows that sibling rivalry is as old as time. Look at Cain and Abel. Sheesh! That was some intense rivalry on Cain’s part! Or how about Jacob and Esau? First, Jacob stole his brother’s birthright and then he tricked their dad into giving him Esau’s blessing too! After that, Jacob had to run for his life, because Esau threatened to kill him. There’s also Joseph and his multitude of brothers that threw him in an old well and then sold him to a slave trader because they found him annoying. So, if fighting among siblings has been around for so long, should we continue playing referee or should we just ignore them and toss it up to being just a “normal” part of raising kids?

While no one wants a house full of chaos and constant bickering can be tiresome, I think that constantly breaking up squabbles between your kids can keep them from learning some important life skills. As they learn to deal with the reality of differences and conflicts, kids can be developing skills such as negotiation, compromise and valuing another person’s opinion. They can also begin learning how to stand their own ground while defending their point of view on a matter. Of course, they may need our help in learning to do that without physically harming the other person!

In my house, my two youngest are 6 and 8 year old boys. Their siblings are all teenagers and adults, and they pick up on every, single, dad-blasted, sarcastic or snarky comment that is said in our house. It’s not uncommon to hear them say things that would normally come out of a teenager’s mouth. In fact, just the other day, my 6 year old had a “roast battle” with his 16 year old brother. If you’re not familiar with this, allow me to give you a sample of their battle of words! It went something like this:

16 – Your ears are fat!

6 – You smell like cheese!

16- Your bangs have split ends!

6 – You have hair on your face! Oooh burn!

This was all in fun, at the dinner table, with their dad in tears because he was laughing so hard. It was also only a small portion of the “insults” hurled back and forth. The battle probably lasted a full ten minutes. So, why didn’t we stop them from saying things like this to each other? What’s going to stop them from saying these things in anger later on?

Let me answer that question with one of my own. What would you rather have your child do when they come upon a real life situation where someone says something mean to them – curl up in the fetal position and cry because someone insulted them, or be able to laugh it off and possibly diffuse the situation with a witty come back?

My youngest used to get really upset when one of his older siblings would tease him or say something he didn’t like. Instead of badgering the other kids to stop teasing, we taught him early on, that he simply cannot get angry at this and that the best way to work through it is to throw it right back at them with a comment of his own that will probably make them laugh. He’s gotten pretty good at this!

Our homes are the training ground for real life that will one day smack our kids right in the face and knock them down if we haven’t prepared them for what it will probably be like. Real life deals with real people, and real people aren’t always nice. That doesn’t mean that we should not be teaching our kids to walk in kindness and humility towards others, but they also don’t need to let others walk all over them. This is why we don’t stop every single altercation that comes up between our kids.

Instead of making our kids stop fighting with each other, I think that encouraging them to find a way to solve their differences without our interference is a much healthier approach. Taking these moments and making them teachable is actually modeling the way Jesus did things. He often repeated Himself over and over again, but, unlike us, it wasn’t with short commands desperately flung at our children. Jesus sat down and talked with people. He talked over and over again about loving God and loving people. Jesus said what needed to be said, but not in exasperated harsh orders. He spoke in calm, quiet and loving repetition. He was repetitious in His stories because we humans are slow to catch on. 

I’m not saying that we should never interfere in our kids’ rivalry with each other. There is definitely a time and a place to stop an argument or break up a fight, and our kids surely need to learn how to behave out in public. We just need to know where to draw the line between when to discipline and when to just let them work it out themselves.

Sometimes, though, words aren’t enough for our kids. We often find ourselves dealing with the same issues that we dealt with yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that. We get tired of repeating the same thing over and over again to little ears that just don’t seem to get it. Instead of trying to change our kids ways just with words, we need to teach by example and we need to pray for our kids. Words simply won’t change our kids’ hearts, but God can.

So, keep correcting in love, but more than you speak, keep modeling humility and calmness. Model humility by not being too proud to apologize to your kids and asking for forgiveness when you lose your cool. Don’t just teach them to apologize to each other; teach them the importance of forgiving the other person as well. Teach them to find alternate ways to solve their differences instead of arguing. Above all, teach them to love like Jesus loves.

One Down, Nine to Go!

So, it’s been awhile since I’ve been on here, but we’ve been kind of busy since Christmas and the New Year getting ready to marry off our first kid! While most of the planning and preparation for the actual event was done by our daughter and her fiance (now husband), I still had to get the rest of our crew dressed and ready for the big day!

Two of our kids live out of state. Chrissy flew up from Florida on Thursday, but after several delays, she didn’t actually get here until the early morning hours on Friday. Jim was flying in from Missouri, and he texted me the day before the wedding frantically asking for prayer. His flight was also delayed, but he had a connecting flight to make and it didn’t look like he was going to make that flight. Thankfully, the airline was able to get him on a different flight into Washington, and his good friend, Daniel, came to the rescue and picked him up since we were at the rehearsal when his flight finally arrived. Whew!

If you know my family, then you know that we aren’t typically a “dress up” kind of gang, so most of us needed to get appropriate wedding attire. That meant hours of shopping for dresses and shoes with my girls, trying on pants and shoes for my guys, haircuts all around and suit alterations for the father of the bride! My friend Vivian was amazing and helped me out by shopping for two days with me to help me find my dress!

I have to take a minute to brag on my thrift shopping skills. We found my dress for $20 at Ross, Amanda’s dress for $25 marked down from $65 at the Dress Barn and we got Dave an amazing Jos. A. Banks suit for $20. We went to Goodwill on the last Saturday of the month when everything is half price for that deal. If you’re into bargain shopping, I highly recommend it! I also got all the older boys’ purple shirts at Sears for half off. I love a good deal!

Oh, I have a quick funny and somewhat nerve wracking story from the morning of the wedding. My two youngest daughters and I got to the church early that morning to help with last minute preparation and of course to spend some time with the bride! Amanda was getting her dress on, and came to me with a troubled look on her face. The store forgot to remove the security tag from her dress when we bought it! It was the kind that if you try and take it off yourself it will explode with ink. I was going to try a hack I found online to remove it with a pair of forks, but after rethinking the possibility of ink everywhere and the ceremony just 2 hours away, I decided to call the mall around the corner and see of they could take it off for me. They were happy to, and just 30 minutes later, Amanda was tag free and dressed for the wedding! (I still think I could have taken it off with those forks, though.)

Anyway, I managed to get everyone looking decent and to the church on time, and our daughter’s big day was simply beautifully. The ceremony was lovely. My favorite part was watching Kyle when he saw her coming down the isle. Truly a man in love! Julia was a gorgeous bride, and we couldn’t be more excited to welcome her husband into our crazy family. The reception was a lot of fun, and I finally got to see those two swing dance together!

It was kind of a surreal feeling watching Dave give our daughter away to someone else to take care of for the rest of her life. Julia hasn’t lived with us for over a year now, and I know that she is fully capable of being independent from us, but I imagine that on their child’s wedding day most parents experience that feeling of “am I really ready to let my baby go” that I felt that day. Happily, I know that I am ready to let her go, and a lot of that has to do with seeing her walking with the Lord, surrounded by godly friends and church family as well as the fact that she and her husband both desire a God-centered marriage.

Now that we’ve gone through all the emotions of marrying a child off, I think that I could do it again! Not too soon, though. For now, I am happy to continue praying for each of our children and their future spouses, whomever they may be, that God would be first and foremost in their hearts and in their lives. I might be praying for some grandkids too…