Hi, friend! I am so glad you have stopped by my little corner of the internet. I hope you’ll take some time to look around and join our wonderful community of moms here as we learn to be better moms together!
Sometimes life is not quite what we make plans for it to be.
Sometimes we do all that we can, and put what we feel is our very last ounce of effort and energy into making our life look a certain way, and then quite shockingly...the rug is pulled out from beneath us, and life has other plans.
Parenting still feels like a new territory for my husband and me. We are in a continuous state of learning how to fulfill our roles as husband and wife, which now includes being parents. As we enter into different seasons with our children’s growth we encounter new challenges that force us to address how we want to train up our children.
“The heartbeat is fast—166 beats per minute,” the technician told me a week ago in the blue hush of the ultrasound room.
“Is that good?” I said.
“Oh yes, that’s very good—very strong.”
Then he told me to hold my breath and I did, and then released as he played back the sound he’d just recorded—the beautiful “ba-boom, ba-boom” of life, its fluid line sketched across the screen and the baby’s arms and legs kicking like tiny sticks on a peanut.
My husband and I had been wrestling with the idea for over a year and I had been reading “Educating the Whole Hearted Child” by Clay and Sally Clarkson with a group of close friends. What I read stirred my heart, but I had never seen it in action! I couldn’t escape an image of of a mom wearing a gingham jumper, with exceptionally polite children, who somehow already knew how to read, bake bread and tend chickens by the time they were four years old. Back then I had a shag haircut and a nose ring, and I was lucky if we made it through dinner without one of my children sticking food up their nose. Being from a family of teachers and public school administrators, a classroom was also the only form of school I could wrap my brain around. I didn’t know how to create a learning environment at home and I didn’t know how I would “fit” into my perceived ideas about this educational choice.
Family hikes have been our thing this summer. Every weekend we’ve sought out a new trail to hike with our three boys. And can I just tell you, it has been glorious, though it doesn’t always begin that way.
Before we leave for hiking we get the usual pushback:
“Dad, no!”
“I’m so tired from baseball. Can’t we just rest at home?”
“Another hike! What?”
When I was seventeen, my best friend, Tania, and I jumped into my white Plymouth Duster and drove from State College, Pennsylvania, to Atlanta, Georgia—straight through in thirteen hours. We drove ninety miles an hour nearly the whole trip. We were reckless and young and crazy. But, oh, did we have fun. Singing at the top of our lungs, windows down, not a care in the world.
