One Reason for Prayer

We pray in order to stimulate, deepen, and strengthen our faith.

This reason for prayer is almost a complete reversal of our usual idea, which is that we pray because our faith is strong and at its best. Prayer is an activity we are called to perform when our faith is not complete, when things are not going well, when God seems far from us. These are the times when we most need prayer. These are also the times when prayer is most difficult and we are prone to procrastinate in our praying, thinking that we just do not have enough time for prayer. We put off prayer and allow time for prayer to get squeezed out of our schedule even when we say to ourselves that prayer is vitally important to us. The near-universal difficulty of finding time for prayer on a regular basis suggests that more than laziness or lack of faith is the issue. We are up against some inner conflict about who we are and who God is, and our flight from prayer is also a way of fleeing from our confusion and ambiguity.

When we discover our resistance to prayer, we should realize that we are in deep conflict, whether we are conscious of it or not. Part of us wants to seek God's will and the other part of us is digging in its heels to resist. The resisting part of us finds excuses not to pray, becomes obsessed with the dry spells and bored with prayer. We begin to doubt that prayer is worthwhile or get distracted from prayer by a variety of fantasies...We need to pray most when we least want to do it, because our resistance is a sign of some spiritual problem that only manifests itself in our reluctance to pray.

The act of prayer is a way of renewing a sense of God's presence in our lives and of deepening our own faith. But such renewal and depth come only when we have resisted the temptation to give up and have pushed ourselves to the demanding work of prayer. [emphasis mine]

--from my current reading: Reformed Spirituality by Howard L. Rice, pp. 75,76

I've Been Tagged

Dawn at Picking up Pebbles tagged me to do a meme. I like this kind of meme where I don't have to ponder what to say about myself. He he.

Book Meme:

Rules -

1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages.)
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people.
   

I am sitting near a bookcase and my glance has fallen on a book that Sophie just read again: The Wheel on the School by Meindert DeJong.

"You'll see. You'll see. I..."

Ha ha ha ha ha! Don't you want to read that book now?!

Now, I'm not sure if "I..." counts as a sentence. Just in case, I'll include the next sentence:

Suddenly he was staring up into the sky.

Whet your appetite a little more? You will just have to read that book to find out what he was staring at... and to find out who "he" is. Seriously, though, any book by Meindert DeJong is worth reading. He understands how children think. In his book Journey from Peppermint Street, he poignantly portrays the thoughts and fears of a young boy. When I read it, I remembered feeling and fearing so deeply as a young child, even though as an adult my thinking has mellowed.

I am tagging:

• Jackie at Jak-in-the-House
• Julie at Shmuffin Baby
• Anne at By Fidelity and Fortitude
• Susannah at Susie-Q.and A.
• Mere at The Ugly Trunk

Holiday Notes

Christmas Reading:

Evan finished the Lord of the Rings trilogy in short order. Matthew received some Redwall books for Christmas which enticed him away from Middle Earth. I told him that he did not have to finish the trilogy, but he pointed out that since he's already read 600 pages, he might as well finish. He just needed a break. In fact, I spotted him reading The Adventures of Bobby Racoon by Thornton Burgess and Evan sped through four books from the Sugar Creek Gang. They have wide-ranging tastes!

Christmas Toys:

My dad commissioned Aunt Beth to play Mrs. Claus and procur a toy vacuum for Logan. We put batteries in the toy, but took them out again after Logan cried, "No, no, no, no, no!" every time it got switched on. He can make his own, non-threatening vacuum noises, thank you very much.



James and I gave Evan and Matthew the joint gift of a programmable robot to their delight and to Logan's fright. The poor kid thinks that the bot is out to get him.

Christmas seemed anticlimactic to Sophie due to her parents' absentmindedness. James bought Sophie a bike which we meant to take out of the back of the van and hide. When I got in the van to ride to church Sunday morning, Sophie sweetly asked me, "Is that my purple bike with butterflies on the wheels?" Sigh. And Merry Christmas.

Christmas-Time Play:

The day after Christmas, the boys stormed the neighborhood, shoveling even the neighbors' driveways. Their motives were purely mercenary as they dumped the snow into our yard to build another fort. Last week, we watched on in disgust as someone in a white Toyota truck intentionally drove repeatedly over the previous fort that the kids had built in the center of the cul-de-sac. We decided that, as the driver didn't exactly check to see whether any children inhabited the fort before he worked his destruction, the kids should build all future forts in our yard... Even Logan enjoyed dragging a shovel around, while Sophie rode her bike in the snow.

Wordless Wednesday

Questioning Authority

As I have mentioned here in the past, Logan is quite pigeon-toed. Though the pediatrician had told us more than once in the past that Logan would grow out of it, I pressed the issue at a recent appointment. The doctor then said that Logan's legs were not aligned and that it was more drastic than what he usually sees. He referred me to a pediatric orthopedic specialist.

On Friday, I took Logan to his orthopedic appointment. Contrary to what the pediatrician thought, Logan's legs are completely normal. The specialist explained to me that the problem lies only with his feet. He has metatarsus adductus which just means that the metatarsals, or bones of the front part of the feet, turn inwards. Thankfully, Logan's feet are flexible and can be straightened to normal with correction. The specialist also said that he has some great toe atavism which means that the big toe flexes outwards. That may improve with correction as well, though it may always be a minor issue.

Thankfully, Logan doesn't need a cast, he just needs inserts to put inside his shoes to align his feet so that they will grow normally. Of course, this will make his feet look even longer, as his shoes will have to accommodate the extra length of the insert!

The specialist told me that it was a good thing that I brought Logan in so that his feet can be corrected. I'm glad that I listened to my "mother's instinct" instead of just going along with the pediatrician's diagnosis this time.

I have also needed to consult other sources of help aside from the pediatrician in the area of nutrition. The diminished appetite of toddlerhood plus "long and lean" genes plus allergy issues plus the uncharted territory of extended breastfeeding (past a year) have caused me to wonder if Logan is getting all the nutrition that he needs. While the pediatrician helped us to discover Logan's allergies, he is not knowledgeable concerning extending nursing and certainly not encouraging. I read the following book on Saturday which helped me to relax:

Good, good book! I wish I had read it when Evan was an infant! I appreciated reading some history of supplementation and gaining perspective on what types of food would be most beneficial to a nursing toddler (partly by inference).

Logan, by the way, has some adventurous food preferences. One of his favorite foods is hummus. I have tried giving him hummus on cracker, but he just sucks the hummus off and spits out the cracker. Now, I just skip the cracker and feed him bites off of a spoon. He also loves black olives (Which actually isn't too surprising for this family. Stop gagging Aunt Beth and Colleen.) And whoever heard of a baby who won't eat Cheerios? Logan won't touch them, but he does like Wheat Chex.

And here are two pictures thrown in for good measure:

Notes from Our House

Reporting from Fort Logan... The dining room table is just the right height for a baby-sized hide-out. Logan thinks it is funny when I peer down at him through the glass.


Look at me holding up a tree!

This kid can crawl fast.

The older three have been wanting to learn how to sew, which is something I don't have a handle on myself. My cousin Julie has agreed to get us started on sewing using the book Buckles and Bobbins for the boys and Stitches and Pins for Sophie. We have James' Grandma's old sewing machine which I need to take in to get fixed. Years ago I tried to use it, but the bobbin thread got snarled inside the machine every time, even after I had it adjusted. It did the same thing for Julie when she tried to use it. For the kids' first lesson, Julie showed them the tools we will be using and explained their use, demonstrated how to thread the machine, and had each of them practice that much. After the machine is repaired, we will continue...

Logan enjoyed the sewing lesson in his own way.

One evening this past week, Evan announced "I just finished Redwall."

I asked, "How many times have you read that book?!"

"Six" he replied, "but I skip over some parts that I know really well like sword hunting."

"What!" interjected Matthew, "That is the best part!"

Family Reading

Yesterday morning, Sophie told me that she did not have a book to read, because she had finished both books that I had checked out for her recently at the library. I perused our shelves and picked out King of the Wind by Marguerite Henry, thinking that it would satisfy my little horse freak.

She finished the book by 4 p.m.

Yes, she did her schoolwork, and I insisted that she put the book down to eat lunch and to practice piano. Apart from that, she could not put the book down. (At least she didn't cry when she finished it...this time.)

I recently watched the BBC film version of Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell. I enjoyed the movie much more than the BBC version of North and South by the same author. This weekend I purchased Wives and Daughters to read. The kids are calling it my "big pink book." It is 644 pages long and Mrs. Gaskell died before she finished it. (I hope writing such a long book didn't kill her.) The kids compared the book's size to the paperback LOTR trilogy on our shelf. They remarked that it would probably take me a long time to read the pink one. Actually, I re-read the LOTR trilogy in two days after the first movie came out. I'll restrain myself this time, though.

This week, I downloaded the Mozilla Firefox add-on called "Scrapbook" in hopes that it might help me to save and print out a hard copy of my blog. I really, really don't want to read the online manual. I hope I can persuade James to read it for me and then just show me the key features. He he. James doesn't read novels, but he has read the riveting story Build Your Own Pentium II PC.

Fit to Print

We've read several books about Johannes Gutenberg in the past couple of weeks. Yesterday, the boys and I did potato printing. We used our letter shaped cookie cutters and pressed them into potatoes. I cut off the potato around the letters with a knife. ( I had to trace "S" and "L" backwards, b/c they couldn't be flipped and so that they would print the right direction.) The boys had fun printing posters that said "I LOVE BOOKS" with a heart shape. Sophie was playing with two little girls we were babysitting. When the girls went home, the kids finished up the project and Sophie made her own poster by painting the back side of our shape cookie cutters and printing them on paper.

The boys are finishing the book Ginger Pye by Eleanor Estes. I finished it myself yesterday. I like this opportunity to read excellent kid books again and read ones that I never read as a child. We bought this Newberry Award winning book at a garage sale.

Matthew decided after the boys' recital a few weeks ago that he wants to play piano now instead of violin. I've agreed that it is a good idea, because piano is a little easier and he is in a stage where he doesn't concentrate easily. I'd like for him to pick up the violin again at some point, though.

Matthew also seems to be over his fear of "torpedoes" in swimming and even puts his face in the water. Swimming lessons are done for now (the teachers have school), but I have the kids signed up for a "homeschool swim class" in Sept. that will last for 5 weeks.

Books on Tape

Angi recently asked me to recommend some books on tape. The following is a list of books on tape that we have checked out from our local library. The kids have probably listened to others as well, but this is what I remember. The kids listen while they eat lunch on school days. I haven't necessarily paid close attention to all of the stories, because I check email and homeschooling message boards during lunch...

Books on tape:

Pippi Longstocking
Peter Pan
Mary Poppins
My Side of the Mountain
Heidi (Sophie liked more than the boys)
The Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankenweiler
Ralph S. Mouse
Alice in Wonderland
The Black Stallion
Henry Huggins
Henry and Ribsy
Little Britches (warning: some bad language, but excellent story)
The Schoolmouse
Sarah, Plain and Tall
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory
Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator
Narnian tale books
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (oops, actually this wasn't on tape, but good book)
Wizard of Oz
Black Beauty
Any stories on tape by Jim Weiss
Adam of the Road
A Cricket in Times Square
Poppy
The Complete Book of Dragons
Charlotte's Web
King of the Wind

Books This Week

I got on a reading kick last weekend which continued through the first part of this week. I even was able to somehow keep the house neat!

Earlier this year, I read Master and Commander by Patrick O'Brian. I started it before going to see the movie, but my eyes crossed at all the naval terms. Watching the movie actually helped me to understand the book better, even though the movie doesn't follow the plot of just that book. I enjoyed the movie, by the way, then finished the book.

Uncle Rich mentioned that he preferred the Horatio Hornblower books by C.S. Forester. I borrowed two from him and dove in. I agree that the Forester books are much easier to follow without as much naval jargon. At first, I wondered what kind of hero that Hornblower could possibly be if he suffered from seasickness! I came to admire his ingenuity in problem-solving, his agility in coming up with a plan of action, setting it into motion and following through. In the first book, Forester tells the story in the third person, but in the second book, he tells the story from the point of view of another lieutenant interacting with, observing and forming a friendship with Hornblower. I appreciated that variety in approach. I liked how the lieutenant tried to understand what Hornblower thought and why he acted as he did. The author didn't spell everything out for the reader, he made me wonder along with the lieutenant.

There are eleven books in the series!!!!!

Matthew just finished Little House on the Prairie and read a couple of Chinese story picture books this week. Evan is reading The Railway Children by Edith Nesbit. Sophie's favorite library book this week was about a princess and fairies, surprise, surprise.

James has been reading in the books of Acts to us in the evening. In the morning, I've been reading God With Us by Marianne Radius to the kids.

Reading, Writing and Arithmetic

For the past two days, I've been reading The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis aloud to the kids. I remember that this was the first of the Narnian Tales that I read as a kid. I started reading it while visiting at a woman's house (I don't remember the details). The story captured my imagination immediately ("surprised by joy"!) I had to get ahold of the whole series when returning home...The kids protest everytime I take a break from reading it. They thought it was hysterical when Reepicheep spanked Eustace with the flat of his sword for swinging him around by his tail (Reep is a 2 ft. tall, chivalrous talking mouse.)

This week, I let the kids watch the movie The Man From Snowy River, a little each day. (I fast-forwarded through the mushy kissing ; ) They had just finished listening to The Black Stallion on tape and so watched a horse movie. Yesterday, I washed dishes and watched them while they watched the movie. When Evan saw the horses plunging through the snow, he looked at me and grinned and looked up at a new print of a painting titled "Horses in the Snow" by David Stoecklein that is hanging in our family room. Exactly. (I'll take pictures of our family room once we have the walls painted so that you can see our new additions.)

This morning, I had them play "War" with dominoes. The boys each drew a domino, multiplied the two numbers on their own domino and the kid with the highest number kept both dominoes. The one with the most dominoes at the end won the game. I just realized that if you multiply the numbers up to 10 by 9, the two numbers in the answer will add up to 9! Ex: 9x2=18 (1+8=9) or 9x7=63 (6+3=9) Maybe everybody knows that but me. Blush.

Yesterday, Sophie decided to write a letter to Ana, her cousin. She told me what she wanted to say. I wrote it down. She copied it. Later, I called Loey, Ana's mom, who said that when she and Ana had gone to the mailbox earlier, Ana had wailed, "My friends never write to me anymore!" They opened the box and there was the letter that Sophie had written to her earlier this week! Ana said that Sophie is her best friend EVER.

...This morning, Sophie insisted on writing another letter to Ana even though the one that she wrote yesterday is out in the mailbox. : )

New to Blogging...

Saying that I'm new to blogging is probably obvious from the stark appearance of the site. If any of you visiting are more computer savvy and desire to share advice on how to add color and graphics, I'm all ears, or eyes, I guess.

As I learn more, I'll post more lists pertaining to our family's venture in homeschooling.

The title, "Our Side of the Mountain", is derived from one of my oldest son's favorite books: My Side of the Mountain. By the way, a favorite book that he recently read was Journey From Peppermint Street by Meinert DeJong. I myself couldn't put it down. The author gives one a poignant view into the inner thoughts of a young boy: his dreams, fears, joys and perspective on adults as he embarks on a delightful adventure.