Thank You, Blogger, For Not Deleting My Account

One of my favorite captures from the other evening when I went treasure hunting in the desert with J.

 
I know I'm more of a stranger here these days.  Maybe you've read the past posts and know what a challenge this year has been for our family.  It continues to be a daily challenge that I face one hour or one minute at a time.  However it comes at me.  Through enduring these challenges, I know there is deep, blessed joy.

Some days are better than others.  Sometimes it's hard to see the good through the difficult.  This week, has been particularly challenging, but I feel myself emerging on the other side.  My hope is that this week was just another wake up call to get my head back on straight and to reprioritize God as the leader of my life and not just an afterthought.  A sidekick.

Guest Post: I Am a RAD Kid

My husband was talking with me the other night about all the things we have learned over the years about Reactive Attachment Disorder.  He shared with me what God had laid on his heart about this disorder and how it relates to us as Christians.  I loved his insight and asked him to provide a guest post here.  Enjoy.

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Imagine you're a young kid. Old enough to have a sense of things but still young enough that the world is full of scary unknowns. You've been out to play a bunch of times and the sun has always been warm and inviting. One day, you go outside and as soon as you're in the full sunlight, your skin immediately starts to burn and blister. Even the skin under your clothes scorches under the rays of the sun that, on so many days previous, had been a warm welcome to come outside and play.

Biding and Abiding

Today is July 22.  In exactly two months, I will be 40 years old.  It's been nearly two months since our family underwent a major change in our household.  On June 1, our oldest daughter, S, decided she wanted to be free of the confines of family relationships and our household rules and abandoned this life for the greener pastures of living freely, somewhere else.  Currently, we do not know where she is, nor do we know when we shall see her again.  Her contact has been spotty and inconsistent and continues in this pattern -- or lack of one -- as each new day arrives.

Today, as I ran typical Monday errands and brought Z to the Senior Care home where he continues to volunteer; bought milk, bread, toilet paper and other essentials at WalMart; and ran in to the chiropractic office to have my adjustment; I suddenly had this sense that I was living inside a bubble, going through the motions and biding my time until something happens.

Here I am.  This is my life.  Each day is ticking by one by one.  Yet, strangely, I am completely disconnected from my actions and my feelings.

Some Advice for Homeschooling Families Just Beginning the Journey

First, let me apologize to my regular readers for how sketchy I have been this year on the blog.  I'm here writing a bunch of stuff consecutively, and then I disappear for weeks at a time.  This is no way to blog.  It doesn't help my need to write regularly and it doesn't help those who actually enjoy reading whatever silly stuff I think to post here.

Truthfully, though, my heart is here wanting to blog on a regular basis.  However, since I had to back track with my therapist recently and set a very simple goal for me -- to get out of bed by 8:30 a.m. each day -- actually doing much more than that has been very, very challenging for me.  Hopefully, I'll have better news on that front soon.  I'm getting my medication for depression and anxiety evaluated again this week and having some more regular therapy appointments during this rough patch, so I hope these things and lots of prayer will have me better able to see life more clearly and maintain some focus to be able to blog.

Today, though, I suddenly felt inspired to blog.  Though I've wanted to blog, I haven't felt a lot of inspiration recently.  So I'm seizing this opportunity amidst my life storm to reach out and be helpful to others.  My brain is seriously uncooperative with me lately, so please do your best to follow the crazy and I'll do my best to stay on track.

Guest Post: Head Over Heels

Today, my husband offered to do a guest post here at Mama Flock.  It is S's 18th birthday today and he offers a unique perspective on our lives with our daughter that I enjoyed reading.  I hope you do, too...

Head Over Heels

I knew this girl once. She was eight years old and had just come to live with us. She was a foster kid and we were foster parents. A good match at least on that count, I suppose. Her two younger brothers lived with us already so, you know, it seemed like a good idea to keep the family together. They’d already lost so much.

Changing Dynamics

We have been a family of seven for so long.  Now that there are just six of us in the house, it seems like we have to rethink how we do everything.  This would have happened whether S left suddenly or not (eventually), but now that we are faced with this situation as it is, there are a lot of things that just seem both harder and easier, as well as different.

End of School Year Reflections

You may remember me mentioning around this time last year (or the year before) that I like to finish the school year with a questionnaire for the kids.  It helps them reflect on everything we've done and I like that it's a bit of a time capsule for them to read about later.  It also helps me see where they are at overall so that I can strive to be a better parent and teacher in the coming years.

I want to share with you some of the answers they provided to this year's reflections.*  Parts in parentheses are my personal comments and/or additions.

1.  Name, date, grade completed.

S - 5/24/13, 12th grade

H - 5/23/13 (they all did it today, someone didn't check his calendar), 7th grade

Z - 5/24/13, 5th grade

J - 5/24/13, 3rd grade

O - 5/24/13, 2nd grade

One Week To Go

One week from today, we will be graduating our daughter, S, from high school.  I am still in shock over this.

There's a lot to do this week, too.  The house needs to be readied for the celebration, we'll be picking up my mom at the airport Thursday, making lists and schedules to be sure it all comes together as well as possible.  We definitely don't want to be late to the ceremony!

It's all very challenging.  I'm also on a last minute cram to finish up transcripts for her and my, oh my, what will we give her as a graduation gift?!

Counting Down to Life

I've always been a big fan of countdowns.  I love anticipation even more than the actual thing or day we are counting down towards.  I enjoy Christmas Eve (the pinnacle of anticipation) better than Christmas Day.  But lately, our life has been overflowing with countdowns and I feel like I'm in this constant state of anticipation without much focus on the actual reveals.

To Love Another

So I promised a followup post once we had some resolution to what caused my Tuesday to be extremely stressful.  Today we got some good news, so I wanted to write this up soon.

I've mentioned before how my sister, D, who lives nearby with her four daughters, is a single mom.  She has some incredible strength to be doing the job of two parents, basically on her own.  The father is not involved any longer.  The girls still have so much promise and joy in them even though their mom is tired so much of the time.

I know how tired I am a lot of the time and I have a partner in this crazy life.  So as well as things continue to go over there at their house, I have admiration for my sister's ability to keep doing and giving to those girls.  Money is always tight, quality time is limited and it's a house full of five females with nobody to kill the bugs or repair things.

We do our best to help D and the girls as much as we can.

Two Gender Specific Blogs I Love

We have been blessed in this family with both boy and girl children.  We are raising both, men and women.  So I kind of like to make sure I'm constantly learning about both.

I'm a girl (aka, woman, but in my heart, I'll always be a girl).  So you'd think I'd know a lot about being one.  To a degree, I do.  But I only have my experience.  Our daughters share some similarities with me, but in many ways their personalities and character vary widely from my experiences.  So I find it's best to find out about the experiences of other women so I can help them grow into who God means them to be.

And boys?  Well, they are a complete puzzle to me.  I had two sisters and no brothers.  I learned about men from my dad and my husband.  But, I am increasing in my boy-knowledge thanks to my experiences with three sons.  But I want to help raise them into awesome individuals.  They are very different from one another and even different from my dad and my husband -- so reading stuff from other guys is important so I know how to apply that knowledge to each of our sons.

A Third Tale and Some Corrections

Some of you may have read my post: Two Tales (or maybe not).  But I have since learned that Kaela (the young girl) has a webpage detailing her story and a way for others to contribute financially to help with medical expenses right there on her page.  Actually, it may not be her webpage, but someone who cares for her and cares for this family enough to post the information online on their behalf.

Anyway, I realize now that I had misheard or mis-recalled certain details of her medical history.  I hope you'll understand and forgive me as I just heard the story the one time and just felt so deeply moved I wanted to make sure and share the story with you -- as well as the resulting actions of our son, H.

Please check out the webpage with actual details and photos of Kaela and notice the sparkling eyes and dazzling smile in the midst of her giant burden.  She is an inspiration to me.

New Goals

Some of you may remember when I wrote about my experiences seeing a therapist for the first time (and I'm still seeing her after a bunch of times).  I blogged about the goals my therapist helped me set up for myself in the beginning.

Since then, many of those goals have been achieved reasonably well, so I'll give you the update here and then tell you about my new goals -- Spring goals, as she refers to them.

Getting Back on Track

Like most years, surrounding the holiday season, our homeschool gets a little ... let's say, creative.  We begin each year with a plan and a pattern for each day, but by Thanksgiving, I start making things up as I go and depending on what each day holds as far as extracurricular stuff.  Let's face it, Christmastime lends itself to a lot of extracurricular activities.

Oh, Z...

I've missed blogging while relatives were in town.  So today, I'm going a little crazy here.

I have two good Z stories to share with you today...

This morning, we went to Target.  We had several items in the cart at checkout, including some ponytail holders S had thrown in there for a couple bucks.

Preview

I hope to share with you a few photos from the hundreds I took as I documented my birthday weekend as soon as I have some time to sort through them and pick some good samples.  But in the meantime, I'll just share with you one of my favorites from the weekend.

Monday's Musings

They say we learn something new every day.  If this is true, then I'm stockpiled for weeks with what I learned yesterday!  It was a crazy day and here's what I learned...

Life Skills

I think most parents naturally teach their children a variety of life skills in the everyday occurrences of life.  However, lately, I have been thinking a lot about the idea of life skills and with one daughter a year away from adulthood (and possibly leaving home if her plans of joining the military come to pass), I was starting to wonder if we have taught her enough of the right kinds of life skills.

Another Lesson from Legos

I've mentioned before how much H loves Legos.  He used to be our only kid with them.  But eventually, J started enjoying her time playing Legos with H.  Z, O and even S would sometimes join in on the fun.  When we moved into our house here, we bought each of the four younger kids a small boxed set to keep them busy on move-in day (while all their other stuff was still packed) and they set themselves up in an empty room and played for hours that day -- till the TV got hooked up and then they zoned into that.

Educational Shower Curtains

Okay, so I know this sounds crazy, but I love educational shower curtains.  Our kids have had a vinyl world map shower curtain in their bathroom upstairs for a couple years (speaking of which, it's probably time to change that out), after they'd ripped up the cute goldfish one that was there before it.