Family Culture {2}: Values

I think it’s pretty safe to say that my family (ahem) stands out. We have a lot of kids. We homeschool. We don’t watch television. We live in a barn, for Pete’s sake.

On Friday, I shared that, in the beginning, we were on the unexamined, default path of family living. True, anyone who knows my husband and I know that we have never had an issue bucking the status quo. But defining our Family Culture helped us not just lead reactionary “we want to do it differently” lives in regards to what’s perceived as normal, but gave us a framework and some bigger goals to strive towards as we walked through the years.

If you’re dissatisfied with the rhythm of your days, wary as you see the character of your children developing, or just wondering how to fulfill your role in God’s great story, this series is for you.

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Sneaky learning

Phineas works. Hard. But he’s not superhuman. He gets tired, he gets irritable, he has off days. Some mornings he would rather scowl out the window than narrate back the nuances of the story he just heard, or painstakingly count, again, six beans, three beans, five beans.

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Mud

There is no mud quite like farm mud.

If you have a patch of earth you’ve broken open and tried to tame, you know this is true. Farm mud is a beast all its own, a subspecies of the normal dirt and water formula churned liberally with gravel and grass and compost and fertilizer. And we all know what fertilizer is, right?

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Remember your why

Yesterday, I got to be part of a beautiful conversation with some passionate homeschool Mommas whose first short years in the trenches have already taught them that the world of curriculum and academia is a perilous place for the sincere Christian. It sounds overly dramatic, but I promise you, it’s true. The family whose top priority is to raise children steeped in the Word of God and submitted to the sovereignty of Christ will quickly realize that holding fast to that commitment is no simple thing.

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You’re already doing it

I was privileged to spend a few hours today with mothers of very young children. Those with four years or less under their belts, still excited and yet exhausted by the day in and day out of caring for little people who can’t meet even the simplest of needs. It was a lovely time; if you ever start to feel jaded by the long haul, sit in the company of women just now discovering the beauty and the burden of being a stay at home mom, of raising her babies, of juggling marriage and faith and stealing a shower in between the newborn’s cat naps…all with a few little people clinging to her skirts.

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