Mondays hate me. They do. I am thoroughly convinced that Monday is a living, breathing thing destined to make homeschooling a nightmare for me. As each of the first 6 Mondays of the school year ended, I was looking for the hidden cameras in my house. I really shouldn’t complain. Nothing really terrible happened…just life with four boys and a puppy, and my always patient and loving reactions. Not. Thank God for no cameras. Oh, a small recap, you ask?

I seem to remember the one morning where I had just finished washing the kitchen floor from a puppy accident, while attempting to do math with two of the children, when another one ran up behind me and with a kiss on the back of my head said something about the bathroom. That something I found out about an hour later when the 5 year old decided that flushing the clogged toilet over and over would fix it, and then his brother helped him by using the entire linen closet to sop up the water. Don’t you just love doing laundry?

Or there was that time that the teenager dropped an advil tablet on the floor and the puppy decided to eat it right up. Bet you didn’t know that it’s toxic to dogs, huh? I kind of thought that the hydrogen peroxide that I had to turkey baster down her throat to make her throw up was, too, but apparently it saved her very expensive purebred little life. Of course this happens when I’m supposed to be out the door in 15 minutes. (Apparently, having a dog again is good for the family. I’ll have to get back to you on that one.)

Add on everyone waking up overtired from the weekends, to bad attitudes, to the laundry still sitting in the washing machine from like…last Thursday, to it being my hubby’s longest day so reinforcements were not coming, it was not a recipe for success. And success was the goal for this certain letter type, list addict, task orientated girl.

My calendar is organized.

My school planner is planned.

My to do list is freshly updated.

And it was becoming more important than the people I was doing it all for. I was putting my list and my need to accomplish it all before the relationships in my life. My reactions to normal life stuff was showing it. And this was not who I wanted to be…definitely not what I wanted for this school year.

A friend introduced me to this book, Teaching From Rest, and there are some amazing nuggets in there….the things YOU KNOW, but FORGOT THAT YOU KNOW. Like…

Surrender my idea of an ideal day…

…or relationship, situation, experience…..

and give it to the Lord, trusting Him with the outcome

The being and becoming needs to come before the doing and checking off…

…being in the moment, undistracted and focused on the people in my life

Do less to do it well

…simplify, simplify, simplify so that what I do choose to do can be done with excellence

Whose “well done” am I working for?

…work, serve for the praise of God, not man

It’s not about being “successful”…God is looking for our faithfulness

…to keep going, keep at it, persevere through it all

Every task, each assignment is an offering of love to God

…no matter how small or insignificant it seems

And most importantly, put relationships before anything else. This one. I mean, this is why I decided to homeschool in the first place…my children’s hearts.

 

So, I decided to quit. I quit Mondays.

Practically speaking, I redid the planners to make Monday an easier day, I emptied the calendar of any Monday appointments, I got up earlier and I let go of my start time a whole half hour. Listen, small steps, my friend. 🙂  And peace reigned in my home. No, everything did not go perfectly. The computer crashed, I got sick, the puppy…well, let’s just leave that unsaid. This is all just… life. I still have my lists, my planner, and my beloved calendar, but I put them back where they belong. I saw an immediate difference in my children and remembered the amazing gift I have in being able to stay home and school them.

My thing is the homeschooling, but I think those little reminders apply to anything we start putting in the “doing and checking off” list as being more important than the “being and becoming.” I know I’ll need to be reminded of this very often…at least every Sunday night.