Thankful.

We are thankful this week, and I do hope it lasts. I hope we remain aware and focused on and vocal about how grateful our family is to have each other and also to have the opportunity to spend so many hours of the day at home with our kiddos. Wow, really?....kiddos?....I've always thought that was cheesy to call kids kiddos, but apparently, motherhood or possibly late twenty-hood has made me cheesy. Whatever, there are worse things I could be turning into. Like too serious, now that is something I hope to never be, though I have been accused of that many a time. But that's a whole other tangent.

So while we had a week of giving thanks and listing blessings we are happy to have, we also had a busy, busy quick little week that passed by so very, very terribly fast that we didn't get to each and every one of our fabulous celebrating Thanksgiving homeschool plans. We did many of them, oh yes we did write blessings on construction paper turkey feathers and read about the pilgrims and work harvest puzzles, but there were so many good intentions that we passed on by. And I am sad to say that it was the best of my well-thought out super mama plans that we did not get to. We were going to bake cookies for first responders and drop them off, while my little darlings wore their freshly pressed pumpkin shirts, but the week went by, and we left the baking goods in their canisters and jars on the shelf...untouched. We were going to write thank you notes to friends and family, telling them "thanks" for all of the abstract gifts we get from them, since we usually only write thank you notes for concrete materials gifts, but we did not. And the list of grand ideas goes on and on. And while I do feel pretty down about not thanking firefighters for what they do for our community throughout the year and for not helping my kindergarten daughter write a thank you note to her great-grandpa for helping her mama learn to love the piano so that now she can learn from me, well, I am going to try to turn my defeated frown upside down and teach my kids that sometimes we fail. Sometimes we make plans, and we change them. And sometimes, we are too busy doing things that don't matter as much as the things we are forgetting to do, and we can work to change that. And I am going to teach them that we can show our thanks any day of the year, not only on Thanksgiving, though that doesn't mean we shouldn't enjoy that special set-aside day of feasting and thanking. But all other days can also be filled up with gratitude in some form or another. So we are going to bake and thank-you note this week. Yes we are. And we are going to pray some thanks. Because that is simple and good and peaceful, and that matters.

So when considering our week of plans both kept and skipped, I came up with the thought that what we need to strive for in our homeschooling house here is less separation between school time and non-school time. I mean, my kids are always learning, and I am always mothering, which includes teaching. I think when I try to have school time and then regular time, then things get a little off balance and a little more clutter enters our lives. Of course, we can and should have set apart time for school, BUT that doesn't mean my mothering mode is turned off during those hours, and it certainly doesn't mean my child's learning mode is turned off after her lesson plan is worked through for the day. Maybe a little more balance will help us make realistic plans and then follow through with them. Maybe if we aren't switching back and forth between our roles, but rather being ourselves a little more comfortably and completely at all times, then this great thing called homeschooling can become even greater for us. We'll just see. That is, of course, after I figure out a way to make that very abstract concept a concrete one. Hmm.