Our day didn’t start with the best start today – my fault – I spent too long on the computer. But we reclaimed it somewhere along the line.
Monday morning is the time we do our Bedroom Bless which is like a weekly houseclean but in the bedrooms. The idea of this is that the children are getting practice (and its their responsibility) to get those tasks done – cobwebs, aircon vents, dusting, decluttering, windows, and the floor (alongwith changing sheets etc). Well, today not a lot got done but the very basics – putting out a few fires (hotspots gone wild – hotspots are those places that always seems to accumulate clutter) and the floor,
The other thing we intend to do on Mondays is to begin the zone clean for the week. We didn’t get there though I did ask the older kids to do a few extra household chores after lunch.
One reason (other than my computer time) that the morning was all switched around was that we said good bye to a very dear friend. This family have only been in town for 18 months but our hearts connect – we encourage each other on and that is a precious friendship to find. So she dropped around with the kids to say goodbye. Another friend (MC) dropped in to say goodbye to them too. MC stayed on for some Raw choc/cherry pie and a cuppa.
Once all our visitors left the kids did get into some of their school work.
Josh – Math, Latin, Science andWwriting (blog)
Jess –Piano, Math,Science, Australian history and Reading
Nomi – Art, Math, Creative Writing,
Daniel – language lessons – drills, and reading 2 sets of 100 common words.
I spent time helping Jessica “get” her Math and since she is finding her science challenging (more on the vocab side of things) I read today’s lesson out aloud to her and was able to discuss some of those tricky words.
We had a couple of heart to heart discussions today. One of which was about the difference between obedience and responsibility. We want our children to be obedient to start with but eventually they need to step up into responsibility and show initiative for the things that they know are right.
Another discussion I had with one of my children was to address walking slow, dawdling, daydreaming, whatever you call it there was no sense of urgency. I took them to the fridge where I have a list of character traits (see my fridge post) to talk about what was missing in their actions. They immediately saw “Enthusiasm” YAY that is what I would have guessed too! So we discussed that it is easy to be enthusiastic over things that we want to do and the trick is to make a choice to do even the hard things so that we can put all our energy, all our efforts into that task too! The best thing that came of this discussion was that one of the other children overheard the whole Enthusiasm thing and started lifting their steps too!!
Mid afternoon I went into town to catch up with my prayer partner and do some run around chores that needed to be done. Came home to find the kids had been very productive with Daniel having begun a science experiment and stitching a felt hand puppet. I haven’t quite got a grip on the science experiment but I have an egg soaking in some sort of liquid sitting on my kitchen bench!! The other kids had been working on their free writing projects.
