Week of Blessings, Day 1: Saturday Stories

While I am not getting to blog much these days, it is for good reasons--I'm doin' life instead!  I'm still trying to figure out what homeschooling is going to look like this year (since last year our "usual" stopped working for some reason). I'm being as attentive as possible to my kids, since the kids and I all seem to be working through a spell of being easily irritable and less gentle than we used to be, a bad habit which takes lots of purposeful mommying to relearn.  I'm starting to clean again--that's the one thing that had to go while we were diving back head-long into school, as I really truly have had a hard time this Fall doing anything else with such a consistent focus on homeschooling well and mommying well.  At least I have been cooking!  After a sloppy summer, I am back to cooking real food dinners, and even some lunches.  And I am purging unneeded stuff, too, but slowly, which means in the meantime there have been piles in several places in the living room, which of course do not help the whole cleaning thing either.  I am starting to work playdates into our school week, so we have been seeing friends, which is GREAT.  And we've had some really positive things happen which I really and truly hope to get a chance to write about!

So I am going to make this a week of Blessings, starting today.  Hopefully I will get to blog even just a little bit each day--and will have to let go of my perfectionist desire to describe everything in minute detail and flesh out the significance of every little thing. ; )

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Blessings Day One:  Saturdays

Normally DH and I don't have much going on over the weekends.  This works well for us, since we always have plenty to do around the house, unfinished projects anywhere the eye might rest, etc. and weekends are the only time DH can work on things around here, so we usually like low-key, hanging-out-at-home weekends.  Since the beginning of August our weekends have been unusually busy--but so chock-full of blessing.

While we have had unusual weekend events since the first weekend of Aug., the first one that was a huge blessing was Aug. 20.  That was the Saturday at the end of the First Official Week of School (our homeschool charter began Monday the 15th, even though I had started school with the kids on the 1st, because I just knew we needed that much readjustment this year before the official start), so it was a week when I had been immersed in all things school, and by the end was very worn, frustrated, frazzled, and a tad overwhelmed.  I really do plan on writing more about why homeschool suddenly became hard, and what I have been doing to move us out of this phase, but for now, let's just say since last year ended up feeling so unsatisfying and less fruitful and rewarding than it should have been, I have been asking God over and over to show me what to do better/differently.  And that Saturday He started to answer. 

One of my homeschool friends arranged a gathering of homeschool moms at the home of a wise, Godly woman who just "retired" from homeschooling, after putting the last of her four children into college.  My fellow moms will understand immediately the blessing of a whole day without children, in the company of kindred spirit moms!  But this lady, named Gracie, really went all out, and provided breakfast and a delicious lunch for us, and all day we sat around her kitchen table and she mentored us in all things homeschool.   It was such a lovely, relaxing time, where we could speak honestly about struggles and get encouragement and ideas from one another, and I took about 4 pages of notes, and felt God whispering and nudging me several times that day, and left no longer feeling defeated at the very beginning of the school year, but excited and redetermined.

Oh, yes, Lord.  Do your good work in me!

This is long enough I think I will go ahead and post--but more Blessing to come today!  May your Saturday be full of blessing too!