Thanksgiving 2014

This year we flew to Texas for Thanksgiving to visit the Mearse side of the family. We were able to fly out Monday evening and spend some time with the grandparents and cousins.

On Tuesday, Tutu and Jan (husband's Grandmother and Aunt) drove out from west Texas to visit with us and have an early Thanksgiving lunch.

Wednesday morning we headed out early for breakfast before going to Dallas for the rest of the week.

Dallas/Fort Worth/Arlington are three distinct cities that sort of melt together in a vast and sprawling city. It's very flat so you can see a long way. There's a lot for families to do there. We enjoyed going to tour the Texas Rangers Stadium. Our 9 year old especially loved this since he's all about baseball. Also, our own Hickory Crawdads are the minor league team for the Rangers so it was neat to see some of the players that have moved up from here. 

After lunch we checked in our hotel next to Medivial Times and rested a while before the show. Medivial times takes you into an ancient castle for a banquet feast and a tournament of knights. Everyone is in costume (and in character) and there are live horses, jousting, and eating with your hands! What's not to love, especially for boys. 

Thursday, Thanksgiving day, we ate a quick fast food breakfast before getting to the mall for our appointment at LegoLand! Kids old and young loved this place. It's kind of a mini version of the one in Florida or California I think. There are rides, 4D movies where you get snowed on, hands on building activities, a playground, kerioke, a snack bar, and a whole exhibit of the city of Dallas made out of Legos. It is pretty awesome, even for grown-ups. The kids could've spent all day there I think. They close early on Thanksgiving so we only spent about three hours there and then it was lunch time. 

All made out of Legos!

We had Thanksgiving lunch at Applebees close to the Lego place because it was agreeable to everybody and there was no waiting. Then we took a short drive over to check in at Great Wolf Lodge. It's basically a huge hotel with an indoor waterpark and game area (think Chuck E Cheese) for kids. There's also a Magi Quest game you can play where you buy a magic wand and look for clues and go on this big LONG scavenger hunt through all 8 levels of the hotel to find the objects. It's a lot of climbing stairs. The waterpark was the highlight for the kids I think. They loved the huge waterslides, ocean wave pool, lazy river, play ground, and pool basketball. We stayed there til we flew home on Saturday. 

Friday night we had dinner at a really cool restaurant called the Magic Time Machine. If your in Dallas you should definatley check this place out. It's a weird kind of place with different themed rooms and servers dressed up as characters like Woody, Spiderman, Arial, and more. It is fine dining in a quirky, fun, adventurous admosphere. The food was fantastic and the whole evening was hilariously entertaining. As you can see below, we ate in the schoolbus and Woody was our server. 

"Help yourself to the salad car." 

We did a lot in six days but it didn't feel rushed to me. Thanks to the Mearse Family for a Thanksgiving to remember. 

Lesson's Learned

The half way mark for our school year is quickly approaching. It has been flying by. Although the blog has taken a back burner to other projects the past few months, I have been journaling and reflecting on the lessons we are learning through our homeschool adventures. I'll share some with you here in case you are thinking of taking the homeschool journey or are just wondering what it's like. 

1. There are far more good days than bad days. Everybody has a bad day now and then. For us, a bad day might look like Mom's sick and doesn't feel like reading aloud today. Or it could be the kids are tired and whiny and just not in the mood to work the routine.  What I've learned from this is that it's okay to have a bad day every now and then because sometimes we need to give grace when we need it the most ourselves. Tough times help us appreciate the good ones and remind us to count the many blessings in life.

2. Beware of homeschooling by Pinterest! I love pinterest. I think its the organization of it. It's like filing a picture of a million ideas into neat little categories you get to name. It has helped inspire me to create and do things I would definitely not have dreamed up myself. My word of caution comes into spending too much time looking for projects you don't have time to do and don't need to do. There are hundreds of amazing homeschool parents out there who have awesome blogs and thousands of pin boards about every subject. There are a million ways to teach multiplication but as tempting as it may be, you don't really need to teach it a million different ways. The lesson here is don't let comparison steal your joy! Just because someone else does five science projects a week and watches a you tube video for every history lesson doesn't mean it's what you have to do too. 

Schiele Museum of Natural History, Gastonia NC

Myrtle Beach SC family vacation in October

3. Life Happens - Let it! There are days when not everything on the agenda gets done. Sometimes life happens and we prioritize taking a meal to someone over finishing our geography lesson that day. We have a lot of company. We have overnight out of town company many times a year. We also invite people to our house frequently for meals or play dates or reading and crafts. If you are obsessed with keeping the schedule this would drive you insane because it means not every day is the same. We learn about life when we let life happen naturally. The kids are always with us. So if we have company they are learning how to show hospitality.  They learn how to clean up and prepare a meal when we invite people over. They learn how to show kindness and share and be generous. If we have to go to the doctor, we usually all go which means we learn to be flexible and re-prioritize our schedule that day. Tonight we had the wonderful opportunity to take some knitted hats and scarves to a homeless ministry in our area called Highways and Hedges. We were able to help serve a hot meal to over a hundred men, women, and children who needed it. It was 42 degrees outside when we were arriving to serve. It broke my heart to see so many in need. It also made me wonder why we had never done this before! There is such a need. Serve others and show the love of Christ with your family! It is such a blessing. Our boys were surprised to see kids there the same age as them. They served bread and helped clean up.  I love that we get to teach these important life lessons with our kids at our side. They were not learning this in school for sure!

Balloon Festival in Statesville NC

Apple Hill Apple Orchard in Morganton, NC

Billy Graham Library, Charlotte, NC

4. Keep Calm and Mommy On! I have had sinus problems for over a month and am thankfully getting much better now. It was hard feeling run down and still seeing so much I needed to do. I was frustrated knowing the kids were fine and ready to learn, play, read, sing and do all the fun learning we were supposed to and I just didn't have the energy. It was miserable. Thankfully, my husband was gracious and supportive and really stepped up to help out with bedtime reading, review games, and even the housework. Even still, nobody does things quiet like mom does, you know what I mean? I have learned that education still happens even without glitter glue and the house will still stand with cobwebs in the corners. Sometimes priorities have to shift to make it through a day, but that's what being flexible is all about. 

Snowing in Boone, NC 

And be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God in Christ forgave you.  Ephesians 4:32

First Month of Homeschool

We've been doing homeschool for a little over a month now, and we love it! I don't have time to write about all the adventures we've had so I thought I'd share a few photos of what school has looked like for us so far.

Visits to the Catawba Science Center - lots of science learning...

"I love this day!"

We love learning with our CC group!

"Skip" counting on the driveway with sidewalk chalk.

We spotted a Hawk in our backyard, observed it, named it "Camo" and read a book about hawks.

Learning games on computer, math/phonics/computer skills

Learning maps: continents, USA, states & capitals

A Trip to Mamaw & Pawpaw's House in GA

Participated in the "Old Soldier's Parade" in Newton with our Classical Conversations Group.

We dressed as Mohawk Indians on the ship throwing tea into the Boston Harbor. The parade had a patriotic theme and our float goes along with our history lesson on the Boston Tea Party. 

On Dad's day off we took school with us to nearby Lake James 

and went canoeing, swimming,  picnicking, and did school lessons by the lake.

Dad bought us this cube to use for school review games.

It looks like all fun and games but we've actually been working very hard. Already we can tell the boys are learning so much, and the best part - they are enjoying learning! 

A Life Well Lived

December 1912 - August 2014

This past weekend, my Great Aunt Louise Lacy went to be with the Lord at age 101. 

She was a sweet and generous woman. She lived most of her life just down the street from my family. I remember her most for her famous sourdough bread she baked every week and mostly gave away to the sick and elderly. She also loved to make quilts. I remember she and my grandmother working on quilts together. She was a strong and brave Christian woman whose faith sustained her through many trials. She was a teacher with a love for sharing knowledge on many subjects and whose stories delighted several generations of children and grandchildren. She will be lovingly remembered. I'm grateful she woke up with Jesus Saturday Morning. 

Our reason for Homeschool

While many schools are starting across the country this week, we are entering our third week of school. It's no secret, we've decided to homeschool our children this year. Honestly, I've been reluctant to blog about this decision for a long time. There are many reasons we have chosen homeschool and like most homeschool families our reasons are personal and complicated. I'll try to simplify and explain here. 

We never planned to homeschool before having children.  My husband and I grew up in public schools and we both ended up with Master's degrees. We imagined our children being part of a school like we grew up in, where they can learn, having nurturing teachers, and a find a best friend. Our oldest son went to public schools from Kindergarten through third grade. He attended four different schools during that time (Louisiana had a different school for every two grades). Our youngest son went to private Christian prek and attended public Kindergarten last year. One reason we chose homeschool is that we had grown disappointed in the education they were getting in pubic "government" schools. I'll spare you all my concerns about Common Core, they are many and have already been documented by countless others. Academically, we felt like they were not getting a well rounded education that includes languages, fine arts, history, and science. Instead they were primarily being trained to perform well on the end of grade test and complete a few unit studies on history and science throughout the year. 

We take our responsibility as parents seriously and strive to give our children the best education we can from cradle to college. We don't believe in delegating that responsibility to anyone else. However it began to feel like that was happening. The schools tell parents how many minutes to read to their child but when we tried to teach cursive handwriting to our son because he was interested in it, he was corrected on his classwork and told he couldn't write in cursive because that was a 4th grade skill. Also, we observed that schools were taking more liberties in labeling children with what used to only be a clinical diagnosis of learning disorders. In more than one school is was suggested that our child might need medication to help him focus, even when he showed no signs of hyperactivity and maintained honor roll status. Thankfully, we know our child and recognize he doesn't have a learning disability but simply a different learning style. Schools tend to only teach to one or two learning styles and don't have time to nurture students who don't fit that mold. Similarly, our youngest was reading well above grade level but not given harder assignments and we felt wasn't being challenged to his full potential.

For us the advantages of homeschool are many. We love spending time with our boys. We love teaching them from God's word and giving them a Christian worldview. We have chosen to be part of a Classical Conversations group in our community. This helps direct our teaching of history, science, math, grammar, Latin, Bible, and fine arts. They meet once a week for 24 weeks with our community group and practice what they are learning at home with a trained tutor. We started a few weeks before our group starts because we wanted to get a routine down before we started the group. Already I'm amazed at how fast they are learning. We don't sit in desks for 8 hours a day and they are learning more than ever before. We use ABeka for Math and Language Arts/Reading and are loving the depth at which their lessons teach them. They are learning phonics and spelling rules, reading, and the Bible is tied into every lesson. 

There has also been a relief for our family schedule. No longer am I spending hours in carpool line and helping with hours of afternoon homework when they are tired and restless from being at school all day. Now we have time to visit the library or go to the park in the afternoon. We cook dinner together most nights, and easily have time to make it to ball practices several nights a week.  Our children play with kids of all ages and all walks of life (unlike school where they are isolated to a class of 30 kids their same age). We are able to serve in our community more than we had time to in the past. When we need to travel we can take school with us or rearrange our lessons to accommodate without having to write extra reports about our trip or having to rush to finish missed assignments. It feels like we have a more balanced life homeschooling. 

It's hard for many to understand our reasons for homeschool, and some will just flat out disagree. I realize it's a personal choice and am ever grateful for the freedom we have to make that choice. As my children get older I find myself wanting to protect their privacy more. They are already in the spotlight quite a lot as Pastor's kids, now they are very aware when mom makes their picture that it might end up on the blog for the whole world to see. Ironic, that's the main reason I don't do Facebook - because I want to protect my family's privacy. Lately, I've had to do some thinking about whether to continue the blog at all. It's been five years of posting mostly about our kids and there are only about five followers. The conclusion I came to was that the purpose of this blog is to show the reason for my life's joy which is Christ in my life. Without Christ I would not be the person I am today and our family would not be what we are. We are just a normal family doing life together striving to know God and make Him known. If someone out there stumbles across this blog and reads something that encourages them to keep the faith, then I consider this blog worthwhile. 

That being said, you might see some changes to the blog in the weeks and months to come. As my career has changed to homeschool mom, I have to take some time to find my own balance between my roles as wife, mother, teacher, homemaker, trainer,  etc. etc. etc. I'm not sure where blogger fits in the priority list yet. I enjoy writing, but I also want it to be purposeful and God directed. We'll just have to see where life's journey takes us next. 

The Joy of Baptism

We took great joy in watching our youngest child be baptized yesterday and express his commitment to follow Jesus. We are so proud of the young man he is becoming.