With JOYFUL Hearts ... Happy Three Kings Day!

If you have hung around my blog for any length of time, you probably know that one of the tenets of my child rearing philosophy is to  raise children with charitable hearts who give to others joyfully.

Acts 20:35
"In all things I have shown you that by working hard in this way we must help the weak and remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how he himself said, ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive.’"


This Three Kings Day we spent the day spreading JOY to people in our community.

We made homemade marshmallows for one of the owners of the dance studio where my children dance. He loves marshmallows and it brought him lots of JOY to receive them.

We also took three of Anne's porcelain dolls that she no longer wanted and left them on playground benches in low-income neighborhoods. We left them with notes that said to take them home and love them. My kids love doing this particular act of kindness. They love to go back the next day and see that the toys are gone and think about the new child playing with them. We hope that each doll will bring some child great JOY!

Lastly, we made nine homeless kits. We dropped them off at our church to be handed out to homeless people on Sunday. Our church is in charge of serving breakfast in an urban park this weekend. In our city, homeless people often stand at  traffic lights to beg. We plan to make some more to keep in the car to give to homeless people at traffic lights.

If you want to make your own, here is a list with ideas of what you might include:

• Non-perishable food, such as crackers, hard candy, cookies, etc.
• Tissues
• Comb or hairbrush
• Hand wipes
• Gum
• Socks
• Gloves and hats
• Band-aids
• Fast food gift cards
• Toothpaste and toothbrush
• Most important ~ a card of encouragement and compassion

We had a wonderful day spreading JOY! I am joining ~ 

Blessings, Dawn

How We Are Reading the Chronicles of Narnia

When I sat down to research in what order to read the Chronicles of Narnia, I had no idea I was entering a great argument between C. S. Lewis academicians. I soon realized there were two camps, that of reading the books in chronological order vs. publication order.  C. S. Lewis himself weighed in on the debate in 1957 when he answered a boy's letter asking which order to read the series. Lewis had a mild preference to read the books in chronological order instead of publication order.

My own experience with the series was reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe as a child. I enjoyed it but preferred historical fictions and biographies to fantasy and moved on after that one book. I never read another one until I was homeschooling my oldest son. Timothy and I read the books in a mixed-up fashion. We read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe followed by Prince Caspian and then realized we hadn't read them in chronological order. We went back and read The Magician's Nephew and then continued on with the books in chronological order from there. My son loved the series but felt that The Magician's Nephew took away from the magic of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. It gave the story away and reduced the intrigue of what was to come. However, reading The Magician's Nephew first does make the sequence of events more clear for the reader and lends to a more biblical approach than skipping it and starting with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (in my opinion).

Our spine ~ Focus on the Family Radio Theater, The Chronicles of Narnia and Veritas Press Comprehension guide

So taking all of this into consideration, I decided to present the books in chronological order -- almost! My oldest son had strong feelings about how The Magician's Nephew decreased his enjoyment of the series. For this reason, I will be skipping and the reinserting The Magician's Nephew later. The question is where. I think after The Silver Chair will be my most likely choice. Do you have a preferred order?

Other resources include ~ The movies, Step Into Narnia, Everything Guide to C. S. Lewis and Narnia, and SchoolhouseTeachers.com Literature Kits.

My current plan is for the kids to listen to the books in this order ~

• The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
• The Horse and His Boy
• Prince Caspian
• The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
• The Silver Chair
• The Magician's Nephew
• The Last Battle

Blessings, Dawn

Urban Nature Study for Homeschoolers ~ Weeks 8 and 9

We are having incredible weather around here. It is unseasonably warm and we are having bouts of intense rain. It is certainly a very rainy winter.




Rain and River Flooding ~ Recently, the two rivers that intersect on the west side of our city seem to overflow every few days. Our nature studies are becoming more and more about erosion, flash floods and rivers. We went for a walk on Christmas Eve to one of the local parks. It runs alongside the larger of the two rivers. It was flooded. Luckily, our city is actively turning as much waterfront as possible into park land, so that floods are not as damaging as they could be.

The parking lot is under water.

The river is covering the pathway.

The river went back within its banks on Christmas but left them again last night. This time the water flowed into a little historic shopping area and threw mud all over the streets and sidewalks.

It has been so warm that the colony of vultures living in our neighborhood has been very active. We have more than 100 of them. Vultures sit high in trees and spread their wings out wide to warm themselves up. This particular day was very rainy and cloudy. The vultures were trying to dry themselves out during a break in the rain. They are called a committee when they are all sitting together in trees.

They are called a kettle when they are flying in a large group.

I am amazed how much wilderness we are finding in the city. It is there if we just look around.

Blessings, Dawn

Thoughts on 2015 and Looking Forward to the New Year

I've been an adult for 25 years. Most of my adult years have been wrought with crisis. It is the nature of being a parent to a brood of special needs kids. If one were to go back and state the most defining moment of each year of my adulthood, most years it would be something big and often scary (Motherhood at 17, open heart surgery for infant son, graduating from high school with a baby on my hip, going to college while working two jobs and managing disabled son's health care -- and that is just the first three or four years.) In the same eight week period, I managed to graduate from college, get married, move to another state, have all my wisdom teeth pulled, and see my son through yet another pacemaker surgery (I know, crazy). In my adult years, I have also moved entire households five times. After trying and failing to grow our family the traditional way, we fostered and then adopted two very high end kids. Then -- surprise -- we had our biological daughter, growing our family from one child to four children in the span of 17 months! Do you see a theme here? CHAOS controlled, but CHAOS nonetheless.

Today is our oldest daughter's 15th birthday. She is not living with us. She is living in a home for children with severe emotional problems. I see now that the damage that was done to her in infancy by her abusive birth mother was so great that she never could have had a normal and delightful childhood. Unfortunately, I doubt she will have the happy, productive adulthood we all wish for our children. We had such grand hopes and dreams for our Goldilocks when we adopted her at age 2. We did everything the doctors and therapists told us to do. But it wasn't enough to heal her, and for 11 years we lived with a child with extreme behavior issues who took chaos to an entirely new level. Today, Goldilocks is an angry teenager who is testing her house mother every single hour of every single day and in strange and unpredictable ways. She has made it clear that she doesn't want to come home (yet) and hasn't seen her siblings in almost two years (because the state requires her to do so, she does see her father and me several times a month but refuses to see her siblings). We are still praying that we will find some program or miracle that will improve her quality of life and the quality of the lives of those who are trying to care for her. She intentionally creates chaos (she admits to this) and thus wears people out, so they can only take her chaos for short periods of time. All we can do for her is to keep praying. 

Finally, I am getting to the year 2015. What words would I use to describe 2015? This year was calm and filled with healing for the rest of our family! When I look back on the biggest moments of the year, they are small but happy ones. Nothing life altering and major happened in our household. The hardest thing was the loss of our dog of 16 years. The most delightful things were watching our kids dance, traveling to new places, enjoying endless hours of board games, homeschooling and family laughter. I love to see my family laughing. There were no major changes to my husband's job, our marriage, our housing, our finances, our family structure. There were no major medical setbacks for any of our children (that is huge in my world). I am so grateful for a calm year. I've tried very hard to make only choices that would create calmness, even if it meant giving up something that was fun (but hard to pull off).

So my goal for 2016 is to KEEP CALM! I absolutely crave calmness. Of course, much of life is out of our control. But we can control some of our choices and the ones I can control I intend to make calm and peaceful choices. Yes, I still hope to travel a bit in the next year and do new things. But I only want to do things that benefit our family in healing, calm ways. We all have been through enough turmoil for a lifetime. So I pray that we will remain healthy and continue to grow and heal as a happy family. Here is praying for another CALM year!

Blessings, Dawn

H Is for Hamster!

The kids got a new pet for Christmas. We now have a sweet little hamster. The kids named him Kevin.

What happened to our hermit crabs, you say? Well, a few weeks ago, the kids admitted that they were really bored with our hermit crabs. I was the only one taking care of them. So we passed them on to a hermit crab enthusiast. They are thriving in their new home. That left us with an empty cage.

The kids started lobbying for all kinds of animals. My rules were that it had to be low cost and fit in a 10 gallon tank, the kids had to take care of it, and it had to have fur (i.e., no reptiles) We have had so many pets over the years. We have sometimes had as many as seven pets at one time. However, we are in a stage of calm and healing in our family. A hamster was a perfect fit. Three kids (at home), a dog and a hamster is just enough for us.

He is a pretty cute addition, don't you think?

Blessings, Dawn

G Is for National Gingerbread House Competition

We are fortunate to live very close to the hotel which hosts the National Gingerbread House competition. We love to attend the display each year and see all of the amazing creations. Everyone from young children to adults can enter. Everything used must be edible. Here is a sampling of our favorites this year. Remember ~ everything you see in the display can be eaten. Sometimes mice get into the gingerbread displays, but we didn't see any this year.

I loved this peacock. There were several peacocks this year, but I think this was the best one. My kids especially loved the sea turtle and it reminded them of the sea turtle hospital we visited this past summer. My daughter took pictures of every teapot display, since she knows how much I love tea. I liked the one in the collage above the best.

The kids love getting a treat at the hotel's bakery. Looking at tons of gingerbread does make one's tummy hungry. The top left corner is a dragon attacking an ice castle. That was the coolest one in our opinion. 

The kids loved the Wizard of Oz display. The military boots and owl were pretty amazing, too.

This display was made by my oldest son, Tim, along with other members of the Hinds' Feet brain injury day treatment program. It is Santa at the bowling alley (which is one of the favorite activities of the Hinds' Feet members). Santa fell over after he was set up at the hotel, and the members were so disappointed. However, I overheard a family looking at the Hinds' Feet display say they thought Santa was break dancing, because he was very happy that he'd made a strike. I thought their interpretation was really cute!

We came home inspired and made our own gingerbread house from a kit. We want to make one from scratch someday, but it always seems so overwhelming during the Christmas season. Maybe we should try it in August ~ LOL!

Blessings, Dawn

Nature Study for Urban Homeschoolers ~ Week 7

We decided to do a one foot square nature study in our urban environment. We went to our usual park and picked a leaf covered area close to the river. We figured we might find a few bugs since the temperature was in the 60's. However, we only found an earthworm. We scraped away the leaves and then looked at the moss under the leaves. We picked up some of the moss and observed the tiny roots underneath. We also collected several acorn tops that were in our one foot space. The kids then began digging into the soil. They found it filled with small rocks. They found an earthworm that was about three inches long. It was not interested in laying on our ruler to be measured and quickly slithered into some dead leaves. We also found a weed with long roots to compare to our moss with very short roots.

We walked over to the location where the river goes under a bridge to see where the water line was now that the river had returned to its banks and was at normal levels again. Last week the river was almost touching the underside of the bridge. This week the water was much lower and the homeless were once again sitting under the bridge when we peeked under.

Lastly, we observed how the small brush and banks were affected by the flood. The light colored sand was thrown halfway up the bank by the raging flood last week.

That was it for us this week.

Blessings, Dawn