When Momma's Sick part 1

This will be a 2 or 3 part post on how I handle being sick.  Please bear with me.

I handle being sick before I get sick, with preparation, training and preparedness.  When the whole family gets sick at the same time, we do the barest of minimum.  If it is the vomiting kind of sick, whomever isn’t sick at the moment has the ability to throw something in the washing machine, dishwasher or sink to rinse it.  The carpet scrubber is always at the ready.  We basically go on survival mode, cleaning the necessary first, everything else is extra. 

The mail on the half wall will get cleaned up and sorted when we feel better.  It isn't of paramount importance while we're sick.  What is more important, always, is people.  DA brought me lemon green tea with honey in it.  What a wonderful servant's heart this young man has!

People come first, always.  People are eternal beings which means they carry more weight in importance far above any “thing”, including dishes, laundry and a clean floor.  Remember that!

In Proverbs chapter 31:27, it says, “She looketh well to the ways of her household, And eateth not the bread of idleness.”  And in Tit 2:3-5 it says,  

The aged women likewise, that they be in behaviour as becometh holiness, not false accusers, not given to much wine, teachers of good things;  (4)  That they may teach the young women to be sober, to love their husbands, to love their children,  (5)  To be discreet, chaste, keepers at home, good, obedient to their own husbands, that the word of God be not blasphemed. 

I am looking at the underlined and bold typed referenced above when I tell you that this is the key to how I handle being sick.  As I type this right now, today, I have showered and gotten dressed.  By the time I made it downstairs to the chair, I was out of breath and exhausted.  I pushed through and dried my hair instead of falling asleep, again.  I was going to go sit in the afternoon sun and give my kids a spelling test, but at the time one of them had something necessary to take care of.  I am still under the weather.  I have to take care not to overdo, or my sickness will last longer, or I will relapse back to what I felt like on Saturday and Sunday.  So with head in my hands, I called my husband and told him how I was feeling and asked if he had plans for the money in the checkbook or if he would mind if we called for pizza.  He told me later that I sounded really bad, so before he could get the words out, I’d mentioned the pizza.  LOL 

Continuing from my writing yesterday afternoon, I woke up with my husband this morning with intentions to have a few minutes with him before he left.  I didn’t get as much time as I would have liked, but his arms were around me.  I praise God for that.  

I tried getting up and getting to work on my pumpkin this morning.  The children have taken care of their pumpkins and all the orange loveliness is packed in quart freezer baggies in 2 cup increments. 

HJ is taking her turn at processing her pumpkin while the boys are goofing around. ;)

Now it is my turn.  I cut the not so giant orange orb in half and put its inner contents in a bowl.  By the time I finished that, I started feeling light headed and feverish.  I called on my youngest son who finished clearing out the inner contents for me while I went to sit down.  I’m going to have my oldest son put the tray in the oven for me with the pumpkin on it.  There it will rest and bake for a couple of hours.  While that is baking, we’ll separate the goo from the seeds and I’ll make a special seasoning for the seeds.  I was thinking a dash of cyan pepper, cocoa powder, salt and a teaspoon of sugar might be a good combination.  I’d like to do this 4^th baking especially for my husband.  He likes hot stuff. ;)   

Today, the children rose at 7AM.  Right now it is 7:50AM and they’re still running a little slow.  One is in the shower, one is dressed and the other may have climbed back in to bed, but we’ll see.  In being a manager of my home, I don’t do everything.  One of those misconceptions that are held many times by many people is that if you stay at home, that all the work (every single bit of it) falls on your shoulders.  This is very untrue!  Even when my children were very little, they helped me.  We scoured yard sales for kids sized house cleaning items.  We looked for toy vacuums, brooms, dustpans, rakes, shovels—anything we could find to help the kids know that they are a valuable help to us, no matter how much they helped.  When my little ones were just starting to walk, they loved “mimicking” us while we vacuumed or scrubbed the floor or even mowed the grass.  We made sure they had a tool of their very own to use while we did the actual job.  Why?  They were practicing to be a big person.  They loved “helping” and knowing they were contributing to the running of the family. 

DA getting dishes done.

Fast forward 10 years and all 3 of the children know how to till a garden, plant seeds and tend them, mow the grass, weedwack, weed the gardens, rake the leaves, turn the compost pile, paint a room, wash the dishes, vacuum, clean windows, clean the bathrooms, dust, clean their bedrooms, do the laundry, sweep and mop the floor as well as cook basic meals.  How did we do all of this with our 16, 14 & 12 year old?  If I said it were easy, it wouldn’t be the truth.  However, a very wise person once told me that it was easier to train them when they desired so much to do it with Momma and Daddy.  When they’re open to learning about, when they’re little, it is the best time to help them learn.  Repetition is the key to helping them to get it down while revisiting it many, many, many times to reteach and relearn what they need to know.  This is where patience comes in handy.  Many times the wash cloths will not be the neatest, nor will the dishtowels.  The main thing of importance is the time spent with the children in loving fellowship doing the work WITH them, side-by-side.  This simple act of love toward our children helps them to remain in fellowship with us.  It helps them to know that you love them unconditionally.  It also helps during times of disciplining disobedience since you’ve already built strong ties that bind your hearts together in fellowship with them.   

If I do not broach the topic of discipline now, I will be doing all of you a great disservice.  You cannot manage your home effectively with disobedient disrespectful children.  We began home schooling in 2001 without effective discipline.  Our first year of home schooling was very stressful, tedious and harrowing.  Those kids you see in W*l-M*rt who are running all over the place screaming...well, it wasn't quite that bad, but very close.  Once we found To Train Up a Child by Michael and Debi Pearl, things progressed to MUCH easier.  As a disclaimer, however, we do not follow everything the Pearl’s put forth in their books.  We do give 2-5 swats, depending on the child’s offense.  We practice, grace, mercy and bringing each child back to the cross at every offense.  This, in my opinion, is sorely lacking in the Pearl’s books.  As with everything you read, you need to take what you can use and leave the rest.  Scripture calls this “separating the wheat from the chaff”.  [Luke 22:31]  I don’t follow everything I read.  I measure everything I read, hear and see up to the word of God, pray about it and move forward from that point how God guides and directs.   We also use Instructions in Righteousness from doorposts.com as a topical guide for individual infractions.  Discipline isn’t just spanking.  Discipline includes paying a child for the work they do; taking the money away when they don’t do the work; taking away fellowship with others when they’re being unkind with their words; having them serve a sibling when they’ve purposely been unkind to them, among a host of other things.  I would encourage you, dear reader, to broaden your mind to include many other forms of discipline to your repertoire for parenting.  Grace and mercy have its place in discipling our children.  So does taking away privileges when their rooms look like a category 5 hurricane hit it.  What works well for one child, will not work for another.  One of my children functions very quickly for me when I take away privileges.  Another child functions well with time constraints.  Another child functions better with the promise of a special privilege after the work is done.  As each one of us is different and uniquely made by God, so are our children.  To expect each of them to fit in to a “cookie-cutter” mold is unrealistic, unfair and honestly disrespectful to the creator of our children.  There is a time and a place for all discipline.  The root word is disciple.  The whole focus of our discipline should be to disciple our children for the Lord Jesus Christ.  That statement alone puts our job as parents in to quite a different perspective, in my opinion.  

The whole success of the running of our homes with children, regardless of how many, depends greatly on the guiding and training of our children.   Putting people before things puts the perspective where it should be--on things eternal, with eternal spirits.  Dust, while it seems like a never ending job, does not have an eternal spirit.  Papers can be cleaned up and put away, but the child who needs rocked to sleep, a diaper changed, read to, talked with, spent time with will always take precedence over any "thing" of this world. 

Tomorrow, I will write more about the knitty-gritty of organizing our days.  I have a basic schedule that works for our family.  I will show you what I do.  I would like to encourage you to take the information and make it your own and nip and tuck it to fit your family.  What works for me, will not work for you, so please take the basics and use it for your own family. :) 

In His Service,

Regina