Category Archives: children

Evenings

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“…Establish a house, even a house of prayer, a house of
fasting, a house of faith, a house of learning, a house of order, a house of
God.”

Doctrine and Covenants 88:119

 

 

My Evening schedule came to be about a year ago. After we had been reading scriptures for a while in the morning we felt like it wasn’t quite enough. Dadzoo would read a chapter while the kids were eating, and while that was good, it wasn’t as good as it could be. We still continued to read in the morning, however we tried to add some study in the evening. Tried is the key word here, it just never seemed to happen. Since having a morning schedule seemed to work so well I decided to implement an evening schedule.

Here is the rough schedule we are working on right now. It isn’t totally complete yet, I am still tweaking it a little, I have added a some new things from last year and I was able to take off “homework” for my two oldest (yay!).
5:45-6:00 Check Stewardships.
(I like the house to be picked up when Dadzoo gets home)
6:00-6:30 Dinner
6:30-7:00 Clean up dinner and bath Tom
(every child has a weekly dinner stewardship: Setting the Table, Clearing the Table, Rinsing dishes, and Bathing Tom)
7:00-7:15 Scripture Study and Family Prayer
7:15-7:45 Tom to bed, baths and homework
7:45-8:00ish Family Reading time
(This is new this fall, and so far we are loving it, right now I am reading Tom Sawyer out loud to the kids, it is a part of being a “house of learning”)
8:30 Bed, the children may read if they would like
9:00 lights out, no exceptions
(Momzoo turns into a witch after 9:00 and nobody really wants to see that)

This is what works for us for now, at this time in our lives. Our evenings are fairly empty and as far as I am concerned I am going to try to keep it this way. On evenings where either Dadzoo or I are not home, the other keeps to the schedule as much as possible. This has become a wonderful time for our family. We laugh together and we learn together, it warms my heart to her my girls giggling over Tom Sayers and Dadzoo’s deep laugh in the background.
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Homeschool Schedule

That kind of Mom

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I have become “that” kind of Mom

sigh….

I swore I never would,

but I did it.

You know the kind of mom I am talking about. The type that has to pack separate snacks for their kid when they go to a party because there might be corn syrup in the food, or food dyes, or milk or…..etc…..

Yes, yes

that is ME!

My oldest daughter has ADHD and we have been treating it for several years with medication that seem to help. In the last year we have added a couple more medications because her symptoms have become increasingly hard to manage. I have wavered a lot on my level of comfort with her medications. On one hand they do help, a lot, they make her behavior manageable and her social skills better, on the other hand she is taking some powerful psychotropic medications and I wondered if we were just covering up the problems instead of teaching her to cope.

At the first of the year I visited a “witch doctor” (really she is a Nurse Practitioner who does Biofeedback) and she healed my chronic fatigue (thyroid). I decided to take my oldest daughter and see what she had to say. We found out that she is very sensitive to cow milk, corn syrup (and any other highly processed sweetener, like cane sugar and fructose) , peanuts and artificial sweeteners.

Pretty much anything that is found in a package.

Which isn’t much of a problem, I am a “from scratch” kind of gal…but…I do use a lot of milk and sugar in my cooking.

It has been a bit of an adjustment, but not too painful. She uses Goat milk or almond milk and honey for sweetener (going to get some agave nectar soon). In my cooking I too have switched to honey and Goat milk (I need to find someone who has a goat…). We also have started to wean her off the medication, and have added some supplements. There has also been a lot of prayer.

So what have we found a week later? I am cautiously optimistic. We won’t see the full effect yet, she is still on her medications, but some very promising things have happened. On Friday evening we went to an event, an open house for the newest LDS Temple, she was great (her medication had worn off by this point, usually I would have given her a booster pill, but I didn’t) until I let her have a cookie at the end, about 15 minuets later she was bouncing off the walls! I thought it was an interesting occurrence and took note of it. On Sunday we were at my parents house and she sat quietly and visited, a little angel, typically she would have been causing all sorts of trouble with her cousins and would have been banned to the corner. Our evenings have been calmer and she is more obedient.

I am excited that this just might work.

So, I guess I am “that” kind of mom!

Culinary Arts

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I don’t know how many time I have sat at a wedding shower and the bride-to-be has said “I totally don’t know how to cook!”

Everybody twitters in laughter and then you hear comments like:

“Rice-a-Roni is really easy….”
“As long as you can ready the back of a box you will be fine…..”
“We lived on Macaroni and Cheese the first year we were married, it was all my husband could cook!….”
“Memorise Domino’s number……”

Inside I am a little horrified.

It use to be that a young lady would never have married without knowing to to cook, much less bragg about it. Being a good competent cook was something to be proud of! I wonder if we focus too much on educating our daughters on the things of the world and forget to teach them to be heart of their homes. Not that book learning is a bad thing, it isn’t, women should be intelligent and well learned, but it isn’t everything.

“That they may teach the young women to be sober, to love their husbands, to love their children. To be discreet, chaste, keepers at home, good, obedient to their own husbands, that the word of God be not blasphemed.” (Titus 2:4-5)

As part of my oldest daughter’s homeschool I have added what I like to call “life skills”. She is learning how to cook! I have also included her younger sister in this project for the summertime and they are both really enjoying the process.

 

There are three categories: Meals, Breakfast and Desserts, they get to pick 5 different items in each categories. They each take turns cooking and marking off what they have done. Once each item has been cooked 5 timed I will sign it off. We will then invite a special guest of their choice for dinner, which they will prepare all by themselves with no help from me. The girls are so excited, they are already starting to talk about who they want to invite.

 

“She ariseth also while it is yet night, and giveth meat to her household, and a portion to her maidens.” (Proverbs 31:15)

Our System of Government

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The other night the punk children of the family decided to vote on whether or not they had to do their daily steward ships on weekends. Of coarse they won by a simple majority and they cheered thinking they had obtained victory. Dadzoo quickly reminded them that our home is not a Republic or a Democracy, that it is a Dictatorship and that he, Dadzoo, was the Royal Dictator.

Later as we were talking about our system of government we decided that it had to be something other than a dictatorship, being that Dadzoo’s rule was religiously backed. He is after all the head of our home by divine right. I, the honorable Queen Mother, (as I at times make the kids call me) made a call to the smarty-pants-college-boy-baby-brother of mine and asked if there was a name for the system of government that was religiously based. Without skipping a beat he said, “Oh yeah, it is called a Theocracy.”

So there you have it, my home is a Theocracy.

Nuff Said!

Summer

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Now that the kids are back in school I have been reflecting on this past summer. I seems to, in my mind, be divided into two distinct time periods. There is the “before the vacation” and “after the vacation”.
Before the vacation was from June until about mid July. It was wonderful. The kids were relatively well behaved, the house was kept relatively clean, chores and school work were done by 11:00 and the afternoon was free time. I really felt like I had it all together.
After the vacation was a different story. We were lazy, very unproductive, the house was messy and nobody cracked open a book. The kids were irritable and I was down right ornery. Nothing seemed to work, the days were long, tiring and tedious.

I have been mulling this over the last couple of weeks, wondering what changed. Were we just getting bored? Were we craving the structure that school created?….Structure….

…Sturcture….ah-ha

The first part of the summer I had a daily schedule. We were up at 7 and there was a plan for the morning, it included chores and some school work. Everyone (including me) knew each day what was expected. The afternoon were free times where the kids could do pretty much as they pleased (within reason). They played in the wading pool, with the bunnies, with friends. Sometime they watched movies or played on the computer. I taught them how to stitch and garden, we picked sweet peas and made daisy chains.


After the vacation it all fell apart. Part of the problem is that I can home really sick and it took me a good week of rest to get feeling better (ha, as much rest as you can get with 5 little ones around). I stopped making up a schedule for the day, there was no structure. The kids didn’t know what was expected, I would just give orders as I thought of them, it would be noon and the house wasn’t picked up and the breakfast dishes still on the table. They weren’t dressed and had been sitting in front of cartoons all morning. Everybody was bored, tired and irritable.

Conclusion: I am a better mother /homemaker /wife /person when I have a schedule. It keeps me on track, I am notorious for being easily distracted. I also think it helps the kids to know what to expect and what is coming next. When I do a schedule it is very detailed, sometimes down 10 minute increments of time. Also, I think that it is a good thing for everyone to have unscheduled time.

Now that the school year has started I have started up my scheduling again. So far (I know I am only a week and a half into it, but you have to start somewhere right) everyday the kids have gotten off to school on time and un-rushed. Beds have been made, house picked up and animals taken care of. I am optimistic that this will be a good foundation for a good year. I have started to schedule the evening too (after school is free time, the kids need a good couple of hours of hard-core play time!) and so far it is working, kids are to bed on time (for the most part, punk #1 is exerting some independence on this point) dishes done, homework finished and house picked up. I has worked so well so far that I pray it will continue, it makes such a difference in our home as was illustrated to me this summer.