Homeschooling When the Unexpected Happens || The Blessing of a Relaxed Approach

[Music] the Bible says not to boast about tomorrow because you don't know what a day can bring forth but we should trust in the Lord with all our hearts and not lean on our own understanding we certainly learned that lesson this week in our home follow along with us for another day in the life of our home [Music] school this week started out for us just like any other average week lots of laundry meals to be made lessons my daughter here has been working on sewing a skirt she learned in Co-op how to sew her own skirt and so she's just been making a couple of them and it's really fun to watch her just grow in this area if this is your first time on my Channel I want to take a minute to introduce myself my name is Sherry I'm a home schooling mom to 10 kids ages 19 down to 14 months our oldest is graduated we have seven in school and two that are preschool I'm married to my high school sweetheart Nelson we've been married for almost 24 years I'm a former public school teacher and I love homeschooling our kids I am someone who believes that motherhood is Ministry that homeschooling is an extension of parenting and I just love coming on here every week encouraging other moms in this incredible job that God's given us to raise up the Next Generation now like I mentioned it's been just an average week um just the normal taking care of kids um getting everyone where they need to be making meals cleaning up my husband's been working quite a bit this week so that has seemed like um something that's just been a little exhausting for some of us but towards the end of the week uh we noticed that our son James who's nine just wasn't feeling very well and at first I thought it was a virus and um but we kept watching it and it just seemed a little bit different turned out um that he ended up need needing to go into the emergency room and it wasn't long that we were there that we realized he needed an emergency appendectomy he had appendicitis and it was a little bit more complicated than an average um appendicitis because he had an abscess right next to his appendix so he had the surgery and my husband ended up staying with him in the hospital because I'm still nursing Ben and I wasn't able to stay overnight so it was a long couple of days um both of us just um kind of taking care of what needed to be done and we had so many people volunteer to help and call it was so great but this night Nelson finally called and told me that James was able to come home so I started making arrangements to go and pick them up at the hospital and my daughters were just so wonderful because they slipped right in took my place and made dinner for us and they're able to do this seamlessly because they're just at home with me so often and they've seen me make this meal over and over again and I just I was so thankful for them they like cooking which really helps um but they just took care of everything got the meal going and then when I came back it was all ready for us you're going to see in this video that not everything is picture perfect if you've been living with one spouse taking care and holding down the fort at home and then going back and forth things can fall apart even with the best routines and efforts but I wanted to just get a little shot of a video and just tell you about how good the Lord was to us this week um in taking care of James and in helping our family we had asked James what his favorite meal was so that when he came home that we could have it ready and he told us he liked hay stacks so this is a really simple meal I learned from my mother-in-law it's rice ground beef you put that on top and then you put peas on top and then cover it with cheese sauce so he wasn't really all that hungry when he came home but it was kind of nice that we at least had this for him and when we walked in the door and he was able to finally be home after being in a hospital bed in a hospital room for several days um I think he was just so happy to just see familiar sites to see the family again and I was just so happy to have him back at home with us where we can take care of him he can get a full night of rest without any of the beeping or people coming in and we can just love on him and give him some good home-cooked foods we're so thankful for how the Lord healed him and took care of him we're also super thankful for the surgeons and how they um just took such great care of our son on the night he came home our older kids actually had to leave for youth group and when he walked in the door they were already gone and it was just him and me and Nelson and our little ones Holland and Ben so we we got some really nice time alone in the quiet with him before all his siblings came home we've been reading the book The Wild robot and because he's been gone he missed several chapters so since it was quiet I took the time to just sit down and I was I have really missed him because I've been home with all the kids my husband's been at the hospital this whole time and I just although I've gone up to see him several times I you know we just we haven't had him at home and I just treasured this alone time with him and caught him up on all the stories we were able to get actually up to where we are now so um this was really [Music] special [Music] James was just so excited to see his siblings and when you spend so much time together like you do in homeschooling you just have a really close relationship when you have something like this happen in your family um or even for example like when we would have a new baby when my kids were all little we would take a complete break from homeschooling but since we have so many older kids it's just easier for us to have them keep going because they're so independent and this gives them something to do it kind of keeps the family routine going um but over the years we have developed a really relaxed routine and I like to think of it as relaxed homeschooling our goal is always progress moving forward every day and so for the next few days my priority is going to be taking care of James getting him back to Good Health taking care of the little ones and then being available as my other kids need help but we're not in a rush we're we don't have any place in our curriculum that we have to be by a certain time we can just take it easy do a little here a little there I want to take a break real quickly in this video to tell you about a mini ecourse that's launching Tuesday April 16th called how to take the stress out of homeschooling this is being put out by Kelly Crawford of generation Cedar I've been following Kelly Crawford for probably 10 years she's a she's been blogging since 2007 she's a mom of 11 with 23 years homeschooling experience I can't recommend her enough everything Kelly writes about on her blog and shares is just excellent and this mini ecourse is going to be like having someone come alongside you and just help you navigate the Waters of homeschooling whether you're a new mom or a veteran homeschool Mom this is going to help you avoid some of the common mistakes it's going to be just a shot in the arm of encouragement it will help you relax click on the link below in the description box to take a look at the first lesson for free and also to get on the wait list so you can get the course half off in the first 24 hours I think for some families if you have more of a school mindset when something like this happens it can just throw you into a tail spin because you're thinking in your mind what how far are we getting behind what are we going to have to do to catch up and you're just thinking of all the days you have to get in whereas if you have a relaxed approach to homeschooling you can make the family your priority and just do a little bit as you're able to one thing my husband and I were talking about recently is how homeschooling connects you to the past and the future rather than being in the same grade all day with people that are your same age you spend a lot of time with people that are younger than you and you know when Grandma Pops in for the afternoon or for lunch you spend a lot of time with people that are older than you when you're out in the community or running a you're with people of all ages all day long and I think the benefit for this is that when you see kids that are younger than you it ties you to the Future you're thinking about your influence on them when you're with people that are older than you it ties you to the past and you become aware not just of your generation and how what's going on in your world but what things were like for people who lived long ago and what you can learn from their life experiences the story I was reading this morning to the kids from Farmer Boy just really reminded me of this conversation I had had with my husband in the story um Eliza Jane and the three older kids in almanzo's family were sent off to a boarding school for a week and when they came home Eliza Jane just kind of acted like a showoff like she had learned all this stuff from getting a real education out in the world so the oldest daughter Eliza makes this kind of rude correction of her father and how he's drinking his tea and that that's just not the way they do it anymore and her mom just puts her in her place reminding her where she comes came from and how much older people do know she said young lady if you have to show off your fine education you tell me where saucers come from and Eliza Jane couldn't really answer and she just gives her daughter this little speech and history lesson just reminding her about how it's been done for the past 200 years and she finishes by saying to Eliza Jane I guess a thing that folks have done for 200 years we can keep on doing we're not likely to change for a new fangled notion that you've got in Malone Academy and she just reminded her daughter that just because you've gone to get a quote real education don't forget the past I think one of the great benefits of of homeschooling is that you see outside of your age group and your time period and you can think it makes you think about the future it makes you remember the past it makes you see education as something that's part of life you don't go to a a special place to to learn you're just you're learning all the time I did get a little bit of work done I think I did one reading lesson with William I sat with Julia and we reviewed her math but my older kids they just did what they could on their checklist and um I wasn't able to spend as much time sitting individually with them today and that's okay because it may not happen today but it does happen and there will be plenty of time for me to catch up with them um I still sit down with them throughout the day and catch up with everybody in other ways but on as far as their schoolwork um they were just working and doing the best that they could for today and and I'm okay with that I think sometimes we forget how much our kids in large part are responsible for their own education yes we teach them to read we teach them the fundamentals of math but once they get going the goal is for them to be independent it's not for us to be spoon feeding them all the time and they really are the ones that determine how far they go how hard they work so having them be independent is a good thing I wasn't really sure what I was going to make today this was kind of a last minute decision I ended up making a sausage dish with potatoes which I feel like we've had a lot lately um and then we just put the leftover cheese sauce that I had made or that the girls had made from the evening before with hay stacks we just kind of put that on top it was really delicious um even though we've had it a lot I felt like it was kind of a good meal for James to have from just coming home at first was going to was thinking about making a tomato dish with the sausage but then I thought that would probably be too acidic so I went with this sausage potatoes with the cheese sauce and it was it was delicious about this time Aton brought her checklist to me so I guess I kind of forgot I did go over her checklist with her and she was just telling me everything that she did for the day and we were talking about some of the things she was reading about um so we did spend a little bit of time going going over that while I was making lunch some of the kids started up a game of skipo the nurses gave James this card game when he was in the hospital just to keep him busy and he was allowed to bring it home so they started up this game and then James came over I just love seeing my kids play together this is a treasured memory um I I love that they're growing up spending so much time together now if you watch my channel uh frequently you know my kids have lots of friends they have friends at Co-op friends at church friends in the neighborhood but these relationships your sibling relationships are lifelong and so them growing up together and spending so much time together is priceless to me um when they're old when they're 80 years old you know who are your closest friends going to be who's going to be there for you it's your family family is a beautiful gift that God's given to us when you give your kids the gift of a sibling you're giving them a lifelong friend we enjoyed this meal together and afterward James started working on a little project that he has for Co-Op um I told him not to worry about doing any work he was just he's just supposed to relax but as soon as he gets bored or wants to do something he can do a little bit and he's is making this tooth toothpick bridge these are the plants let me just show you that we planted a couple weeks ago and they are sprouting so that was kind of fun to show him when he came home he's making this toothpick bridge um that's part of a science project for Co-Op and this was something that he kind of wanted to do he was feeling a little better at this time and so he got started on that one other thing that we did get done today was we did a nature study lesson on on hent and I had Aon go out we had this little hin plant that was growing at the bottom of our walnut tree and she cut just a couple stocks and brought them in and um we use this as part of our lesson for science today everybody got their sketchbooks and we all went in the living room James wanted to lay down for a little bit so the kids huddled around our piano bench they're not very picky and they started copying and sketch ing the lilacs I use two books for this one is Anna Botsford comstock's Handbook of nature study and the other one is the Diary of an Edwardian Lady this is one that is one of my favorite for nature study I can put those below if you'd like to look at them sometimes I'll have them just look at the plant and copy it um but then I'll also give them these other books if they want to look at diagrams or try to copy from those the handbook of nature study has some great questions to ask but it didn't have anything that I could find on hin so we weren't able to use that for this lesson I continued reading the wild robot to the kids um while they were drawing when we finished that I got out the Diary of an Edwardian lady and had some of the kids read little excerpts from her diary and if you've never seen this book it's it's really one that's just adorable and I think it's inspired my kids to keep their own nature studies journals some of her excerpts include things like the first flower that she sees or she saw frog spawn down near the pond um so it just it makes them after they read the little section they just want to go and look for some of those things outside themselves all in all this was a very simple day we really didn't do a lot the kids just did a little bit of schoolwork I did a lot of reading to them just sitting on the floor reading and and um a lot of kids were around me all morning and that's okay for times like this this is when we do just enough schoolwork to keep the kids busy to give them something to do but we're not trying to be anywhere we're not trying to do two things at once we're doing what's needed and important for everyone if you like the content that you saw in this video I want to invite you to take a look at another day in the life video I did a couple weeks ago ordinary day in the life of our homeschool every moment holy thank you for following along with us in our home I hope you have a great week I do one video a week on homeschooling encouragement for everyday [Music] moms [Music]