Stan with Four and Five, in February 2015. Photo Credit Lindsay Crandall.
When I was growing up, we had an ugly brown hassock in our living room. Many of my happiest childhood memories involve that hassock. I remember the sensation of being breathlessly underneath it while another sibling balanced on top, or attempting to balance on it while we rolled it on its side, using it as a drum, leaning on a book against it while coloring or drawing, pretending it was a steep cliff for our toys, throwing it at one another, or sitting on it on top of the sofa cushions like royalty.
As an adult, I wanted a hassock for my own house because A. We need all the seating we can get in our modestly-sized living room and B. I want my own kids to have fun memories of playing with a hassock.
I picked out a lovely, colorful one on Overstock several years ago, and realized immediately that it broke the rule that says that with so many kids in the house, One Cannot Have Nice Things. As I waited for it to arrive in the mail, I wondered how in the world I could protect it from destruction.
For years after I started homeschooling, I would start the summer with grand plans for activities, workbooks, and reading assignments to make sure my kids didn’t go brain dead over the vacation.
We did a page here and there, but the school year would start again and I’d find I hadn’t done much of anything I’d hoped to do.
Several years ago, I gave myself permission to stop making plans for summer learning. The kids needed a break, but more truthfully, I was the one who needed a break from having to oversee all the learning.
This summer has been tough again. I’m finding myself fighting guilt about not doing more with the kids. I’m not reading to them. The Littles can’t read to themselves. No one is doing math review. The Bigs aren’t reading the leftover reading books we didn’t get to from the school year.
I’m still trying to figure out how to be good at being married. As it turns out, that process is a lot less straight forward than I would like.
The harder I try to keep it together on the outside, I have a patch of eczema that’s like, “LALALA YOU CAN’T PRETEND YOU AREN’T STRESSED WHEN I’M HERE!!! And the more you pretend it’s ok when it’s not, the bigger I get!”
Today, I met the Chaplain at our riverside trail with the Littles after dropping Two and Three off at the dance studio. It was a long day with the kids. I felt like I had tried really hard all day and had still failed.
Starting way back at 11 a.m., I had made dinner for lunch since we would be out at dinner time. I’d fed the kids sandwiches before leaving for the evening. I’d brought water bottles and snacks so no one would be hungry. I started getting ready to leave the house long before we had to go so that we could actually leave on time.
The whole day, I had worked up to this moment, at the trail. All the kids had shoes on. We were ready. But I hadn’t had a chance to pee before leaving our house and there were no bathrooms at the trail.
The image above is from the Boy’s Body Book, by Kelli Dunham. You’ll find a brief review, as well as a bunch more titles, in Homeschool Sex Ed, Part II, coming next month.
When it comes to sex ed in our house, there are a lot of considerations in play. First of all, we have a ton of kids and they are all different ages, so I need to have appropriate ways to talk to each one. Second, one of the most important things to me – maybe even more than giving my kids accurate, useful information – is creating a culture in our house where normal things are normal, and we can talk about stuff that we have questions about. And I’m not embarrassed to say that we hope to delay our kids having sex for as long as possible, with the ultimate goal of them making it to their wedding day, although I recognize a lot of that will be up to them.
Having a healthy view of sex and a functional sex life is foundational to having a successful marriage. We know it’s a tool our kids need to have, and we have to figure how to get them started with the information they need, long before they are having sex themselves.
When I was in college, I had a friend who apologized constantly. It was the first time I became aware of the mostly female habit of apologizing unnecessarily. In my friend’s case, it came to seem as if she were apologizing just for taking up space.
My self esteem wavered at that time, but I saw value in myself. Enough to recognize what I didn’t want: to be in a place where I was apologizing for existing. I determined not to let that happen.
I’d like to say I never apologized for anything that wasn’t my fault again after I made that decision, but my inner self has always taken the marathon route when it comes to personal growth. Slow and steady wins the race, right?
I have been especially guilty of it with the Chaplain. The Chaplain isn’t someone who wants or needs me to be sorry all the time. And we’re at the point now where I’ll catch myself starting to apologize and then I’ll stop myself aloud.
I have made big strides with how often I do it when I’m out in the public sphere.
But I also do it with my kids.
I was so excited about the first load of laundry in this story, I hung it on the line. And then took a picture.
I’ve been working nights for more than ten years. During that time, we’ve added 6 kids to our family, for a total of seven. Laundry started out being primarily my responsibility, with unloading folded baskets of laundry delegated to whichever kids were capable of delivering piles where they needed to go without unfolding everything again.
As our family grew, I taught my big kids how to do their own laundry. That starts at age seven. That leaves me responsible for laundry for my husband, the four Littles, myself, and whatever family laundry is generated, including bedding and towels. It ends up being a minimum of two loads a day on most days.
On weekends that I worked, I understood that whatever shape I left our laundry room in when I left for work, it would be the same or worse when I came back to it later that weekend after sleeping off my shift. That was ok for a long time.
