What is this?... Where did it come from?...Why did it come from the tree?...And then it grows into a tree?...Why?
And I often think about how many acorns do not grow into trees.
"A little yellow acorn fell to the ground and lay there patiently without a sound..." (From Edward Gibbs's Little Acorn Grows Up, one of our favorite books.) We have quite a few books about acorns growing into big strong Oaks. And with a 2 year old and 4 year old, we play the "why" game a lot.
What is this?... Where did it come from?...Why did it come from the tree?...And then it grows into a tree?...Why? And I often think about how many acorns do not grow into trees.
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I wish I had more time to post on here, but motherhood is keeping me plenty busy. Here is the message I'll be sharing in church this morning for Mother's Day.
As I mentioned in my last post, I've been going to Bible study before church every Sunday recently. (I'm not going today. My husband is home, which is rare in the fall, so we're staying home to watch the parade with him.) Last Sunday I didn't think the lesson spoke to me at all. It turned out, I just needed to keep listening.
The lesson was on the "Healing of a Demon-possessed Man," from Luke 8:26-39. I could not come up with answers to the reflective questions. Here they are in brief:
Granted, I was a bit distracted by Acorn, but that is nothing new. I just wasn't feeling any of these things applied. On Thursday afternoon Acorn and I walked to the library and a book had come in that I forgot I requested. It's called 7: An Experimental Mutiny Against Excess, and was brought to my attention by A Little Bit of All of It's September book selection. I've often had this feeling that we have too much. I've talked about it to a few people, but always feel paralyzed when it comes to doing anything about it. A lot of our stuff I would like to get rid of, but for most things, I rationalize why I need all this stuff and more. I've only read the intro so far, but it's really resonating with me now. I hope this book will help me. One of the reviews on the back says it's not a guilt-trip, which is good, because I'm good at coming up with plenty of guilt on my own. In fact, during that Bible study, that was the answer to my first question. "If I could be free of just one thing, it would be guilt." But I couldn't tell you guilt over what at the time. And I thought, "well, guilt can be good; it keeps us on the right track." But if you're not doing anything to relieve yourself of the guilt (other than waiting until you forget about it), then it's not really doing you any good. At the present moment I am: all of the above? The most helpful thing my group can do for me is: get excited about what God is doing in my life, be part of it, and help me see what else God could do in my life. "While I feel it is beneficial to recognize the importance of our role with young children, I am the first to admit shortcomings in my attitudes and actions in bringing up my own children and in being with young children in many given moments. However, we not only try to do the best we can, but we can also strive to do better, or the most important work of the parent with young children is inner work on oneself. The young child accepts us as perfect and good; once he becomes older and sees our imperfections, the most important thing is that the child sees we are striving to do better. Our desire for inner growth (or our complacency) is perceived by the child and has a very deep effect on him." From Your Are Your Child's First Teacher p.332
Have I posted on here yet that I decided to get my Montessori Teacher training for infants and toddlers? Most of you probably know that by now though. I did most of my academics this spring and summer. Right now I'm taking Acorn to a parent child class on Thursdays and Fridays. It's quite a hike, but as a practicum student I'm assisting instead of paying the class fee, so it's totally worth the drive. Plus I get to continue learning from the amazing instructors. I still need to find a regular practicum site where I would work in a classroom with children anywhere from 0 - 3 years old without their parents, for a minimum of 15 hours a week, spread over three days, for nine months. (Run-on sentence anyone? Sorry.) I also have my advanced seminar coming up in November and there will be another one in the Spring. I have to journal about every parent-child class or practicum day. I have tons of assignments to get done in the next 2 1/2 years. And why am I doing all this? "the most important work of the parent with young children is inner work on oneself." Looking back at old posts, I see that I did post a little about this...When I was pregnant I was looking for a parent-child class and the closest one I found was about an hour away. Now I want to bring something like this closer to home. Unfortunately, Montessori is often kind of an elitist thing because it costs so much! I understand, we go through a lot of training, and pay good money for that training, so teachers should be paid well. I wish it was that way for all teachers. But since it's not, I want to share my good fortune with others. I want to start a low- or no-cost parent-child class in my area. I want to help as many families as I can do the best they can with what they have. Other ways I'm doing inner work on myself? I've been attending bible study before church. (More about that in the next post...) I also want to read The Spiritual Hunger of the Modern Child: “ten lectures by notable speakers representing a variety of religious perspectives including Judaism, Christianity, Subud, and Buddhism...All of the writers agree that who you are and what you do around young children are more important than religious dogmas or indoctination. Reviewer Rene Knight-Weiler summarized the book's common theme as: 'Religion must be caught, not taught, and indeed it cannot be caught from someone who doesn't truly have it...'...In one of the essays...'That is really the fundamental thing to satisfy the spiritual hunger of the child - that the grown-up does not stop working upon himself, that no day does he stop working on himself.'" (330) I'm not a fan of absolutes, and I don't actually believe the above statement. But I'm looking for a sounding board right now. Most of you know I sell Tastefully Simple products to help raise money for my church. I've been struggling lately with the decision of continuing to do this or not. I often don't meet the quarterly minimum with customer purchases and have to pay for product out of pocket to stay active. I can then sell this product, but I'm constantly playing catch-up. As I'm trying to organize this post in my head, I'm going through all the pros and cons, and the cons are out-weighing the pros.
Cons:
I've sort of been looking at the direct sales as similar to any other job that a person would have that they don't like. The things that I'm passionate about about wouldn't make money for a very long time. Direct sales is a way I can make money right now. But if I truly pursued it, I don't think it would allow me the time I need to devote to my current priorities and/or my big dreams. It is a priority to me to stay home and raise our son. People often say they got into direct-sales so they could make money while staying home with their kids. But I'm having a hard time even balancing that. This fall I started going to a parent/child Montessori class with our little Acorn. I've been reading a lot of books on the Montessori philosophy, and started reading some of Maria Montessori's personal work. As I was reading one such book, and how important she stressed the first years of life are, I started (for the second time) considering getting my Montessori training to teach. I am very passionate about this approach, not just to education in the traditional sense, but to life in general. Before I had a child, I always thought people would take offense when I compared their child-rearing experiences to my animal training experiences. But since having a child, I have not ceased to see the parallels. When you work with animals, you are always training them whether intentionally or not. They do something, you provide them with a result (even a non-response is a result), and they adjust their behavior. It is a constant cycle. Like wise, kids are constantly learning, whether you are intending to teach them a lesson or not. Maria Montessori referred to the first six years of a child's life as the period of the "absorbent mind," in which children are like sponges, taking in everything around them. This is why I feel so pressured right now to focus on parenting and providing a good environment. (I'm really falling down on the job right now as the condition of the house continues to deteriorate, and I sit in front of the computer.) But I'm also still thinking about what I'm going to do with the rest of my life, I lately I've been considering teaching a lot. Partly this is because I want to home-school our kids. But this is not set in stone. I've also considered sending them to a Montessori school, but that can be very expensive. Also, they are not very prevalent. We happen to have 2-3 Montessori schools in our area, but this is very unusual. However, none of them have a parent/child program. (We have to drive an hour to our program.) And I believe only one of them continues past the age of 6, and even then, only goes to 8th grade. I'm also not intimately familiar with all of their programs. They may all be wonderful. I visited the school that teaches ages 3 - 6, and it was great. But often a school will use the Montessori label to because it's become popular, and not actually follow the philosophy very closely. Often when I see a need for something, I personally want to fill it. So I'm trying to be very careful here and decide if this is really something that I personally want to do. (For example, I've experienced a need for a local, independent, large animal veterinarian. If I hadn't already been involved with my husband, I probably would have applied to vet school, regardless of an extreme needle phobia!) So lately I've been trying to play this out in my head. If I got my Montessori training, what would I do with it? How could I put it to use for more than just my own kids, and still stay home with them when they're not yet old enough to go to school themselves? Not having any idea how many children we want to have complicates these questions a little. But a plan is starting to form. Shortly after I had Acorn, someone posted on a message board looking for a local home day-care that used the Montessori approach. I didn't see any responses. I recently learned the school that Acorn and I go to started as a home day-care. I also recently read an article about unique schools and how they were started. One such school was started by a group of parents when the school their children attended announced it would be shutting down. I don't know the first thing about starting a school, but neither did these parents. Also, the woman that introduced me to Montessori through her blog FeedingTheSoil, is working on starting a "network of public Montessori charter schools in diverse communities across the United States called Montessori For All." (excerpt from her book, Kids In the Kitchen, by Sara E. Cotner and Kylie D'Alton, which I just received in the mail today, and highly recommend!) Perhaps I'll contact her for some advice. She's also written about having big dreams and making them happen. She's obviously very ambitious, and a huge inspiration. I don't usually share my plans so publicly in the brain-storming process, but I'm starting to think I should. I usually don't share them because I'm afraid of somebody saying, "What happened to that thing you said you were going to do? Don't you follow through with anything?" But perhaps if I invite more people to help me with the brain-storming process, it will help me think things through more before I get too involved. Another thing holding me back from getting my Montessori training is my dream of training horses one day. I would like to spend more time with my horses. Some day we would like to have our own farm, and I would like to train horses in some capacity. The details of this plan have changed more than once, and I'm sure they will again. Until then, I should be spending more time with the horses we have now. Both to give them the exercise and attention, and to give myself the practice. I think I can still have both dreams, if I scale back the horse idea a little. After seeing other people in horse businesses get stuck with other peoples' horse, or people not paying bills, or not doing anything with their horses, it makes me a little leery of getting into the business. So maybe I'll just keep it as a personal hobby. I'd like to work with my own horse on trail and ranch work. I'd like to work with my husbands horse on the same, so he can go riding with me; and he'd like to be able to use the old horse-drawn farm equipment. And I've thought about training young mustangs to make them more adoptable, or something along those lines. I've also been trying to decide what I'm doing with my massage license. It expires at the end of this year. I already have my CE's, so it's just figuring out if I get a non-practicing license or not, and what level of professional membership to get. I have to decide this mostly because I don't want to get sued if I do massage. I don't think family would do that, but I might like to trade with someone sometime, and legally you have to be insured to do massage. Although, now that I think about it, you only have to be insured to get paid to do massage. I guess I could still trade and be o.k. But I think I still want to keep up with my CE's and license because if you don't, and you decide you want to do it again later, you have to catch up on all the CE's you missed since your license lapsed and the fees. After all the work I went through to get that, it's not something I want to slip away. I really enjoyed doing massage and would love doing it again if I didn't have other things on my plate. But again, as I'm looking down the road, it seems like it could be a long time before I do this again. Do I spend all that money on CE's and a license in the mean time? I would probably enjoy the CE's. But it's not cheap. Well, I know this has been a long rambling post. Selling food, teaching, training horses, massage... As I said before, there are many things other than this blog post that are demanding my time right now; but this was a much needed mental health break. So now I welcome your comments. Hopefully you can organize your thoughts better than I did. |
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Blogs I follow (Does it count as following if I have 50 unread posts sitting in my RSS feed?) when I have time:
A Montessori Home Ali's Art Adventures At Home with Montessori Feeding the Soil How We Montessori Janet Lansbury Jo Cessna Jordan Bagwill Eusebio Montessori ici Multilingual Living Nature Moms Our Best Bites Simply Natural Mom Three Chord Me Under the Sycamore Vibrant Wanderings |