One Step Closer to Central America

Yay! The province of Quebec took my money!

I never thought I’d actually celebrate that sentence.

The convoluted explanation behind the glee:

There are friends of ours who were missionaries in Nicaragua for many years. They started a church while they were there, and the church is now doing well enough to be starting an orphanage.

They are going back down in the new year to help build the facility and get things set up. There are three teams of people going down with them and I’m part of the third team, going in March. (Doors, windows, electrical, paining, general finish work. Semi-skilled is my middle name).

I don’t have a passport, so I tried to apply for one in November. As it happens, I was born on an Air Force base in Quebec, and birth certificates issued in Quebec before 1999 are not acceptable as ID for a passport. (Something to do with being issued by a municipality instead of a provincial body). I now have one more long step in the process of getting a passport. I gathered up all the material I needed and mailed it off.

Come December, the US government announced that anyone entering or leaving by air needs a passport. Suddenly there is a huge rush of people applying and the process is backed up. And I haven’t even applied yet.

I’m waiting on tenterhooks (whatever those are, I’m on them) to get my new birth certificate before I can even submit the paperwork. Today, the credit card bill came though, and the Government of Quebec has charged my card, which means they got my application and have processed it. Yay!

Now to wait by the mailbox….

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We have a pet rabbit. It is currently located in the kitchen, due to renovations in the basement. It was supposed to be temporary, but building has taken many months more than expected. He’s just a part of the kitchen decor now.

My fifteen month old daughter started calling him “bunnee” a few months ago. About a month ago it progressed to “rabbee” and then a week ago the “t” was finally added - “rabbeet.”

She understands fully what a rabbit is, identifying wild rabbits on our lawns, Bugs Bunny on someone’s shirt, and bunnies in books. Last Wednesday, we were at a friend’s house, helping with some painting. My youngest toddled around the kitchen saying, “Rabeet. Rabeet.” I didn’t think much of it. My friend’s mom is an artist. I thought maybe one of the many art pieces had a rabbit on it.

Then today, at another friend’s house, my daughter kept looking around the kitchen floor saying “Rabeet. Rabeet.”

It suddenly twigged on me and I realized she was looking for a rabbit. She has decided that all good kitchens should have there very own “rabeets!”

Thank you Little One for your beautiful innocence and simplicity. It blessed my day. Thank you Lord for the “least of these” who are everything to me.

In J.M. Adler’s How to Read a Book, he discusses the need to answer four main questions:

What is this book about? (What is the leading theme of the book and how does the author develop the theme?)

What of it? (What significance will this book have for me?)

I think these are great questions to ask my children when we read our books, even our picture books. I want for my children to be discerning readers. I want for them to be discerning Christians:

And this is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless until the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ—to the glory and praise of God. Philippians 1:9-11

I’ve been working on our school ‘omnibuses’ (lists of books I want to read-aloud, or I want them to read for themselves) for the upcoming year and I’m excited about the possibility that my oldest might begin putting up her own “book reviews.” Mr Pages and I thought this would be a wonderful way to teach them a myriad of skills - not only discernment but reading, outlining, summarizing, writing, grammar, spelling, etc.

The best part of all: she thinks it will be fun and can’t wait to start!

I love homeschooling!

One of the things that didn’t sit well with me after reading the Well Trained Mind was in the area of faith. Susan Wise Bauer recommends 10-15 minutes a day as art of family time in the grammar and logic stages and with no time suggestion, just as part of family time in the rhetoric stage.

When I first started my classical journey, I followed this recomendation. Everyday we dutifully did our 15 minutes. Slowly I realized what was bothering me. Religion was just another subject that I was doing during the day - like phonics and copywork. It had been relegated to an item on our to-do list.

That realization, among other things, eventually led me to the Bluedorns. Harvey and Laurie recommend two half-hour family worship times. This seemed to allow our family more time to get into the Word, to pray a little, and to sing together.

And yet really, it’s still not enough time. God is so unfathomable, so incredibly good, so ultimately loving, that their are not enough hours in the day to sing His praise, to study His Words, to commune with the Creator of all.

And that’s most what I want my children to see, to learn, to experience. God cannot be relegated to a few simple time slots. He must be woven into the vary fabric of our existence. He needs to be a part of phonics, and spelling, and reading, and learning to tie one’s shoes.

Sometimes I struggle with how exactly to do that - to keep my eyes fixed on Jesus. I have learned that rising early and spending time with Him alone is pretty much the only way I can succeed. I need to pray, and to study and memorize His Word. As I learn to do those things, I can then teach them to my children. As I learn to see God within the fleeting moments on my day, my children will hopefuly see Him too. As I let Him mold and change me into the image of His glorious Son, so hopefully, shall my children let themselves be changed too!

So tell me, how are you working on weaving Him into all the moments of
your day?

I really like Amazon. I use it frequently. Not so much to buy books, although I do that, but to order books online from our local library. Amazon allows me to peruse the books before I order them and have them sent to our local branch. Generally I have found Amazon to be a reputable company, one which provides me with lots of browsing, and when I make purchases, with good prices and free shipping.

When I sign up for accounts at such places as Amazon, I usually opt out of all mailings and marketing. I do not need the extra spam filling my inbox. However Amazon has occassionally mailed me offers based on my previous purchases. I simply deleted them and moved on. Until today.

Today I felt sure the Amazon email in my inbox must be a spam. It cheerfully announced that others who had purchased the Fruit of Her Hands by Nancy Wilson had purchased this new novel. The title looked extremely suspect. I went to Amazon and searched for the title. I was greeted by a trashy p*rn novel.

My darling husband checked the email code to ensure it was from Amazon. It was. I quickly removed myself from all future Amazon mailings (I hope) and then proceeded to fill in a Customer Service form at Amazon.

I can just imagine the techie at Amazon receiving my mail, mentioning to his or her co-wroker about another wacky conservative Christian and promptly deleting it from his inbox.

The world is an evil place, and my computer is an open window to it. We’ve tried to put safe guards in place. We’ve tried to use this tool wisely, to help us further our knowledge of the Great God we serve, but every once in a while I just want to cry. And so I pray the words my wonderful Saviour prayed for his children. I pray them for my children, for myself, for my husband, for His Children:

John 17:15 “I do not ask You to take them out of the world, but to keep them from the evil one. (NASB)

Overview
The story of an orphaned child who is sent to live with relatives who do not really wish her, but are doing their duty.

Read the rest of this entry »

Makarios is the Koine greek word for Blessed. And my life is definately full of blessed moments.

A wonderful husband who loves God, loves me and loves our children.
Five beautiful children, who love God and life.
The blessing of staying at home full time to care for and raise my family.
The joy of homeschooling my crew to know God and His creation better.
The opportunity to serve Him with my time and talents.

What could be more blessed.

Of course, I have not in any way become the person Jesus would most have me be. I stumble, and complain, and basically make a mess of things. But God is good and patient and kind.

Here is my attempt to sort out all those blessings, all those things in me that fall short, and all that my life could mean for Him.

Come and share the journey.

Blessed is possessing the favor of God, that state of being marked by fullness from God. It indicates the state of the believer in Christ, . . . said of one who becomes a partaker of God’s nature through faith in Christ.

-taken from Spiros Zodhiates’ Complete Word Study Dictionary

Kendra over at Preschoolers and Peace has a wonderful site. I’ve also “run” into her on the Trivium Pursuit email list and she has always been friendly and helpful - a woman with a beautiful online spirit , so it is both a privilege and honour to be included in her latest blog. Please pop over and visit her! It is definitely worth the trip.

Preschoolers and Quiettime

It was chaos day today. It was “Okay, we’ve had enough with all the clutter and junk and mess” day today.

We’ve been hinting to the Little Pages that their rooms were due for a tidy for about a week now. Surprisingly, none of them leapt to attention, screamed “YES SIR!” and ran off to do it. So today was enforced cleaning day.

It started with the two girls sobbing uncontrollably at the enormity of the task, and then going out to lay in the fetal position in the grass after MrsPages and I decided that if they won’t declutter, we’d do it for them. A large black garbage bag later, the room looks pretty much the same, except all the papers, kleenexes, candy wrappers hidden in drawers (that’s a whole other post) and other actual garbage is gone. The clutter remains, but I now see why the girls were so upset. Hercules didn’t have it so hard in the Augean stables.

Sometimes I wonder what my kids will be like when they grow up. Will they have to shovel out their cubicles to find reports for their bosses? The dugout canoe going up the Amazon to an unreached tribe of headhunters will sink halfway there because Little Page #1 just couldn’t get her backpack under 500 pounds. Sigh. I worry about my children’s future…

The house is in a state of “being decluttered” which means it is in that period of being darkest before the dawn. Decluttering always makes a room look worse before it gets better. MrsPages fought her way clear of the girls’ room and announced that it was a great day for a McDonald’s lunch. The rest of the Little Pages heartily agreed.

I hopped into the PageMobile and sped off, the mighty modern-day hunter out to wrestle a paper bag full of simulated chicken product to the ground to feed his clan. The drive-through was lined up, but I decided to wait because if I order inside, I can’t carry 7 drinks and two large bags of food back out to the car. A few radio tunes later (Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, I didn’t mind the wait), I give my order to the cheerful gradeschooler who is working the window. After ringing it all through, she gives me a chipper “…and Have a Nice Day™!” but the line of cars in front of me hasn’t moved yet, so there’s an awkward silence. She has absolutely no idea what to do. This isn’t in the manual. She decides to make some light conversation:

“Wow, there’s like, lots of cars here. It’s like, total dreadlock.”

My response can only be shown in text as a “…”. How do you respond to something like that?

I went home feeling much better about my kids’ future. They’re going to do just fine. I wept because I had no shoes…

I am a born and bred Canadian, raised by a proud Scotsman who is passionately in love with both his homelands - the one of his birth, and the one of his choosing.

So it only seems natural that I spell like a Brit (’Honour thy neighbour.’), make a good cup o’ tea, judge the warmth of a day in Celsius, and measure my runs in kilometers.

I find it most amusing then, that I still judge my height in feet, estimate small measurements in inches and cook in cups and ounces. This dichotomy represents something deep in the Canadian culture, which I have neither the time, nor the inclination to discover.

What sparked this whole insight, though, was the recipe I posted yesterday. I have listed:
2 - 540ml cans of black beans, rinsed
and
1 - 28oz can diced tomatoes

Now packaging in Canada, because it often comes from down south, generally lists both measurements. Why I chose metric for one and imperial for the other, I cannot fathom.

I worry about this, you see, because honestly, I’m functionally illiterate in both. I mix and match the systems randomly and don’t understand whole sections of either. For sewing, I measure in inches and meters. I use ounces fairly regularly, but have no idea about pints or quarts. I know a fever is 100F, but don’t know if 68F is warm or cool. I know that 25C is a pleasantly warm day, but is 39C a fever?

Perhaps things will clear up when it comes time to teach these things to my children. I love homeschooling. I love that every day I get to relive my education, to fill in the holes, to study things I never even dreamed of. I love that by the time I’m done, I’ll be some well rounded intellectual that six years of university couldn’t make me.

Thank-you Lord for this wonderful opportunity. Thank-you for a daily adventure that allows me to learn and study. Thank-you for the time to share with my children all about why one is measured in ounces and one in milliliters.

So here’s to the mixing of the old and new, the British and the American, the best of both worlds, and the opportunity to share it all with my precious blessings!

Cheers