A Story

This weekend I had the great privilege of going to Cincinnati for a homeschool convention! It was great! Heath (the greatest husband ever) stayed here and let me run off kid-free for 4 days! I spent the weekend with one of my best friends Kelly, and we stayed for free at the house of a friend of hers. It was so good to see her, and we had a really good time.

I really learned a lot there. We had 3 days of going to sessions and browsing through the booths of all the curriculums and various things. Kelly and I came out every evening absolutely exhausted and our brains about to explode! There's just so much to learn! I'm most excited about how all of what we study fits together. Every subject is interrelated to all the others, and all the subjects teach us about their Creator, and studying them well glorifies Him! It's amazing when you stop and think about education in that way. I was also inspired by several speakers in the importance of stories. One of them was a story teller himself and was AMAZING at drawing us in to his rendition of GK Chesterton's Father Brown Mysteries. But I'm excited to think about stories as not just entertainment but as the best way to learn! All of history is a story, each individual life is a story, and we experience lives beyond our own through stories. What better way to learn history and improve our character than by challenging ourselves with great stories.

I enjoyed session after session of inspiration, encouragement, and challenge. I was also able to buy some of our curriculum for next year and start looking that over. It was an awesome, though mentally exhausting, weekend.

So I spent the three days feeling challenged to keep developing my own learning, inspired to teach my kids about God's amazing world, and excited that there are so many people out there who realize what education is really about. A quote I've posted before and still love is: "Education is not the filling of a bucket but the lighting of a spark." I'm excited to be the one who gets to light the spark for my own kids!

Coming home after any inspiring trip is always interesting. I was so excited to see Heath and the kids again and so glad to be home to rest. But today it's back to my much-too-large to-do list, laundry, house cleaning, breaking up fights, changing diapers, etc. While I was in the shower this morning, Tabitha found a pair of scissors and cut her own hair. (Not dramatically but enough to need a fix-up.) It's so hard to come from a weekend of dreaming of potential and how wonderful it is to learn, back to the reality of day-to-day life. But I guess the point is that even in the mundane tasks, there is a big picture, a STORY, going on. This chapter may not be the climax of the novel, but nonetheless it's an important part of the plot. I'm just thankful for the wonderful chance this weekend to reflect on that and be refreshed on the journey of motherhood and homeschooling. Thank you, Lord, for such a blessing.