Whiplash!!!

Do you ever have days that feel like your mind, soul and body are being cracked at one end or the other like Indiana Jones's braided leather whip!?  Today is one of those days for me. 

What a ham!!! Sad Sam...1st day of school 2010  LOL!

It is the "official" start of the school year.  For homeschoolers, school doesn't really have a beginning or an end because we seize all those "teachable moments" ("Why is the sky blue, Mom?" -- "Because God made it that way. Now go read something edifying." -- See what I did there? Science, theology, reading AND vocabulary! :-D LOL!)  No, really, the world is our classroom and we use it often, but the time comes in the fall when Algebra and foreign languages and history and great literature call and we settle down to it in a somewhat more predictable routine.

Today is the day! We'll pull out our Rosetta Stone Spanish, and Notgrass History and Saxon Math and the accompanying checking, grading, and one-on-one teaching that makes homeschool not only tremendously effective but relationship-building and full of challenge and joy.

This year will be more difficult than past years, though.  Not because Sam is a junior in High School or because Will is starting 6th grade.  No.  This year I have a serious distraction.

We had a "school room" -- a mini library with work table -- that the kids never used except as a big locker.  ("Go get your science book."  "Where is it?" "In the schoolroom.").  That's all changed this year with an addition to the family.   She's not named yet, but I'm already loving her.

She's a Nolting Hobby Quilter.  She took the old School Room.  She's in sight of the family room where the bookshelves and school table have been re-located (displaced? like refugees?).  Sigh.  So as I'm laboring over lesson plans and urging my somewhat reluctant learners to get at it, I'm whipping my head back and forth between my children's future and my quilting!  Algebra or Stitches-per-second calculations?  Ruler work -- it'd be so much more fun over in the OTHER school room with HER.

I've often heard preachers laud over choosing between what is good and what is BEST.  As I ponder my choices this morning, however, another verse comes to mind:  "A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways." (James 1:8 KJV).  The Amplified Version is a little more ....hmmm, vocabuary-ridden:  "[for being as he is] a man of two minds (hesitating, dubious, irresolute), [he is] unstable and unreliable and uncertain about everything [he thinks, feels, decides]."

When Emily (my college sophomore) was little, I caught her chastising her dolls with, "You better make up my mind!"  (The inevitable result of child-rearing books that said give your child choices, and my impatience, when she couldn't decide!!!)  Her somewhat twisted version of my admonition, "You better make up your mind!" couldn't ring more true than today.

I better make up my mind.  Quilting will wait.  I have my boys here. Now. And their future -- while in God's hands, to be sure -- is a stewardship I'd be wise to invest in.  The school day will end later this afternoon, and I'll have HER and hand work and fabric to also pour myself into.  Never has a woman had it so good -- more than I can ask or imagine (Ephesians 3:20), that I can love my boys, love my quilts, and show my love for God doing both.

I might even watch Indiana Jones while I do it!
Blessings,
Mary Lou