~ Weeds ~

This weekend one of the topics I will be speaking on at the MTHEA Expo is 10 Things I Wish I had Known as a Young Mother. I’ve got more to add to that presentation now since this morning when I took a break from office work and took a foray outside to get some fresh (cold) air. It’s been rainy and chilly for five days in a row now, and it’s mid- to late May. Weird.

Anyway, I love to take a turn about the gah-den in the mornings and see what is blooming out there. We have an acre and a half, but since we are on a wooded hill overlooking a lake, there isn’t a lot of yard that gets enough sun for a garden. Erosion is an issue as well.  Ugh. BUT I do have two garden spots, and this morning since it was so cool and damp out, I thought it might be a good time to pull some weeds. I would have taken a “before” picture if I wasn’t so ashamed of how weedy the flower garden had gotten.

As I was wildly grabbing fistfuls of weeds and yanking them out by their roots, I began to think about my “garden” of children and how relevant the metaphor of raising children and tending a garden is. I remember writing a piece on this topic once when I was much younger and my kids were as well. But today I had much more to think about regarding this particular metaphor due to hindsight. I thought I’d share some of the things that I’ve learned over the past 21 years of child-raising that may be worth sharing.

It’s best to weed when the weeds are small. Big weeds not only are tough to get rid of, but they hurt more to remove. (See pic above) The time to pull those weeds of bad attitudes, whining, disrespect, anger, and all things crummy is when children are young. If these weeds are pulled when the soil is soft and loose, the pullin’ is much easier.

Pulling weeds takes effort on the gardener’s part! It is part of the daily care of the garden. So it is our daily task as parents to lovingly correct our children with consistency and diligence and effort.

Fertilizing plants is a good thing. In our metaphor here, fertilizer is praise. Give praise liberally and with all sincerity.

Weeds may look pretty, but they ultimately steal nutrients and space from neighboring plants. For example, the sweet pea vine looks pretty, but it strangles everything it touches. Beware of stuff that appears to be good for your garden, but in reality, it steals, kills, and destroys…all while looking pretty.

Some kinds of weeds I need my husband to pull for me…such as poison ivy. He has no allergic reaction, so I let him tackle all the poison ivy since he is better suited to dealing with it. Same thing w/children’s behavior. Some behavior (weeds) myhusband will deal with because it is beyond what I want to deal with, quite honestly. For example, after a day of weed pulling, I am tired. It is sometimes necessary for dad to back up mom after a long day of weed pulling. I have said before, “You’ll be dealing with your dad when he gets home,” on occasion when I simply am worn out and the child needs to also deal with daddy. Mom and dad form a partnership (or a landscaping crew, if you will). It takes two to weed.

For a beautiful and rewarding garden, the gardener must be attentive to weed pulling. If the gardener slacks off, the garden reflects it!

Wouldn’t you agree that a gardener shapes a garden? How much more do parents shape their children?

If you can’t make it to my seminar on the 10 Things I Wish I’d Known as a Young Mother, it is available for Kindle download on Amazon.

Says who?

Three of my girls take piano lessons. I am thankful to their Calderwood grandparents for funding the outsourcing of these lessons. I am a pianist myself, but I do not enjoy teaching piano. In the busyness of my life, I’ve found that it is very hard to find time to do things about which you are not passionate. Sometimes something’s gotta give; you cannot do it all. Know what I mean? I know you know what I mean!

Yesterday, Adrienne asked me to take a look at one of her assigned piano pieces. It was in 2/4 time, and the right hand was on the off beats in this syncopated piece of classical music. As I played through the piece for her, I flashed back to when I actually learned to play this piece as a child. I also remembered my teacher, who happened to be my mom, fuss at me because I didn’t always pay attention to the fingerings. And it didn’t only happen with that particular piece either.

There was a good reason why I didn’t always follow the suggested fingerings: I have a genetic thing where my pinky finger is smaller than the average person’s pinky finger. So what? Well, playing octaves is certainly a challenge. If you don’t have short-pinkyitis, don’t judge me. LOL Here’s a pic to prove my disability:

Notice how my poor little pinky only comes up to about the middle knuckle? Now look at your hand. I bet your pinky comes up to about the first joint on your ring finger, right? Because of this issue, I had to make some adjustments in the fingerings of music I played. I had to compensate for the stuff I couldn’t physically pull off.

I discovered that whoever wrote in the fingerings in my piano books wasn’t always correct. At least the fingerings didn’t always work for me. I had fun convincing my mom of this since I didn’t get the genetic issue from her side of the family. She would point out when I used the “wrong” fingers, but to me I was using the “right” fingers. Who said you have to follow fingering notations anyway? I doubt Mozart or Chopin included them in their original manuscripts.

Certainly fingerings in piano lesson books are there to help the budding musician adopt the easiest approach to playing any given piece. The fact was that just because it was easy for everyone else didn’t mean it was possible for me, so I adjusted the fingerings so that I could play more easily. I think my mom eventually gave up trying to enforce the fingering rules. I failed to conform because in many cases I just couldn’t due to the fact that my young hands were small, and they just couldn’t stretch like everyone else’s.

How does a tiny pinky relate to education?

Not all children are alike. Guidelines that work for one child may not work for the next child. In my teaching days, I was not always able to tailor a lesson to the needs of individual students due to time constraints. In fact, it was more like throwing all the information out there to the class and hoping some of it would stick with a high percentage of the children. I’d tell the class what I was going to tell them, then we’d go over the information together, and then I would tell them what we just “learned,” followed, of course, by some sort of quiz or test to see if they learned what we’d discussed.

Not all the children in my classroom were ready to understand the “ph” sound when I presented it. Not all children had the mental maturity to understand fractions just because the math book said it was time to learn fractions. In a classroom, it is difficult for a teacher to monitor each student to ensure that he/she has mastered each subject each day before moving on to the next lesson. The child either succeeds, partially succeeds, or fails. Or figures out a way to work around what they can’t do that everyone else can do.

In some cases, this involves self-protection devices where the child just gives up and accepts failure because he gets used to it, hoping that he’ll “get” the next thing that is presented in the sequence of the school year. Just as I totally disregarded the fingerings because so often I had to find my own way through the piece, children will find a way to work around what it is they cannot do. Or they will give up.

Had my mom insisted that I conform to the fingerings, I would have hated piano and felt a definite sense of failure. Instead, she let me find my own way through.

As a teacher of my own young children, I have learned not to be a slave to our curriculum. If my child is not understanding basic phonics skills that we’re doing together, perhaps I need to back off for a season. Who says every 6-year-old child is ready for phonics just by virtue of the fact that the curriculum says he should be?

Failure is not an option in my home school.

If a student isn’t “getting” something, I’m looking to see why. I’m looking at the possible reasons why he or she is struggling. Very rarely is it laziness on the student’s part. More often it is just a concept that needs to be presented in a fresh manner. (Reteaching, so to speak.) Or perhaps I need to set aside the consonant digraphs until the child is ready to understand blends.

The most important part of teaching children is understanding how their young brains work and not expecting them to conform to a curriculum in the elementary and middle school years especially.

What a great benefit of home schooling! The students move on when they are READY to move on. They don’t fail at a lesson and then just move ahead because we don’t have time to make sure they know everything to an A level. Of course we have time! But do we have the patience and stick-to-it-tiveness to identify the issue and then help the child find another way to understand the material?

If you get to a point in your child’s educational path where he is really struggling with something that is being presented, find out *why*he is struggling instead of moving on to the next day’s work, and help the student find a work-around.

Sometimes that may mean allowing them to do something a little unconventional like not forcing their little hands to conform to the fingering markings because they aren’t physically capable of playing that way. Or are they being lazy? Hmmm….as the parent, I should be able to discern the answer to that question. A teacher, on the other hand, may not be able to uncover the source of the issue because she does not know the child as she would know her own child. Conformity is the issue in a school classroom. Conformity is not always possible.

Says who? Says me, the parent of my children. Says you, the parent of your children. Don’t force conformity to curriculum without a good reason.

~ Amazing Insight from a High School Valedictorian ~

And this is from a public school valedictorian. Love her insight!

http://americaviaerica.blogspot.com/2010/07/coxsackie-athens-valedictorian-speech.html

Here is one of my favorite parts:

“And now here I am in a world guided by fear, a world suppressing the uniqueness that lies inside each of us, a world where we can either acquiesce to the inhuman nonsense of corporatism and materialism or insist on change. We are not enlivened by an educational system that clandestinely sets us up for jobs that could be automated, for work that need not be done, for enslavement without fervency for meaningful achievement. We have no choices in life when money is our motivational force. Our motivational force ought to be passion, but this is lost from the moment we step into a system that trains us, rather than inspires us.

“We are more than robotic bookshelves, conditioned to blurt out facts we were taught in school. We are all very special, every human on this planet is so special, so aren’t we all deserving of something better, of using our minds for innovation, rather than memorization, for creativity, rather than futile activity, for rumination rather than stagnation? We are not here to get a degree, to then get a job, so we can consume industry-approved placation after placation. There is more, and more still.”

And Erica has MUCH more to say than this excerpt! I hope you will take a moment and read this piece from the mind of a young rebel dressed in a cap and gown, inspiring her classmates to stop the madness that is the public school system. Or any school “system,” really.

~ Slight Change to Teleconference on Monday ~

I goofed. I’m sorry. I had two different topics listed on two different places for our upcoming teleconference Monday night at 7 PM Central Time. Here is the correct information, and I promise not to change it on you.

March 28th topic:

12 Strategies for College Board Exam Prep NOW!

While attaining high scores on College Board exams is not the goal of my self-teaching and mastery methodology of education, it is certainly an outgrowth of this type of learning. Why? How did I raise  perfect and nearly-perfect SAT scorers? Is there a method to it, or is it simply luck?

This will be an exciting call! Be on this call if you want tips for preparing  students of ANY AGE for the SAT/ACT. That’s right, there are things you can do TODAY with your young child, your elementary- or middle school-aged child, not to mention your high schooler, that will put him on the road to high test scores! When should these tests be taken? How can your student best prepare for the college entrance process? What steps should you take in determining the best college for your student?

I’ll answer all of the above questions for you, revealing all of my secrets and holding nothing back! I’ll also take YOUR live questions at the end of the call.

**Feel free to invite your friends to listen in. There is a limit of 250 people, so you may want to dial in at least 5 minutes EARLY to reserve your spot.**

For teleconference details and a link to get your downloadable worksheet for the call, go to http://tinyurl.com/March28thTeleconference.

~ Upcoming Teleconferences ~

Announcing two new teleconferences from URtheMOM.com coming up in March!

Each call will be on a Monday night, and each will begin at 8PM Eastern/7PM Central. Each call will be about an hour, depending on how many live questions there are to answer.

The dates to scribble on your calendar:
March 14th & March 28th.

March 14th Topic: Self-Teaching 101

I love to share the secrets of homeschooling freedom! How can you avoid burnout yet give your children the best education possible? Be on this call to learn the basics of the Self-Teaching and Mastery methods of education & how you can raise lifelong self-learners who work with excellence.

Feel free to e-mail me beforehand with any specific questions you may have that you would like to have answered and that are relevant to this call.

I’ll also open up the call and take your questions.

March 28th topic: All About College Prep & Testing

This will be an exciting call! Be on this call if you want to hear tips for preparing your student for the SAT/ACT. When should these tests be taken? How can your student prepare for the college entrance process? What steps should you take in determining the best college for your student? Looking forward to dumping a ton of info on you in this call!

Again, feel free to e-mail me before the call with any particular questions you have. We will go to a live Q&A session at the end of this call as well.

**Feel free to invite your friends to listen in to these calls. There is a limit of 250 people on the calls. Dial in at least 5 minutes EARLY to get your spot.**

CALL-IN INFO FOR THE TELECONFERENCES:

Dial 1-(507) 726-4217 and enter the Pass Code 149647 followed by # key.

If conference is not in session, system will put you on hold until the moderator arrives.

During the Conference

Conference Commands:

Press *3 – Exit Conference

Press *4 – Help Menu

Press *6 – Mute Individual Line

**************************************

If you have any questions on these teleconferences, please e-mail me at joanne@joannecalderwood.com. Hope you can join us!

~ Why don’t more parents homeschool? ~

I know it is kind of silly to ask my 5 loyal readers this question because you all homeschool. However, I am wondering what the major reasons are for parents NOT to homeschool their kids? Now this is a very serious question, and I am hoping to glean a lot of insight should I get any responses.

In this day and age, there are so many resources available for parents to provide their children with an excellent education at home. There are also homeschool groups all over the country. Most folks, I’d think, would have access to a homeschool support group or co-op of some variety. Socialization is really a non-issue these days. There are many activities available to homeschooling parents and their children in most parts of the country.

So why do parents choose NOT to homeschool? There is no right or wrong answer. I’m just looking for some reasons to fulfill my own curiosity. And become less ignorant. I’m sure economics is a big issue. But aside from that, why NOT homeschool? I ask with all due respect and with a desire to learn.

If you do not homeschool, would you be open to leaving a comment with your reasons for choosing a different educational option for your children? If you do homeschool, would you be open to listing some reasons you know of for parents to choose a more traditional educational route for their children?If you’d rather, you can e-mail me privately at joanne.calderwood@gmail.com.

Thank you in advance. I appreciate opportunities to see things from differing perspectives.

~ Motivation Happens ~

Not long ago, my resident high school senior, Franklin, asked me which Physics book I thought he should work through. We have Saxon Physics, a challenging text which contains tons of math along with physics, and another physics text that is not so heavy on the math side of things but is still a very good intro to physics.

Note: I allow the kids to do science OR history in a semester’s time. They complete the book of choice in one semester by studying the subject more intensely each day instead of flipping back and forth between the two subjects each day. In this way, the student goes deeper into the subject at one time, allowing for better understanding and retention. If the student prefers to do both science and history, he/she may.

I give a choice because choice is motivating!

Give as much choice and control to your students as possible, and they will have more motivation than if you decided everything for them.

Back to Franklin’s question: which Physics text did I recommend? I asked him what he wanted to do. His answer was, “I want to tackle the Saxon Physics because it will give me more math which will get me better prepared for college. The more I learn now, the better off I will be in the fall.”

The bottom line: Franklin wants to spend as much time as possible on the ice in college. He is going to school to play hockey, really. But he knows that the education side is important too. Do you see his line of thinking here? With a computer science major, math will be important. He is choosing to take the hard road now so he has some breathing room in the fall.

Yeah, baby. That’s the way we want our kids to think: how does what I am doing now prepare me for what I want to do in the future? If kids can make that connection, motivation happens!

Sure, there are going to be some things that the high schooler just has to study that he or she may not be particularly interested in learning. But the beauty of homeschool is that the student can choose to focus on his strengths in order to hone those skills and interests and be ready for his next step post-high school.

One of the best things we can do with our high schoolers is to have them look down the road and see where they want to be, and then backtrack to the present, see where they are right now, and help them devise a plan to get to where they want to ultimately be. With Franklin, Tim and I spent Tim with him, looking at his best plan of attack for getting to the NHL since that is his goal, no pun intended. A lofty goal? Absolutely! Attainable? Absolutely! He has a plan for getting there now. The rest is up to him. A young adult’s goals may change, but having goals in place makes all the difference when it comes to motivation.

Incidentally, I would have chosen the physics book with less math in it, if I were the one taking the course. Does that make me less motivated than my son? Not at all. I know that time is short, and I don’t want to waste time on stuff that I don’t need and am not interested in. I’d much rather hone my strengths than waste time on stuff that just doesn’t make sense to me. After all, I’m the Mom; I Don’t Have to Know Calculus (if I don’t want to.) And I don’t want to.

~ Extraordinary Happens ~

I remember when my first child was three, my husband and I contemplated the idea of homeschooling. As a former classroom teacher, I knew exactly what life would be like for my perky little red-haired boy who would soon be expected to be present in a classroom from, say, 8 a.m. until 3 p.m. five days a week. Nicky was reading at age three and a half. I can still hear him reading a short story called, “Who Will Bell the Cat,” in his tiny little voice as I sat on the floor with baby Taylor and sweet little Lauren, age two. I have a tape I recorded that day which preserved for me the sounds of young motherhood and childhood. Talk about priceless.

It really was the thought of putting Nicky on a school bus and not having the pleasure of his company all day long, five days a week that caused me to think seriously about homeschooling. Call me selfish. I had been conditioned to think that sending a young child into a big, strange building with complete strangers was a cool thing to do, that age segregation was the only way to learn, that someone else should be teaching my child the alphabet and teaching him to read. Wait. He already was reading.

Tim and I had just met our first homeschooling family about this time. We were Northern transplants to the South. I had never even heard of homeschooling before moving to the South in 1987. There was one family we knew who homeschooled their children. The mom was an elementary ed-degreed parent like me. Tim and I observed their two boys who were probably ages 8 and 10 at the time, and the first thing I noticed about these boys was their behavior. They seemed extremely mature for their ages and had *gasp* respect for their parents and other adults. They got along well and acted like they liked each other.  I was impressed. After observing this family in their natural habitat on different occasions–meaning we hung out at their house–we decided that homeschooling could only be a good thing.

I knew I could teach my kids the educational stuff, but beyond that, I wanted to be the one to influence their hearts AND minds. I wanted to be together as a family. Tim felt the same way. I would say that our educational journey began at that point, but that would just not be accurate. I had already been educating and training my children! Of course it is “normal” for parents to teach their children how to dress themselves, to feed themselves, and all of those life skills that develop early in life, you know, like how to crawl and how to walk.

Wait a minute. I didn’t teach my babies how to crawl or how to walk. They learned those important skills on their own. When they were ready. There is no classroom environment necessary for what pediatricians term “Developmental Skills.” Seriously, think about that.

Why suddenly, when Nicky was age five, did I then wrestle with worry about whether or not we were doing the right thing by not turning our child over to “the professionals?”  Isn’t that kind of silly? It seems silly to have worried now, but back then I lacked confidence. Before long, however, it was apparent that we were doing what was best for our family.

The thought of teaching my young children at home soon became a reality. I think that having a college degree gave me more confidence to “teach my kids at home,” but come on! I had been teaching them since birth! I had never had a course in that part of parenting, and 21 years later, I can see that the early years of child training are of the utmost importance in building character and forming lifelong habits. I’d never had a course in that stuff. We just trusted our instincts and prayed. A lot.

Trust your instincts.

If you feel called to keep your children out of the public school system, if you want to be the one to experience the joy of teaching your child to read, to see the spark of joy when all the phonics pieces come together, and most of all, allowing it to happen at your child’s own speed and readiness level, then do it with confidence! You can raise extraordinary kids who impact the world!

Children are naturally curious, and they naturally want to please their parents. Working with my young children and watching them learn, being a part of that process, has been a source of great joy! Mentoring our young adults in the high school years has been relationship-building to a degree that we never imagined!

To have had the privilege of being part of our children’s lives 24/7 with no interference from well-meaning educational institutions has made an enormous difference in the relationships we have with our kids, and that is PRICELESS! That is the bottom-line value to homeschooling, in my opinion.

I have no more babies to teach to read. Lilie just turned nine, and Nicky–excuse me–Nick will graduate from college this year, with six other children in between those two. I have been so blessed as a mom to be able to be with  my children, to ENJOY them daily. Sure, I have a bad memory and forget the really hard parts of the early years of lots of babies and lots of diapers and all of that potty-training fun, but some things are best forgotten.

What is so cool and something I will remember the rest of my life is this incredible sense of freedom I have as a parent who is not tied down to a school system’s schedule. My husband and I have total control over our children’s lives and so do you have with your children. You can direct them in the way that you see fit.

Every family has a distinctive flavor all its own. Some families are willingly fragmented each and every weekday from breakfast until dinner time. That is the norm. That is “normal.” If parents choose to outsource the education of their children, so be it. That is the glorious freedom we have as Americans, right? I am not one who would say that every family should home school. It is not the right choice for every family, just like public schooling is not the right choice for my family.

But if you want to educate your children at home, you can do it!

That is my message to you: you can educate your children with excellence in the comfort of your own home! Heck, after about the third-grade level, they even teach themselves!

“But Joanne, how do they learn chemistry? I did terribly in chemistry when I was in school!”

My answer is: you give them the book, or you give them the online course.

I want to raise extraordinary children who grow into extraordinary adults! This is much easier to accomplish through the medium of homeschooling these days for many reasons I don’t have the space to go into at this moment. I know and am convinced that parents can teach their children better at home than teachers in a traditional schooling environment can. How do I know this?

I’ve lived it! I’m still living it!

If my first child had turned out to be a socially-shriveled-up, educationally-stunted piece of work, I wouldn’t be writing this. He didn’t have to score perfectly on the SAT to prove anything to me. I knew he was extraordinary before that happened! His perfect score was merely an outgrowth of his desire for excellence. And our next three kids have all wildly excelled in their respective realms as well, with four more guinea pigs to go. (Extraordinary guinea pigs, mind  you.)

Why settle for normal when you can have extraordinary? Every child has the potential for extraordinary! Your children have the potential for extraordinary, and I bet you already know that because you see it in them already. Nourish that potential! The public school system is not likely to do so.

My final thoughts:

Extraordinary is not random; it is the result of attitude, motivation, and mentoring.

You as a parent can provide the attitude to model, incite motivation, and be the best mentor on the planet for your child or children. Homeschooling provides the format for doing so.

~ Self-Teaching Saves the Day(s)! ~

 

sick mom

Recently it became my turn to enter the land of fever, dizziness, aches, and general malaise commonly known as the flu. I spent one entire day in bed, and I was able to sleep peacefully due to the fact that life continued on in my absence. While my husband was at work and I was miserable, the kids knew what needed to be done chore-wise and school-wise.  Throughout that particular day, I would hear little knocks on my bedroom door, and one of the girls would come in and ask if I needed anything. It was very sweet. Almost made being sick worthwhile. Almost.

I actually was out of commission for more than one day, but I am not a patient patient. There was business stuff that needed to be done once the tylenol kicked in. But one thing I did not have to stress over was how we could continue schooling when mom was sick. We’d just taken two weeks off for the holidays, so taking another week off would not have been a good thing. I guess that depends on who you ask though. The kids just went about their daily work, nary missing a beat in the rhythm of family life. Even with mom sick in bed.

If you have children who are in grade three or older, it is not only possible but also preferable for children to work as independently as they possibly can. Not every subject needs to be done on the child’s own, and self-learning certainly is a process. There is a transition time necessary for the child to go from parent-directed learning to student-directed learning. This length of time will depend on the child’s makeup and maturity level.

Eight out of eight children surveyed recommend self-leaning for their peers who have to learn stuff.

There are many, many benefits to a child being raised to learn without being spoon-fed every tidbit of information,  benefits to the child as well as to the parents but mostly to the child who in turn grows into a motivated, inquisitive young adult. To read more about self-learning and the tools necessary for a smoothly running self-teaching home school, pop over to URtheMOM.com.

I think I will settle back down here on the couch for a bit. Not sure where everybody is right now, but I know what they are doing. I love home schooling! It is simply a *part* of our lives. It is not who we are. It is just a part of what we do in a day.

That reminds me. I haven’t been out of the house since Sunday and it is Thursday. I love being at home and having my family around me, and I am thankful for good health once again.

I hope you manage to avoid the flu this year, and I also hope that you enjoy today with your family to the fullest!

 

~ Each New Day ~

As most everyone does at this time of year, I’ve been pondering the New Year stuff. What change do I want to see in my life? How can I determine which goals are most important and deserve my energy and attention? How can I even set goals when I don’t know what each day may bring? How do I actually achieve those goals if I manage to set them in the first place?

As a homeschooling mother of eight children, three of whom have graduated from high school and are currently in college, I can look back and see that my now-young adults achieved their goals step by step by having good habits that were established at a young age, the habits of working to the best of their ability one day at a time.

Did they have goals? Yes, where their studies were concerned especially. Short-term goals were  used as guides to mark progress. However, the goals were accomplished day by day, a little at a time. Goals are good things in the educational realm.

Long-term goals can be helpful as well: graduate from high school. A student doesn’t wake up one morning and think, “Today I am going to graduate from high school.” This long-term goal is reachable when taken one day at a time; there will be just one day in the young adult’s life when he wakes up and thinks, “Today I am going to graduate from high school.” A whole lot of effort went into achieving that goal, right? Most certainly!

Then what?

Time for the next goal. And so goes life.

Isn’t life more than traveling from goal to goal? One who lives only to meet goals may miss out on the joy of the journey. If you are a workaholic, you know this only too well. The desire to achieve for the sake of achieving wears thin after a while, and burnout sets in. I still find myself striving to reach goals and missing out on JOY. Do you do that as well?

Are goals a bad thing to have then, I ask myself? Ummmm….yes and no. It is hard to be single-minded about reaching goals when one has young children unless the target goal is simply survival until daddy gets home from work. Or the goal of getting children bathed and into pajamas and to bed before utter exhaustion hits. Gosh, I used to not be able to go to sleep unless everything (and I mean everything) was in its place, including laundry folded/ironed/put away. How times and goals change! I remember when I had four babies, ages five and down, and I would go to bed with a table full of dirty dishes because there was nary a drop of energy left to do the dishes, (and my husband worked nights).

Children sure change you, don’t they? The dreams you had as a bold, energetic young adult take a turn when your first child is born. Suddenly, the joy of a newborn baby takes over, and all else takes a back seat. Goals that I may have had before having children changed drastically as the stork dropped off bundles of babies on my doorstep, year after year. (Sometimes even skipping a year.)

It was painful at times, exhausting for sure, yet as I look back now, I easily forget the hard stuff and remember the good stuff: cuddling a sleeping baby, reading book after book after book to little ones sprawled on the floor in front of a roaring fire, planting and tending a garden together in the warm summer evenings, catching lightning bugs together, going for walks as a family down the country lanes past stinky dairy farms.

Life seemed simpler back then; memory feigns the idyllic.

Time changes everything. Today I am blessed to have all of my offspring gathered here in my home. I realize  much more NOW what a blessing it is to be together as a family. Ten years ago, I could not have imagined the joy one could feel just by sitting around the supper table all together, enjoying a meal, because this was a daily occurrence. I wish now that I had not taken those times for granted. I am saddened just by the thought of three of my kids going back to their respective worlds in a matter of days. Oh, to learn to live in the moment instead of looking down the road. I have spent many years looking down the road at the next destination instead of dancing in the puddles of joy that are directly beneath my feet TODAY.

Back to goals, my personal goals for 2011. My first goal is to remember that it is no longer 2010 when I write a check or write an entry in my journal.

Last year I hoped to reach my “goal weight” and I did! For some reason, I didn’t maintain that goal weight past October. Why not? Because I only was exercising to achieve my goal. Once I achieved it, my motivation to maintain never really kicked in. Oddly enough, I am not setting a weight goal this year. (You may not care to know this fact, but I jot it down here anyway.)

Since I met my goal last year but then FAILED to maintain, how then can I get motivated this year to once again reach that goal? I think I have discovered the secret.

The secret, I’ve learned, is not to look down the road at a whole year stretched out into somewhere in the future, but I will look at today as a new day. Just for today, I am going to DO the change I would like to see in my life.

Here is my little checklist for myself:

1. Do I want to feel better? Exercise.

2. Do I want to have more energy? Exercise.

3. Do I want to be more productive? Exercise.

4. Do I want to be inspired to eat right? Exercise.

5. Do I want to be motivated? Exercise.

Notice there is nothing in there regarding weight. We’re talking benefits that I can have TODAY, not down the road. I know that exercise will yield each of these benefits, so I am much more likely to answer YES to these questions each morning and look for a time to exercise during the day.

That takes care of body and mind. What about the spiritual?

1. Want heart change?

2. Want peace?

3. Want joy?

4. Want to love more?

5. Want clarity of thought and vision?

6. Want to be more productive?

7. Want to really have faith?

The answer (for myself) to all of the above questions is to daily read the Word, meditate on it, journal about it, pray about it, pray for others, (Job 42:10), and finally, listen and do. If I want to meet each new day of 2011 and fully experience it, all I need is to read, pray, and listen. Enormous changes will come from those three items! The hard part is not jumping out of bed and doing my own thing to meet the day’s challenges in my own strength.

It’s pretty simple: spend time at the beginning of the day getting with God, then do what I am led to do that day in His strength. View exercise as a blessing, not a negative, and enjoy the benefits of it all year long.

Woo hoo!! Happy New Day, y’all!