Category Archives: homeschooling

resilient: the trait that covers a multitude of sins

Posted on by February 16, 2024

Friends, this is an excerpt from Work That God Sees. Enjoy!

We avoided ER visits at least three times that spring day: Once, a sibling left her baby brother alone on the couch (but he didn’t fall on his head), and twice, another child was caught carrying a knife the entirely wrong way (but no one was stabbed). The dryer was busted, so we were channeling our inner Little House on the Prairie and clothes were hanging everywhere to dry. Also, our ice maker was on the blink because it didn’t like the glitter that fell into it.

resilient: the trait that covers a multitude of sins

We had tears during math, so I grabbed a file full of stickers – big stickers, little stickers, one sticker for every problem, I didn’t care how many stickers it took as long as she found joy in it – and suddenly I realized that I need the same thing sometimes, too. Not stickers, but whatever will bring a little more joy to the day and its drama: a fresh cup of tea, a few minutes with the cat, or an hour of outside time for the kids so I can read for a while in a quiet house.

I came across this verse, and in a moment of homeschool rebellion, wrote it in our math textbook:

Above all, keep loving one another earnestly, since love covers a multitude of sins.

– 1 Peter 4:8

This verse was good news because we had a multitude of sins that day on top of the chaos already mentioned: broken dishes, tantrums, yelling, an almost-ruined camera, blaming…I’ll stop there. But if we could love each other earnestly at the end of the day, those loud memories might quiet a little under His covering, and we might have a little less chaos tomorrow. 

I won’t pretend it’s easy, though.

We moved on from math to science, and my oldest son was reading about the discovery of protein structure. It was a hard process; scientists had already figured out how to find the structure of a molecule, but proteins were so much smaller and more complex that it made discovering their structure that much harder.

And I think it’s sort of like how I can understand how love covers a multitude of sins, but I am still trying to learn how to consistently stay loving in the midst of the chaos. Not everything is solved by a handful of sticker sheets or a fresh cup of tea. So many small humans, so many complex behaviors, and I am so often out of answers, out of energy, and out of patience.

Some days are full of life-changing events that threaten to devastate us: A diagnosis. A confession. An announcement. An event that happens so fast, we don’t have a chance to prepare for how it is going to shake our reality in the days to come. A multitude of sins.

Sometimes facing tomorrow is more than we think we can handle after the day we’ve just walked through.

“But,” as my son’s science book said, “some people have dozens of times more perseverance than the rest of us.”

And that’s what I want to be: Persevering. Steadfast. But also, resilient.

If steadfastness is pushing through to breakthrough, resilience is rising again after devastation or loss. They both move forward and they often go together. We are steadfast when we have survived the waiting; we are resilient when we have survived the breaking. And there are many days when motherhood breaks us wide open.

Now may our Lord Jesus Christ himself, and God our Father, who loved us and gave us eternal comfort and good hope through grace, comfort your hearts and establish them in every good work and word.

– 2 Thessalonians 2:16-17

We moved on to a Bible lesson, and the kids and I talked about Jericho: The marching, the yelling, and the walls falling down. The obedience, the declaration, and the miracle.

“It doesn’t make sense!” Chamberlain said. And she was right; it never makes sense. Marching around a city can’t make walls fall down, right?

But it did, because God told them to. Obedience is powerful. Especially when it doesn’t make sense.

Forgiveness doesn’t always make sense. Reconciliation doesn’t always make sense. Most big moves – starting a business, a mission, a family – don’t always make sense. Mothering in the midst of the overwhelm, in the clutter and the mayhem and the mess, and then getting up to do it all again the next morning in spite of how the day before attempted to break us, doesn’t make sense.

But here we are, you and I, doing it. Over and over again.

We can do whatever He’s calling us to: Adopt, give birth, defend the helpless, write the book, heal the breach, comfort the hurting. Cover the multitude of sins, earnestly love the sinner. We can survive the breaking, and rise from ashes. We can do whatever He says.

When school was done, we got in the car. And I don’t remember where we went that day, but I do remember that the trees were budding and it was in the sixties, and we drove with the windows down so everyone could hear our Alaskan kids complain about how hot it was in the Stagecoach. 

But all those tiny green leaves had a sermon, and they still preach to us: In case you ever think your story is over, God has given us nature to show us that a season of bleak winter is never forever. 

Go pray circles around that next step and kick up some dust, because this is how we cover the multitude of sins, and how we rise from the ashes. The Lord has given us the city.

You can find Work That God Sees here, and if you’d like future posts sent directly to your inbox, you can subscribe here.

what we know: tools for adoptive and foster families

Posted on by December 23, 2024

How hard is it to read the word “graph” when you know all the sounds? On a good day, not hard at all. But on a rough day when you’re operating from fear and control, impossible.

“What do the letters ‘ph’ say together?” I ask. He knows this.

what we know: tools for adoptive and foster families

Not only does he know this, but I just coached his sister through reading the word “sphere” two minutes earlier, so he just had a refresher course in the “ph” sound. And that might be the very reason he’s choosing this hill to die on – it makes it all the more obvious that he does know, but You Can’t Make Me Tell You.

“Ape,” he says.

We both know it’s wrong. He does a quick extra chore to regroup while I work with someone else.

I ask again. “Ape,” he says, knowing it’s still wrong, it will always be wrong, never in a million years will “ph” ever say “ape,” but if I asked him what his name is right now, he’s just as likely to answer “Hippo.” Or, you know, “Ape.”

Another chore. Wash some windows. Specifically, “Wash the two windows behind you,” I tell him.

He starts doing a third window, though. So I say, “Go ahead and finish that one. You can do three.”

He stops half way through the last one.

“I’m done,” he says. We both know it’s not true.

“How many windows did I tell you to do?”

“Three.” Okay, kind of. I’ll give him that.

“How many did you wash?”

“Four.”

“Really? How’s that?”

He counts the panes, two on each window – one, two, three, four.

“So how many did you wash?”

“Three.”

Because two plus two is three. Because what he’s really saying is, Ef you. You can’t make me.

And I can’t. We both know that’s true. But what he doesn’t understand yet, is I don’t want to make him.

I want him to do it himself. For himself. Because he is loved, and he is valuable, and his days are valuable. I know it’s true. Some days, I think he might finally believe it’s true, also. But not today.

Not all days are like this. It used to be, for years, that every day was like this and worse (so much worse), but now he goes in phases – good days and bad days, great weeks and terrible weeks.

But it’s Christmas time, and right now he’s having some really hard days, because festivities and gatherings and events, oh my. The turmoil this brings up for kids with a background of trauma can be immense, sometimes catastrophic.

But it’s nothing like it used to be.

It used to be, we had to avoid almost everything that involved people because people didn’t know how much their well-intentioned interactions with our kids cost our family.

It was easier to just avoid them. We could at least avoid those triggers…but isolation also cost our family.  

Eventually we learned how to communicate what our kids’ needs were to the people around us – family, friends, our church, our school, our medical professionals. And that quickly helped us discover who “our people” were – they were the ones who respected the boundaries our kids needed. The ones who didn’t, weren’t.  

If this sounds familiar to you, I have some quick resources for you to help the holiday season be more fun than a root canal without anesthesia. Been there, hated that. Some days, as you can tell, we’re still there. But it’s nothing like it used to be.

This post explains the Why Behind the Weird Limits to our people. It helps family, friends, teachers, and other professionals understand exactly why it is such a no no to overstep attachment boundaries with kiddos who have a background of trauma. It’s chapter 2 from Upside Down: Understanding and Supporting Attachment in Adoptive and Foster Families.

Or there’s this: The Upside Down Cheat Sheet is a quick, one-sheet reference. Don’t be afraid to click on it; it’s a free download, no signup required, with a few basic principles to remember. Print it out and give it away as much as you want. If you charge people for it (good luck with that), I will find you…and I’ll ask you to share your savvy marketing skills with me.

And, need the whole book? It’s just 100 (ish) pages – a quick, easy read, and it’s funny. Because I’m funny. At least, my friends think so. You can buy it in stores everywhere or get it directly from us and take advantage of our discounted prices for buying multiple copies. It’s also now available in audio here. Everyone needs this information and we want to make it easy for you to have it, because adoptive and foster families need real support and understanding from their people. If our community can learn, yours can, too.

So that is a look into our fishbowl, seven years into this. At least the windows are clean.

May your gatherings be filled with joy, and your home be filled with peace and as little aftermath as possible. What you’re doing is hard, but you’re doing a good job. And that’s the truth.

with vision: reading with Grandma

Posted on by April 19, 2022

Kav’s hair was all tufted and feathery-soft after his bath, copper in some lights and red in others. I sniffed him and ruffled it, and before I knew what I was saying, these words came out of my mouth:

“His hair is so pretty.” I paused. “Listen to me, I sound just like Grandma.”

with vision: reading with Grandma

For nineteen years Grandma has called our babies’ hair pretty, and she doesn’t care whether it’s a boy or a girl she’s crooning over. Anyone under ten is fair game.

The next day, we drove the wavy road to her house in forty degree weather. Puddles from the last few days’ rain on the roadside trail were still glazed with ice in the early afternoon, and you could see their frozen lines crisscrossed on their surface. If you grew up in cold weather, you can imagine the perfect crunch these puddles must make if you walked on them. But no one had walked on these ones yet; through miles of the road, they were all still untouched.

Forgive me for going on about the puddles. We’ve been listening to an audio version of Nicholas Nickleby on these drives between Wasilla and Palmer, and Dickens makes me verbose.

It’s a forty minute drive all the way past the river, and Kav’s tolerance for car rides usually expires around the 25-30 minute mark (I don’t think this is Dickens’ fault). So since we don’t make it over as often as we’d like, we planned a two-for-one-deal this time: Stop at Grandma’s house before heading to Dad’s, where the kids were going to rake leaves while Vin put the winter tires on the Stagecoach.

Grandma turned 88 this month. She’s been losing her vision for years; her peripheral vision is still good, but faces are hard to see and reading is almost impossible. She misses driving and seeing people, but she especially misses reading.

And she doesn’t like audiobooks and I don’t blame her; we both must have similar attention spans.

But I was praying about it the week before and an idea struck me, so I asked her about it that day:

What if we could read to her from home? What if we recorded some of our school readings out loud, and burned them to a CD, and gave her a new one every time we came over?

It would be different than a normal audiobook. It would be us in all our mess and glory – Finnegan’s interruptions, questions from the kids, babbling from Kav and meowing from the cats – and it would be less like being alone or being read to by some stranger (professional though they may be), and more like we’re there with her.

And she liked that idea. She also liked knowing that it would be help us with school, motivating the kids to practice reading aloud.

So we’ve been filling the Voice Memo app on my phone with chapters and we’re halfway through several books now…and so far, only one of them is interspersed with me bossing a toddler to stop jumping on the couch, stop wrestling with his baby brother, and stop driving his racecar over the cat.

See? Like I said, it’s just like we’re there.

I called her again a few days ago – her number is the only one I still dial because it hasn’t ever changed – and gave her an update on our progress. Who’s reading what, what’s almost done, which characters get silly voices.

“Some people are just readers,” she said. “Other people read with vision.”

And then she started telling me about when she was a kid. They had poor light in the evening but she read in it anyway; she needed glasses long before she got them, and maybe that’s at least partly why her vision is gone now.

“It was a different world. People will never know what a different world it was back then.” She talked about the rationing in World War II. Sugar was rationed; it was a rare occasion when you could go to the store and see bags of sugar on the shelf. Paper products were hard to come by.

So many things are ever so much better, she said. Our lighting is so much better now. People have no excuse for not being readers these days. It was an altogether different world then.

But that day when we visited, it was the normal, familiar world of Grandma’s house: We dropped off cookies, the boys used her recliner as a merry-go-round, and we fortified ourselves with hugs before heading to Dad’s for yardwork.

And when Finn went up to her for his hug, these words came out of her mouth:

“Look at you, and your pretty hair!” she said, running her fingers through his blond tufts. But we saw that coming, I guess.