Category Archives: homeschooling

work in progress: what happens when we fill the lake

Posted on by February 5, 2025

Reagan is next to me, reviewing letter sounds. And not just that, but she’s also reviewing other important things, like how to pronounce “the” like thuh, not duh – and she plods through all of them in order: Thuh…E…says…ehh. Thuh…F…says…fff, and so on. It may be the first time in my life I’ve ever wished the English alphabet had less than 26 letters.

work in progress, part 1: what happens when we fill the lake

People often ask how we homeschool all these kids (“all these kids,” they say, as though we’ve collected them like so many postage stamps) and I hate to disappoint them, but the answer is pretty boring:

We don’t, really.

At least, not anymore. We put in our time with the older ones when they were younger, and now they mostly homeschool themselves; we just check and discuss their assignments and read with them a little. Life is all learning, of course, but as far as school goes, they’re pretty independent now.

So school-wise we direct our efforts to working with the Littles, as far as they will cooperate, which is…ah, how do I put this…extremely variable. And if you know us, you know that the category of “Littles” has less to do with age and more to do with ability and maturity. Our big kids are 18, 15, almost 13, and 9; our Littles are 13, 13, 3, and 2 months. Our 18-year-old recently moved out, and our little Kavanagh is just learning to take the world in. He’s growing like a weed; he smiles and laughs. Which might all be the same thing.

Last month I made filling the lake a priority again, and it’s working. I’m remembering that this is why we chose to write from home full time: I feel alive again when that’s what I’m actually doing, as opposed to the administrative, publishing parts that consume certain phases of it.

When we like what we’re doing, we forget that we’re working.

I like the movement of standing up to reach over the back of my laptop to grab a favorite style guide from my stack of writing books on the back of my desk. And I like having a row of finished works next to them, and different notebooks and journals scattered all over the place.

I like that one of the works-in-progress is not just a digital file like the one I’m currently typing on, but it’s a stack of research materials, a notebook, and Oh My Soul and its companion journal. Eric Liddell said he felt God’s pleasure when he ran; I feel God’s pleasure when I am in full nerd-mode with a pencil behind my ear, going through familiar books, rifling through pages and marking up passages, and typing as the words flow easy, fast, and furious.

And I even kind of like it – in a perverse, self-flagellating way – when I am in front of the laptop with no words, frustrated with the wrong words, and aggravated as all get out trying to pull a piece together before a deadline when the clock is ticking down (like right now, she thought nervously), because I know the thrill of accomplishment and relief when it’s done.

I don’t love it so much that I forget that I’m working, but I know that it’s worthwhile because whatever I’m doing is working. Purpose comes easier when we see the headway we’re making.

Like when Reagan pushes through and makes it to Thuh Z says zzz – it’s progress, and she is gaining. In the effort and aggravation, we see achievement and increase, and it’s worth it. You know, sort of like childbirth: Ta da, look, we did it. We made this.

The other day one of my kids asked me for harder books, but she didn’t say it that way. She said she wanted “books that would take longer than a day to read” and I had the happy task of going through the library with her to find a new stack that would keep her occupied. She didn’t want The Hunger Games, she wanted the challenge: The Scarlet Pimpernel, Mother Mason, My Antonía.

And this is when I love homeschooling and forget that it, too, is work: Learning, like teaching or writing or any other job, ceases to be work when we get lost in it.

Along those lines, this month I got to dig into the first chapters of Bleak House with my writing student. I almost wrote “dive” into it, but no, one does not dive into anything of Dickens. You wade in cautiously, stir a foot around the water to check for sharp objects, and, finding none, keep going deeper and deeper until you’re surrounded by 43 characters swimming around and splashing you in the face and pulling you under, and you like it. At least, I do.

And I might as well confess up front that I’m already reading Pickwick Papers with Iree and Nicholas Nickleby (one of my favorites) with the family as a read aloud. So, no, I didn’t pick Bleak House, but I’ve read it before and was thrilled that my student chose it.

Each of us read from our own copies. I leaned over to see where she was at, and she was a full page ahead of me, because I had gotten lost in sentences like,

Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.

And I forgot I was supposed to be working.

So now I find myself in the middle of three, count ‘em, three Dickens novels, and perfectly happy about it. Vin thinks I might have issues. I think I might want to be a Dickens scholar when I grow up…and that, too, might be the same thing.

routine maintenance: when life is under construction

Posted on by June 23, 2018

Fourteen weeks. Past most of the morning sickness, still soooper tired off and on, and always hungry. As I type this, a salad bowl the size of a small bathtub is next to my laptop.

Vince has been home for the last seven of those weeks and we’re (slowly) getting into a routine. I’m starting to get some work in. Not as much as I’d like, but now I’m more productive than the cats, who just nap on piles of laundry all day and chase after loose Nerf darts.

routine maintenance: when life is under construction

I’ve been plowing (ahem – “plowing” should be loosely interpreted) through my book to get it ready for the editor in two weeks. Vin has been working on his website and it’s entertaining in a sadistic sort of way, watching him struggle through the aggravation of navigating WordPress’s bleep-bloop room like I’ve done for years; now he yells at his computer as much as I do. It’s sort of like those contraction and labor simulator belts that let husbands in on the joy of pain in childbirth.

The kids still do school a few hours a day because we’re fun parents like that and don’t like reviewing how to add and subtract in the fall. Finnegan roams around with his own agenda, playing with a pair of tongs he pilfered from the kitchen. Or drawing on himself and the floor with dry erase marker. Or licking the solidified residue at the bottom of Vince’s ice cream dish from the night before.

But at least he’s moved past the phase of dumping popcorn kernels onto the kitchen floor, or trying to put Reagan’s barrettes in his hair, or walking down the hallway with no pants, but wearing someone’s pink slipper on one foot and a blue slipper on the other.

Toddlers are awesome. I still can’t believe we’re doing this all over again.

I love routines, but they’re hard to fight for during seasons like this, and it’s going to be like this for a while. Life happens – a new baby, a major illness, a move, a new nap schedule, a new school or work schedule – and our structure is shaken and sifted. Sometimes I am shaken and sifted with it.

House-wise in this season, we’re used to the noise of traffic, trains, and planes from JBER flying over us. And now we’re getting acquainted with summer noises, like every night around 10 or 11pm – it’s still bright as day then – when someone buzzes around the trails on a machine that sounds like a hybrid between a moped and a weedwhacker.

Added to that, our stretch of the highway is under construction right now, with all the rumbling, beeping, digging, and spraying, and if you listen closely, there’s probably also an undertone of children whining and exasperated drivers using expletives at various decibel levels.

For example, when I tried to leave our neighborhood Wednesday night: My blinker was blinking left, I was in the lane that turns left, and the way left was clear since traffic was blocked in both directions, but the flagger sent me north toward Willow instead. This is a good time to let you know that I still need Jesus.

I buttonhooked at the first opportunity and came back south, and within a quarter mile a line of cones appeared out of nowhere dividing the two lanes in front of me – no flagger, no signs, no indication of what the cones were there for or which lane to take. Being lazy, I stayed in my own lane, which is a good thing because around the bend in two-tenths of a mile, the other lane was closed off with cones. Whiskey-Tango-Fill-in-the-blank. Anyone in it would have to stop on the highway, get out of their vehicle, and creatively rearrange cones on behalf of the DOT in order to escape the maze and continue on their way.

Passing a mile of vehicles headed north at a standstill, I determined to take the scenic route home. It worked until I was within sight of our house – I could see the eave of our roof from where we were parked on the highway.

I know the construction is for maintenance. The disruption is to a good purpose, just like the life events that rock the routines I lean on, sifting and stretching me. The truth is, I always need Jesus – and sometimes He sees fit to shake my complacency and remind me how much.

Plenty of things are still the same and may never change. Finnegan, at almost any time of day, can be found eating oatmeal and drinking his tea from a sippy cup, flaunting the British side of his heritage in all its glory. Meanwhile, also at almost any time of day, bigger kids loiter in the kitchen like it’s some recreational arena, getting in the way of my genuine, desperate American need for bacon and coffee.

And at almost any time of night, Alaska is still awake and making noise, though we don’t even notice most of it anymore.

Except for the other night. Around 12:30 when we were climbing into bed, we heard the familiar high-pitched, cranking buzz going down the road.

“The guy riding the weedwhacker is running late tonight,” I said.

Vince turned off the light. “Probably got stuck in construction traffic.”

something out of nothing: how He moves us

Posted on by April 29, 2024

Our thoughts turn into prayers, and I don’t know if they were our thoughts first or His. But when our thoughts are His thoughts, our prayers become reality because He is such a troublemaker sometimes.

something out of nothing: how He moves us

There was no railroad there now, but someday the long steel tracks would lie level on the fills and through the cuts, and trains would come roaring, steaming and smoking with speed. The tracks and the trains were not there now, but Laura could see them almost as if they were there.

Suddenly she asked, “Pa, was that what made the very first railroad?”

“What are you talking about?” Pa asked.

“Are there railroads because people think of them first when they aren’t there?”

Pa thought a minute. “That’s right,” he said. “Yes, that’s what makes things happen, people think of them first.”

– Laura Ingalls Wilder, By the Shores of Silver Lake

Two years ago I wrote a list of things I would do if I had more time – all the millions of things we couldn’t do because Vince commuted (and did all of our family shopping) for almost 60 hours a week – and none of them were ambitious. They were pathetically in the vein of survival mode.

Find a therapist for one of the kids. Attend FreshStart with one of the other kids. Read all the books and watch all the videos and resources and trainings for our kids’ special needs. Buy pajamas for Finnegan, and get a haircut, and start putting effort into cooking better meals again. Clean the bathroom, and eat breakfast before noon.

Most of them never got done. Well, sometimes I cleaned the bathroom. And the older kids learned to cook.

Many of those things, looking back, I wish we could have done somehow. Seems like we would have benefited from them, but for crying out loud, we must breathe sometime. And there was no time.

We wanted to be together more, and together less. We needed one-on-one time with each of the kids and each other. Vince needed to be home more for the kids, and I needed to be out of the house more for my own sanity.

But other things were on that list, too. We both wanted to be more involved in ministry. I wanted to visit my grandma more often. I wanted to write daily, and study, and not feel guilty about it because there was always something else I should be doing.

I wanted to finish the books I’d started. And Vince did, too.

And maybe you noticed – I purposefully left that goal vague when I wrote it, unsure if I meant the books I’d started reading or the books I’d started writing. Because I wanted both, but was afraid to hope that big.

It was a someday-but-probably-never kind of daydream.

Until about five weeks ago.

What results is almost miraculous. We create new alternatives – something that wasn’t there before….What is synergy? Simply defined, it means the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It means that the relationship which the parts have to each other is a part in and of itself. It is not only a part, but the most catalytic, the most empowering, the most unifying, and the most exciting part.

– Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

Five weeks ago, Vince went back to work after taking a month off to finish some backburner projects we’d been praying about for years. On the last day of his vacation, we closed on this house. And we felt strongly that even though he was going back to work, it was only temporary.

We had no idea how it could possibly be temporary; we only knew that God had been talking to us for a long time about a big move and it didn’t just mean our physical location.

We asked Him for years for this move, and He finally said, How bad do you want it? If I give it to you, will you really take it?

The next day was the day of the fridge and the frenulum, and in that post I mentioned a phone meeting with our insurance guy. What I didn’t mention was that during that discussion we learned that a smallish, forgotten nest egg we’d plugged away at for years had actually made itself useful.  And God asked us, Do you believe Me now?

The creative process is also the most terrifying part because you don’t know exactly what’s going to happen or where it is going to lead. You don’t know what new dangers and challenges you’ll find. It takes an enormous amount of internal security to begin with the spirit of adventure, the spirit of discovery, the spirit of creativity. Without doubt, you have to leave the comfort zone of base camp and confront an entirely new and unknown wilderness.

– Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

And it’s sort of like when we got married: We eloped, but we talked to my dad ahead of time. Just like then, Vin was a little terrified to tell him, but also just like then, Dad was full of encouragement and good counsel. He said, in so many words, you have to take the risk to know if you can make it.

So, friends: Vince has worked for the same company for 21 years, and he put in his notice this week.

We’ll be home together, out and about together, and working together and separately. His first book is already off to the editor and should launch early this summer. My second book is a month or two behind his (can’t wait to show you the cover!), and the third should come out this fall.

We have a kid who’s on his last year home with us, and we want to do this thing together. We have six other kids we want to make great memories with, and we want to show them what’s beyond the fifty mile radius around us. We haven’t ventured past that in over five years.

We have a bazillion other ideas involving print and publishing, business and ministry, fellowship and community, deep and wide. But mostly, we are available for whatever He has for us, because He is always making something out of nothing. And He’s still moving us.