Sunday, May 8, 2011

Surprise!!!

I wasn't sure that I would ever write on this blog again.  But reading my friend's blog has inspired me, so I'm going to post.

I have been learning so much about godly womanhood and God's plan for families and it is having a huge impact on my family.  There's way too much for me to write about in this post, but suffice it to say that we are focusing on our home being our center of ministry, not only for our family but also as a way to reach out to those around us.  We're cutting out activities that do not support our family vision and beginning to make our home a center of industry.  Rebecca and I began a foray into canning this last week, with decent results but a lot of room to grow!  At least our strawberry jam is edible, if not a little weird.  We also want to learn to sew.  And I want to improve the gardening situation in our back yard and bring the kids into my gardening projects.

But all this industry takes time, and when we are doing school until 4pm every day (including piano practice) we don't have time for any additional projects.  So we have decided to start doing year-round school.  I never expected to be excited about such a thing.  But I am thrilled at this prospect.  I think that we will have so much more flexibility in our year because we won't be pushing to be finished by a certain date.  When the grandparents want to take the kids camping and it goes over a week day, I won't be worried about their school.  And if they don't get everything done in one day, I will know that we have many more days to work on it without the deadline of the end of the school year looming over us.  It will also keep their minds from turning to mush over the summer, so that's a good thing.  If all goes the way I think it will, we will have academics in the morning, Bible and music practice in the afternoon to be done by 2:30.  Then we'll have our project time from 2:30 till 4:30 or so where we can work on whatever we have going at the time.

The other change I want to share is that we are converting one of our bedrooms into a family closet!!!  In short, all of our clothes, shoes, bedding, etc. will go into one room on hangars, shelves and bins.  Once I have the project done, I'll (hopefully) post pictures of it.  But you can google "family closet" if you want to read more about it.  You can probably imagine what a chore the laundry is around here.  And then there are the bins and bins of off-season clothes and in-between sizes clothes.  Oh my, it's a job.  This should greatly simplify the challenges of getting laundry clean and put away for me, as well as help me to see at a glance what our clothing needs are.  And in the end, it will greatly increase the storage space in the rest of the house.  So a major overhaul is coming at the Stroup home in more ways than one!