Like reading a job description, and liking it.

It sat on my shelf for far too long, then, perhaps out of desperation, I loaned it to a friend, who loved it, then I had to read it. "Don't make me Count to Three!" by Ginger Plowman is my Summer pick for 'the book to tell everyone about' and I have been! Regina, Anna, Melissa W., Emily Y., and Melinda C. have all read it since this Spring and I've got more people in line! So far it's the only parenting book I've ever read that I can jive with. It looks at the child's heart, not the behavior and challenges us parents to do what we know we should do, take the time to teach the right behavior and not just punish the wrong. It does not condone counting to three or threatening consequences (guilty!) even if you do follow through. It's philosophy is that the child should obey, "all the way, right away and with a happy heart" (shouldn't we all?). It encourages creative discipline all the time and spankings under certain circumstances, however, none of this happens without a simple Scripture that reinforces what crime has been committed, and more importantly what God would have us do instead. Essentially, putting off the old, putting on the new, then most importantly, she encourages role-play, so the child practices the right behavior.

One heart-probing example of parenting was given in the book that I was able to try out with little Z just after reading it: We were with some friends at their house and their little boy was playing with a toy lawn mower for quite a while. Z came to me and said, "Mommy, Tommy won't share the lawn mower," now normally I would say, "Did you ask him nicely if you could have a turn?" But, instead, I said, "Does it look like Tommy is having fun with the lawn mower?" Z nodded eagerly. Then I asked, "Don't you want your friend to have fun and be happy?" His face started to sag. "The loving thing to do is to wait until Tommy is done with the lawn mower, then you may ask him if you can play with it. You may find another toy to play with while you're waiting." Z didn't need anymore help that day, though some days he does. He watched him for a while until he found another toy to play with. Finally, Tommy was done and Z got his turn.

It gave me direction and tons of examples of a Biblical model for parenting, not to mention really handy Scriptures like "[Love] finds no pleasure in injustice done to others, but joyfully sides with the truth." That's a handy one when someone decides it's fun to taunt his sister by pointing a stick at her until she cries, over and over and over, or "Love is not rude," for back talkers or for interrupters, "Love is patient, Love is not self-seeking and is not easily angered." All of these were found in 1 Corinthians 13, but she had lots of awesome verses, but my handy reference guide is still out on loan. Well, I guess I still have this one:

It's a quick reference guide ($3.99) also by Ginger Plowman, shaped like a calendar, with common behavior problems, questions to ask to probe the heart, Scriptures to "reproof" (put off the bad), reprove (put on the good) and extra verses for special occasions. This author definitely met a need in my life, as it can feel a little out of control and cloudy at times as to whether I'm doing the right thing for the ones I love most.

I'm striving for becoming the kind of parent that only is a "helicopter parent" when it comes to heart issues, not controlling their every move. But, I want to be right on (not that I'm perfect at this!) the sin in their heart, as I don't want it to take root in their lives...and it's my job. On the topic of helicopter parents, my college friend, Rachel (a feisty, common sense mother of eight), linked us to this site in a recent post that addresses how common sense in child rearing has been all but forgotten in our highly protective, fear based society. It was an interesting read, to say the least!

I'm now reading, "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle," by Barbara Kingsolver and "Glass Castle" by Jeannette Walls. Both are very intriguing so far. I'll keep you posted!

Irresistible Revolution

The BOOK REVIEW you should read!

Irresistible Revolution by Shane Claiborne

I have truly struggled with how and when to share my thoughts about this book with my readers. There are parts of this book that would truly offend many of you. Also, there is a growing popularity of the author in many circles that borders on idolatry. So, I hesitate. I don't want to offend and I don't want to be yet another wannabe dread head that follows Shane Claiborne and becomes part of a trend. I can live with being offensive, but I hate trends.

That being said, I really really liked this book. Not since I read, C.S. Lewis', " The Great Divorce," have I been so affected by a book other than the Bible. This book, which my pastor recommended, coupled with the impact of our new church has made me challenge some of the most significant soap boxes I've stood on in my life.

So, what did I like about it? First I'll tell you what I didn't like. I didn't like that the author did a lot of name dropping throughout the book. It was slow at one point, but it picked up again at the end. Also, he was rather blunt at times and I was offended, at first.

Instead of summing up the book, here's just a couple ways the book impacted me, you'll have to read the book for the controversial points:

• I'm reading the Bible with new eyes, asking with many others at our church in jest, "What if Jesus really did mean what He said?" For instance, "Feed the poor". I realized I don't actually know many poor people to feed. Thankfully, I'm starting to meet a few, but I have a long way to go! I've started giving my clothes and things away to actual people and not just sending it all to Salvation Army or Goodwill just to get my donation slip {YES, I endorsed this practice in my Money For Nothin' series a while back} . Here's what Shane Claiborne says about that:
  

I'm just not convinced that Jesus is going to say, "When I was hungry, you gave a check to the United Way and they fed me," or, "When I was naked, you donated clothes to the Salvation Army and they clothed me." Jesus is not seeking distant acts of charity. He seeks concrete acts of love: "you fed me...you visited me in prison...you welcomed me into your home...you clothed me."

...The church becomes a distribution center, a place where the poor come to get stuff and the rich come to dump stuff. Both go away satisfied (the rich feel good, the poor get clothed and fed), but no one leaves transformed. No radical new community is formed. And Jesus did not set up a program but modeled a way of living that incarnated the reign of God, a community in which people are reconciled and our debts are forgiven just as we forgive our debtors (all economic words). That reign did not spread through organizational establishments or structural systems. It spread like disease - through touch, through breath, through life. It spread through people infected by love.

• Community. "Love your neighbor as yourself" has taken on a refreshingly new meaning where I don't translate "neighbor" as just everybody in the world, but rather my actual neighbors, that live next door to me. I'm trying to truly love them, then branch out from there. I've taken bread to all of my neighbors since our move, with a note that invites them to call us if they need anything. Better yet, I'm trying (and so is Ben) to make genuine relationships with them. Sadly, at our last house I can count on one hand the number of good conversations I had with my neighbors and we lived there for nine years!

The community concept is much much bigger than just what I mentioned, but I'm taking baby steps. I have many aspirations that I'll share with you as they unfold. For a much bigger picture of community and how we can live out His will on Earth as it is in Heaven, read this book for some inspiring stories and some gut wrenching convictions.

Finally, I want to end with one last quote (actually of a footnote) that I love to share with others:

The story of Minucius is a beautiful glimpse of irresistible revolution. As a lawyer who was persecuting Christians, Minucius understood the empire and the religious establishment well. But he soon caught the contagion of love. Here's what he had to say about Christians before his conversion in AD 200: "They despise temples as if they were tombs. They despise titles of honor and the purple robe of high government office though hardly able themselves to cover their nakedness...They love one another before being acquainted. They practice a cult of lust, calling one another brother and sister indiscriminately.

And here's what he said after his conversion: "Why do they have no altars, no temples, no images?...What temple shall I build him [God] when the whole world, the work of his hands, cannot contain him? Should we not rather make a sanctuary for him in our souls? The whole heaven and the whole earth and all things beyond the confines of the world are filled with God...I would almost say: we live with him. What a beautiful sight it is for God when a Christian mocks the clatter of the tools of death and the horror of the executioner; when he defends and upholds his liberty in the face of kings and princes, obeying God alone to whom he belongs. Among us, boys and frail women laugh to scorn torture and the gallows cross and all the other horrors of execution" (Eberhard Arnold, ed., The Early Christians: In Their Own Words [Farmington, PA: Plough, 1998]).

All Aboard!

Welcome! If this is the first time you're visiting WigLife, I'm so glad you stopped by! I'm currently in Iowa visiting family, but wanted to take a minute to welcome any visitors that stopped by via "The Times Reporter". Many thanks to Julie Watts for a lovely story, I'm honored to be included!

My husband, Ben, and I have enjoyed living in New Phila for ten years now and are looking for another house in the area (one with some acreage). I hope you'll peruse the recipes and deep thoughts (see Zerbik in the side bar) that are contained in this blog. I love to hear your thoughts and every blogger loves to get comments, so if you have the time, do share!

These were taken during our visit to the Dennison Depot last weekend.
Our little choo choo lover was in heaven!

Book Review

I just finished Lisa Whelchel's, "So, you're thinking about homeschooling!" She's the girl who played "Blair" on "The Facts of Life". It was a quick read (less than a week is a quick read with two little ones!). She interviewed over a thousand homeschool families by e-mail and picked one hundred to interview by phone. She aggregated the information and created 15 composite families to demonstrate the varied approaches to homeschooling. Her writing style is casual and slightly silly, but I did enjoy getting a glimpse into the different ways people homeschool. I learned about different stlyistic approaches, curriculums, ways people make homeschooling work with difficult situations such as a single mom and people who own their own business. Throughout the book she tossed in helpful ideas such as make sure you choose a style that works for both your child AND you as the teacher.

After reading a little about the principle approach, literature based curriculums, the classical approach, unit studies, and Charlotte Mason methods I have a little better direction in which way to research curriculums now. I'm starting early, Z isn't yet 3, but I don't want to wait till the last minute to get my feet wet. As with most subjects, there is too much to learn in just a few weeks and I don't want to go about it haphazardly. The unit studies seem like they might be a good fit as I like how they take an area of interest, such as astronomy, and then all the subject areas reflect that area. So, math, science, language arts, etc. would all be about astronomy somehow.

For the record, my reasons to home school are two fold. #1) It's the road less travelled and that defines our family to a tee. It's no coincidence that we do family bed, wear our wedding rings on the right hand, and own hairless dogs. We just like to be different. #2) Most teacher's biggest complaint is that parents aren't more involved with their kids education, well, we want to be involved....100%! (I might have borrowed that line from Lisa Whelchel.)

All in all, this was a good book for people contemplating homeschooling their kids and for people, like me, who are really really green and don't know where to start.

HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY!!!

Book Report

The Trouble with Boys: A Surprising Report Card on Our Sons, Their Problems at School, and What Parents and Educators Must Do by Peg Tyre

Ben and I read this together at his suggestion. The author was an investigative journalist for NewsWeek magazine. The book goes through every grade from Pre-K to College and identifies how many boys are struggling at every level. She identifies historical (Women's Lib movement) and political reasons (No Child Left Behind and standardized testing) why the problems exist and why it's so unpopular to discuss the problems many boys have.

Some problems she sites are that boys are inherently different than girls, meaning they are naturally very active, even aggressive, they are slower to develop fine motor skills and typically learn to read at a later age, and these differences are often overlooked in the typical expectations boys face in schools. She follows that boys are quicker to get referred for evaluations, get labeled with a diagnosis and get medicated or labeled as learning disabled and get an IEP (or whatever they're called nowadays) or put in special classes. Worse, little boys from Pre-school and kindergarten become discouraged because it's too hard for them to sit still or live up to increasing academic expectations at younger and younger ages and "check out" of school before they've hardly begun.

The problems continue throughout the school years and many boys aren’t even interested in continuing their education through college and many of those who do can’t pass admissions requirements. This is where it got interesting. Colleges are starting to lower their standards for boys just to get them admitted. If their ratio of boys to girls is too lop sided admissions go down all together. So, they end up overlooking more qualified girls to get more boys in their schools. That’s discouraging for EVERYBODY!

She doesn't have any miracle solutions, which I can appreciate. She mainly encourages parents to advocate for their boys. She affirmed that there are many teachers and school officials that are trying hard to find ways to meet the needs of boys, but many are not as most don’t even recognize that there is a problem. Some ideas I gleaned from her if you think you may have a super active little boy are: choose play-centered pre-schools instead of overly academic ones, wait an extra year to have your son enter school, don't assume male teachers are all sexual predators - remember boys like to learn from men, make sure Dad role models reading, and watch out for video game addiction in your son. For schools: one school has a different police officer come every week to read to the elementary kids in full uniform (gun and all), don’t limit recess and lunch times, incorporate movement in the classroom, encourage reading and writing topics that the children are truly interested in, be sensitive to inherent differences in boys – if most of the boys in the class struggle with handwriting, it may be too early to expect them to have as nice handwriting as their female peers.

I think Ben was excited about this book because there were chapters covering the elementary years that he feels depicted what he went through. He was the little boy who couldn't sit still or stay quiet and was struggling enough his mother pulled him out of school and home schooled him for a year in fourth grade. I appreciated learning some ideas to use in my future home school classroom to keep my son's interest.

The back side of my family

I didn't mean to take so many pictures of people's back-sides, but I did! So, here they are scattered among my collection for this post. I kind of put blogging on my "low priority" list these past few weeks as I've been busy traveling, spending time with my parents and generally just being busy. The neat thing about that is that I have TONS of stuff to blog about now! So watch out, I feel a super jam-packed post about to happen here.

Chronologically, the first thing I have to share is a couple of pics from my sister-in-law, Deb's pre-prom. In case you weren't aware, I'm an only child, so when I married into this large family and gained three sisters and a brother, then even more as they marry, I'm in heaven. My new sisters are precious and understand my need for sisters and don't rub in the "in-law" part too much. Deb was five when I met her and now, here she is, all grown up!

I read on this site some ideas of things to do with your kid and this is my variation of one of their suggestions. They said to use bowls of different cereals and then put one of each type in a egg carton and have your little one match them up (from the bowl to the carton). Z didn't much see the point in moving cereal from one place to another, but enjoyed the display of snacks and helped himself. Once, in grabbing a handful of All-Bran he dropped a twig into the rice krispies and took the time to fish it out and put it back into the proper egg cup. That was good enough for me, he gets it, they're different. We used the egg carton full of snacks for a few days for snack time until the novelty wore off.

Our Memorial weekend was spent at the family cabin in WV. As always it was relaxing and fun. Only two of my siblings were able to come (we missed you Biz, Jer, Andy & Missy!). Z missed his cousins, but revelled in the constant attention from his aunts and Ben's cousin, Megan. Bottoms from L to R we have Gramma H., Bekah, Megan and Deb.

Aunt Bekah and Z on one of our hiking trips

Some ferns we found along the way

The four ladies and "The View" as we now call it. Breathtaking in real life! I mean the view of the scenery, not my family's backsides. Not that they don't have lovely bottoms, yadda yadda yadda...

Finally, I finished my book while out in WV. Z slept over three hours Sunday and Monday which felt like a vacation in and of itself. Before I read the book, "Addicted to Mediocrity" by Franky Schaeffer I wasn't thinking about his relation to the author Susan Schaeffer Macaulay who I reviewed in this post. The two are siblings and supported each other in their premises that we (especially as Christians) should aspire to excellence and provide our children with exposure to all sorts of greatness whether it's labeled "Christian" or not. As you might notice from the title he has a problem with the complacency of Christians. In this book, though, he focuses on the fact that as a church and somewhat as a society as a whole we have given creative endeavors low priority in our lives for the past century as creativeness has been deemed impractical or useless (settling for bumper sticker art). We see evidence in most every Protestant church you visit, often times in gymnasiums, we have become utilitarian and pragmatic in our view of worship, service and worse yet, of people. We have separated creativeness in terms of "Christian" or "Secular" forgetting that all creation is God's creation. We need only separate ourselves from sin. This book made me want to paint, to get rid of our cable subscription, to become an activist in the things I'm passionate about and to get off me duff! It's super short and I devoured it. We had to pay $2 for our interlibrary loan to find the book (from Greenville College in IL, where artists Jars of Clay and Jennifer Knapp attended). I wish now that we had just spent the $9 it would have been used from alibris.com with a $1 off coupon from this site. I'm inspired to read some of his suggested readings and perhaps some from his parents, Francis and Edith Schaeffer.

On our way out...

Well, has any of you ever heard of the kid's show, "Yo Gabba Gabba"? We're not dedicated fans by any means, but I like the clothes they have the dancing kids wear on the show and so attempted to recreate my own version. You can print out the characters from the website. Turns out, when you use iron on transfer paper you can't see the color unless you're transferring onto a white shirt. So, our "Plex" shirt has a vintage look, not on purpose. At least it's not a boring old plain red T-shirt anymore. Oh, and the shadows on Z's forehead are not a strange haircut, but rather are from the odd shape of his forehead (he has me to thank for that).

Here's my new hired hand working the soil before I planted okra, squash, leeks, onions, bell peppers, brussel sprouts and my "eggshell starters" of spinach to go with the rhubarb you see and the raspberries you don't (they're in the back yard). We don't have a lot of room, so it was a tight fit. I bend the rules on how close to plant things...I know...I'm so naughty!!!

Ben went to WV for the weekend to help open up the family cabin so Saturday night Z joined me for a girls night with my friends, Molly, Laura, Coleen, Carolyn and Joan. Click here to see a picture of us all. After a super yummy vegetarian dinner and gourmet cheesecake we went to the stables where Molly and Co keep their horsies. Since Z only had shorts on and it was getting chilly I put his p.j.s on him for warmth. So, for his first horsie ride he traveled about five feet, bareback, in his p.j.s. He LOVED it! If I wasn't so allergic I'd move out of town and buy a farm and stable and keep all sorts of animals. Here he is with Molly...

Z with Co and Molly behind Rayah, her horse.

Must tell you about two books I've read recently and really
enjoyed. Simplicity, by Mark Salomon is a wonderful perspective on where Christians often go wrong in dealing with others. The author is the lead singer for Stavesacre, a band Ben used to play on his "Rock Radio" show on the local Christian station.

Escape, by Carolyn Jessop, is one woman's account of her life in the FDLS (Fundamental Mormonism) and polygamy. As I read it I described it to others, "It's like junk food," not that it wasn't well written, it was just so addicting, I couldn't put it down, but compared to Simplicity it wasn't nearly as edifying or beneficial. In found myself praying for those in cults a lot and women in marriages against their will. In Simplicity I found someone who understood the jadedness and cynicism that my husband I have sometimes with others that call themselves Christ-followers. It was an honest account, in which he owned his own faults and pointed to ways we can be like Christ and break out of the cultural expectations often found in churches.

I leave today for Tennessee with my giant lap child. I think I'm all packed! We'll see! Ooh, on a totally different side note - (an informal "Web World" installment) I found this link for house cleaning inspiration on my friend, Jenn's website and am giving it a shot. Can't do much while in TN, but the "Fly Lady" on there already got me to shine my sink like I've never shined it before! I'm looking forward to getting another perspective on house cleaning and more than anything, on routine and structure. I'm so erratic sometimes! Check it out if you're interested in getting her free e-mails (you can consolidate the many daily e-mails into one daily e-mail digest).