Distracted Mom

You know you are a distracted mom when you tell the doll on the toddler bike in the living room to pick up her shoes.....three times.

So what's distracting me? Well, I would insert a picture of Joseph's smiling double chinned baby face here, but my camera is broken.

What also occupied my thoughts that day and in the cracks of spare time since has been what went best with our homeschool year and what do I want to improve for next year. To jump start my thinking I have been following my friend Elizabeth's summer study on Charlotte Mason. Right now we are reading Education is... and thinking about Miss Mason's motto:

Education is an atmosphere, a discipline and a life.

I love this motto. It is a simple reminder that learning is always happening and should always be happening. So, following Elizabeth's pace, I've been pondering about the atmosphere of our home and the discipline in our home.

The atmosphere I would love to see is one of gentleness. One where brother comforts his sister whom he has hurt or sister chooses to show her knitting to little brother instead of hiding it if he looks interested. I want a home where Mother says, "Are you ok?" before "What happened?" I would love to see an atmosphere of hospitality and graciousness. I would like to have a home where friends big and small feel welcome and comfortable. I think this is especially important as our kids get older and are more challenged by life. I would rather see them and their friends occupied in a constructive way in our welcoming home (and under our watchful eye) than elsewhere. I'm not saying I want to constrain them. I want them to want to be here and to want to bring their friends too.

Right now, I feel like our atmosphere is often one of false efficiency. Don't bore me with details, just tell me what I need to do to fix it. But what sort of atmosphere is fostered by my interrupting a boring story to find out if there is blood and where (and if the story is long, there'd better be blood or you're wasting my time)? But I realize that efficiently dealing with this problem in front of me in the way I do isn't modeling empathy or gentleness or love. I'm trading taking care of today's problem for planting the seeds of virtue. So I am reminding myself to kneel at their level, to make eye contact and listen, to speak gently and softly, and to try to care that this child feels cheated and wounded because her 2 year old brother drank the last few ounces of her Gatorade. Because it does matter to her. And fortunately, I have a few friends who can model this sort of mothering on a daily basis.

As far as discpiline goes, I think the kids are being well trained in many ways. And the ways they are not well trained are due to me not doing my job well enough. Last night, Bill gently pointed out that you should not beat your boss to work regularly. So when I come down to breakfast 15-30 minutes after them and still in my pjs, they are beating me to work. I thought it was a very good point and getting up early has suddenly become true priority. Nothing else but Bill's insight and example has ever convinced me that losing 30 minutes of sleep was worthwhile. Now I feel ready to get up as soon as the alarm calls me. And I could immediately see that if I am faithful to beating the kids to work, my job of training them and helping our routines develop into habits will go much more smoothly.

This is really the Cliff notes version of my thoughts. If you are interested in reading Education Is...., click here for a free e-book. I printed mine since it is only 45 pages.

Here is a link to Elizabeth's insights about atmosphere. Here is a link to her thoughts on discipline.