Planning

It's that time of year again. Planning for next year. Theodore loves this time, because not only do I follow him around the house espousing the virtues and downfalls of various curricula I'm considering, I also spend lots of money.

This will be my third year with Tapestry of Grace. I feel like I should be handed some sort of prize for sticking with a curriculum three years in a row. I had a chance to look at a friend's copy of Learning Language Arts Through Literature last night, and I didn't even crack the cover. I will not be swayed by the siren song of a new curriculum.

Of course, we're also going to stick with Rod and Staff for grammar. This will be our fifth year with it. I have become a Rod and Staff evangelist, since I've enlisted one friend on the program, and have almost persuaded three more. The kids have never particularly enjoyed Rod and Staff, but have never complained...much. Peter, however, has realized this year that none of his other friends are having to diagram sentences with subordinate clauses and thinks perhaps there might be an easier way to do this. And I just laugh, because I'm cruel that way.

And then there's science. Science is the subject that always causes me the most consternation, which is ironic since that's my background. I had never seriously considered Bob Jones University Press. Since Theodore and I are way more conservative than the rest of the world, so it's a little freaky to discover a publisher that is even more conservative than we are. But I received the books yesterday, and they're so shiny and beautiful and rigorous. It's just what I'm looking for.

Now for the hard part. I have to actually finish THIS year's stuff.

Okay, so I'm a day late

But I finally got around to drawing the winners for What He Must Be...If He Wants to Marry My Daughter.

So, Dy and Rebecca, you win! I'll get the books out to you as soon as I receive them.

Thanks to all for entering.

What He Must Be - A Review and Giveaway

One day, while I was home visiting my parents from college, I ran into a high school friend. She had been one of the "nice kids" in school. She attended the Bible Study that met in the choir room on Thursday mornings, and was active in her church's youth group. She had been engaged for quite a long time, and she was telling me how her wedding was still more than two years away. She and her intended had to finish college first, because, as she put it, "we have our priorities straight".

Now, unbeknownst to her (and I wasn't completely sure myself, but I had a pretty good idea), I was a mere days away from receiving an engagement ring of my own. And since Theodore and I were married about eight months later (before I was *gasp* finished with college), I obviously didn't agree with her reasoning for a long engagement.

I've lost touch with my friend, so I have no idea how things turned out for her. But her story is not unusual. Most people my age were raised with this mindset: get your education, then you can start thinking about marriage. And this advice is given with the best of intentions. Education opens many doors, and it's certainly easier to get an education when you're single and unattached. But somewhere along the way, we started revering education above marriage. In the book What He Must Be...If He Wants to Marry My Daughter, Voddie Baucham agrees:

Imagine a family who did not prepare their children for college. This would be unthinkable in today’s world. Everyone prepares their child for an academic future. Day-care programs boast about the head start they will give children in their “academic careers.” We buy houses in neighborhoods with “the best schools.” Beyond that, many families place their children in expensive preparatory schools, enduring tremendous financial burdens, incurring debt, and commuting hours each day in an effort to give their children an edge in that all-important race for the apex of academia.

However, little thought is given to preparing our sons to be husbands. Thus, they meander through life without the skills or mind-set necessary to play this most important role until one day, having met “the one,” they pop the question, set a date, and—in the rarest of cases—go to the pastor to learn everything they need to know about being the priest, prophet, provider, and protector of a household in four one-hour sessions. In the words of that great theologian Dr. Phil, “How’s that workin’ for ya?”

Baucham asserts that marriage is something parents should be actively preparing our children for. He lays the biblical foundation for the parents' (especially the father's) role in raising our daughters to be wives and our sons to be husbands.

Discussions of patriarchy and courtship are often met with resistance. But Baucham is not advocating a godfather-type mentality, in which parents control their adult children's lives indefinitely. Nor is he a proponent of keeping our girls at home and out of college - an extreme view that is gaining an alarming amount of traction among some ultra-conservative homeschoolers. He fully expects his daughter to go to college, and he is very clear that his daughter's future husband is to be the leader of her family. His purpose is to make parents aware of the importance of their responsibilities to their sons and daughters.

I have observed that occasionally when a couple's offspring turn out well, the temptation is strong for them to take an inordinate amount of credit. Not only does this make them obnoxious, it is little help for parents who are hurting. Pastor Baucham does a good job of reminding us that parents should be intentionally raising their children to be husbands and wives because it is their biblical duty before God, and stays away from the mentality that if you do a, b, and c, your children will be perfect and have trouble-free lives.

This book is primarily written for fathers, but I recommend it to any parent. And while it tends to dwell a bit more on protecting our daughters, fathers of boys will benefit just as much.

I highly recommend this book. And, thanks to the generosity of Crossway, I have two copies to give away. If you'd like a chance to win, just leave a comment. I'll draw a winner on Saturday, March 7th.

Comments Closed. Thanks to all who entered.

Can you hear me now?

So, when I pull up my blog, I'm getting a blank screen.

I'm surprisingly calm about this, which just goes to show how off I've been on my bloggy game these days.

Hmmm. Blog's gone. I guess I'll go check Facebook.

Then there's a voice in the back of my mind that reminds me that this could be a big deal. Not because I've ever said anything that needs to be preserved for the ages, but more along the lines that I've spent an awful lot of time on this thing over the past four years, so it would be a crying shame to have nothing to show for it.

Unlike that ten-page paper I had to write for Cultural Anthropology in college, which I whipped off in two hours because I had just met Theodore the week before and needed to get to church that evening to see him again. I walked into my professor's office, slid the paper across his desk, and said, "Excuse me, but I've got to go see about a man."

Not really, I think I actually slid it under his door and ran. But I turned it in and never looked back.

Anyway, can you see this? Am I here? Am I being silenced?

I think it may be a vast left-wing conspiracy.

And a post to assuage my guilt

A few weeks ago, back in the days when I updated regularly, I agreed to participate in a blog tour for a new book release.

Because who wouldn't their book promoted by a blogger who only gets around to posting every 15 days?

The good news is, I like the book. Which is nice.

And two weeks later, she blogs again

I'm sure you're as tired of reading my excuses for not updating as I am of typing them, so let's dive right in as if nothing happened, okay?

So, I'm PLANNING again. That means my couch is covered in binders, books, and writing instruments. And for the record, I think that having four pens at one's feet at all times is PERFECTLY LOGICAL and need not be commented on by one's spouse.

The goal is to have the entire quarter planned, written down, and in Homeschool Tracker before we start on Monday. And don't even bring up the possibility that someone could get sick and therefore not school for half a week because there is no room for that thought in my world right now. We have a schedule, and we're sticking to it.

The main point is to have it in Homeschool Tracker. That seems to be the weak link. That way, if we're out and about during school hours, and someone comments that my kids aren't in school, I don't have to sit and wonder if I've updated my log in the last month week or so. The idea of the authorities knocking on my door is a lot less stressful if I can picture myself handing them a printout of all my hours instead of gathering an armful of scraps of paper and saying, "It's all written down in here....somewhere."

It also appears that I dither over phonics programs once per kid. I am now done dithering and am embracing, once again, the Explode the Code/Sonlight I Can Read It books for Samuel. This is the combo that I used to teach Peter and Camellia to read. I don't know WHY I keep thinking I need to re-invent the wheel, but I do. Samuel's reading lessons seem to be going swimmingly, despite the fact that his mother can't seem to make up her mind what to do with him.

If I had a fourth child (which isn't in the plan, I'm just being theoretical, here), would I STILL feel the need to try new phonics programs, or would I just stick with what I know works? Hard to say.

Christmas Books

Because I took my accidental blogging break when I did, I never got around to mentioning the books I got for Christmas. I don't know why, because I love to use the carousel widget from Amazon.

I realize that these selections all together might seem a little, er, gloomy. Lest you think you think my loved ones are trying to tell me something by buying me books on depression and suffering, the gloomy books are books I purchased with gift cards.



Trusting God is a book I originally checked out at our church library, and then went and bought because it's that good. As someone who tends toward anxiety, a healthy dose of God's sovereignty is the only thing that has ever helped me. Jerry Bridges is such a gift to the body of Christ.

The other ones are just books that interest me. I am trying to learn more about Nouthetic Counseling. I think that it's intriguing that my grandparents' generation lived through two world wars and the Great Depression without the help of Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors, and still ended up happier than your average clinical psychologist. (And here is my disclaimer. I know that antidepressants have been a lifesaver to many people. But the numbers of people taking these drugs is staggering. I don't think we're ALL suffering from chemical imbalances.)

So, I have lots of interesting reading ahead of me.