Being a Home School Family

October 7, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Using home school to educate our children is another thing that makes our family unique. Homeschoooling adds to our family identity. Certainly homeschooling is not for every family, but what ever your education method, that adds to your family identity. Dads, you should be very active and intentional in choosing how your children will be educated. Don’t take the public school education program blindly without understanding if it is the right choice for EACH of your children. One child may be better servered by a private school. Another child within the same family may be better served by public education or home school.

Sherry and I are passionate about home school education. We enjoy helping families through their review of education choices. Sherry is a former 3rd grade public school teacher and now she has several years of homeschool teaching under her belt. This is another subject that we approach carefully and prayerfully. We encourage you to do the same. To help you decide if homeschooling is right for your family we have a new resource. If you choose homeschooling we will lead you through the mounds of choices with curriculum, resources, books, co-ops, and more. Our new online support group web site launched this week is called the Home School Support Network. The site is a Blog and Podcast for now. Eventually we will be adding video and possibly even a member area. The first episode of the podcast was just released this week. We are waiting on the iTunes review process to complete, but in the meantime you can get the introductory podcast episode via the HSSN RSS feed.

Filed Under: Education, Parenting Tagged With: , , , , ,

Halloween is Optional

October 5, 2011 By 4 Comments

Stop before you go blowing a bunch of money on Halloween candy or costumes. Halloween can be skipped with absolutely no ill affects. As a matter of fact, as parents, you can use this holiday as a teaching opportunity and build on your family identity in the process.

But everyone else is doing it. We have always done it this way. Yes, there is an overwhelming urge even as adults to do things just because other people are doing it or because these things are just things that we have always done.  We don’t want to be the weird one in the bunch. We don’t want to have people make fun of us. We just want to have a little fun. These are all very common response when I ask why people participate in halloween activities. The truth is that not everyone is doing it and you should not feel guilty if you choose not to do Halloween.

Halloween provides an excellent opportunity for parents to build on family identity. If you are not certain why you participate in Halloween activities other than “just to have fun” or “because it is what we have always done” then you might consider letting the October 31st pass by in your house as if it were any other day of the year. We have done this for several years now and have seen no negative affects.

Why pick on Halloween? Why use this holiday as teachable moment or as a way to set your family apart from other families? For our family it is a personal conviction that stems from our faith in God. I first wrote about this five years ago and received some very positive feedback and encouragment from readers of my personal blog The Land of Ozz. Here is an excerpt from that original blog post titled Halloween – Should Christians Participate?:

A few days ago I was involved in a conversation where someone said that “everyone needs a spooky computer background for Halloween.” I simply said, “I don’t do Halloween”. The response of another person was, “to each his own” in a gruff and grumpy sort of way. The amount of truth from that comment is staggering even though it was delivered to me with a very disapproving tone. For the purposes of this article I will define this phrase “to each his own” as a person’s right to choose.

I have already made the choice for my family based on prayer, research, and discussions with my best friend (my wife). We no longer buy or make costumes, attend festivals, go trick or treating, and we do not give out candy. We just plain avoid the whole thing all together. It has actually been a pretty simple deal once we committed to the decision.

Not all Christians share our convictions on this subject. As a matter of fact I would guess that a majority of Christians disagree with our response to Halloween. As you can see above I have wrote in much more detail about what line of thinking originally brought us to a decision to stop participating in Halloween. I encourage you to read more of my thoughts on the subject if you are looking for encouragement to stop participating in Halloween. Not everyone is participating and you should not feel obligated to do so with your family. And this is not just a narrow minded Christian view point either. Many people of other faiths understand the roots of this holiday and choose not to participate. Here are a few other blog posts from years past on this subject:

Halloween and Christian Families
Halloween II – Why Christians Should not Celebrate

As parents we can be different and should be different. We should strive to be the best parents that we can be and not settle for “at least as good as Fill in the Blank“. Doing thing like everyone else will result in raising kids just like everyone else.

What will you do to help your family stand out as unique? How will you rise above mediocrity as a family? Are you considering a change to your response to Halloween?

 

Filed Under: Family Fun, Parenting Tagged With: , ,

We Don’t Always Get What We Ask For

August 1, 2011 By 1 Comment


Parents of special needs children will tell you that they did not expect or specifically ask for the challenges that they face.  There are those rare gems who seek out special needs children to foster or adopt and I believe those parents will have a mansion or a castle in heaven as a reward. As a parent of a child who has severe medical issues I can tell you that the life we lead is very different that what we expected when my wife became pregnant with our second child in 2004. The difference has turned out to be such a blessing to us and so many others who have come into contact with our almost seven year old son Caden.

We visited a new church (Deer Park Baptist) this weekend. The message delivered by Dr. Stephen Carr was great. We learned how horrible of neighbors we are when the pastor looked at our visitors card and then proceeded to tell me that he lived two houses away from us on the same side of the street. [blushing] It turns out we had both been witnessing to the same family for some time now. I am sure we will spend some time getting to know each other moving forward.

Like with most sermons different people often learn different things from the same message regardless of what the pastor is teaching on. In this case I believe God spoke to me in a way the pastor may never have intended when planning this message. The message was framed by the interaction between Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well in John chapter 4. I am pretty sure the pastor’s primary intent was to encourage believers to use average conversations to share the gospel so other people would get saved as a result. Just as Jesus did with the woman at the well by sharing the promise of eternal life. She in turn shared with others who also believed. I got a bonus message from a nugget he threw in there when describing the dynamics of the interaction between Jesus and the Samaritan woman. Here is how the passage goes in John 4:

7 When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, “Will you give me a drink?”8 (His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.)

9 The Samaritan woman said to him, “You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?” (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.t)

10 Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”

11 “Sir,” the woman said, “you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water?12 Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his livestock?”

13 Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again,14 but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

15 The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.” (NIV)

As the pastor pointed out, the Samaritan woman did not know what she was asking for. She was obviously asking for drinking water even though Jesus had just explained that he was offering something very different. What she got from Jesus turned out to be best for her and it saved her and many in her community. What the woman intended to gain with her request appears to have been a purely selfish. That way she “won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water”.

This is like when parents pray for a healthy child (some for purely selfish reasons). they want the perfect child in every way. They want a healthy, smart, and beautiful child. And then they end up with what the world describes as a “sick” child. Our son Caden if often referred to as sick by the doctors due to the vast number of complicated medical issues Caden has and still does face. Caden has had way more major surgeries than birthdays, surgeries on his heart, neck, stomach, and spine. Caden is exclusively tube fed and has never taken single bite of food by mouth and he has never been able to drink from a cup to satisfy his thirst even though he so desires to do so to this day. Not exactly what can be described as healthy.

Just like the woman asked Jesus for water even though he had described something different, we asked God in our prayers early in the pregnancy for a healthy child and he knew exactly what was giving to us. Just like Jesus did give the Samaritan woman water based on his definition, Jesus gave us a healthy child based on his definition, not ours. The woman did have to go back to the well for water to sustain her physical body. We have had to go back to the hospital to sustain Caden’s health.

What we received from God was an encounter with Him that sparked a change in the community around us like we could have never imagined. Like with many special needs children, you only need to spend a few minutes one-on-one with Caden to fall in love with him. God is using him to create a new definition for the word healthy.

As parents of a special needs child we have received way more than we could have asked for or imagined. We have a child that God has used to bring our family closer together, bring us closer to our friends, and closer to God himself. I don’t know exactly how many or if any have been saved as a result, but I know there will be some. Glory to God!

Filed Under: Parenting Tagged With: , ,

I hope my kids can’t remember

July 24, 2011 By Leave a Comment

…the first time I ever prayed with them.  I know that sounds weird, but stick with me on this one.  I was listening to a pastor on the radio a while back.  The pastor talked about how dads really should be setting the example for their kids.  Many parents tell their kids, “Give me a kiss and then go on up to bed…oh, and don’t forget to say your prayers.”  If the statistics being thrown around are close to being correct, then this sort of dialog is much more likely to be the norm in most Christian homes.

Some of you parents may have heard something like this before, but I am going to say it again.  Way more is caught than taught.  You can not sit in your recliner and give the old “do as I say and not as I do” speech and expect it to work.  That dog won’t hunt, especially with the older kids.  Get up and join your children in their bedtime prayers.  Teach them how to talk to God by your example.  Do you remember the last time you prayed with your children other than when giving thanks for food?

I hope that my kids are not able to remember the first time I prayed with them.  I want prayer to be so much of a routine part of our lives that they can not remember when it started because it was farther back than their memory can stretch.  I challenge all dads to get a similar mindset towards prayer and daily devotional with their kids.

Filed Under: Parenting Tagged With: , ,
« Previous Page