Still Waters

I'm enjoying a breather of a few days to catch up after a busy, busy May...and before a busy, busy June.  Next week is our church's Vacation Bible School, then a homeschool conference, and a couple of weeks with our families.  It's been wonderful to get my house clean, take time to cook appealing meals, have more time in the Word, and watch the grass grow. As a homeschool mom, though, it's hard to put aside thoughts and plans for the coming year.  I no sooner finish one year than I'm prayerfully planning studies and schedules for the next.  And while I would truly love a mental break from it all, I'm grabbing the chance to analyze what worked and what didn't for us. I ended this year feeling particularly drained and overdone, out of touch with myself and our home life.  Some of the outside commitments I made took more planning and execution than I anticipated.  We had to adjust our curriculum and scheduling a number of times.  Various deadlines kept me f

This was one of those fill-your-well days, the kind you need after a long haul of concentrated effort.  I wrapped up our VBS curriculum last night (with no small sigh of relief!), and SweetPea and I decided we'd done enough school this year and needed a break for a bit, so... ...We went to Vienna this morning, courtesy of Rick Steves and PBS--in our robes and sipping a hot mug of jasmine green tea.  Oh, my goodness, such fun.  I love  travel shows, practically as good as being there without all the fuss. ...Cleaned out some daunting piles of paperwork and reduced them to a couple of civilized, ready-to-be-filed stacks.  Happy sigh. ...Swept the patio, washed down the furniture, cleaned out a storage table, sorted and cleaned piles of junk, and got thoroughly distracted by all the lovely green lushness and growing things, the birdsong in the trees. My yellow irises in the photo above haven't bloomed like this since the summer SweetPea was born.  And just take a look

We think  that our raccoon problem resolved itself--we haven't heard them in the fireplace for a few days and can't see them down the chimney, either.  Yay!  I suspect that the Eau de Ammonia might have convinced Mama that this was not a lovely place to raise her babies.  One evening at my desk upstairs, I heard a loud thump on the roof over me and quite a commotion, so that might have been her departure.  We've got a chimney cap on now and haven't seen any frantic little masked faces trying to stage a jail-break out the mesh enclosure. I love the contrast of old and new growth I'm in the home stretch with our church's VBS materials. It got to be something of a last-minute push this year again, but the Lord is helping me get it done, and of course, it's an incredible blessing to be reviewing the fabulous truths of our faith.  This year it's a Treasure Hunt theme with God's Word being the treasure.  The kids will be working on a treasure map