So, this conversation happened earlier and I laughed until I cried.
Me: LARP seems like a geek thing but I have a theory that it's really education
Because homeschoolers graduate and are like, man, what am I going to do with these military strategy and leather working skills mom let me work on for extra credit...
Hunter: hahahhaha when the zombie apocalypse comes.
we will all be happy we dedicated hours to sword play, armoring, and small unit tactics.
cause lets be realistic here.
guns will be nothing but stupid and bullets will be rare.
and to be honest it doesnt take too much to stop some rotten teeth from penetrating your clothing.
get some light leather armor combined with some small sheets of chainmail for weak points and you're set.
also the fact that i essentially know how to build a castle is super useful too.
1 comment
Hello! It's been a while. Recently, we've started chore charts in the Simmons household and I wanted to post about it. We were sort of in a post-holiday slump and the boys were doing hardly anything except drifting from one play-activity to another, with an admittedly daily dose of Netflix thrown in. I listened to a recent Raising Playful Tots episode about simple Monterossi stuff to do at home on the cheap, and though chore charts weren't mentioned, I was inspired to finally follow through on making some charts like I've been talking about for months. (This show regularly inspires me!)
I made my charts with a mix of google image search, Photoshop, and Microsoft Publisher (I loooove doing this sort of thing). I made one for each boy and a really simple one for Lucy (just to get her in the habit and because she loves doing Big People stuff).
So, in practice, how does this work with three-year-olds? I wanted a chart that they could "read" for themselves, even though I'd be helping them with all the jobs. Sam's chart isn't shown, but he has the same selection of jobs but at different times/days, so they're getting to work with me one-on-one for each task. It honestly doesn't take that long, it keeps them busy and involved, and helps me keep up with stuff around the house! I told them when we first hung the chore charts up that they were big enough to help take care of the family and the place where we lived.
We check the chore chart right before or after breakfast, around lunchtime, and right before dinner. Here's a rundown of each picture symbol and what it entails for them:
Dishes - Clear the table after we eat. They gather dishes into a Rubbermaid bin, a lot like a busboy would. They can throw it all in there-- leftover food for the trash, dishes, utensils, cups-- and I'll sort it out in the kitchen. They can carry the bin to the kitchen.
Dishes bin!
I let them do this part pretty much entirely on their own after a few practice runs. Then they can help put away leftover food-- they can snap lids on leftovers containers and put containers in the fridge. Then they can help put away any clean dishes from the drying rack-- they can reach shelves for pots and skillets, clean leftovers containers, their own plates and bowls, metal mixing bowls, and all the non-knife utensils. I supervise, giving them step-by-step instructions.
Laundry Basket - They can help gather dirty clothes, help put things into the dryer or washer, and put folded clothes away with direction. They don't fold (yet) or measure soap. They love to push the washer and dryer buttons.
Bathroom- This is the "biggest" job for them because it's the first time they've ever handled cleaners. I actually do all the spraying, but it's a big learning curve for them to be in the bathroom with me and the spray bottles and it requires the most supervision. They can wipe off surfaces that I've sprayed, use the scrub brush in the toilet (they love this), put away bath toys, and help clean off the bathroom counter before we wipe it down.
Books- Picking up and reshelving books is a five-times-a-day way of life here. But the books on the chore chart are specifically for gathering up library books before our library visit and then helping unload new books onto the right shelves or baskets.
Vacuum Cleaner- The boys can each get the vacuum cleaner out of the closet on their own. I usually straighten up or dust the room we're vacuuming beforehand. They like to unwrap the cord and help plug it in. They can push the button to start the vacuum. Then we push it together, with directions from me to "push" or "pull" around the room. They can also mostly direct the hose by themselves for corners and along walls. Then they help wrap the cord up and put the vacuum away.
Picking Up Toys- The boys trade off cleaning up the toys at the end of the day and cleaning up after dinner. I help with the toys, directing them to categories of toys to pick up (baby toys, Duplos, cars, puzzles) based on whatever is out. My help might be for every category if there's a lot or hardly any help if it's just one small group of toys out by that point. We do not at all distinguish between "Sam's toys" and "Theo's toys" or "Lucy's toys" in this house, even though they each have some of their own. If picking up toys is their job, they are responsible for anything out. I want them to grow up expecting to help one another rather than only watching out for their own person and belongings. (Even if I know I'll have to fight that natural tendency anyway...I mean, c'mon, how many times have you moms with older kids heard the whine, "But that's not my [job/toy/dish]"?)
Lucy's jobs are basically just things she already likes to do. She likes to wipe stuff off (even if it's not very well, heh) and she loves to push the Swiffer around. They all get Sunday off. We started on Wednesday and so far, we haven't missed a day yet. Confession: Last night we caught up on midday and evening chores right before bed, but still. I know we will eventually miss days, but it's the general practice I'm more interested in instilling. Yesterday, actually, lunch stuff was still on the table when dinner was almost ready due to a nap immediately after lunch and a lazy afternoon, and I carried all the dishes to the kitchen myself. But then when they were distracted, I ended up taking them all back and helping Theo to clean them off. Once we've gotten started (and especially at the beginning of the new habit), I don't want them to start feeling like if Mama doesn't remind them or help them, the job just disappears.
Anyway, I had a blast making these charts and the boys love checking stuff off and being involved. We've had a bit of feet-dragging when it means leaving toys behind for a bit, but as long as I stay cheerful and explain clearly what they have to do, they usually get into it fairly quickly. The jobs rarely last longer than ten minutes at the most.
As of right now, the images I've used are not all technically "free" images, so I shouldn't and can't sell the charts, but if anybody is interested in these with some slight modification for the jobs (or just as-is!) let me know and I can whip 'up a few! I can change names, fonts, and pictures (other ideas: beds, pets, outside jobs, etc.).
Also, considering two upcoming posts: Surviving a grocery store with Littles, and Menu Planning. Any interest?
The boys have been on a space kick recently, so I abandoned my neat list of two-week school units and all we've been doing is space, space, space. Rockets, planets, space shuttles, stars, moons, galaxies...whatever we can find and that they'll sit through. I might post a list of the books we've gone through later if anyone is interested, but mostly we just look through whatever we have on the shelves here and whatever they have at the library and then read, reread, reread. And then we talk, talk, talk about what we've been learning.
Tom Swift and His Rocket Ship is our evening read aloud and their oral story is usually either a story about them going into space and visiting planets or is the story of creation.
We've been printing out space coloring sheets (rockets, planets, etc) to color and varying levels of activity. Some days they just color, some days we add star stickers. We've made rockets out of toilet paper tubes. We've assembled our solar system puzzle several times. And today we did a craft I did absolutely no planning for. It just sort of fell together and it worked out well.
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I found the planets here : http://s3.amazonaws.com/PCPC/solar-system-01.jpg
They each picked a color of construction paper for asteroids and then cut the asteroids out with a little help for practice with scissors, while I cut out the planets for them. Then we started with Jupiter, Earth, and Mars and they glued those and then glued the asteroid belt in the middle. Then I gave them the rest of the planets and the sun and let them sort them onto which side of the belt they belonged on.
We've also watched For All Mankind about the lunar missions over at Hulu+ and we've watched this NASA video about the Mars Rover Curiosity a few times.
God's been really renewing my sense of wonder and amazement at His power and the beauty of His creation as we study this-- I've been learning things, too! It's just mind boggling how HUGE it all really is and how easy it is to forget. It's funny to me how feeling that wonder and awe at God's handiwork awakens in me the desire to create! What a powerful God we serve!
The words awoke something in him
that had been dead so long, he had forgotten it ever lived. It was
uncomfortable, this being reminded. He tried to distract himself with less
disturbing thoughts; traffic is a mess today! Isn’t that a tasteless
advertisement? It’s cold enough to start hunting for my winter gloves again.
These were things that presented no real challenge, no contradiction of
opinion, no disruption of routine.
There was a tiny part of him that
recognized this as cowardice, and this he shoved away, too. He did not want to
catalogue himself as anything in particular. At least, nothing beyond “good
citizen” or “content survivor.” And had he not survived? Did he not deserve
this rest at least? Should he feel guilty for wanting an extended reprieve from
such difficult things? Had he not fought, in his own way, as hard as he could?
At first, he had thought she was a
woman—he saw her when he walked by, saw the way she stood close to the man with
her. A husband and wife. Nothing unusual. He hardly registered them at all
except as fellow passengers. He sat in front of them on the bus, without regard
for how close or far they were. Why should it matter? Who were they to his day?
She was whispering, a low soft
steady whisper that sometimes grew suddenly too loud but only on certain words,
the way people talk when they are soothing themselves and not quite right in
the head. This made him uneasy and he scooted toward the left, away from the
window. Even then he didn’t think of her as dangerous. Just distracted—and who
wasn’t distracted now and then? And even if something was wrong with her head,
what was that to him? She was just a woman, another person to avoid eye contact
with.
Then the bus’s brakes hissed and
screeched with a sort of yawning, reluctant noise and it was his stop. He
stood, twisting to look out the window out of habit. And then he saw out of the
corner of his eye the clumsy motion of her as she stood and he realized, a bit
startled and then not startled at all, that she was not a woman but a young
girl. A tall young girl, but not at all with the body or face of maturity.
Maturity was what he thought—age is what he meant. She was twisting, too,
craning in the space between the seats to stand on tip-toe and whisper in the
man’s ear. Not a husband, then—a father.
Somehow this made him feel better
about the whispering. In an adult, it marked a sort of unbalance or unawareness
of the world at large. Her youth excused this. They were in line behind him to
get off the bus and she began whispering again, but this time they were closer
and her could not help but overhear.
The girl was reciting.
“Lord, I am lonely
And
the sun is shining
Listless,
while the wind…”
And
then she was gone. They stepped off the bus and she and her father went one direction,
he another. He stopped on the sidewalk, letting the foot traffic stutter around
his still form for a brief second, regroup and swell away. The bus groaned and
pulled away from the stop and then he was alone there, standing and not
turning. He did not look back to see where they had gone.
The
newsstand attendant across the street, who kept the day’s paper as an artifact
in the midst of his fast-moving stock of gum and cigarettes and energy drinks
and crinkly bags of over-salted potato chips more than anything else, noticed him
standing there by the bus stop, staring down at his shoes and chuckled. The
laugh was half pity and half bored amusement.
“Old
man just remembered he left the kettle on, that or he’s pissed himself,” he
said to no one in particular. Of the stragglers on the sidewalk, the thin crowd
before the next bus stop collection began to grow, no one gave any sign that
they heard him.
What
was actually going through the man’s mind was not about the kettle or urine or
even the girl. It was simply,
“Shakes…shakes
the…something leaves. Shakes the something leaves.”
The
heart inside his chest was pumping away at a steady pace, but the heart of his
mind, the heart of him was fluttering
with a stormy mix of excitement and dread. The thrill was that he knew it was
recited poetry because he himself had once known that poem. Not as a particular
favorite, but as something little and elegant and lovely and worth reading whenever it turned up or
when the mood took him. And dread because he had known it, no longer knew it,
and did not want to remember either of these facts.
And
still there was a surge of frustration at his inability to finish the next
line. Or even remember another word, beyond what he had already heard and thought.
He couldn’t even call to mind the name of the poet. What the girl was doing
reciting poetry while walking around never occurred to him as a subject worth
pondering, so wrapped up in his own thoughts and internal struggle was he.
It
was the struggle that bothered him. The poem was now filling his head, banging
at the doorways of his memory in search of its missing words. And even without
them, the first few lines were the death of his content.
“Lord,
I am lonely,” he mumbled, as he walked forward. Then, as if trying to rid
himself of a nasty insult, he slammed the words out and forced himself to think
of other things. The traffic is a mess today, he thought, observing the
stop-and-go procession of quiet cars.
Once, this would have
been noisy, he thought.
He did not give himself the consideration
of a reply. He shifted his attention.
That is a tasteless advertisement,
he thought, when his eye was caught by the vivid greens of a digital billboard—the
mother in the ad wore a neon dress that contrasted with the blood-shot eyes of
her children as she force-fed them bowls of sludgy dirt with toxic waste
stickers on the side. All the children were crying. There was a line, some
line, about feeding babies garbage, but then it was behind him and he realized
he’d been thinking about the poem again and hadn’t really read the board.
The wind that whistled through the
streets curled around his fingers and he flexed them, his old joints aching
with pain seconds before it registered that they were cold. At first, it felt
like being burnt—the opposite of scorching his leg on a metal playground slide
that felt freezing for that first half-second, years and years and years ago.
His children had played on plastic and rubber slides and he had always checked
them first anyway. They had never been the same kind of hot.
I should get out my winter gloves
soon, he thought, making a mental note for himself.
Shaking
the ageless leaves.
And then it came to him, just like
that. There was triumph in that small moment, the triumph of something lost
becoming found.
Ageless.
The door to his office was a block
behind him before he realized he had missed it. He backtracked, feeling
sheepish and awkward for the distraction. He did not nod at the security guard—he
had long since given up such niceties, feeling no purpose in them for how
infrequently they were returned.
Inside, the walk to his assigned cubicle
was a long one. He did not remember the walk at all once he reached his desk,
because he was in such turmoil over what to think about that he couldn’t think
at all. If he was the sort of man who ran for exercise, he might have thought
that a run would clear his head. If he was the sort that turned to food for
comfort, he might crave a bag of chips or a pizza (but in the older style, the
kind with real cheese that was hard to find anymore).
But no, his greatest hobby and habit
and comfort was his blankness. He enjoyed sitting and thinking of nothing; of
staring at a screen at work or the back of a seat on the bus or at the kitchen
wall at home as he drank a glass of water and thinking about nothing. He
drifted through conversations with small amiable smiles and nods, letting the
speech of others enter his mind, dance around, and flit back out like little
harmless bugs. His was now a mind unused to discomfort, because he had gone so
long without allowing any such thing to settle there where it might require
thought or effort or action.
And sitting now at his desk, the
screen before him full of work he did not choose and would not have ever chosen
for himself, symbolizing nothing but the further years of toil and mundane,
sweat-less work to merely function—to sleep, to eat, to continue, to continue
having a place to sleep, and things to eat—his heart, his real and physical
heart, skipped a beat and then began racing.
It felt seized, as if in a vice or a
death-grip and in the peak of that panic he just barely kept himself from
crying aloud with a wordless groan. He wanted to shriek and beat his fists
against the floor—he wanted to bury himself or turn himself off again. Whatever
piece of him that snatched poem had awakened, he wanted to beat it back into the
inner closet it’d crept out of when it received new breath.
Where he had been able to pacify
himself with triumph at remembering words, there was now no consolation. Only a
certainty of death, of uselessness. A dark dread came upon him, casting a
shadow over everything—the packed lunch he had been looking forward to in its
own small way, the sweet lounging rest of the half-nap he’d take at home before
dinner. They were now soured and seemed insignificant.
His hands gripped the arms of his
desk chair and he willed, willed, willed the feeling to pass. He remembered it
now, from long ago—things were rushing back to him as if the poem had unlocked
a floodgate.
But his will was weak. It did not
pass.
He put his head upon his desk, now
not caring who saw or noticed or commented.
“Oh, God,” he mumbled, his breath
stirring up tiny motes of dust near his keyboard. “Oh, God.”
Stop
sleeping.
It was a gentle, quiet voice, far
off, while louder and angrier voices shouted a chaos of instruction, of
interpretation, of opinion. I am crazy, he thought, for the first time in
years. I am crazy.
Wake
up.
Then it came to him in its entirety,
unbidden, a remnant from a day when he loved words and beauty and mystery, days
that seemed lifetimes away and sort of foolish now. He could not tell if it was
a crucial part of what was happening inside him or a distraction. He spoke the
whole poem without noise, moving his lips as in silent prayer.
“Lord, I am lonely
And
the sun is shining
Listless,
while the wind
Shakes
the aging leaves.
The
harvest has been gathered
All
is bagged and barned,
Silos
burst with grain.
Why,
Lord, must I still stand
Dropping
blind seeds
On
to a barren soil?
Come,
sweet Jesus, cut me down
With
the sickle of your mercy,
For
I am lonely
And
a stranger in this land.”
Cliff
Ashby, he thought, the poet’s name now without question in his mind. A small
part of his dread abated.
I do not want this,
he thought simply, wishing already for sleep. And he knew it was a choice,
shoving this feeling away and going back to his screen. A struggle, yes, but he
had done it before.
But,
a limping part of his inner self argued as it grew in size and strength. It
argued things he had known and long locked away, things he had professed to
believe and then doubted and wavered and shut up in cupboards instead. But, it argued, you cannot live without Him.
“Oh,
God,” he said for a third time. “Sweet Jesus.”
They
were still not, and never had been, curses. And despite all the reasons to stay
or go, to think or not think, to forget the poem all over again or to tack it
up on the wall of his cubicle to look at every day, he knew in a part of him
that had been sleeping for years and years that it would be his end to fall
back asleep now. There were no other answers. There were no other questions.
“Where
else would I go?”
It,
too, was a prayer, and with it came rushing into him a ragged breath of hope.
***
The purpose of struggle and trials is that we be refined like gold; it is to make us more like Christ. Lord, you save me, and ever do I need to be saved. may You develop perseverance in me! Too often, I want to shut out or turn from what God is calling me to do-- to follow Him. But Christ has the words of life-- where else would I go? It is worth it. There is joy in obedience; there is growth and hope in struggle. If you are struggling today, know that He is worth the fight. And He is already fighting for you.
(this is the first writing I've done in a while! :) forgive typos; it was written and posted in the same few hours. probably going to tweak it some.)
Just two notes:
Tomorrow starts the Summer Book Club Blog Hop! Yay! Check back tomorrow for a post about a favorite book of mine, with links to all the other ladies who are writing about books every Wednesday in June.
And the second note is that my domain is back to audreysimmons.blogspot.com . http://wifeof.dadamsimmons.com isn't going to work anymore. Sorry for all the jumping around!
Sam has been talking a lot about his dreams recently, from pleasant ones to scary ones (three blue moons in the bedroom!).
He just woke up from a nap and came into the kitchen exclaiming,
"God made that train track for you!"
You, in this case, pretty much means "me," as he still gets those mixed up.
That must have been an awesome dream, son. Doesn't God love you so well?
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