The Reluctant Homeschooler

Back?

2011-06-28T11:38:00.004-04:00

I did not drop off the face of the earth. Well, maybe I did a little bit.

I was simply so busy with life - my son finishing high school and going on to the local community college to study auto mechanics; the relief mission trip to Haiti in March 2010, from which I returned brokenhearted for the destitute and Americans' blindness to their desperate need. I presented in churches and other organizations, raising several thousand dollars for the relief efforts and orphanage where I had stayed, and I got over a dozen children sponsored with monthly support so that they could go to school and get one hot meal per day, often their only meal.

A year ago in June - July, I spent a month in Panama on another mission trip, this one with Alexandra. We lived among the Kuna Indians on San Blas Islands, then in the Darien Jungle. Now, a year after that trip, Alexandra has also finished homeschooled high school, and after much prayer, feels that she is called into full-time missions. In the fall, she'll be leaving home and going to an internship program with the mission organization with which I traveled to Haiti twice.

In fact, all our family went to Haiti last January. I organized a trip for the youth of our church. Sadly, in the middle of the media's cholera scare, nearly half the team dropped out. We didn't see a single case of cholera where we were, and these teens missed a life-changing experience. My family and I went, however, even though I was diagnosed with breast cancer - stage 2 - just days before the trip. The trip was a blessing and got my mind off the adventure of 2011 that I did not sign up for.

Cancer treatments - a mastectomy, then surgery to get a mediport installed, then chemo treatments - have kept me busy. And all through this, I continued to homeschool my two girls and faithfully journal through the cancer. I will continue with the cancer treatments for another half year, but my strength is returning, and my hair is starting to grow back. The side effects I had from the chemotherapy were quite hard to take, especially the bizarre sharp pains in my brain and the burning skin rashes, and I'm glad that's behind me. We continue to pray that this aggressive cancer that I had will not return. I bailed out of the chemo treatments halfway through and continue only with the Herceptin, which I get through IV every three weeks.

I'm well enough to sign up to return to Haiti this coming fall. My daughter Alexandra will be there as part of her internship, so I will meet up with her then.

To those who have encouraged me to keep writing, I thank you. I will try.

Batteries for Haiti

2010-03-12T05:42:00.029-05:00

At a team meeting at work, my boss anounced that I'm going to Haiti. Sometimes it's odd for me to realize that not everyone wants to go. I feel so compelled to go that it's hard to imagine that others have no such desire, or are even afraid. I don't feel like a hero; I feel blessed to have been selected!

Shortly after the announcement at the meeting, I sent out the following email to the entire department, many of whom are in different workgroups:

- - -

Some of you have already heard – but many haven’t – that I will be going on a relief trip to Haiti with a team of volunteers from all over the US. I will be gone March 16 – 24.

I feel extraordinarily privileged to have been accepted to be part of this team. We are heading to an orphanage in Léogâne, a coastal city 18 miles west of Port-au-Prince, which was the epicenter of the recent earthquake. In Léogâne, 80–90% of the buildings were damaged, and nearly every concrete structure was destroyed - including the orphanage where I will be based (see below).

BEFORE:

AFTER:

This trip isn’t going to be a typical vacation (dictionary definition: a period of time devoted to rest and relaxation). Instead, I think this will be the most difficult trip I’ve ever been on. Our team has to bring all our food and shelter (tents) with us – kind of like camping, except that our days will be filled with clearing rubble, working in a refugee camp, assisting in a medical clinic, and whatever else needs to be done in a place that still has no basic amenities – in other words, no electricity or running water. And I hear that the surroundings aren’t exactly scenic.

I really could use your help. Each relief team member has to bring items that we’ll be leaving behind for the needy. I’ve been assigned to collect and bring with me two suitcases full of batteries. (Remember, there’s no electricity.) I’ll be packing all my personal belongings in my carry-on, and I need to fill each of my two suitcases with 50 lb. of AA, AAA, C, and D batteries. I’ve set up a box in my office for the batteries and would really appreciate your donations!

The link below shows typical conditions of Haitian orphanages. This isn’t the orphanage where we’ll be based, but the conditions are similar - except that the building is no longer standing:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOp5lo0VbaU

Naturally, I’ll be bringing my cameras, and I’m hoping to borrow a pocket video camera. I would love to have the opportunity to share my experiences with you after my return.

- - -

The reponse for batteries was overwhelming! By the end of the day, I had 100 lb. of batteries! A company that a coworker knew donated the full amount. I was stunned.

"Why are you surprised?" asked my husband. "Didn't God call you on this trip? Don't you think He knows what He's doing?"

I was humbled. And the batteries kept coming in. Last weekend, I drove 50 lb. of batteries to Ohio for the other team member who has to bring batteries because she hadn't been as successful in her battery drive. And the batteries, like God's blessing, just keep coming.

Delight versus despair

2010-03-11T14:49:00.003-05:00

I heard the geese today, calling to each other in the sky as if encouraging one another, a sound that always lifts my spirits.

Spring is in the air. The first snowdrop is blooming. The snow is melting. The sun is shining.

Somewhere in Haiti, children sweat in the sun, waiting for food.

My workgroup celebrated bonus day with lunch out.

Haitians search for their next meal, not sure whether they’ll get one at all that day. Even before the earthquake, eating only one small meal per day was normal.

My body is here in the spring, the warmth, the promise of new life and a new season; my mind is in Haiti, a place of despair, hopelessness, and brutal heat, a place where I will be in a few short days.

“Prepare yourselves,” said the trip leader a few days ago. “Civilization as you know it ends when you arrive in Haiti.”

A catastrophe of biblical proportions. A place where every email you ever sent or received marked “urgent” seems like a joke.

Feeding 800 orphans.

Sleeping under armed guards.

Haiti. In six days.

Prophecy

2010-02-20T10:47:00.001-05:00

Plans, plans, so many plans! I will topple them all. What happens is what I want. There will come a time and I will put everything in its place.”

This was God’s message to me last Sunday, spoken through an old woman visiting our church.

I’m an analytical person, thinking, analyzing, evaluating. These words hit me hard. I do make many plans in my head, often traveling to distant lands, photographing, speaking at churches, writing articles or books in my thoughts. In my plans, my children are grown, I no longer homeschool, I don’t have to work any more, and I’m free to travel – and some Christian organization wants me to do so and pays my way so that I document their missions in photos and words. Sort of “work for food.” I’m off traveling in my thoughts frequently since I feel that I’m in home stretch of teaching and home stretch of my working life. Just three and a half more years of homeschooling, and a few more until I can retire – or perhaps resign?

Granted, my health has had its ups and downs, and sometimes I question whether I’ll be able to travel at all in the future. But the family joke is that when Mom is done homeschooling, she’ll send everyone a postcard from Africa.

But will I? According to this prophecy, perhaps not. Or could it be referring to something else? Maybe I’ll travel, but elsewhere? Or do something I haven’t even thought of yet?

So my analytical mind is churning out possibilities.

We were invited to dinner to a Ukrainian family’s home this week. The working mother so wants to go to Haiti with me and was disappointed to learn that the team is formed and there’s no chance of her coming. The Ukrainian churches don’t run many mission trips. They don’t have the connections to foreign lands (other than Ukraine) or the organizational experience. And there’s a language barrier for many of the new immigrants. I organized our church’s first ever mission trip last spring. (We went to Mexico.) With my experience in missions and travel, and my skills of organization, is organizing missions for this community what God had in mind? Only time will tell. But most likely, it's something I haven't even thought of yet...

Haiti!

2010-02-16T19:55:00.011-05:00

Ten days ago, I got the call: I will be going to Haiti next month as part of a relief team! After the phone conversation, I fluttered through the house, giddy with excitement.

“I wish I could come with you,” lamented my daughter Alexandra. “Maybe you could book the same flight for me and I could just tag along and not be officially part of the mission team…”

The minimum age for this trip is 18, which disqualifies all my children. Jacob will turn 18 in April; the trip is in March. But he’s not the one interested in going; it’s my 16-year-old middle daughter who inherited the same love of going to the hard places. And from what I’ve been reading, Haiti may be the hardest of all places I’ve been to.

Before I travel to a foreign country, I read about it. So I logged on to the local library’s website and typed in “Haiti” for a keyword. That’s how I found Angels of a Lower Flight: One Woman’s Mission to Save a Country… One Child at a Time.

I finally forced myself to put it down at 1:30 AM. Between the horrific conditions described in the book and the heart-tugging poverty shown in this YouTube video, I’m wondering what I’ve gotten myself into.

But I still can’t wait to go. I just wish that Alexandra could come with me.

Got carried away

2010-02-10T23:21:00.010-05:00

“Do you have any assignments to turn in, like your vocabulary or American Government?” I asked Jacob. Every evening I devote a couple of hours to correcting the day’s assignments and creating the next day's schedule.

“No, I don’t have anything to turn in. I got carried away reading.”

“You what?”

“I got to a really interesting part. I must have read a hundred pages today.”

This was not like my son, who reads only what he has to and how long he has to. Jacob does not read for pleasure.

Sixteen-year-old Alexandra was as surprised as I was. “What are you reading?” she asked.

“Slave.”

If he’s that captivated by this part of his Exploring Social Injustice through Literature curriculum, I made a good choice.

Haiti?

2010-02-02T00:12:00.007-05:00

Disaster relief work. Not exactly everyone's cup of tea, but every time I hear of a tsunami, hurricane, or earthquake, my heart beats faster. I ache to go there, to reach out, to help somehow. I don't know how I'd help - I'm not a doctor - but I believe that through hugs and love, physical labor and prayer, through acts of kindness, and with my photographs and written words, I'd make a difference somehow.

I so want to go to Haiti!

I've wanted to go to Haiti ever since I read Mountains Beyond Mountains. I want to go to Haiti all the more because of the earthquake.

And I might get my chance!

Global Expeditions is running a mission trip to Haiti. I signed up immediately. But will I get chosen to go, to help to set up and serve in a refugee camp, rebuild an orphanage, and facilitate medical care for orphans? I can't think of a better way to spend my time. My only regret is that Alexandra can't come with me because she's not 18 yet, a requirement for this trip. She so wants to come with me. I think that there's a lot of me in Alexandra, and, like me, she enjoys going to the hard places. She was disappointed that we had to stay in a hotel during our mission trip to Honduras two years ago instead of in tents as originally planned. Turns out that the field where we were to set up these tents was flooded with over a foot of water after a deluge halfway through our trip. That certainly would have made for an exciting trip...

I'm sure that a trip to Haiti would be even more exciting. I'm praying that I get to find out.

Serving

2010-02-01T00:26:00.007-05:00

“I’d like to volunteer at the Mission,” said Alexandra about a week after we came home from our Dallas mission trip.

Since working with homeless and inner city kids in Dallas during our Global Expeditions trip, both my daughters came home changed. They returned on fire from meeting other godly teens and young adults, people passionate to serve the Lord. And they were blessed by working with a church that not only reaches out to drug dealers, addicts, prostitutes, gang members, and prisoners, but also fills its church pews with ex-dealers, ex-addicts, former prostitutes and gang members, and ex-cons. What a place!

After getting a taste of what it’s like to serve in Dallas, Alexandra wanted to serve here at home. It was her initiative to volunteer at The Mission, a soup kitchen, but I made the call (she's still a bit timid) – and left my name and number on an answering machine. Twice. But my calls were not returned.

As I was putting away groceries around 5 o’clock Saturday evening, the phone rang. It was Candy from The Mission apologizing for not getting back to me. Could I serve there tonight? She’d had a cancellation and although she knew we hadn’t volunteered there before, could I fill in...? I told her that four of us would be glad to serve – my two daughters and I, and a special girl from our church youth group, the only girl from the youth group who had gone on the Mexico mission trip with us last spring. (Three guys had gone, but only one girl.) Helen and I had been corresponding via email since that time. Ours is a special relationship. She’s really my daughters’ friend; I consider myself her mentor and have a warm place in my heart for her.

“Now I know why our neighbors couldn’t come to dinner tonight,” observed Alexandra as we rushed to get ready to go to The Mission. We had tried to invite a widow neighbor to dinner tonight, but she turned us down, stating health reasons. So we invited a divorcee for dinner because, after all, we were baking a whole chicken. But she’s a nurse and had to work 3 to 11 PM. Had either of them come, we wouldn’t have been available to go to The Mission.

How can setting out 78 salads, setting tables, dishing out food, and carrying it out to the long tables of homeless men be an exciting way to spend the evening? Because it’s work done for the Lord. Captain, the chef at the soup kitchen, was an interesting guy with a sense of humor. As I suspected when I met him, he’s been on the streets himself. We heard his testimony as he showed us the room upstairs that houses 40 men in 20 bunk beds. He’d been one of those men until about six years ago. Oh, he’d had a 26-year career at General Motors, then worked as a painter and roofer, but drugs and alcohol ate up his pay and ruined his life. It was through the sermons given right there at The Mission night after night that eventually touched his heart. He had a powerful experience of coming to the Lord in the middle of the night right there at The Mission, where he now serves with all his heart.

I felt blessed to serve at The Mission, and delighted to share that experience with Helen and my daughters. I hope to have many more such evenings there and to introduce other girls from the youth group to the joys of serving.

As the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without deeds is dead. - James 2:26

It could have been his last day

2009-11-23T22:51:00.015-05:00

When my husband George was leaving for work this morning, I said an extra prayer for his safety on the road. He covers so many miles driving to his clients’ homes and schools to tune pianos or do home renovation. Today he was to tune four pianos in a school 50 miles from home. That's a long drive. Then 50 miles back.

I didn't realize that Jacob had said good-bye to George twice, and asked for extra prayer. Jacob had a dream last night that George died. He kept dreaming it over and over last night, but we didn't find out until later.

At 8:30 AM the phone rang. I saw George's cell phone number on the caller ID, but George didn’t respond right away when I said, “Hello?”

“Hello?” I said again. “Hello...?” Larissa came closer, trying to listen in and figure out who was calling.

Finally, George’s voice came on the line.

“Hi, how are you?” Hm, this wasn’t a typical before-work conversation. And he didn’t normally call me at this time.

“Uh, I’m OK. I’m getting ready for work…”

“I, um, I had an accident. I totaled the van. A woman pulled out in front of me and I honked and tried to avoid her, but I hit her kind of head on.”

I could feel my face drain. “Are you OK?”

“I have some pain in my stomach.”

“And the woman?”

“She’s OK. We’re both outside waiting for the police to come.”

“Well, you won’t be able to get to work today, not unless I come and get you, then you drive back 50 miles and drop me off at the office, then you drive back again…”

“Come and get me and we’ll sort it out. Take exit 7 from the highway and then just follow the road south. You can’t miss me. It’ll take you about 40 minutes to get here.”

Not exactly the way I hoped to start my work week with deadlines that I can't possibly meet looming this week and, of course, homeschooling to do while in my spare time I prepare for the Dallas mission trip. But thoughts of deadlines and mission trips faded from my thoughts as I wondered what shape George was really in. Would I find him by the road waiting for me – or in a hospital? Could the pain in his stomach be from internal bleeding?

"What's going on?" the kids wanted to know as soon as I hung up. My end of the conversation hinted that things weren't quite right, so I filled them in on the details. Then I called my boss and left a message that I would be in late, and why.

When I was ready to leave, I gathered the kids for prayer – for George's well-being and for my safety. We couldn't find Jacob at first, and when Alexandra finally located him in the basement storage room, he told us he'd been praying. It was obvious that he'd been crying as well.

The drive south was beautiful this sunny, late fall morning – over hills, past corn fields with yellowed stalks, by farms, horses, cows. I kept wondering just how far south I needed to go. I hadn't thought to ask. Is it possible that I passed the accident site? Could the cars have been towed and victims in the hospital, and I would just drive by and not know where to find them? After all, I'm one of very few people I know who does not have a cell phone, so I couldn't even call my husband from the road unless I stopped in a store or a house.

Worry gnawed at me, and I kept driving until, at last, I came upon a tan sedan whose front end was demolished. Our green van was nowhere to be seen, but there was my husband, pacing, cell phone in hand, beret on his head, talking apparently to the insurance agent. I parked on the side of the road in front of a large, white rural home. I got out of the van and got some information about the accident from Don, the father of the 16-year-old girl who had pulled out from her driveway right in front of George's van. She'd had her license three months and was rushing off to school. She was late and didn't look.

Later, on the drive to see the van in its final resting place where it had been towed, George filled me in. "I was driving along about 55 miles per hour when I saw this car pulling out of the driveway. I thought it would stop. I honked the horn, slammed on my brakes and kept honking, then I pulled into the left lane to try to avoid it, but she kept going right into that left lane. I hit her almost head on. Fortunately, I was going only about 35 at the time. If I hadn't gone into the left lane, I would have crushed the driver's door – and the girl. I don't think that she would have lived.

"Before I hit, I knew I was going to hit and I wasn't sure if I was going to live. There was smoke and smell of plastic and a terrible odor. All the engine fluids leaked. The airbags went off. And then I just walked out. I walked out of the van like nothing happened. And she walked out."

She got a cut on her lip. George is bruised from the seat belt cutting into his chest. But, oh, it could have been so much worse!

This evening at dinner and afterward, we surrounded George with extra hugs, and I shed a few tears of joy. Praise God that we still have George with us today!

Visit to a city mission

2009-11-22T14:43:00.012-05:00

A few days ago I left a message for Lily, the head of one of the city mission agencies that I visited two weeks ago on the tour of outreaches to the poor, the immigrants, the drug addicts, the homeless, and the ex-convicts.

Lily and I used to work together more than 20 years ago, she as an engineer designing spectrophotometers, I as a technical writer writing the documentation. I worked freelance at the time, so I eventually moved on, but we stayed in touch through lunches and Christmas newsletters. But I never expected that we'd get back together in the basement of a church as we did yesterday.

Several years ago in her Christmas newsletter, Lily announced that she'd quit her job – retired she put it – and started an after-school program for city children where she worked for $1 per year. Wow, I thought, my curiosity piqued, I should visit her. But I didn't follow through for many years, not until yesterday.

I brought along Alexandra and Larissa so they, too, could get the detailed tour and to hear the story of how the mission began.

We walked into this large, brick church built in 1907. In the basement, the smell of food and the sight of dozens of rather bedraggled-looking people sitting at tables greeted us. I scurried around the building looking for Lily, peeking into the kitchen, the medical office, and the thrift store before I found her.

Lily's soft-spoken voice was sometimes had to hear above the ruckus as we toured the facilities for over an hour.

"You started all this?" I asked her, incredulous.

We saw over 100 people in the fellowship hall eating breakfast and dozens of volunteers cooking and distributing the meal. We observed a wheel chair bound woman coming to visit a social worker. We chatted with a medical technologist, who described how she serves the area's children with virtual medical visits via a computer and cameras, and a link to the local hospital where a doctor communicates with her. "He sees all I see via the cameras and equipment I have connected to the computer." We walked through the store in the church building that sold used clothing for a pittance. And we glimpsed into the food pantry supplied by the local food bank. We saw children darting through the halls, on their way to be picked up and driven on a day trip to an area park or museum, or apple picking. "We take them places every other Saturday that they'd never have the chance to visit with their families," said Lily.

Upstairs Lily showed us the rooms for the after-school day care program for grades 1 though 6. The videography classes for teens. Sewing classes. Bible studies. Men's Bible studies. My head swam with the details.

"How on earth did you start all this?"

"I didn't know what I was getting into," Lily laughed. "I first started the store that sells used clothing. I did that in 1998 while still working. In 2002, I quit my job and first started the after-school program for kids to keep them off the streets and away from the drug dealers. Many of these kids come from homes where the parents work and they would be coming home to an empty house – or to the street."

One thing had led to another as more and more people suggested additional ministries. In fact, we talked with the woman who suggested – and now heads – the weekly Saturday morning breakfasts. "And we also serve dinner once a month," she added. "By the way, Lily, I want to talk to you about an idea…"

"Oh, no," smiled Lily. "Another idea? Later."

Just then a stocky black woman insisted on getting food from the food pantry even though she didn't have the proper documentation. "I don't have any food at home," she claimed. She was kind of belligerent, not meek or polite as if asking a favor, but as if she were demanding a right. She did get her food, but frankly, I'd have a hard time working with people like that.

Still, you could tell by looking around that these people had been beaten down by life. We heard many stories, but the ones that touched Alexandra's heart most were about the Nepali immigrants. Bill, a tall, paunchy man with graying hair, had interrupted Lily's description of some ministry to tell us about these new immigrants.

"These kids get really picked on in the city schools. I would call them assaults. The first day in one of the city high schools, one Nepali was eating lunch in the cafeteria when someone threw a condom in his lunch! Hardly a day goes by when one of these kids isn't thrown up against a wall and frisked for money. One kid had a trashcan emptied over his head in the men's room! Welcome to America. The thing is, these boys come from refugee camps and they've had a life that is way rougher than any of the kids in school ever experienced. They're time bombs waiting to go off. Push one of them too far and they're bound to explode."

What a way to be treated in an unfamiliar culture. My heart broke for them.

Back home, Alexandra couldn't get this conversation out of her head. What school did this happen in? How old were the victims? How could this occur? This kind of thing never happened in their suburban public high school…

My main question was: How can we get involved with Lily's ministry?

The best option I saw was to come to the after-school program and give special presentations. "Show them something from Ukraine – dress in the traditional outfits, talk about the food, anything," Lily had suggested.

Although I've done many such presentations in the past for my kids' classrooms when they were young, my challenge will be to get the girls to do the presentations. We have to take it one step at a time. Perhaps it will be the beginning of something.

Giving hope for Christmas

2009-11-19T11:27:00.003-05:00

The kids still remember their presents from last year. It's not because they received fancy gifts, but because each of them had the chance to choose a gift for someone in need. And each of them remembers just what they picked.

Praise God, this year we are still employed and not struggling financially like so many others. So once again, I'm not going to rain needless gifts upon my children, but I will once more give each a wrapped catalog and a check made out to Partners International. They can read and reread the catalog, ponder the needs of others, and select a gift from their hearts. What better way to celebrate the birth of Christ? Would He really want my son to get a video game in honor of His birth - or for him to choose education for three kids in Sudan, feed four poor families, and more...

Harvest of Hope™ - Gifts That Change Lives from Partners International.

I want to come with you

2009-11-15T18:43:00.022-05:00

For years I've wanted to inspire others to go on mission trips to foreign lands, step out of their comfort zones, and develop compassion towards others who are unlike them.

During a missions conference last month in the community church I used to attend, one woman told me that my photographs of Senegal, which I had shared with the church, have spurred many to join the church's annual mission trip to that West African country. Each person who has gone represents another life that's been changed.

In the church that we now attend, I organized a mission trip to Mexico last spring. I hope to organize another trip to Mexico in the future, but for now, I'm slowly getting ready to go to Dallas with my daughters on a mission trip to the inner city, organized by Global Expeditions. I've mentioned this upcoming trip to a few friends.

After the church service today, the wife of the assistant youth group leader (who came to Mexico with us) approached me.

"My husband is encouraging me to go to Dallas with you," said Olga.

My heart sank. I was both happy that she had this desire and sad because it was unrealistic. It would be such a big leap for this woman to leave her two toddlers in the care of her parents, who recently came to live with her. But she's an immigrant from Ukraine and doesn't speak English. She wouldn't get much from the trip without knowing the language; she'd need an interpreter (like one of my daughters) with her at all times. Besides, I'm not organizing the trip; Global Expeditions is. So even though I was thrilled with her desire to go, I advised against it.

"When I return from Dallas, I hope to apply what I learn there to some mission opportunity right here in our own city. Perhaps you can get involved with that," I said hopefully.

For years I'd prayed about missions and influencing others to serve or give. I've had my heart broken in Kenya over the suffering of the Sudanese refugees, many of them widows, who, for a daily bowl of food for their starving children, are willing to give up their Christian faith and attend a mosque. Why aren't we Christians in the West supporting our sisters in their time of need? I've shed tears over severely malnourished and dying children, whom I personally met. I've played with the AIDS orphans and listened to stories of rescued street children in Ethiopia. And I've been disturbed by our overabundance in the West, our propensity to buy the latest gadgets for our own amusement, to waste our money on coloring our hair or doing our nails while so many in the world struggle just to feed their families.

I've wanted to share and speak and stir my American sisters and brothers out of their complacency, touch their hearts, stir their souls. And I've wanted to do this full-time. Our brothers and sisters in Africa and all over the world work so hard to help the destitute and reach the lost, but they have so little funds – and we have so much. But most Americans are unaware of the needs. I'm convinced that many would help if they only knew.

Olga wanting to come with me encouraged me. Someday I hope to stir more hearts to action. I keep this dream alive while I homeschool and work full-time writing instructions for equipment.

But perhaps, despite how busy I am and how little I feel I'm doing for God, He really is using me.

Are there really people like that here?

2009-11-13T13:59:00.006-05:00

Ever since I read Growing Up Empty over a year ago, its contents have haunted me.

I grew up as the daughter of immigrants who came to Canada following WWII after being displaced from their homeland by war. I always felt the pinch of my father’s slim salary, but I never went hungry. Still, I grew up with stories of my own parents’ times of hunger – of drinking the water that the potatoes were cooked in, of wanting a stick of gum that the soldiers had so as to have something to chew, of surviving on bread alone.

But I never dreamt that there we such people in America.

Like the author, who adopted and fed an elderly woman, I’ve wanted to adopt and help feed some family. But where do you start? How do you find the hungry? I can’t just go into the inner city and knock on doors – can I?

For over a year, I’ve wanted to help and get the kids involved in aiding this city’s destitute, but I didn’t know where to start. But last Saturday, I made my first step: I took a tour, organized by a local aid organization, of several churches and other charities helping the poor. They feed and clothe and take children off the streets after school to keep them away from drugs and danger. They rehabilitate the drug addicts and teach job skills to the uneducated. They have a heart for the poor. And among those working with the inner city children is a former coworker, an engineer who retired and now works even harder, but at something that God called her to do.

I felt energized after that tour. At last, I took a baby step towards volunteering. Signing up for the Dallas mission trip was another step. A third step was giving Alexandra Growing Up Empty as a reading assignment.

“Are there really people like that here?” she asked me after reading the first chapter. “Can’t we find them and help? The Bible says to invite in and feed those who can never repay you, like the homeless. Can’t we do that?”

“That’s why I went on that tour last Saturday,” I told her. “I want to find out how to help. We can’t just drive around and pick up a homeless man and take him home, but maybe through one of these organizations, we can befriend someone. Then we can bring them home – or bring them food to their home.”

“Like we brought dinner to grandma last week?” she asked. The girls had cooked corned beef and cabbage with potatoes, and we’d brought that over and eaten with her.

“Yes, just like that.”

Isn’t homeschooling wonderful? I gave Alexandra a book that touched my heart, and now it touched hers. I get to mold her heart the way that I want – the way I feel God calling me to do.

And God willing, we will find someone to help. I know that they’re out there.

A writing assignment unlike the others

2009-11-01T20:42:00.015-05:00

Fridays are creative writing days at our house. It's not always easy to come up with an assignment, and last year I used up most of my own ideas. So this year I often search the Internet for more.

I found the assignment below on some link and let the kids have free reign. What Alexandra came up with wasn't at all what I was expecting. It seems that she was affected by reading A Child Called It and her story took a twist I didn't expect at all. But the rewarding part is not only is her writing style rather engaging, but she has also absorbed some of the sensitivity to the downtrodden that I've been trying to impart to my children ever since they were in preschool.

Assignment:
In your composition book, write a story that starts with this situation:

It’s a regular school day, boring classes, same old things. At last you hear the lunch bell ring. You sit down with your friends and open your lunch bag. There is no sandwich, no chips, no cookies. A mystery package has replaced all of that! Slowly and incredulously, you take the package from your lunch bag. Not only did it appear in your lunch, but it has your name on it! What is inside? Who sent it and why?

Alexandra's composition:
Andrew sat in class with all the rest of his classmates, listening to the drone of his teacher's voice. He couldn't understand what the teacher was trying to say. Whatever it was, it didn't seem to be penetrating his head. Instead, he'd been counting down the seconds to lunchtime since five minutes ago. There were 39 seconds left.

As soon as the lunch bell rang, the teacher announced, "Line up, students!" Andrew raced to the coatroom, grabbed his lunch, and dashed to the door. He was third in line. He shuffled his feet impatiently, fighting the urge to grab his string cheese that he'd seen his mother pack this morning, and start eating it right then and there.

Finally everyone was in a straight line, and they marched off to the cafeteria.

Andrew sat down with his friends, Tom and Steven, at their usual table. Each boy pulled out his typical lunch: a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. Andrew reached into his, anticipating the usual bologna sandwich, banana, juice, string cheese, and cookies. Instead, he felt a crumpled bag in his lunch box. He pulled it out and peered inside. He reached in and pulled out a lined piece of paper. It read:

Andrew,

I'm sorry, but I couldn't resist the temptation to take your lunch today. I was very hungry and I knew you'd have some cookies in there; you always do. I told myself I'd only take one cookie, but when I saw you had my favorite bologna sandwich, I couldn't resist. I'm sorry I ate all your lunch. It won't happen again.

Sorry.

P.S. It's just that I haven't eaten since Friday.

Andrew glanced into his lunch box. Indeed, it was empty. Buy who could've eaten it? They hadn't eaten since Friday? Today was Monday!

"Hey guys," Andrew asked, "Do any of you have two bucks?"

"Sure, buddy," Tom replied, reaching into his pocket, "but what do ya need 'em for?"

"There's no lunch in my lunch box," Andrew replied. His friends gave him puzzled looks as they looked at his empty lunch box.

"That's interesting," they commented as Andrew took Tom's money and went to buy himself some lunch.

Andrew looked despairingly at the long line as he got into the last place. Today there were chicken nuggets, so lots of people would be buying.

As he stood in line looking about, Andrew noticed a kid sitting at the end of a table by himself. His name was David, and he was quite shy. For some reason many children didn't like him. He was poor and it showed: his clothes had patches and he looked as if he needed a shower. He was also flesh and bones, seemed to have no meat on him.

David glanced at Andrew, saw him watching and quickly glanced away. Suddenly it hit Andrew that this might be the person who'd taken his lunch. Should he ask?

Once out of line, Andrew hurried to his table. He ate four of his chicken nuggets, leaving 2 for David and some tator tots. As soon as both his friends looked away, he hurried off with the rest of his lunch to David's table.

"I noticed you have no lunch today," Andrew said to David. "Want the rest of mine? I'm not hungry anymore."

David didn't glance up, but mumbled "Sure." Andrew hurried away, feeling as embarrassed as David had looked.

"Where'd you go?" Tom and Steven asked as soon as he'd returned.

"I was done with my lunch," Andrew replied. "Wanna play kickball during recess?" he asked, changing the subject.

"Sure," his friends agreed.

_________________

The next day, when Davy came in to sit at his desk, he found a granola bar waiting for him. Who could've put it there? he wondered. He glanced at Andrew, sitting at his desk, busily writing something. Then he grabbed the granola bar and went to the bathroom to eat it.

_________________

That same day as the lunch bell rang, David hurried with the rest of his class to line up. He didn't bother going to the coatroom, since he knew he had no lunch. But as Andrew passed by with his lunch box, he shoved a paper bag with "David" written on it into Davy's hands. Davy glanced about; no one had noticed. He peered into the bag. He could see a bag of cookies, a banana and a sandwich. Embarrassed, but thankful, he made his way out of the classroom with the rest of the class.

After school that afternoon, near the buses, David stopped Andrew and asked, "Where'd you get the lunch?"

"I brought it," Andrew replied. "Why don't you come over to my house today?"

David looked at him skeptically, then agreed.

From that day on, Andrew and David became fast friends. Andrew always brought him lunch or money to buy some if there was something they like being sold.

Andrew learned from David that his mother and father were divorced, that his mother didn't care what he did, as long as he was out of her sight, and that she used to throw him out of the house if he'd ask for food or was caught taking some out of the fridge. She believed him a nuisance and said he reminded her of his father. If he wanted food, he should earn it.

So David came to live at Andrew's house. Since he'd be at his house all the time anyway, and in the end, Andrew's family adopted him. They always went around together and were quite proud to say they were twins.

The end.

Mission to Dallas

2009-10-31T20:32:00.016-04:00

Two evenings ago, after we had finished eating Alexandra’s birthday cake and were sitting around the table, Larissa sprang the news.

Timidly, quietly, looking at the table as she spoke, she said, “I want to go to Dallas, too.”

It was another case in not pushing and allowing God to do the work.

Once you’ve been on a Global Expeditions (GE) trip, you’re on their call list. Jacob went on three mission trips with GE (two to Mexico, one to Guatemala), Alexandra went on one (Honduras), and I’ve been a leader on two trips (Mexico with Jacob, Honduras with Alexandra). So in the early fall, we started getting phone calls about joining a holiday trip this year.

“I don’t think so,” I said when I answered the call for Jacob. “I don’t think that the timing is right. We’ve already been on two family mission trips this year – to Mexico in the spring and to Ukraine in the summer. Maybe next summer…”

But Global Expeditions kept calling. They called Alexandra. They called me. They called Jacob again. The answer was always the same. Not now. Not this time.

And then God did something with my heart. I love travel, and I do love mission trips. Wouldn’t it be great to get away from my desk and computer where I spend all my work and homeschooling hours, writing manuals for my employer and schedules for my kids. I sit at a desk and correct assignments, and I sit at the desk reading through grammar books, textbooks, and answer keys. Perhaps I could get away over Christmas break, maybe with one of the girls. Living with a tribe in Panama sounded exciting…

But it still didn't feel right, so I kept telling the Global Expeditions folks no.

Then I read Same Kind of Different As Me in three sittings. (I couldn't put it down.) There are so many needs in our own inner cites. I never before wanted to go on a mission trip to an inner city, but God whispered to my heart, Go! My husband said how could he say no to something like this?

Normally they don't pester, but now I know why those Global Expeditions reps kept calling. On their next call I said, “Yes, I’ll go. I’d like to go to Dallas as a Country Assistant.”

Now you don’t always get to pick and choose your trips when you’re a leader, and the holiday trips usually get Country Assistant volunteers quickly. But to my amazement, there was no Country Assistant for the Dallas trip yet. But why should I be surprised if God had put it in my heart to go there?

Although I would have been happy to serve on this youth mission trip without any of my children with me, I did invite all three to join me. It didn’t take Alexandra long to decide to go. Just mention children, and Alexandra will be there. This trip is about working with inner city children.

Alexandra tried to convince Larissa to go, but she just didn’t want to.

“I didn’t want to go on the Honduras trip,” Alexandra admitted. “Meet all these strangers and sleep with them in the same room? I only went because you made me,” she said to me.

I was shocked! When we had gone two years ago, I thought that she was just as excited about going as I was. Alexandra admitted that she was glad that she went, and that she grew more spiritually during that 10-day mission trip then ever before. But she hadn’t wanted to go.

I had considered telling Larissa that she should get out of her comfort zone and let God use her. But I’m glad that God told her before I did.

Sweet sixteen

2009-10-30T20:58:00.003-04:00

Yesterday we gained another driver-to-be in the house. Alexandra turned sixteen, and following the precedent set by her brother, I took her to the Department of Motor Vehicles and she got her learner’s permit right on her birthday. She even managed to pass the eye exam without glasses (unfortunately, she rarely wears them). And true to her character, she scored a perfect 100% on the written test.

Because Jacob needed the van to drive to his mechanics class in the morning, Alexandra and I got to the Motor Vehicle Department just before lunch. I’d expected a long line, but there was none, not a single person waiting! It took less than an hour to fill out all the paperwork, take the test, and pay the $92.50 for the permit.

Then I offered to take Alexandra out to lunch.

“I’m not eating until supper,” she announced.

The last several months, she’s been doing a lot of fasting – skipping a meal or two during the day, or not eating for 24 hours. Considering how thin she is, I’m not so happy about this frequent fasting, but she doesn’t do it for weight loss; she does it because the Bible says to pray and fast. I know that she prayed and fasted for our pastor when he had a very serious operation last month, an operation he was told he had only 50% chance of surviving, yet he was back in church within a week! So I said nothing about the day’s meal-skipping.

“Where were you going to take me?” she asked as I turned the van towards home, her interest obviously aroused.

“Olga’s Omelets,” I said. This restaurant specializes in omelets and egg dishes. I had taken all three kids there only once, but it was many years ago, and they still talked about it.

Alexandra sat in silence for a while.

“Where is Olga’s Omelets? How would you get there?”

“I’d take a right on one of these cross streets and drive right through the city. It’s in the city on Commons Avenue.”

More silence.

“OK, let’s go,” Alexandra said, her willpower broken or perhaps her fast put off for a day.

I certainly didn’t want to push her to give up something that she’d promised herself, but I was glad when she agreed to go to lunch with me. This day she was uncharacteristically friendly to me as we went for her permit, and I wanted the moment to last. Unfortunately, for the last several months, she has not been very pleasant toward me and even announced to others that she and I are very different, and she didn’t like me, to which a girl in her youth group said, “I think your mother is pretty cool.” No other mothers in our church travel to Africa, lead mission trips to Mexico, or cook weird (that is, Middle Eastern, Thai, Mexican, etc.) food. Perhaps that embarrasses her.

“She’ll come around,” my husband has assured me over and over as Alexandra’s teenage moods pushed me out of her world.

Didn’t I read somewhere that girls tend to pull away from their mothers during these years? Doesn’t that have something to do with growing less dependent or asserting their own individuality as women? Whatever it is, it’s painful for me. She doesn’t open up to me and often responds in curt, one-word answers. But she fawns on Dad.

At the restaurant, we talked like old friends, shared bites from each other’s omelets, and discussed the mission trip that we’re going to take to Dallas over Christmas break. Through that lunch, I had a peak at what our relationship might become one day after Alexandra outgrows her teenage moods.

Although I had wanted both daughters to go with me on this mission trip, perhaps it was better that Larissa didn’t want to go and that I would spend one on one time with Alexandra.

This moment in time

2009-10-15T20:24:00.002-04:00

Driving home from the grocery store last night, I had an odd thought: for this moment in time, all is well. And the odd thing is, I expect things to go on indefinitely just as they are right now.

Mom is back home and functioning OK. Dad is still sitting in front of the TV hours on end, barely walking from bed to chair and back again, but still alive and not even seriously ill – and he's almost 90. My kids are all living at home. They're all teenagers and sometimes we get a bit too much togetherness, but I can't imagine them not living with me, not being here.

For this moment in time, this fall day, this is reality for me: all is well.

It's hard to grasp that idea of perpetually passing time, especially when the passage of time steals away people. My brother died last year, so I'll never hear his voice again, share a story, or have him offer me a cup of coffee in his office. A cousin died not too long ago; we'll never walk together in his village in Ukraine. My mother's friend has a husband with Alzheimer's, another thief of memories and times gone by.

Even though Jacob doesn't know what he'll do next year, what he'll study or whether he'll work (I think he'll end up at the community college), this is trivial, a small trial in the story of his life, and mine.

But my parents and elderly friends and family, they're at the end of the bench, as one man said. Just not sure which one will get pushed off next. Then again, it could be someone young, like my brother.

But this evening, as fall settles in and frost nips the leaves and sends them whirling to the ground, all is well. Chaotic at times, exhausting, full of rabbits and goats, too many of us cooking and too few cleaning up, but I wouldn't have it any other way.

Jumping another hurdle

2009-10-01T21:06:00.003-04:00

That’s what it feels like to complete each of the tests in the Apologia science curriculum. Today the girls jumped hurdle number two in Biology. Fourteen more to go. There are sixteen modules in the book.

I think I sweat out those tests at least as much as my kids do. They aren’t the multiple-choice tests that they used to have in public school; these are all short answer!

I assign the test. The kids put it off. They do all their other subjects so the test would come too late in the day when they’re exhausted. They push it off to another day. They study. They procrastinate some more. I assign them material from the next module to push them along.

Then they take the leap: they take the test.

I nervously grade it.

They pass.

On to the next module. The next hurdle is about two weeks away.

Help has arrived!

2009-09-29T17:16:00.005-04:00

We couldn’t go on running to feed my dad at his house four times per day while Mom recovers from her operation.

My sister was always late to work because she had the breakfast shift. I had to take time off from work in the middle of the day to fix and serve lunch.

The evening hours didn’t interfere with work, but they interfered with homeschooling. And they do take time out of the day. It was stressful.

And Dad, instead of being thankful, complained to Mom about any little thing we did “wrong.” Not giving him a glass of buttermilk at night. Serving an undercooked egg (even when my brother cooked it exactly 2 min. 10 sec. like Dad instructed). Not giving him enough vegetables. Or water. It was always something, and hearing about his complaints was downright demoralizing.

“We have to get someone in here to take over the breakfast and lunch duties,” I suggested last weekend after we realized that a nurse, even if covered by insurance, would only give him his pills. And that wasn’t the problem. He takes his own pills.

“We should ask around for some middle-aged or older Ukrainian woman,” suggested my youngest brother. “Someone who speaks Ukrainian and cooks the Ukrainian food that Dad's used to. The best way to find someone like that is by word of mouth.”

I sighed inside and braced myself for delivering a lot more lunches.

That was Saturday morning. So we each made a call and put out the word.

By 2:00, we had interview and hired our rescuer. Lydia was definitely sent there by God! She’s 64, has 15 years experience with cranky old people, and was a take-charge kind of woman, yet compassionate and has a servant heart. And my father loved her!

She’s also from our church.

God bless you, Lydia! And good luck to you!

Struggling

2009-09-23T23:29:00.003-04:00

Homeschooling is coming along. The kids are doing labs, taking tests (the completion of each Apologia science test is a celebration), writing reports, giving oral reports, and even learning Russian. The school year is going reasonably well.

But I'm a mess. Working a 40-hour-per-week job and teaching stretch me to the utmost. I'm completely, utterly inundated with work just juggling those two tasks because, after all, I still cook and do some housework. But my mother's sudden hospitalization has driven me to the very edge of the precipice. I have moments of losing it.

In a few days she'll be released from the hospital, but if she goes home, my father's demands could kill her. He thinks only about himself, and whether she is able to serve him or not, he will expect it. And she is so used to that role of servant that she would probably fetch or clean or do whatever just to get him to stop pestering her. So we kids have to either find some place that will take in my mother while she convalesces or find daily help at home. And even if we do find a place for Mom, we still need to find a person to at least come in daily and feed Dad lunch and do some laundry. I can't possibly take time off daily at lunchtime, drive to Dad's, fix him a meal, and go back to work, not even if I work from home. It just tears up the day. If all goes well, Mom will be healing for two to three months! I'd lose my mind.

If Dad was a pleasant person, appreciative of our efforts, flexible – perhaps we could do it. But he is not. He has very particular demands. He eats specific foods prepared a certain way. He cuts tomatoes with a specific knife, as my sister-in-law found out when she gave him THE WRONG KNIFE. But the worst thing is that he so often puts us down that none of us want to be around him. He's close to 90 years old, frail, dependent – but so critical and unpleasant that all of us kids are really struggling with serving him.

Mom in the hospital

2009-09-22T23:45:00.003-04:00

I had just come home from shopping for a birthday gift for my niece when my husband met me in front of the house and said, "The party is canceled. Your mother is in the hospital."

That was on Saturday. Days later, I still haven't caught my breath.

My two brothers and sister had beaten me to the emergency room. X-rays. CAT scan. Diagnosis: ulcer had perforated her duodenum and the contents spilled into her abdominal cavity. Without surgery to clean her out and sew up the hole, she would die of infection.

Prep for operation. Saying good-bye – just in case. Waiting. Praying. Driving home to check on Dad. Waiting some more. Returning to the hospital. Waiting…

Mom made it through surgery and is recovering well, though she's in a lot of pain and sometimes confused due to the medications. But it's Dad who's put a wrench in my already overbooked life. He's 89 and can barely walk, and then only with a walker. He goes from bed to easy chair, where he sits all day watching TV, dozing, doing sudoku, dozing, cruising the Internet on his laptop, dozing some more… Then at the end of the day, he shuffles back to his bed. He needs someone to prepare his meals and place them in front of his easy chair, so my siblings and I divided up the days. I get to prepare the lunches and wash the dishes from the previous meal.

I won't get into details, but it's not been easy. My dad's personality is the opposite of pleasant. Each of us dread our shift. I know it's un-Christian, and I go to the ends of the earth to serve others, but I have a hard time serving my own father. I know this, yet I cringe each time I go over there. Years of putdowns and criticism never go away. I'm an adult – been an adult for decades! – and could easily push his frail body over, yet I still fear him. I'd rather serve a stranger. It's his tongue.

…no man can tame the tongue. It is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison. (James 3:8)

In fact, over the weekend, my brothers, sister and I reminisced about his insults over the years. How sad. Unfortunately, that's how we'll always remember him. For his tongue.

We can't wait for Mom to get back home, but even when she does, she herself will need care! All of us work, and I work full-time AND homeschool three kids.

Sigh.

A year ago today...

2009-09-14T22:29:00.006-04:00

This was the day, a year ago, when my brother Greg was taken off life support. His accident was on September 11, a date that will never slip by unnoticed. Technically, he died on September 13, the day he went brain dead. It's been a year. Seems longer. Much longer.

It still bothers me how my brother's affairs all ended. No will. No administrator. No estate. House being foreclosed. Everything for naught. Meaningless.

The house is still unsold, unoccupied, with gutters that need cleaning and a yard that sorely needs care. The lawn that Greg so painstakingly planted and tended is full of weeds. The flower gardens he created are overgrown or emptied, the hostas dug up and replanted in other gardens, including a memorial garden I created in my own yard. It's painful to go to his house, painful to think about his death, painful to think even of him. Still. A year later.

She drowned the candy thermometer in caramel

2009-09-13T18:44:00.008-04:00

Lately I've been obsessed with cakes - I mean tortes.

I've been baking tortes since I was 14, but only last week did I learn the definition of torte : a cake that uses ground nuts instead of flour.

OK, there's more to the definition than that, but my cakes - I means tortes - never had flour in them. Lots of nuts and eggs and butter and sugar, but no flour. But I digress...

I've been obsessed with tortes the last few weeks, ever since I began trying out new recipes with the hopes that the girls can make a small business out of baking tortes. So I've been outdoing myself brainstorming, researching, and trying out new recipes. Hazelnut Dacquoise. Chocolate Truffle Torte. Mocha. How would Dark Chocolate Hazelnut Truffle Torte sell? Would an almond buttercream taste good in a hazelnut torte, or should I put in a layer of chocolate? What if I put crushed hazelnuts in one layer of the praline buttercream? I have to hold myself back from going to the kitchen to make yet another torte when my refrigerator is already filled with sweets - or when I have homeschool plans to make or homework to grade.

Until I perfect the recipes I want to feature, I haven't involved the girls in the testing, so they've been doing some testing of their own. They love to bake just as much as I do, and I never know when suddenly they'll spread out cookie tins and mix concoctions of oatmeal and brown sugar, or, more recently, caramel chocolate bars with nuts. Mmmmmm!

But alas, accidents do happen, and when I walked into the kitchen last week, I found my digital candy thermometer, which you need for making caramel, a little... um... sticky. All the words had disappeared from the buttons, and the label was curled back.

It was an expensive batch of caramel chocolate bars, but you know, they were worth it. I just love when the girls cook and bake because they want to, not because I ask them to.

This book is actually interesting!

2009-09-12T15:56:00.003-04:00

Those were Jacob's words a few chapters into the first book I assigned him this school year.

What a sad reflection on the literature that I’d assigned him in the past. Not that all books I gave Jacob were boring; in fact, he had enjoyed the livelier books, such as The Red Badge of Courage and Never Cry Wolf. But during the summer I had decided that I would not assign him another book that I myself have not read or one that I didn't find interesting. Looking back, I wonder why on earth I felt that I had to assign him classic books for his own good. If he doesn’t like to read, why give him books that are difficult even for me, an avid reader? Just so he can say he read them???

I had found A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah interesting. It was also unsettling and eye-opening, but very interesting. I guess Jacob found it interesting, too. It's opened his eyes to a new and previously unknown world - and he enjoyed the experience.

I guess I succeeded.

Exploring Social Injustice through Literature

2009-09-11T13:40:00.029-04:00

Last year I was bent on teaching Jacob the classics. Moby Dick. Walden Pond. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. Yaaawn...

Oh, Jacob read them all right – but they didn’t do anything to instill a love of reading in him. In the end, I’m not sure what he got from these books. He did learn a few things – and a lot of perseverance. And that literature can be really boring. But that’s not what I wanted to teach.

So this year, Jacob's senior year, I changed my approach. None of the books I selected are classics, not in the stood-the-test-of-time way or on the list of must-reads in the local high schools. In fact, when I pre-read some of the books that are on the local high school’s list of assigned literature, I was horrified! For example, I would never assign Born on the Fourth of July by Ron Kovic, with its foul language, focus on sexual thoughts, and visits to brothels, not even if it does give insight to what a wounded Vietnam War veteran goes through. And it wasn’t even well written.

So this year I compiled my own list. I’ve read all these books, so I know what’s in them. I chose them because they touched my heart and taught me something new. And they weren't hard to read.

Yes, all these books have a theme. They aren’t uplifting, and although some have happy endings, what the subjects live through is heartrending. I’m hoping to arouse both awareness and empathy. So I’ve decided to call this course "Exploring Social Injustice through Literature."

Here is the book list:

A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah is the autobiographical account of a 12-year-old boy who got separated from his family during a brutal civil war in Sierra Leone, West Africa, and how, after struggling to survive on his own, he ends up abducted into the army. The book describes the atrocities of the war, mass slaughters, and how children are brainwashed and drugged to become killing machines. It's a very a disturbing and powerful book.

Sold by Patricia McCormick is a story of sexual slavery, a heart-breaking account of a 13-year-old Nepali girl, Lakshima, who is sold into prostitution by her stepfather and transported to a brothel in India. This difficult topic is handled sensitively. The book is written in free verse. It reads like poetry and hints at the horrors that Lakshima lives through in terse, but poignant language. Although the book is a work of fiction, it is based on true lives and depicts the horrors of forced child prostitution faced by an estimated 300,000 girls worldwide.

City of Joy by Dominique Lapierre - the book, NOT the movie! (The movie was made into a love story, but the original book most definitely is not.) Over 20 years ago, I read this moving true tale of a destitute peasant who ends up as a rickshaw driver living in a slum in Calcutta, a Polish priest who came to live with the poorest of the poor, and an American doctor who joins the priest to help in the slum. Scenes from this stirring book remain with me to this day - the intimate details of the daily lives of the poor, their desperation, and the self-sacrifice of those who try to help them. A detailed and gut-wrenching view of poverty.

Slave: My True Story by Mende Nazer is an autobiography of a village girl in Sudan who was kidnapped, raped, and transported north to the capital city of Khartoum and sold into slavery. Describes the conflict between the Arab north and the black south, and the Arabs' attitude towards the blacks. Mende was severely mistreated, humiliated, and abused until she finally escaped to freedom. Sadly, there are many more slaves like her all around the world today, hidden and suffering in silence.

Where Little Ones Cry: Tragic Stories from War-torn Liberia by Harvey Yoder is a collection of true short stories about different children and how they survived the civil war that recently tore apart Liberia in West Africa. Most stories are not that well-written, but the book is informative, describing the horrors of war from different people's perspectives. My favorite passage, which rings so true, is from a first-person story called "War!" as told by a Liberian woman:

I almost have to laugh now when I think of how war was presented in the history books. Generals and plans. Heroes and marches. Lots of trumpets blowing and people making speeches. Maps showing where armies marched and who controlled which countries. A few pictures of the destruction of buildings and cities.

That is not war. That is just what they tell you about war. War is much more than that. War is screams, death, and horror. War isn't real until it visits you personally...

Growing Up Empty: The Hunger Epidemic in America by Loretta Schwartz-Nobel is about hunger and poverty in America. I read it because of a comment on this blog. Some parts of the book are like a textbook, but the stories of the invisible poor around us are a real eye-opener. I will probably assign only a few select chapters. The stories of an upper middle class wife and mother reduced to poverty when her husband runs off with another woman (and all the money), and the description of the hardships of families in the armed forces were both a revelation to me.

Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust by Immaculee Ilibagiza is firsthand account of hiding in a bathroom for 91 days to survive the 1994 genocide as frenzied Hutus slaughtered Tutsi "cockroaches." She writes how her faith in God helped her survive the genocide and forgive her enemies. All this was happening while Jacob was toddling around the house with his Playskool toys.

When Invisible Children Sing by Chi Cheng Huang is a memoir of a Harvard medical student who went to Bolivia to work with orphans in Bolivia and expanded his ministry to reach out to street children who live in squalor and inhale paint thinner to dull their appetites and senses. Describes the day-to-day life of these children, and what keeps them on the streets.

Under the Overpass: A Journey of Faith on the Streets of America by Mike Yankoski describes how he, an affluent college student, decided to test his faith and live with the homeless for seven months. It gives an insider's view of homelessness in America.

Jacob already read the books below, but if he hadn't, I'd include them as well:

Tears of My Soul by Hyun Hee Kim is the memoir of a woman who planted a bomb that blew up Korean Air Flight 858 in 1987. She described growing up in North Korea, being indoctrinated by Communist thinking, then being recruited and trained as a covert-operations expert. Although the author was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death for her terrorist crime, she was later pardoned. She described her deprogramming in South Korea and her redemption through Christianity. I couldn't put this book down and read it at one sitting.

A Child Called It by Dave Pelzer is a fascinating and horrifying autobiography of a child who was ostracized by his family and sadistically tortured by his alcoholic and (I believe demon-possesed) cruel mother. Hard to imagine that anyone would treat another human being like this, much less her own child. An inside look into child abuse and what the child is thinking.

First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers by Loung Ung is a personal account of surviving the Khmer Rouge takeover of Cambodia from 1970 to 1979 from the viewpoint of a young child. Since she started out as a middle class city girl but ended up a war refugee, it makes me wonder whether my life might not have a sudden and unexpected turn of events that could lead to completely unexpected results. Powerful descriptions of the horrors of the Khmer Rouge.

Even though the subjects of these books are emotionally difficult, I think that Jacob will enjoy reading them. Hopefully, they'll touch his heart.

Ouch!

2009-09-06T20:45:00.007-04:00

Making praline paste can hurt - if you're clumsy like me. I pushed a lone hazelnut into the 370-degree F caramel (I measured the temperature before pouring it), and now I have a blister to remind me not to repeat that maneuver.

My girls keep wanting to earn money, and a way that we've brainstormed is to bake and sell cakes. I'm not talking about the usual birthday cake from a mix; I never even tasted one of those until I was almost grown up. In my home, I grew up on European tortes, cakes baked with pecans and blanced almonds and walnuts, icings made of praline creams laced with Frangelica and mouthwatering chocolate tinged with rum. What I thought was a normal birthday cake in my family is something only the fanciest bakeries can produce.

The idea of selling cakes sprang from tea and cake that I served the youth group after a mission training meeting at our house last winter. As one mother picked up her son, I handed her a piece of George's birthday cake.

"Where did you get this?" she asked after one bite.

When I told her I baked it, she asked whether she could order one for her next party. She still hasn't, but the seed was planted.

So before we dive back into school and (hopefully) launch the girls' baking business, I'm testing out a few new recipes. The girls learn them right along with me. Yesterday's Chocoloate Truffle Cake was a real hit at today's barbecue at my sister's house. And tonight's test cake is has praline buttercream. But I had to make the praline paste.

Ouch!

Things falling into place

2009-09-04T17:49:00.005-04:00

We returned from our visit to Ukraine in mid-August. But even after a few days readjustment, I couldn't face homeschooling. I felt overwhelmed by the complexity of the high school subjects I need to teach (all three of my kids are in high school!), the paperwork I still needed to turn in to the school district, the projects at work, the mess that I had to sort through in my home office before I could teach, the schoolbooks I needed to order... It all bore down on me.

However, I had to face it: the beginning of school was just around the corner. And somehow, though I can't clearly remember how, things began to fall into place.

First it was the math. We had a tutor for all three last year, but Jacob and Alexandra didn't feel challenged enough. Alexandra had always been in advanced math, but she was bored by the slow pace set by the tutor, who admitted that the level of high school math she was teaching my older two kids stretched her abilities.

I don't recall whether I mentioned the community college pre-calculus class or they heard about it from Peter, a homeschooled friend, but they jumped at the chance to take a challenging class. The best part was that the college class is being offered specifically for homeschoolers in a church building, not on campus. I signed up Jacob and Alexandra.

Next was Physics, which I thought would be the bane of my existence this coming year. I had decided to teach Physics to Jacob, and to double up Alexandra and Larissa and teach them both Biology. I know Biology well – I have a B.S. in Biology – so that subject doesn't stress me, but I fully expected to read the Physics text hand in hand with Jacob, staying up late nights to relearn Physics as I did with Chemistry last year.

Then my friend Nita mentioned that the homeschooling center was offering not just the lab, which is what I had thought, but the entire Physics course. (Driving all that way just to do a lab didn't seem worth it.) A physicist would explain the concepts, provide the materials and do the labs with the students, and be available to answer questions – questions I'd be hard-pressed to answer without investing a lot of time reading and studying. What a relief! I signed up Jacob right away. Then Alexandra decided that she, too, wanted to take Physics to get it out of the way. "But I'll do Biology, too, so that next year I don't have to take a science," she explained.

The math class is at a church 18 miles away on Mondays and Wednesdays, 1:50 – 3:30 PM. Then Physics runs 4:00 – 6:00 PM on Wednesdays, giving Jacob just enough time to drive the 8 miles or so from the church to the homeschooling center. He'll be driving Alexandra and Peter as well, which will be a real help.

Jacob still wants to take a mechanics class as an elective, and I have to figure out how and when before I write my IHIPs (Individualized Home Instruction Plans), but what a relief that a couple of tough subjects have fallen into place!

Burned out

2009-08-31T15:28:00.005-04:00

The past year of homeschooling – my first year homeschooling all three children! – was rough. Really rough. By June, I was completely burned out.

Partly it was difficult because my children are older – two were in high school, and one in middle school – and the subjects are harder. I had to jump in with advanced classes, like Chemistry, which I taught myself.

Partly it was trying because for the majority of the school year, I was not well. I still struggled with fatigue and chest pains, symptoms of lupus.

The other thing that made teaching challenging is that I work full-time. Granted, due to illness and God’s hand in the illness and work, I ended up working from home for the most part, and only part-time (30 hours per week) for the first half year of school. But work time is time that I can’t be doing homeschooling. Thus all my planning and grading was done in the evenings, often after everyone went to bed. Even after grading assignments and printing out detailed daily schedules for the next day’s studies, I would lie down in bed and read for an hour or so. Sometimes I read Chemistry; other times I pre-read literature. I read a lot in the last year! And I always turned in well after midnight.

I was so worn out by teaching this past school year that I did no schoolwork over the summer. None. I had hoped to get materials ready, books ordered, more literature pre-read, and IHIPs written. But I did absolutely nothing. I read for pleasure. I dug in my garden. I procrastinated.

Now I have to hit the ground running.

First day of school... sort of

2009-08-27T23:01:00.007-04:00

With all my crazy work hours (another late night at the computer writing user manuals tonight) and because I don't yet have all my books and even courses figured out, it's been hard to get together a "normal" full-day schedule for the kids for that official starting day. So I finally did what I should have done a week or two ago: I just dove in with a couple of subjects rather than the full load.

I started the girls in Biology. At least the Apologia curriculum is very cut and dry: 16 chapters, start at page 1, exercises right in the book. English, on the other hand, is always a little of this and a little of that. So I started with Biology… and English – the structured science, and the smorgasbord of vocabulary, grammar, reading, and writing.

This school year Alexandra, in grade 11, is going to study Biology with Larissa, in grade 9, while Jacob will study Physics (gulp!). I like to double them up on the sciences. It's easier on me to have only two subjects rather than three when they start asking hard questions that I have to look up. To be honest, I end up reading entire chapters and trying to keep up with them in the science courses. So it would be tough to do with three high school sciences. Two is difficult enough!

Since I was I Biology major, I'm not afraid of that course. But Physics!? I never quite understood Physics, and I didn't have a good teacher for the subject. So that's the course that I'll be reading and studying right along with my son. But I have another day or two before I dive into Physics because he's been working for Dad in general contracting, making some money and learning new skills.

Meanwhile, I'm still planning, making calls about college level math and mechanics, ordering the microscopes and more Russian books… It's going to be quite a year. Hope I survive without getting sick again.

Overtime

2009-08-26T20:45:00.005-04:00

Just as I was getting ready to dive into intensive scheduling (I had pulled out the Physics book last night) and IHIP writing, work gets in the way. At a sudden emergency meeting this morning for which I had less than an hour's notice, my boss told me that I have until tomorrow to write a basic user manual.

"It's based on the old manual. Just switch out the illustrations," she said.

Yeah, sure.

First, the illustrations hadn't even been created, so the illustator had to work overtime to draw them. Hours later, I'm still working on the callouts for this completely different product. What are all these parts called anyway? Isn't it great that I get to name them? Also, back at home this evening, I discovered that I need still more illustrations. And I think that the illustrations and/or the steps in Start Guide for this product, which is frantically being written by another writer, are not correct. But, of course, it's hard to tell when I don't have the product here at home; it's on my office desk at work.

Second, this product is designed completely differently than the previous model, and it does more things. And that means more writing.

A 24-hour turnaround for this manual? Hardly. But I'm getting lots of overtime... No IHIPs yet, though.

Drowning

2009-08-25T15:08:00.004-04:00

It was just too much: full-time work, homeschooling three teenagers, organizing a mission trip for the church youth in the spring, and my regular chores as a wife and mother – plus this blog. Something had to go.

It was the blog.

Much as I love to write and share, it was yet another thing on my "to do" list. And I was already overwhelmed.

So I skipped writing about all the meetings we had before the Mexico mission trip – the spiritual training, logistics and tickets, gathering and sorting used clothing, and taking the excess 15 boxes of used clothing to a local refugee aid center.

I didn't write about the Mexico mission trip itself or our enchanting time staying in a Chinanteco village in the mountains of Oaxaca.

I never mentioned that my best friend from fifth grade came to see me in the spring and met my family for the very fist time – and that she was in church when we presented a slide show of our trip and received a donation of a vehicle for a pastor that we met in Oaxaca.

I didn't have time to describe the Adobe Dreamweaver course that I took in night school during spring evenings while my husband and kids were in youth group.

I didn't discuss the grind of the rest of the school year – and the euphoria of finally finishing school – and Chemistry – in late June!

I didn't announce that we finally bought a she-goat this summer – nor did I share about the building of the shed and fence, the death of one of the goat's two kids, and the daily chores of feeding and milking. It's been a steep learning curve!

I didn't describe the continuing saga of my deceased brother's estate, the upcoming foreclosure on his house, and all the unresolved issues because the court denied my petition to be the administrator of his estate – and his ex-wife washed her hands of the whole thing. It's still not over…

And who wants to peck at a computer when you can go outside and garden? Certainly not I.

I didn't hint at our summer trip to Ukraine to visit family and teach VBS to local children.

And I certainly didn't describe all the long hours and overtime I put in during the summer writing user manuals before the release of a new product at our company.

Now I'm facing IHIPs (gulp!) and the new school year (gasp!) with my oldest a senior who doesn't know what he wants to do next year.

Will I be able to handle this blog again?

A show of enthusiasm

2009-03-18T22:24:00.022-04:00

At 16, almost 17, Jacob doesn’t get excited very often. He might show some enthusiasm over a sports car or electronic gadget, but not over things to do with animals or nature. Like many teens, he’d become a bit jaded. So when I suggested that he accompany me to the woods behind our house to at least see the taps on the maple trees, it didn’t surprise me that he declined.

Although Jacob initially showed no interest in the pots of water-like liquid that I started boiling on Sunday, by Wednesday, the sweet, golden fluid in the steaming pot had become more concentrated and tasted distinctly of maple syrup, just more diluted. Jacob loves maple syrup. Tasting that concoction seemed to awaken a tiny bit of interest in him.

“Wait, I’ll come with you,” he decided.

I was going to check the 20 or so buckets in the woods to see whether any were overflowing, and if so, I’d pour off a bit so as not to waste the precious sap. Since it was our neighbor who tapped the trees, I didn’t want to just help myself to large amounts of sap, but if they were overflowing, pouring some off the top would leave room for more to fill through the rest of the day. Besides, JD did tell me I could help myself to some.

Larissa ran ahead of me to show Jacob the tapped trees.

“Look, the bark’s wet. This one’s overflowing,” I said.

Larissa showed Jacob how to remove the cover from the metal bucket. He took the bucket off the hook and poured a bit of sap into our pail. There were so many buckets overflowing that we soon filled our small plastic pail. We went home and poured our find into some pots, then returned to the woods with two plastic pails.

At this point, Jacob was hooked. He sprinted from tree to tree checking how full the buckets were. Almost all were overflowing. He showed enthusiasm, and yes, even excitement over gathering so much sap. We brought home five pails of it.

How much maple syrup would we get? We did some calculations…

Calculations:

Concentration of maple sap to syrup is roughly 40 to 1 (if I start with 40 cups of sap, I’ll get one cup of maple syrup).

1 bucket = 2 gallons
We brought home 5 buckets = 10 gallons
At 16 cups per gallon = 160 cups sap
160 divided by 40 = 4 cups or 1 quart!

We don’t’ have the right equipment for collecting and boiling down sap into syrup. By the time we were done collecting sap, we had filled every pot in the house. I set four pots boiling on the kitchen stove in addition to the two on the wood-burning stove, and there was still more sap in our five-gallon water container we used for camping…

The house became a steam bath. Condensation covered every window, and by evening every wall. I understood why the cooking down was usually done outdoors.

We haven’t cooked down all the sap yet. (We had gathered some the day before, too.) But we decided to cook down our first batch of syrup. The syrup is ready when the temperature of the boiling liquid is 7.1 to 7.5 degrees F above boiling water, which we determined was 211.9 F this morning. Thus, when our candy thermometer read 219.0 F, we were done! Since Jacob is our most enthusiastic maple syrup lover, he was the one with the thermometer watching the pot.

So far, we got SIX cups of syrup! That was more than we expected. We hadn't realized we'd carried - and boiled - that much sap.

Can’t wait for the girls to make pancakes!

Stomach flu all around

2009-03-16T17:39:00.003-04:00

If we hadn’t visited Grandma on Friday, this wouldn’t have happened. After all, she said that she hadn’t felt well and had a bad case of diarrhea. (She failed to mention that she was nauseous, too.) But the kids really wanted to visit my parents and ask them what it was like to live through World War II, so I agreed to go. Halfway to my parents’ house – they live just a mile away – I mentioned that maybe it wasn't such a good idea to go over there. Maybe Grandma was sick with something (stomach flu did occur to me), but we were on the way, so I just told the kids to keep their distance and not kiss Grandma. We had a good visit, heard about my mother searching for her dad in Germany, how the Red Cross helped to reunite them, how my dad used to ignore air raid sirens because they went off daily at the same time and nothing ever happened, and then how his building was bombed soon after he left Dresden. Had he stayed in Dresden, he would have been in that building when it was destroyed...

On Sunday morning, 36 hours after our visit, Alexandra started throwing up. Larissa joined her a hour or two later. My mom called during the morning to tell me Dad was sick with the stomach flu so we shouldn’t come over.

“Don’t worry, Mom, we won’t come. I have my own two here with the stomach flu.”

While George and Jacob when to morning and evening church services, I spent the day at home with the girls. Sunday evening, Jacob retired to bed with a pail by his bedside.

Today classes were cancelled, the math tutor notified, and the kids had a low-key day hanging around the house sharing memories and looking at home videos of their childhoods.

Although I have a stomachache and I’m eating very little, I managed to function normally. I know that this is my body’s manifestation of the flu, and I thank God for not being truly sick (although I bet I’m contagious).

Since George didn’t go to my parents’ house, he was just exposed to the flu yesterday morning. The 36-hour point will come this evening…

Maple syrup from OUR backyard?!

2009-03-15T23:41:00.018-04:00

When Larissa came in after a walk in our woods last week and told me that someone had tapped many trees, I was stunned. I’ve lived here over 20 years and no one had tapped trees before. I didn’t know that there were trees that could be tapped! Not that they were my trees; only a small part of the woods actually belongs to us. It’s just that no one seemed to use the woods at all other than our family. We have bonfires and cook over the fire. George cuts a tree now and then and Jacob chops it into firewood. I’ve dug up ferns to transplant into my garden. And the girls spend hours in the woods, hiking, stalking deer, spending time in nature. They know where the deer sleep, where the screech owl nests, and where the skunk has its den. We’ve always thought of the woods as “ours.”

So who was tapping “our” trees? We wanted to find who the mystery tapper was and considered leaving a note on a tree by the pails. But in the end, we didn’t have to. This Saturday, Larissa burst in.

“I think someone’s collecting the sap. Could you go with me and see?”

That’s how we met our new neighbor, JD. JD doesn’t live next to us; he lives w-a-y behind us in a house on the top of a hill overlooking our neighborhood. He owns the lion’s share of the woods that my daughters play in. And he had just moved in six months ago. Since JD works as a nature guide when he’s not working as a Language Arts teacher, he knows by the bark which are the sugar maples.

“But you can tap any maple. It’s just that sugar maples have the highest sugar content,” he said.

I learned all kinds of things about maple sugaring this weekend:

- That it takes about 43 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup.

- That you finish boiling sap when it reaches 7 to 7.5 degrees above the boiling point of the water (the water boils at different temperatures, depending on elevation and pressure).

- That I can make maple syrup from trees in my backyard!

JD was kind enough to allow me to take some sap. So this weekend for the first time ever, I made maple syrup by placing large pots of sap on our wood-burning stove. I suppose we can eat it later this summer when we’re eating our other wild foods. Mmm!

Tandem story #3

2009-03-15T06:53:00.007-04:00

Perhaps you've had enough tandem stories by now, but I just to share this one. This is the story that when I read aloud, I realized my blunder and laughed so hard that tears were rolling down my cheeks and the words were coming out in gulps. Larissa had to take the paper away from me and read the rest of the story to the others. You see, after Larissa wrote that the horses had to walk, I immediately continued the story and had the horses canter, then gallop! And why was there a stream in the desert? I obviously had not been a careful reader as I bungled the story and blindly added on contadicting information.

Story #3

The frightening thunderstorm finally stopped, and the sun peeked out from behind the receding clouds.

Hannah stood already dressed looking out at the beautiful sunrise. Today would be an exciting day so she’d gotten up early to make it last as long as possible.

She hurried into the kitchen and grabbed an apple for her pet rabbits. Actually, they weren’t really pets because they were to be eaten. Soon she was done with all her chores and now she had nothing to do but wait for her parents to get up and take her to the BLM headquarters where the horse roundup would start.

- - -

Two hours later, Hannah was sitting astride her horse, Appy, with about twenty other riders. Everyone was to go out together as as soon as they spotted a herd, they would get around it and herd it towards a corral. Of course, most people here were amateurs, so who knew what could happen.

“Alright everyone,” said the leader. “Just a few rules. Stay within sight of other people and stay safe. Now let’s go.”

Hannah was riding with her brother Stephen. This was their first time and they didn’t really know what they were doing. They were just going for the fun of it.

Hanna’s horse was grayish-white with a white diamond on the forehead while Stephen’s was all black.

Stephen liked riding horses, but he joked around that he’d much rather have a black Ford Mustang. He went with Hannah because their parents wouldn’t let her go otherwise.

The group trotted off into the desert where Hanna knew the wild herds roamed. She had often gone on trail rides on her own in this area, but she had never actually herded the wild horses.

Hanna looked around to the edge of the horizon. She thought she saw something moving far off in the safebrush. Then the leader had everyone halt.

“See way over there, by that lone tree,” he said, “there’re some horses. But it looks like they’re just stragglers from the rest of the herd. We have to walk now otherwise they will all gallop away.”

Slowly the group plodded over, spreading apart.

“You four,” the leader said to Hannah, Stephen, and two others, “ride over there around back to herd the horses over here.”

They headed over to the wild horses at a canter, but when the wild herd spooked, they took off after it at a gallop. Lucky thing her horse’s gait was so smooth. Hannah wasn’t comfortable racing through unknown territory at such a fast pace.

The wild horses saw the four riders heading their way and bolted. Soon it seemed like a race was underway. Over hills, down valleys, splashing through streams. It seemed that the wild horses could never be caught; they knew their territory well. Stephen secretly hoped they’d get away so he could go home sooner. Hannah wanted to catch them, but still, a small part of her cheered for the wild herd, hoping they could live free for at least another year until the next roundup.

As if they herd could read her thoughts, they suddenly disappeared from view.

“Where did they go?” shouted one of the riders. “I glanced down for a second and they’re gone.”

“But they were in that valley…” said Hannah.

Stephen smiled. He’d seen them walk into a cave, but he’d never tell.

Tandem story #2

2009-03-14T08:25:00.007-04:00

This is another tandem story that we wrote yesterday. The previous story had a great ending, thanks to Alexandra. Like the previous story, this one also included dialogue, which makes any story more interesting. Although this isn't publishable material, the children carried on the story line better than I'd expected.

Story #2

The frightening thunderstorm finally stopped, and the sun peeked out from behind the receding clouds.

Amanita stepped out from under the banana leaf where she’d been hiding during the storm. At this time of year, rains were common in Ghana. She was so tired of the mud, the humidity, the heat. Ever since her mother had died of AIDS, 13-year-old Amanita was the head of household, cooking, tending the goat, sweeping, wiping away tears of her three younger siblings who still didn’t understand that mother was gone, never to come back. But there was no one to wipe away Amanita’s tears as she cried herself to sleep, being careful that her three younger brothers did not see or hear her.

Amanita was so thankful that she had that one goat, a Nubian that she had received as a gift from a Christian man who had come to her village a few months before. The dark goat, whom she named Bella, provided enough milk for all of them, enough to ward away the hunger pains that she had learned to live with most of her life. And now Bella was pregnant. Amanita could not wait for the little kid to be born.

Where was Bella hiding? Amanita wondered as she searched her muddy compound by the thatch hut. She saw movement under a bush.

Unsure, Amanita started towards the bush. It rustled again, but now Amanita could hear a dog barking. Village dogs didn’t bark at goats. What could be hiding here?

All of a sudden someone jumped out from behind the bush. Amanita screamed and turned to run. Then she heard laughing as the village troublemaker fell to the ground cracking up. Amanita turned away in disgust. She had plenty of work to do today and she had to find the goat so her younger brothers could have milk for breakfast.

She headed out to look behind other houses, thinking maybe the goat had wandered into someone else’s yard. Indeed, that’s where she found it, chomping away at a neighbor’s garden. She quickly took her away, making sure nobody saw. The neighbor never said anything anyway so she thought she was fine.

She sat down to milk the goat. She used a plastic bucket the same one she used to get water from the well. When they had drunk most of the milk, she then put it in a plastic water bottle she had found. That way she could get water from the well for the goat. Her village was lucky because they had a well; most villages didn’t. In the day she and her brothers went to the forest. They had to gather firewood for cooking. While they were away, Amanita’s youngest brother stayed home in the hut to make sure Bella didn’t get tangled in the picket line and to be there when Bella started kidding.

Amanita heard a yell. She looked up and saw her youngest brother running towards.

“Amanita, come quick, Belle is kidding, but there is something wrong with her!” he panted.

Dropping her sticks, Amanita hurried after her brother. When she arrived, she found Bella still on her picket straining in labor, her eyes rolling from the pain. The birth sac had emerged and burst but nothing was happening. Amanita knew what to do. She had been with several women when they had given birth.

After half an hour, everything was over. Surprisingly, the kid was light brown unlike her mother. After being licked clean and dry by Bella, the kid got up on wobbly legs and started suckling. Amanita was delighted and thanked God for the tiny female goat, which in time would provide more milk for them, maybe even enough to sell.

Tandem story

2009-03-13T15:08:00.026-04:00

For creative writing today, we wrote a tandem story. Actually four tandem stories.

Tandem means “a group of two or more arranged one behind the other.” Thus a tandem story is one that someone starts then passes off to someone else to continue. You can go back and forth in partners, but the four of us – Jacob, Alexandra, Larissa and I – sat in a circle around a table and passed the story to the right. We had 10 minutes to write (I set a timer), then wherever we were in the story, we had to pass it off. Each time we got a story, we read the story from the beginning, then continued adding to it for another 10 minutes. We did this four times. That fourth and last person had to end the story. No one got any story more than once and had no control over where the story went next.

It was a blast.

When we were done, I read all four stories out loud. I can’t think of when we had so much fun with our homeschooling.

If we read a story too quickly before adding on to it, we made humorous mistakes. As I was reading aloud, I caught one of my own mistakes – I had skimmed over a key detail and contradicted the previous writer – and was laughing so hard that I couldn’t read on. Larissa had to finish for me. In another story, a character introduced by the first writer was completely ignored for the rest of the story as if she didn’t exist. Oops!

We all had a good laugh and plan on doing it again someday, this time having the person who started a story write the ending to his own (now completely different) story.

If I gave everyone a blank sheet of paper to start with, I thought we might take too much time figuring out how to start. Thus, I wrote the same first sentence on each of the four sheets of paper, and we all had to use that sentence as a starting point: The frightening thunderstorm finally stopped, and the sun peeked out from behind the receding clouds.

One of the kids didn’t pay much attention to the first sentence and we had to make a small change in the beginning of that story. We had a good laugh about the sun peeking out in the middle of the night. You can take a story in a different direction, add characters, or simply “tread water” and add lots of details without saying much.

I’m going to share these stories. They probably won’t be as much fun to read as they were to write, but it’s a great exercise that I highly recommend.

(I changed the color of the font for each of the different writers.)

Story #1

The frightening thunderstorm finally stopped, and the xxx moon peeked out from behind the receding clouds.

Even though it was the middle of the night and Josh had barely gotten any sleep, he decided it was a good night to take a ride.

He had just won the grand prize in a raffle and the prize was a brand new Shelby GT-720 Super Snake.

He put on his clothes, grabbed his keys and rushed downstairs. When he came into the garage, he stood a minute and just looked at his new car. He jumped in and twisted the key. The Mustang growled to life. He opened the garage and back out onto the road. Everything was quiet, no one was awake and there were no lights. Josh left his lights off; he could see everything anyway.

His tires hissed on the wet road and made a wet spray in the back. Josh swung the Mustang around a curve and headed the car along the smooth road that wove through the woods. Suddenly he saw a dark shape hurl itself in front of the car. Josh tried to swerve, heard a dull thud, the stopped. He switched on the headlights to see better and slowly got out of the car. Something lay unmoving by his front left tire. Josh crouched down and looked uncertainly at the wounded fox, wondering what to do. He didn’t know what he should do but he felt bad just leaving it there because it definitely was alive. The fox feebly lifted its head and looked painfully at Josh.

How would he explain the fox to his parents? Josh wondered as he delicately lifted the wounded animal. And the blood. Oh, how he didn’t want to stain the interior of his brand new car. But he couldn’t just leave the fox. He decided to take off his shirt and wrap the fox in that. He had many more shirts, but only one car.

The drive home was short and slow. Josh turned off his headlights before he turned into the driveway. He decided to leave the car outside. He would have to confess about his night ride to his parents in the morning; no sense waking them up now.

Josh gingerly picked up the bundled, wounded fox and carried it to his bedroom. He would have to take it to a vet since he didn’t know what to do. He just hoped it would live. For now, all Josh could do is make it comfortable in a cardboard box and some rags that he fetched from his father’s shop area.

- - -

“Josh, what’s in that box of rags?” asked Jessica, Josh’s annoying little sister – at least he thought she was annoying – when she barged into his bedroom at 7:00 AM.

“It’s a long story…” he said.

Jessica knelt by the box and peeked inside. “Aww,” she said. “It’s a little fox. What happened?”

“Like I said,” Josh said crossly, “it’s a long story.”

“It’s hurt,” she announced. “Looks like its leg is broken. Why didn’t you fix it?”

“Fix it?” Josh asked, astonished. “How am I supposed to do that?”

“Like this,” Jess said, and Josh heard a grinding noise as the two pieces of bone came back together.

“Now give me a stick so I can wrap it and splint it.”

Josh obeyed, surprised at how his sister was handling this. At least she was being helpful. Soon the fox was taken care of and Jessica sat by its box, watching it sleep. “…And we’ll keep it forever and its name will be Sir Benjamin, and all my friends will be jealous of my royal pet.”

“Yeah,” Josh said. “Right.” Then, after thinking a moment, he suggested, “Why don’t you go tell Mom and Dad about your new pet? I can hear them talking downstairs.” Josh grinned as his little sister hurried off to tell her news.

“I’m going to school,” he called out to his parents, and hurried out to the car.

“Bye, honey,” he heard his mother call out after him.

Whew

2009-03-11T16:35:00.004-04:00

Every time my children finish – and pass – another Chemistry test, I breathe a sigh of relief. Today was such a day.

After studying for two whole days and not doing any other subjects, Jacob took the Module 11 test. I held my breath. I prayed. Then as time stretched out, I prayed some more. He even took a break from the test, walking around the house, finding a list of the dozen most populated cities in the US (“I know it’s kind of random, but I just wanted to know.”), even copying the list on a piece of paper. Last night Alexandra had baked a batch of cookies in the middle of taking her test to take a break. It was not an easy test.

Finally, Jacob handed in the test.

I had already corrected Alexandra’s test, so I knew some of the answers. I skimmed the page. As usual, Alexandra had written out entire answers for each question, but Jacob simply circled the correct answer within the question. For example:

If a solute’s solubility in a liquid solvent decreases when the temperature increases, is the solute most likely a solid, liquid, or gas?

Alexandra wrote out, “It is most likely a gas.” She underlined gas to help me find the answer. Jacob simply circled gas, the last word in the question.

Both got the same grades again, but missed different questions. Each got 94%.

Whew. On to the next module…

Oral reports

2009-03-09T15:58:00.007-04:00

Every once in a while, I pull back and analyze what I’m teaching the children. Just how important are the subjects and assignments I give them in their future lives?

Chemistry is a valuable subject with important concepts – but most likely they won’t be balancing equations very often after this year. French may well come in handy – not here, but on a mission trip to West Africa. Trigonometry? After the SATs, I doubt they’ll use it much. I sure don’t. And while history is great general knowledge, it’s not a critical skill. Besides, you can always look up dates.

English, a subject I wasn’t wild about in school, comes out on top as the most important single subject we’re covering. Conveying your thoughts and ideas in grammatically correct sentences is a skill you use every day. English isn’t just literature or grammar exercises or vocabulary lists; it’s the way you write someone a note, even the way that you speak. So with that in mind, I came up with a new assignment:

In the magazine I gave you, read one article thoroughly. Take notes (a list of facts). Before devotions tonight, in your words, tell us what the article was about. You should speak at least two minutes.

I gave each child a different Christian magazine that I receive from various mission organizations: World Vision, Send, and The Voice of the Martyrs. I wasn’t expecting a formal report, just an account of the major points of interest, something one might convey in a conversation rather than a formal report. But it’s good practice for future public speaking.

The day I gave the oral report assignment, a friend came over. Leanne stayed late enough into the evening that we included her in our devotions. And part of devotions that day was the oral reports. I hadn’t intended the kids to deliver their reports in front of an audience outside the family, but this opportunity came to us. Despite some protests and embarrassment, I insisted that they present their reports. It seemed to me that God had orchestrated this audience. Perhaps Leanne needed to hear something in one of these reports.

The first report, which Jacob gave, was a touching account of how the president of World Vision, once a wealthy CEO of Lenox, became the president of World Vision and had his heart broken by a visit to a child-headed household in Uganda. He challenges us to renew our commitment to the gospel and offer yourself to God: “Use me; I want to change the world.”

The second article, which Larissa delivered, was about a man in India who went to live in a cave after his life fell apart. He came to accept Jesus through the compassion of a Christian who heard his cries of frustration echoing in the mountains.

The third story, which Alexandra hesitantly presented in front of our guests, was the most powerful. Leanne’s brother came to pick her up just in time to hear this last report. This The Voice of the Martyrs article was about Li Ying, a woman jailed for being an editor of an underground Christian newsletter. She is serving a 15-year sentence. Through Voice of the Martyrs, she has received 8300 letters of support. When asked whether things had changed for her after receiving the letters, her brother said that they had – they had gotten worse. The author asked whether people should stop sending letters, but the brother replied no, the loss of support of Christians worldwide would be more painful to his jailed sister that the beatings the prison officials inflict upon her.

We ended devotions with a prayer for Li Ying. Because of her faith in Christ, she’s enduring something that none of us in the room could imagine.

Creative writing: Describe a relative

2009-03-02T23:03:00.008-05:00

Last Friday's writing assignment:

In your writing composition book, describe one of your relatives (aunt, grandparent, cousin…) Describe that person’s physical appearance, personality traits, sad or funny stories from their life, and convey through these descriptions either how much people like this person, avoid this person, think this person is funny, crabby, etc. so that the reader can really feel this person. You can use a situation to describe the person.

Alexandra's description:

I was 2 years old when my paternal grandfather came from Ukraine to visit us. I don’t remember much about him being here, but I’ve heard quite a few stories about it. And I know we used to always go on walks through Ellison Park. Grandpa would always carry me some of the way. Once when he put me down, I wanted him to keep carrying me I refused to go on and sat on the ground until he came back to pick me up.

I really love my grandpa. He reminds me a lot of my dad. When we went to Ukraine when I was 5 years old, we stayed at my grandparents’ house. Whenever we did something bad that we weren’t allowed to do, Grandpa would yell at us, and we quickly learned what to do and not to do. His anger flared quite easily, but then he’d always come back and try to apologize at the same time defending himself, explaining to us how we’d done wrong.

At night, he’d sometimes sit with us and tell us stories about when he was a little kid. We always enjoyed those. He’d tell us about World War II, and I think it’s pretty cool how he lived through it, although he was only a little boy back then.

Another thing about Grandpa is that he always tries to show off how tough he is. He went on a 15-mile trip to try out his new bike this winter, and ended up getting sick. He won’t even try to take care of himself, so he’s not getting better either, and is still coughing. Funny thing is, he’s always telling Dad not to show off. So he realizes he shouldn’t, but does it anyway, telling others not to act the same way.

If someone told me, “Imagine your grandfather, and what do you see?”, I have to say I’d either see him smiling at me or working at something. Usually his bees. He really likes to take care of them and the honey that he gets. He always sends a lot of it home with us. He enjoys showing us children how to take the honey out of the wax. He lets us help sometime, but always finishes it up for us, saying we can’t do it as well as he, because we don’t get all the honey out.

That’s pretty much what comes to mind when I think of my grandpa. And I miss him.

Comments: She used the word always too many times, and she did not describe his physical appearance. But I liked how she used snippets of interactions between them to describe his character.

I’m busy right now

2009-02-27T15:17:00.007-05:00

Ever since Larissa and Kara met in their second grade classrooms, they’ve been best friends.

Fair-skinned, blue-eyed blonde Larissa and Kara, with her olive skin, dark eyes and matching hair, seem like two opposites. But they are very similar. They are both excellent students. Both love horses, cats, and dogs. They’re artistic and enjoy drawing. Both love to bake and help in the kitchen. And they like to garden. They were tomboys – running in the woods, exploring, climbing trees. And on top of that, each spent summers in a foreign country – Larissa in Dad’s homeland of Ukraine, Kara in Turkey where her mother is from. They went through getting glasses and braces the same year. In school, they were inseparable. Everyone knew they were best friends. Friends for life, they assured each other.

This year we pulled Larissa out of public school for eighth grade. They could no longer have lunches together, or sit next to each other in various classes. Last year, when Larissa knew that she’d be homeschooled this year, she and Kara discussed how they’d hang on to their friendship, seeing each other on weekends, calling each other, even writing cards.

But it didn’t happen. Kara was always busy – playing sports, doing homework, going to temple with her family, cleaning her room. Always too busy to visit or talk.

Last week Larissa climbed into bed with me and lamented that fact. “Kara just doesn’t seem to want to be friends anymore. She’s always busy. How can you be too busy to talk? We used to talk on the phone even when we saw each other in school. I think that she doesn’t want to talk – or to be friends.”

For several weeks, Larissa has been calling Kara’s house. No one ever answers. Are they out most evenings, participating in sports? Did they go out of town for winter break? Are there problems at home? Did Kara’s dad get laid off? Or – this thought crept into Larissa’s mind – do they see Larissa’s number on caller ID and simply not pick up the phone?

Larissa called Kara a couple of days ago and finally her mother picked up. After a long silence, Kara came to the receiver.

“I’m busy right now,” she said in an aloof tone. “I have to do math homework.”

Larissa was crushed, and I perhaps even more so.

Three-week-old bunnies

2009-02-21T22:28:00.005-05:00

The baby bunnies are soooooooo cute now! They're coming out of their nest box and exploring the cage, so mom often jumps onto the nest box to get away from them.

Don't you wish you had a nest box to jump on at times?

Pulling together the mission team

2009-02-19T21:57:00.022-05:00

There’s a lot of background work – and a lot of waiting – that goes into pulling together a mission trip. To me it seems that we haven’t done much in weeks, and I’m getting impatient!

First, George and I invited the pastor and deacon to view George’s slides of his earlier trip to Matamoras. George wanted their blessing for our trip. This church, which consists of immigrants from Ukraine and their children and grandchildren, has never sent out a mission team. Ever. So we’d be breaking ground.

The pastor and deacon came to our house late Sunday, February 1, with their wives, looked at the pictures of Mexico and listened to George’s stories. They gave their blessing to proceed.

So that the kids would know what sort of conditions await them, George next gathered them at the church the following Saturday, February 7, and gave the slide presentation, then proposed to take up to five youth members with our family to similar conditions on a mission trip.

“You would be staying in village homes and have to be ready to sleep on the floor,” I warned. “And there will be latrines. There won’t be any showers in the villages, only basins to wash in.”

No volunteers came forward that day. Or during the next youth group meeting. By the time the week was out, I was worried that no one would join our family, or worse, that George would decide not to go at all because no youth members wanted to participate. I want to go so badly that I had a few rough nights lying awake worrying. But it’s all in God’s hands, I reminded myself, and calmed down a bit.

Finally, one 15-year-old boy stepped forward, and not one I expected. His older sister wanted to go, but she was worried about getting her period in such primitive conditions. Even though her mother assured her that woman all around the world face those same difficulties, it took her a few more days before she committed.

This past Sunday, George made an announcement at the end of the church service. First, he told the congregation that he and his family were going on a mission trip to destitute Mexican villages, delivering used clothing, school supplies, and food, as well as singing and holding church services. Then he asked all youth members who wanted to go on this trip with us to come to a room at the back of the church. The grandmother of one of the boys came to the room (her grandson attended our youth group, but a different church on Sundays), a girl who had just joined the youth group the week before (and had not been to the presentation), and a few people who were not in the youth group at all. We certainly had our five, but did we really want to take people not in the youth group?

We’re still sorting it out. I’m one who likes to get things done; my husband is more the wait-and-see kind. This waiting is a patience test, and once more, I’m starting to have trouble sleeping.

Foreclosure

2009-02-16T21:38:00.005-05:00

Dear Gregory:

According to documents filed at the County Clerk’s Office, foreclosure proceedings have recently been commenced against your home or other real estate. As you may know, these proceedings may eventually result in the sale of your property at public auction. However, we may be able to help you save your property and stop a foreclosure sale from taking place.

This letter from a lawyer came on Friday last week and suggested that my brother Greg hire him. It was my first hint that foreclosure proceedings have been filed against his house. But then again, with Greg dying five months ago and no house payments being made since, it’s not a surprise. My hands have been tied this entire time. I’m still sitting on several checks made out to him, unable to cash or deposit them, even though I need the money to pay his bills. Then again, with the courts denying my petition to be administrator, it’s not my problem.

The other odd thing that happened was that last Friday, ten minutes before the French tutor was due to come to the house, the doorbell rang. I just happened to be changing in the bedroom, so the kids got the door, thinking it was the tutor. It wasn’t. Some strange man said that he represented something (the only word Alexandra could repeat to me was “marshal”) and asked whether Gregory live at this house.

Stunned, Alexandra answered, “He’s dead.”

Now it was the guy’s turn to be taken aback. He said he was sorry and didn’t seem to know what to say, and he left before I got to the door to ask who he was or what he wanted. Only later did I begin to wonder: did he have something to do with the foreclosure?

Am I cheating my child out of an education in American history?

2009-02-15T20:43:00.005-05:00

Manifest Destiny. The Treaty of Guadalupe. Hidalgo. Battle of Brandywine.

I was flipping through the eleventh grade American History textbook recently – the one I’d started teaching from and then set aside – when these words in bold text caught my eye. I felt waves of panic. I wasn’t teaching any of these to Jacob. What was I doing to my son? Was I cheating him out of a thorough coverage of American history? Was he going to end up deficient if he couldn’t spew out facts from history like the multiplication table?

You see, I’d started teaching him out of that textbook, but assigned him a biography to supplement the text. One biography led to another, and I began to follow American history via people’s lives, not battles and treaties and dates, assigning Jacob book after book about George Washington, Lewis and Clark, Abraham Lincoln...

“I’d rather read the books,” Jacob had told me, and I sympathized. A gripping biography stays with you, the personalities and adventures burned into your memory like the plot of some spellbinding novel. I understood so much more about the Cultural Revolution in China by reading the autobiographical Life and Death in Shanghai by Nien Cheng than I ever got out of any textbook. I came to love history not because of textbooks, but because of biographies and autobiographies. History came alive through books like that.

So when Jacob came to me last week with book in hand and said, “Do you have a minute?” then proceeded to read from Commander in Chief: Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War by Albert Marrin, I knew I’d hit another absorbing account of history.

“Listen to this,” he said.

“Although Abraham had left the woods long ago, in many ways he remained a child of the frontier. His homespun manners annoyed [his wife] to no end. Often he answered the door in his stocking feet or came to meals in his shirtsleeves, unheard of in ‘proper’ households, where men wore jackets in the hottest weather. He would lie on the hallway floor, his back propped against an overturned chair, reading newspapers aloud; that way, he explained, he could absorb an article with his eyes and ears. If guests arrived while Mary was dressing, he called out, ‘She will be down as soon as she has all her trotting harness on.’

Abraham’s jokes embarrassed his wife. She never knew whether he might say the wrong thing at the wrong time… [Once] he saw a well-dressed woman slip in a muddy street. ‘Reminds me of a duck,’ he piped up. ‘Feathers on her head and down on her behind.’”

Jacob shared snatches about Abe’s wife Mary, her high-strung nature, her episodes of smashing dishes, screaming, throwing books at Abe, hitting him with a broom, or hurling potatoes at his head.

Now that you won’t find in a typical textbook.

Perhaps I’m not cheating Jacob after all, but enriching him.

Creative writing: My version of "Winter"

2009-02-10T01:14:00.004-05:00

Oftentimes when I assign a writing exercise for the kids, I also fulfill that assignment. Sometimes I make my version about a slightly different topic - a description of a home I spent part of my childhood in instead of this house - and let the kids see it before they write so they know how much detail or what style I expect. Other times I let them read my writing after they're done. That's this case with the "Winter" assignment.

One wrote prose. Two wrote poetry. I wrote the series of phrases.

Here's my take on winter:

Winter
A gentle snowfall.
Hushed woods.
Pristine whiteness.
Ah, the beauty of winter.

Misty breaths in nipping, cold air.
Shimmering snow under silvery moonlight.
Soft whiteness lining every branch after a snowfall.
Scent of wood smoke in the frosty air.
Crunch of snow under boots.
Sledding and trudging up the hill and racing down again and again.
Laughter and screams.
Reddened cheeks and runny noses.
Cross-country skiing, the whoosh of skis in the stillness of barren-branched woods.
Hot chocolate.
Sitting by the crackling fire.
Jingling bells and tinsel and excitement in the air.
Countless batches of cookies baking in the oven, filling the house with their fragrance.
Anticipation.
Presents and wrapping paper and always chocolates.
Christmas cards and caroling.
Snow angels.

Howling winds and freezing temperatures.
Tingling in the nose from frost crystals.
Hunching against the wind while walking to work.
Scraping ice and brushing off snow, again and again and again.
Snowplows rumbling up and down our road.
Cars unable to drive up the slope of our street.
Stuck.

Tracks of deer crisscrossed across the back woods.
Too cold for birds to chirp.
Magical glitter drifting down in the sunlight.
Frost drawings on windowpanes.
Another snow flurry.
More shoveling.
Milky gray skies for days and weeks on end.

Frozen surfaces of lakes and rivers.
Breaking the ice on the water garden so the goldfish survive.
Rhododendron leaves curled tight as pencils in the frigid temperatures.
Bringing in countless loads of wood to heat the house.
Warming my hands.
Always feeling cold.
Yet more snow and cold and gray days.

Groundhog Day.
Still the drab skies.
Ever-present cold.
Another blizzard.

Dripping icicles.
Good packing snow.
Snowmen, snowballs, snow fights.
Jubilant cries and flushed faces.

Filthy gray-black snow banks by roadsides.
Chirping of chickadees.
Honking of Canada geese as they travel in skeins across the sky.
Melting snow, flooding creek, mud.

A snowdrop blooms.

Creative writing: Another “Winter”

2009-02-09T09:52:00.013-05:00

Each child responds differently to a creative writing assignment. Thirteen-year-old Larissa wrote prose; fifteen-year-old Alexandra wrote poetry:

Winter
Winter – moonlight glitters on the snow
The house is dark, inside it’s warm
A child sleeping in its bed
Dreaming of riding on a sled.

Wind and snow whoosh in his face
The other sled tries to keep pace.
Next day mom’s to take them skating.
Oh, what fun, he has been waiting!

The dream changes, she’s at church,
Standing under a lone birch,
Watching children laugh and play,
In the snow from yesterday.

A group of friends stands nearby
While she looks on with sad eyes,
Someone comes and joins her there,
The burden of sorrow with her to share.

Someone laying by the fire
Doing homework, though he's tired.
Soon he’ll finish, to bed he’ll go
What will he dream – who’s to know?

Winter – moonlight on the snow,
The house is dark – inside it’s warm.
A child is sleeping in its bed,
Dreaming of – how can it be said?

Creative writing: Winter

2009-02-07T13:29:00.012-05:00

For some time, I've been giving all three teens a weekly writing assignment to be written not as some polished piece, but as an exercise just to get them writing. This week's writing assignment was about winter, which still holds us in its grip:

In your writing composition book, write what winter means to you. It can be prose, poetry, or even phrases or strings of words. Write about the sights, smells, feel, sounds, temperature, emotions, sports, events, holidays… anything to do with winter. Write in PEN. 1½ pages minimum.

Larissa’s composition:

Winter, snow, cold, ice… Clean crisp air. Silence.

Animal tracks through the woods. Shaggy deer, fuzzy rabbits, fluffy squirrels.

Sledding, skiing. Flying down hills in sleds, snow in your face as you scream. Then saliently skiing along wooded trails, listening to the swish and glide of the skis.

When the sun rises in the morning or is high in the sky at noon, the crystal ice diamonds glisten and shine in the snow. And when the sun sets, the snow glows yellow.

Bears, woodchucks, and skunk hibernate and flocks of birds fly south. Only some, like the tiny, tough chickadees stay behind cheering each other and twittering that spring isn’t far behind the first autumn frost. And really, it seems that soon you hear that familiar honking of geese passing by, and you know that soon the flowers will be blooming again.

Baby rabbits!

2009-02-06T09:47:00.014-05:00

When Alexandra went to feed the rabbits outside in the hutch this morning, she checked out the nesting box that George had made for the gray female. We had mated her with a white buck not quite two weeks ago, but she'd already pulled out a lot of her fur and lined the box with it. When Alexandra reached in, the box was fuzzy and warm. Warm?! Alexandra pulled out a baby bunny! And another. There are three, and all of them are dark; they have no white at all and don't resemble that buck that we borrowed from friends. However, we'd placed her with the brown male, her cousin, when we were moving around all the rabbits a while back. Looks to me that he's the daddy, not the white rabbit. Gestation is supposed to be 31 days, not less than 14!

Welcome to the world, baby bunnies!

Intended daddy with mommy on left; real daddy on right

Barnyard in OUR backyard?!

2009-02-02T17:48:00.008-05:00

“Mom, how many gallons of milk do we drink in a week?” asked Larissa.

“Hm, sometimes you kids go through almost a gallon a day. But I’d say about four gallons per week.”

“And how much does milk cost?” she continued.

“Nowadays, about $2.65 per gallon.”

Larissa punched some keys on a calculator. “That’s about $550 per year that you spend on milk. Mom, if we got a goat, you wouldn’t have to buy milk anymore. At their peak, goats can produce 4.3 gallons of milk per week! Even if we buy the goat feed, we’d still save money.”

Larissa has been reading Barnyard in Your Backyard since visiting a family we know from church who have a dog, goats, chickens, rabbits, and a calf. But they live in the country; we live in the suburbs. Still, if you have an amicable relationship with your neighbors, which we do, you might be able to keep a goat, or better two, says the book. Two goats keep each other company; one cries for companionship. And two goats would produce twice as much milk…

“We could make goat cheese,” Larissa explained. “It’s really easy. The book tells you how.”

Last summer Alexandra convinced my husband George to keep rabbits, not for pets this time, but for the meat. I wasn’t very keen on this idea.

“It’s good for the kids to learn how to feed and care for and breed rabbits, just in case any of them end up having to be more self-sufficient than we are,” George explained, fully supporting Alexandra’s idea. He grew up on what I’d call a small-scale farm in Ukraine. His parents were both teachers, but they raised a lot of their own food and livestock, especially chickens for the eggs and rabbits for the meat. Me? I grew up in cities and suburbs where the only animals we owned were cats and dogs.

I must admit that although I don’t take care of these rabbits, I’ve learned a lot about rabbits since August. I didn’t know, for example, that

- A rabbit’s gestation period is only 31 days from the days she’s bred

- The female rabbit (doe) does not come into heat but will accept the male (buck) at any time

If our breeding was successful, we should have some baby rabbits in three weeks. I’m sure to learn more about rabbits; George is sure to learn more about building and adding on to rabbit hutches. When anyone will undertake learning about rabbit meat is another piece of the puzzle.

I have a feeling that a goat shed (or whatever you call it) will be next. Isn’t that in part what homeschooling is about?

Re: Estate of Your Brother Greg

2009-01-28T23:11:00.017-05:00

I received the following letter today:

Dear Faith:

We have been advised by Surrogate’s Court that they are rejecting your Petition to serve as Administratrix of your brother’s Estate.

Due to the fact that the sole distributee of the Estate is Greg’s son Luke, the only person who can administer Greg’s Estate is the property guardian being appointed for Luke. We are contacting the attorney who is in the process of having a property guardian appointed for Lucas for a further discussion relative to this matter and will advise once we hear from him.

In the meantime, please total all of your out of pocket expenses relative to the Estate so that we can request reimbursement.

Should you have any questions, please call me.

Very truly yours,

LAWYER & LAWYER, P.C.

Stunned, I called the paralegal at Lawyer & Lawyer.

“We’ve never had this happen before,” she informed me.

I’m shocked, even a little insulted. But in the long run, this might just be for the best. No more calls from the mortgage company, from collection agencies, no more more calling medical facilities that are owed over $34,000, no more drives to check up on the house, no more haggling over extending payment deadlines for gas and electric. No more hassles. If the water pipes burst or the basement floods, it's not my problem. I didn’t stand to inherit anything, nothing at all. Greg’s debts will be far from paid off even after all his estate is dispersed. I just wanted to do what was honorable, what seemed right, but if the courts disagree, so be it.

So that this sort of thing doesn’t happen to our estate or our family, George and I made an appointment for next week to draw up our will.

What can we do in Mexico?

2009-01-25T18:17:00.005-05:00

I was elated when Paul called a few days later.

“We’d like to go with you and Tere on a trip to the interior like you described in your Christmas newsletter – all five of us,” I said after greetings and a brief update on our family. “And if there’s room, we’re thinking about taking some of the kids from our youth group at church where George is the youth leader.”

Paul described several options:

“There’s a pastor south of Veracruz who needs help building three houses out of cinder blocks.” (I scratched off that option immediately; a building trip was not what I had in mind.)

“Then there’s a church in Veracruz that needs help getting the building up to specs. They need to put in a tile floor to make it into a daycare center in the daytime. It’s in the center of a squatters’ camp with lots of unwed mothers all around who need to go to work, but can’t because they have no one to look after their children.” (Better because of proximity to the squatters’ camp that I’d want the kids to experience. Perhaps the girls could visit the women while the boys laid tile.)

“And then there’s this school that a pastor built in Oaxaca (pronounced wa-HA-ka). It’s an outreach point. There are indigenous tribes there. They’re extremely poor.” (My heart was beginning to race; this was more like what I’d imagined.)

“They’re about 50 miles from Veracruz in the mountains,” Paul continued. “It takes about three hours to drive there. We could help in some way. They desperately need school supplies. We could do food distribution, give out used clothing that you bring with you, George and I could preach, you could sing, and we can have prayer services for healing.”

I was sold. This was it.

“This is exactly what I had in mind!” I told Paul. I could hardly hold back my excitement. “I want our kids to experience some hardship and see how others live. We live in Disneyland here. We have everything. Our American kids have never experienced or even seen hardship. How many can you take with you?”

“Ten, besides Tere and myself.”

That’s five from our family, five from the youth group. We began to discuss details.

“It’s $30 per night for a hotel, four per room. Or you can stay with families,” Paul offered.

This was better than I’d hoped.

“Definitely with families.”

“You may have to sleep on the floor or in hammocks.”

“Fantastic!” My own children have lamented having to stay in a hotel rather than camping in the past. “The more inconvenient, the better. It’s exactly what they need, Paul.”

By the end of our conversation – I’d been scribbling on a notepad from the start – I had a rough sketch of where we’d go and what we’d do. I even had the beginning of a packing list – suntan lotion, mosquito repellant, and ship the sleeping bags in advance so we could carry more used clothing and school supplies with us.

Oh, this is going to be a great trip, and I’m so excited that I am the one organizing it. What a learning experience this will be, both for me and for my homeschoolers. And any from the youth group brave enough to accompany us.

Mission to Mexico

2009-01-24T15:37:00.016-05:00

“If you decide to take this leap and join us on one of our trips to the interior, believe me, you will never be the same.”

Those words jumped out from the missionary’s newsletter and touched my heart. That was it: the trip I’m to take with my family this spring, a trip into the interior of Mexico. Since I’m homeschooling, we can go anytime.

When I presented this idea to my husband, he was receptive and gave me the go-ahead to contact Paul. But, God willing, it wouldn’t be just a family mission trip; we’d take some of the church youth group with us.

I had met Paul Gonzalez during a Global Expeditions youth mission trip to Matamoros, Mexico to build house for the destitute. I had gone on the trip with Jacob when he was 14. To go, I underwent training and selection, and was chosen as one of two Country Assistants (which really means go-for and assistant to the Project Directors) on the Matamoros trip, a trip that included 115 youth. Paul was the in-country missionary that we worked with. It was his vision to build the homes; we provided the materials and labor. Of course there was far more to the trip, and that spiritual aspect made the trip special. And so did Paul.

I ended up sitting with Paul and his wife Tere at dinner one evening after a day of ministry. It was the table for “extras,” in a sense, those who were not Team Leaders or youth teams or translators. That table included a Mexican pastor, and missionaries Paul and Tere. I don’t know why I was bold enough to join them. But we hit it off, and I’ve stayed in touch with Paul ever since.

When I heard Paul’s story of how he came to be a missionary living in a tiny shed-like building on a landfill among the stench of burning trash, I was awed. He’d grown up in the States, child of immigrants (like me), and bilingual (he spoke Spanish at home; I spoke Ukrainian). He lived in Texas just across the border from Matamoros and held a good job. His home was much like mine.

Then God touched his heart. He was moved to help those who could never repay him. While still working in Texas, he accompanied a pastor who visited the dump across the border. There Paul saw an elderly couple living under a tree. They had no home; theirs had burned, and they had no money with which to rebuild. Moved by their plight, Paul took money from his own savings and built them a house. Their house, like the others, was more like our shed - a 12- by 20-foot plywood structure with no plumbing or electricity - but it kept out the elements.

Paul has been building houses ever since.

He quit his job, sold his home in America, and now lives with the poor in a tiny shack of a house just like theirs, a house with no running water, no electricity, no flushing toilet.

“I do miss showers,” he admitted to me during the course of my stay in Matamoros. “Sometimes when I visit friends in Texas, they offer me a shower.”

“I can relate to that!” I told Paul about the times our family visits Ukraine and since my in-laws’ house doesn’t have hot running water, upon invitation, the entire family trudges to my husband’s cousin’s house, towels in hand, to take baths. And it’s not considered weird to do that. The rest of the time, we bathe in a basin.

After many days of talking with Paul and photographing his ministry, the youth, the building of the homes, and the destitute that he ministers to on the dump where the garbage trucks roll in, I knew I wanted my husband to meet this man. So a few months later, I bought George a round-trip ticket for his birthday: a round-trip ticket to spend two weeks on the dump with Paul. Perhaps it’s a strange present to send your spouse to a dump, but it shows our family’s character.

Since we both know Paul, we’re willing to take the leap and be changed by another trip with Paul. I emailed Paul’s sister (Paul doesn’t have electricity much less a computer) and awaited Paul’s reply…

Humbled

2009-01-18T18:45:00.002-05:00

After church service, we went to a local family diner for brunch, something that we do every once in a while. We don’t eat out often, so the omelets and sausages and pancakes and eggs are a special treat. Even though the food is common, being served is not.

But today, we had a very unusual treat. Near the end of the meal, the waitress brought us our check, then after a few minutes, took it away, surely to add something to the bill that she’d left out, I thought. No one paid any attention to that gesture, but all of us noticed. Several minutes later when we were almost ready to leave, the waitress returned.

“Your check was taken care of,” she informed us.

We were all stunned because although we often ran into church friends there, today there was no one in the restaurant that we knew.

“Who…?” several of us asked.

“She didn’t want you to know. It was the sweet older woman sitting right there,” the waitress jerked her head to the now empty booth next to our table. “She said that you were a sweet and well-behaved family, and she wanted to pay for your meal.”

I had hardly noticed who sat in that booth. But George and I immediately knew why she had paid for our meal: it was because we had all stood up and said grace before the meal, honoring God before we partook of the food. And that’s very uncommon in a restaurant. To my shame, I am often embarrassed by George’s insistence that we rise while we pray instead of meekly sitting in our seats with our heads bowed as other Christians do in a public place. But he insists that if an important person entered the room, you would rise to your feet, not talk to him sitting down. So we rose as a unit, prayed, and ate.

And were rewarded in a very unexpected way.

Sick days

2009-01-14T23:43:00.010-05:00

First it was Alexandra. Vomiting, fever, sore throat. Larissa had the nasal-spray flu vaccine. Perhaps she (and I) would be spared. We were both vaccinated.

But two days later, Larissa didn’t feel so good. “I think I’m gong to throw up,” she told me as she grabbed her stomach.

She didn’t throw up, and she didn’t even get a fever. But she’s been moping around the house with a stomachache for the last day. Neither of the girls did schoolwork. They hung out together in their bedroom in fuzzy bathrobes all day long, playing several games of chess. Jacob is plodding along in his schoolwork alone, but because of the atmosphere of illness at home, I’m not pushing him. Jacob and I are frantically drinking glasses of Airborne and praying daily for protection from illness. George is still coughing from the bad cold (or mild flu?) that he had two weeks ago.

Oh, the joys of winter.

Make your cake and eat it too

2009-01-09T22:25:00.039-05:00

When I was 14, I learned to bake a fancy European layered torte. The cake was made of eggs and sugar and grated nuts, and had coffee and chocolate icing. It was exquisite. Thus I became the family baker at a young age. I just didn’t know how to decorate my cakes to make them look as
fancy as they tasted.

Last month at a local Jo-Ann store, I signed up for a Wilton cake-decorating class. But why stop there? I signed up Alexandra and Larissa as well. They needn’t wait until they’re middle-aged to decorate a cake; they could start out baking cakes and decorating them at the same time! They already bake fancy cookies – why not fancy cakes? So off we went to class last month, not realizing just how much we’d learn in three short sessions.

The best part? The classes were during the day, so we were the only three students in the class! Four is the minimum number of students for a class to run, but the fourth class member got pneumonia and couldn’t make it. But the teacher ran the class anyway. It was like a private, intimate tutoring session for just us three!

I must admit that baking three cakes each week so we’d each have a cake to decorate became rather insane. The kitchen showed the remnants of our splattered struggles to bake and mix. We had to make enough icing for three cakes plus extra for practice, and that is a LOT of icing! Spatulas and cake platters, parchment triangles and decorating tips, and pounds and pounds of icing sugar bedecked the kitchen counters. We even sent out Dad for late-night icing sugar runs. I had no idea how much sugar went into this type of icing!

Then we had to schlep our cakes and containers of icing, color gels and toothpicks, aprons and sponges, books and spatulas, decorating tips and bags… And after class – what do you do with three cakes? We’d eat one and give the other two away to neighbors and friends!

Atta boy

2009-01-07T23:13:00.013-05:00

Two days ago, I got an email in my corporate email account from a manager:

Good morning all,

Check this post out - nice job in 2008!
Top 10 Posts for 2008

I’ve been contributing to my company’s corporate blog since its inception in September 2006. It’s been a creative release for me, something I truly enjoy doing because I write mostly about my mission trips or things dear to my heart. I’ve written about a visit to an orphanage in Ethiopia, my role as photographer on a medical mission trip to Senegal, West Africa, and many posts about trips to Ukraine to visit family. The company blog seems to have gotten more and more commercial in the last year, promoting company events and products more, personal posts less and less. At first I posted every three weeks. Then every four. Then every six weeks. But in the last year, I was asked to contribute only five times. Since the blog posts a new article every weekday, that’s a lot of posts. I did the math: 260 posts!

Imagine my surprise when I read the “Top 10 Posts for 2008” and found that one of my articles about my daughter was in 7th place for the year. I kept scrolling to see who else had placed. Third place, second place, first… First!? My article that I wrote about my brother’s death got first place?!?

I emailed the manager:

Hi Tom,

I'm stunned and humbled to be put in the #1 spot. Truth be told, I think it's due to my brother's popularity and to the sudden way in which he died. Just curious: did you come up with these top 10 by number of hits? When I looked at the blog metrics, they show that the Olympics blogs got the most hits.

Thanks again for suggesting that I participate in this blog. I've really enjoyed contributing.

Faith

He replied that it wasn’t all in the number of hits. I just couldn’t believe that it would be.

Faith,

I am always touched by your posts, always!

Interest (visits), use of photography, comments, diversity all came into play.

-tom

Well, I was so excited that my article got first place that I emailed my family the link to the Top 10 Posts article and waited for a reaction. Wouldn’t they be happy for me? Excited that so many people were touched by the tragedy that befell our family?

I waited.

And waited.

Why is it that we want praise from our own? Wasn’t it enough that the company recognized my writing and photography?

My brother John opened the email – I got the return receipt – and said nothing.

My sister, who’s not a computer whiz, couldn’t get to the article. When I re-mailed the link, her reply was concise:

Nice.

That led me to wonder whether she meant spot #7, or did she see that I also got spot #1? Or perhaps there was some jealousy? “Nice” was so understated that I thought John’s non-reply might be better. Left me to wondering at least.

Mom didn’t reply at all. She admitted she couldn’t figure out the link and didn’t even scroll down to Tom’s message. Mom definitely needs a bit of coaching on the computer.

Bless her heart, at least my sister-in-law Tammy cheered me:

wow - not one but 2 on the top 10 list, and #1 as well. (just wish it was about a happier occasion.)
you must be proud....
congratulations,
-t

And finally, my busy youngest brother, the lawyer, reacted as I wished my other siblings had:

Wow! #1!

Atta boy Faith! Greg would be tickled.

Card

2008-12-31T14:23:00.016-05:00

A card came for my brother today, forwarded to my address, as is all his mail.

"Hope all is well..." I read, shaking my head.

Obviously, someone had not heard the news, had not read the blog post or searched the Internet, had not been e-mailed or called.

Who is this mysterious card-signer from Canada and what is his/her name? I can't make out the signature at all. The well-wisher did not write a return address, and the postmark is smeared, as if on purpose, so I don't even know the city from which the card was sent. The sender will remain blissfully, regretably uninformed.

All is not well...

Merry Christmas!

2008-12-24T12:43:00.006-05:00

Death certificate at last!

2008-12-22T23:34:00.005-05:00

Fourteen and a half weeks after his death, my brother's death certificate finally arrived from Kansas City.

It's been a trial waiting and waiting for this piece of paper without which I could do nothing with my brother's estate. Already the electricity was turned off at his house once, and after a series of phone calls and a letter from the lawyer, I managed to get the power on before this massive freeze that hit half the country, so the pipes at his house didn't freeze and his basement didn't flood. But the company had only so much patience. Death certificate of not, they were going to turn off power for good on Dec. 24 - unless I paid them $173.53 before that date. So I paid them out of my own funds.

The courts are closed until after the New Year, and even though I finally got the death certificate and immediately rushed it over to the lawyer's office, I won't be appointed administrator of his estate until January. And until I get that official appointment, I still can't sell his car or take care of his estate.

But at least we passed the initial hurdle. I still can't believe that it took over three months to issue this piece of paper!

St. Nicholas Day present

2008-12-20T22:55:00.010-05:00

I’m thankful that the Ukrainian tradition is to exchange gifts on St. Nicholas Day, and to celebrate the birth of Christ on a different day. Gift-giving is not a part of our family’s Christmas ritual; it’s what we do to celebrate the life of Saint Nicholas, who used his inherited wealth to give to the needy. Christmas celebrations are never “polluted” with what has become the center point of the holiday for most people: not the birth of Jesus, our Savior, but the orgy of tearing open all those piles of presents...

While most of the country is preoccupied with buying better and more expensive presents for junior, we have decided to cut back. I have been pained to witness people who have all they need continue to give, give, give – to their spouses, to their kids. Our media has brainwashed us, suggesting that we’re not good parents if we aren’t burying our kids with gifts, indulging them with games and things that they don’t need and may rarely use. But it’s our moral obligation to give to the kids or they’ll think that we don’t love them.

Is it really??

I think that it’s my moral obligation to teach the children to be good Christians and good world citizens, and to think of others, not just of themselves. Painful as it is not to indulge my kids with gifts, my husband and I chose to curb back on consumption and give only token presents, things that they need or will use. Our kids know that we love them; they also know why they aren’t getting the latest electronic gadgets for presents.

St. Nicholas Day has already come and gone, and our family gift exchange is already in the past. I’ll share with you what I gave each of the three kids as their main gift. Each received a letter, a check for $500, and a catalog. The letter said:

St. Nicholas is said to have come from a wealthy family, but he used his wealth not for himself, but gave it away to the poor. Thus, St. Nicholas Day should be commemorated not by gift-giving to those who already have all they need, but by acts of charity – giving to the poor. So this year, my gift to you is for you to select $500 of items for the needy from this catalog, and send in the enclosed check and your selections to help those who do not have nearly as much as you do.

The catalog was not to a clothing company or electronics store, but to Partners International and ANM.

Larissa chose a well in Kenya for her gift.

Jacob bought education for three kids in Sudan, fed four poor families, provided therapy for two disabled children, and bought some Bibles.

Alexandra is still mulling over the catalog, reading all the selections. Then she’ll choose her gift. I’m sure it will be a good one.

The Greatest Gift

2008-12-08T15:36:00.002-05:00

As the holidays draw near, you may be wondering what gifts to buy for your child. What’s the popular gift this season? Where are the sales? What are the best catalogs?

But the greatest gift of all, the one your child wants more than anything, is free. You just have to make it.

You may wonder, “What supplies do I need? Do I have the skills to create this gift? What could I possibly make for my child that’s better than what’s on sale in the stores?”

I urge you to think back for a minute to your childhood holidays. I, for instance, recall my father strumming a mandolin and teaching my four siblings and me Ukrainian Christmas carols. I remember the smells of the traditional 12-course Christmas Eve dinner that my mother cooked for days in advance, and the stories my father told every year just before dinner, stories about Ukrainian Christmas traditions and how he celebrated Christmas “in the old country.” Like my father, we’d excitedly watch for the first evening star before sitting down to the traditional candlelit Christmas Eve supper. I remember well the time my parents spent with me; I can’t recall many of the gifts I received.

The time you give your child is the greatest gift of all. Children need you far more than they need any material thing. As your gift, make the time to spend with your child.

Make an annual tradition of going out to cut down your own Christmas tree. Or create a wreath with your child and hang it on your front door. Start a tradition of making ornaments for your tree. Or bake Christmas cookies together to give away. My own children remember our cookie-baking times far better than they remember any particular Christmas gift. Although I, too, recall the clouds of flour in the kitchen during this process, baking cookies together ever since my son was old enough to hold a cookie cutter has been a favorite and much-looked-forward-to event for all of us. And we don’t bake just once. During the holiday season, we measure flour and sugar and butter every few days, mix and roll and cut, decorate and bake, then do it all over again. We give away many of the cookies we bake, but it’s the process more than the eating that the children enjoy.

Making time for your child should not be a one-day deal or simply an annual holiday event. In the end, the time you spend with your child is the one gift you give him that makes the most difference in his life.

Your time on this earth is limited like a pad of paper from which you tear off one sheet at a time, slowly, continuously, until the pad is gone. But you don’t know how thick a pad you were given at birth. After a day, a week, or a year is gone, you can’t change how you spent it. And only you control how you spend your time, how you use up those sheets in your pad.

Each one of us is free to spend our time as we please — within limits, of course — so the way you choose to spend your time says a lot about you and your priorities.

Because we each have a finite amount of time, the time you spend doing something is a sign of your priority. You do something because you feel that it’s worth the expenditure of part of your pad of paper. When you truly enjoy doing something, you want to spend a lot of time doing it, so time equals love. It’s hard to convince children with whom you spend little time that you love them.
The next time you think of agreeing to another community activity or project, or of accepting a promotion that will keep you away from home even more, think of your pad of paper: you never know just how thick a pad you have left.

When I was pregnant with my first child, I worked as a technical writer in a department where the highest positions were held by a husband and wife team whose son was in a Montessori school. Both worked hard and kept long hours, often picking up their only child late from Child Care, having kept the staff overtime.

A few years later, after I had left on-site work to write from my home office, I heard from a mutual friend that the husband had died unexpectedly of a heart attack. He was 41.

After her husband’s death, the wife cut down on work hours and turned down a promotion that required lots of business travel. She and her son later moved out of state to be close to her family. But I often wonder if she doesn’t have regrets about how little time they spent together as a family when her son was young and her husband was alive. Does she now think that focusing so much on their careers was worth it?

When I hear stories like this, I think about the odd twists and turns of fate. We live life for the moment as best we know how, but not always in the wisest way. We never know just what will happen in ten years, or even in two. You can plan all you want, but an event that happens unexpectedly tomorrow can turn your life upside down. My brother's death in September was such an event.

With all three of my kids now teenagers, I already look back nostalgically on their childhoods. I feel fortunate that I realized back then that the interactions with my children are the precious moments in life, the memories I’m already looking back upon wistfully. So I chose to work from home when they were young because that way I could come out of my home office any time of day and spend time with the children. I recall my son Jacob catching the first ants that came out one long-ago spring, putting them in his critter cage, and taking them to his bedroom to admire and lay next to as he and his sister Alexandra each drank a bottle of warm milk — but I don’t remember any of the work projects I was working on at the time. I remember watching from my office window as the children caught toads in the backyard, then splashed with them in the wading pool and swung with them on the swingset — but I have long forgotten the tight deadlines and late-night meetings with clients that took place at that time.

In one sixth-grade classroom, a teacher was surprised to hear her pupils say that they would really like another Depression. The pupils realized that a Depression meant lack of material things. “Why would you want a Depression?” the teacher asked her pupils, puzzled. The answer surprised her. “Because my parents would spend more time with me!” Children all through the classroom echoed this response. That says something about our society — and about children’s true needs.

Money and the stuff money can buy is no substitute for time. Time is your most precious commodity, so spend it wisely. Your children need you, and your greatest gift to them is the time you spend with them.

Homeschooling parents already know this. They give this gift throughout the year.

Missionary biography project

2008-11-23T20:52:00.031-05:00

Sometimes part of the challenge of teaching is coming up with assignments – assignments that aren't just busy work, but will actually teach the kids life skills. Being able to write a paper and deliver an oral report about a researched subject is a valuable life skill. I've done it many times as an adult. I dreaded public speaking all the way into my 20s; now I love it, especially if I'm talking about a subject that I'm passionate about, like missions. So after reading many biographies of missionaries, I came up with the following assigment, which I'll give the kids tomorrow:

- - - - - - - - - - - -

JACOB: Samuel Morris: Missionary to America by W. Terry Whalin
ALEXANDRA: Mary Slessor: Light for the Dark Continent by Sam Wellman
LARISSA: Gladys Aylward: For the Children of China by Sam Wellman

For this assignment, you will:

- Read a biography about a missionary.

- Write a report summarizing the interesting and important events in the missionary’s life (5 – 10 pages, double-spaced).

- Deliver a 5- to 10-minute oral report about the missionary – with notes but not reading your report – to the family at devotion time.

1. READ the assigned book by Friday, December 5.

As you read, take notes and, if you wish, use sticky notes on pages where there is important information. Jot down interesting or humorous details as you read because you will forget them! In your notes, write down important events and page numbers so you can look back at important facts when you write your report.

Example:

David Livingstone got into trouble for reading on the job in a spinning factory, but under questioning, the supervisor saw how studious David was and that he could recite all 176 verses of Psalm 119 by heart, so he allowed David to continue reading on the job, as long as he did his work as he read. – p. 17
Factory boys rarely knew how to read, but David not only read, he also studied Latin at night after work. David was determined not to work in a factory all his life. - p. 27

2. WRITE the report by Friday, December 12.

Write a report 5 – 10 pages long, Times Roman 12, double-spaced. Summarize the interesting and important events in the missionary’s life. Include:

Whether the subject was raised a Christian, and if not, when/how did he become a Christian
Any pivotal event that inspired the subject to go into missionary work
The reason that the missionary choose the country he served in, or if he wanted to serve in one country and ended up in another, describe how that happened
How he got there (not just means of transportation, but whether someone paid his way or he earned the money, whether through mission organization or on his own, etc.)
What did he do in the country? Be specific and descriptive.
What you admire about the missionary

3. GIVE AN ORAL REPORT 5 – 10 minutes long one evening during the week of December 15.

Write down bullet points that you may look at while delivering your oral report. The report should include the main information covered in the written report, but may also include additional information. Practice giving this report out loud before actually delivering the report. It must be at least 5 minutes long so you can give a lot of interesting details, but no longer than 10 minutes.

A routine for teaching English (at last)

2008-11-22T23:28:00.008-05:00

From all the subjects I’m teaching my teens, the single most important academic subject, I believe, is English. It’s not because I’m a Shakespeare fan. Nor do I expect my kids to grow up to be authors. No, I consider English so crucial because it’s a basic skill that my kids will use in any career. Engineers, teachers, doctors, policemen – all have to write reports, requests, summaries, invoices, proposals… something. Others often judge a person’s level of ability and intelligence by their writing skills.

Thus, I am stressing English. And I don’t mean just reading literary classics like they do in our local public high school; I’m talking about reading literature and doing drills in vocabulary, grammar, and writing. Beating those skills into them through practice, practice, practice.

However, until this past week, I still didn’t have a method to my madness. I’d assign daily literature reading plus vocabulary exercises, and then sporadically I’d give them a grammar lesson from a workbook. Or a creative writing assignment. I had no strategy, no schedule; I wanted to throw all the information at the kids, but I wasn’t doing it systematically. When I recently noticed that the grammar workbooks were several hundred pages long, I panicked! I’d never get through it all, and time was slipping away. My oldest is a junior, so I have very little time left to teach him!

I assign the literary works as long-term reading assignments, and the essays based on the reading as long-term writing assignments. I expect the kids to work on them every day. This has been our standard. Read a book; write an essay. And on top of that, I assigned a vocabulary exercise every single day. But that left no time for grammar. And when would be do those clever creative writing assignments I’d dreamed up?

Then it hit me. I can’t believe that I didn’t think of it sooner:

Monday – vocabulary
Tuesday – grammar
Wednesday – vocabulary
Thursday – grammar
Friday – creative writing

It’s so simple. Why did it take me since last January, when I first started homeschooling, to think of it?

First snow

2008-11-20T10:38:00.010-05:00

View out my home office window

It actually happened two days ago. I was not ready. On Friday, it had been over 60 degrees - warm, fall-like. Then just a few days later - wham! Now it's winter...

Photos

2008-11-12T22:33:00.007-05:00

Last night after everyone was in bed, I pulled out a box with dozens of envelopes of photos that I had brought from my late brother’s house. In the quietness of nighttime, I observed Greg’s life from a perspective I didn’t have while he was alive.

These photos were mainly from the time he was married. Wedding photos. Exuberant smiles. Cake and glasses of champagne. Only Greg’s two closest friends and their wives attended Greg’s private wedding ceremony in snow-covered Vermont. Yesterday I glimpsed their joyous party. The sleigh ride. The giddy delight of close friends celebrating.

It pained me that all three couples eventually divorced.

I looked on at other photos. Photos of ski trips. Hotel rooms. A jacuzzi. Ski slopes. Mountains. Driving somewhere with a dog in the car. A ride on a ferry. Orcas. A dinner party. His pet dogs and cats. The view from his lake house – the one he left to his ex-wife. Spectacular sunsets.

I felt like a voyeur going through all those pictures. A smile. A look. A gesture. Moments between two people caught on film. There was nothing indecent, just a depth of feeling that it pained me to see. It pained me because the marriage dissolved. It hurt because Greg will never again smile at anyone. Ever. And he was always smiling, always upbeat.

It was the joy of his relationship, the love and delight that shone through the pictures that pierced my heart.

Sometimes it’s really hard to look at photos.

Bit by bit

2008-11-09T11:23:00.034-05:00

My first garden project was building a water garden in 2001 – pond, waterfall, rock border, stone path, and a flower garden on the berm created from the soil dug out of the pond. I worked on this water garden every night after work for several hours (I ate after dark), and every Saturday from morning until nightfall. My family was away at the time, and I wanted to surprise them.

The project took me four weeks to complete.

Today, this home of goldfish and frogs is the focal point of my backyard.

The following summer, I cleaned up an area between two spruce trees, an old garden so unkempt that the periwinkle and lilies of the valley were completely intertwined, and most spadefuls I dug out some of each. Patiently, I separated the two types of plants, placing periwinkle in boxes on the right, lilies of the valley in temporary containers on the left. It was the summer I was first diagnosed with lupus, so some evenings I had the strength to dig out and separate only two or three spadefuls. But each evening I persevered, dug and divided.

“I don’t know how you have the patience for that,” commented my husband one evening as I teased apart plants and put them in separate places, then dug up another spadeful of plants. “I would have dug all that up in one day and just bought new plants.”

“But these are perfectly good plants,” I defended. “Just neglected over the years. I don’t mind doing this a bit at a time. Besides, it would be far too expensive to buy enough lilies of the valley and periwinkle to cover the areas I have in mind for them.” I had a vision for that garden, so I persisted.

At the end of the summer, I planted the periwinkle on the right, lilies of the valley on the left, and hostas and astilbes in the center. It’s a delightful and orderly garden now. The lilies of the valley thrive in their separate area; the periwinkle grows profusely in its spot.

Every summer since 2001, I’ve tackled a new garden project. Mostly I’m bringing order to the chaos of gardens planted decades ago, then neglected. The majority of the projects are daunting at first. Putting in a new garden is far easier than making neatness out of a mess.

”As long as you do something every day, even for 10 minutes, you’re making progress,” a coworker once told me. I have recalled those words often.

This fall, I put in a new garden. It hadn’t been in my plans to do so, but when my brother, an avid gardener, died suddenly, I wanted to create a memorial garden using some of the dozens and dozens of stunning hostas from his yard. But I have not been well, so I certainly couldn’t put in a garden in a weekend, not even a small new one. So I’ve worked on it bit by bit. When weather permitted, I broke ground in front of my house. I turned over a few spadefuls of earth. Improved the soil with a bag of cow manure. Installed a stone step or two in the hill. Planted a dozen daffodil bulbs. A couple dozen crocuses. Placed a large rock by the bottom step. Carted compost from the backyard. Planted a hosta. Then another. Baby steps, not major leaps, day after day, week after week.

And now I’m done.

As I was thinking about the “baby steps” I was making on my memorial garden, I thought how this applies to teaching children. I can’t teach my child grammar in a day. Or even in a year. That task indeed is daunting. But if I teach a little every day, bit by bit, year by year, my child will learn whatever it is that I want to teach her. I must remember to have the same patience with teaching my children as I do working on my gardens.

Everyone's Encyclopedia

2008-11-06T20:52:00.004-05:00

“Do we have sand?”

“Yes, it’s behind the green shed. It’s labeled ‘play sand.’”

“Where is the toilet cleaner?” Jacob continued.

“Why do you need that?” I wondered. Could it be that he had a sudden urge to clean?

“For the experiment.”

“What experiment? You must be on the wrong experiment.” Luckily I had read the experiment – and the rest of his Chemistry assignment – last night as I continue to relearn Chemistry. I knew he needed sand – plus salt and filter paper and beakers – but certainly not toilet cleaner.

“Oh. Maybe I turned to the wrong page.”

I’m relearning a lot more than just Chemistry. As I sit in my home office writing for my company’s website, I get a parade of family members through my office door. Today I decided to write down all the questions they asked me because it was getting comical. The door would remain closed only a few minutes before the next person would barge in with a question.

“I know this is sad,” Larissa introduced what she figured was a ‘dumb’ question, “but how do you subtract fractions, say 5/2 – 17/5?” She was doing review and she had, quite understandable, forgotten how to do this task. I had relearned it several years ago when Jacob was introduced to fractions in elementary school.

“They have to have the same denominator for you to subtract them. Do you know how to make both numbers have the same denominator – like 10 in this case? Multiply the top and bottom numbers by…”

“Oh, yeah…”

“Is China or the US bigger?” Jacob was now working on Spanish; this must have been one of the questions he had to answer in his workbook – in Spanish.

“China is bigger,” I said offhand. “Russia is the biggest country – Siberia is huge – then Canada, then China, then the US. That’s how I learned them. But let me check…”

I quickly Googled “countries by area.”

“Wait, what’s this? Disputed territories? China is bigger according to some lists, and the US according to others, depending on whether or not you count the disputed territories?”

“Never mind,” waved Jacob, probably wondering how he’d phrase such a complex answer in Spanish.

It was Alexandra’s turn. She came in, vocabulary book in hand. “In this sentence, does ‘allure’ make sense? A career in show business held a certain BLANK for Jodie Foster from a young age.”

“Yes, allure makes perfect sense there. It means attraction or appeal. Jodie Foster is an actress, by the way,” I called after Alexandra since our kids are not into TV or movies. But Alexandra was out the door as soon as she heard my initial “yes.”

Larissa was next, back with her math. The door had barely closed. “I have to place brackets around this math statement to make it true. Do I need two sets of brackets, or is one enough?”

“Let me see. Four minus one times three divided by… Definitely two sets of brackets.”

“Do you have any strong perfume?” This time it was my husband, and his queer request caught me off guard.

“Perfume? Whatever for? Oh, never mind, it’s in the bathroom medicine cabinet.”

“Mom.” It was Larissa again. “Last time you gave me exercise 5C; this time you gave me 5E. Why did you skip 5D?”

“Because with three of you to keep track of, I make mistakes! Do exercise 5D in the vocabulary book.”

OK, so not all the questions required encyclopedic knowledge. But I am regularly expected to spell words, give a definition without looking up a word, explain anything to do with science, help with math problems, recall facts from history, and take care of organizational matters – plus cook and clean, of course!

“Did you know that wigs had to be maintained – recurled and perfumed regularly?” This time it was Jacob telling me something that I hadn’t known. He was working on his history lesson.

“No, I didn’t know that.”

Perhaps someday he can take over being the encyclopedia.

Relief

2008-11-03T19:06:00.007-05:00

In two weeks, the first 10-week marking period will be over and the quarterly reports will be due. I’m not relieved about that, but I am breathing an inward sigh of relief that we’re almost on track with science.

Larissa just finished chapter 4 (out of 16) of her Physical Science today, so she’s actually a bit ahead. Jacob and Alexandra are finishing up chapter 3 (out of 16) of their Chemistry. They won’t quite finish chapter 4 before the marking period is over, but we’re not as far behind as I’d feared. With my brother’s death and the kids’ struggle with chapter 2, I was afraid that we’d be so bogged down that I’d be homeschooling science year round just to get through it. So despite the setbacks this fall, we’re almost on track with Chemistry, the subject I’d been most concerned with.

In math, the kids don’t seem to get as much homework from the math tutor as I had expected, especially since they go to her only once per week. (She lives over 15 miles away, so math takes a big chunk of the day when we do go there.) I was assuming that they’d be doing an hour of homework per day — but they aren’t.

“You’re not getting as much homework as I thought you’d be getting,” I mentioned to Jacob today. “Do you think that you’re learning as much as you did in school?” Jacob had been in public school until last January, so he still often compares homeschool to ‘real’ school.

“Yes, I think we are. In school we’d go over the homework in class over and over and beat it to death. Here we’re moving along more quickly. We’re not going over the same thing so many times.”

Hm, I hadn’t thought of that. But I do remember how Jacob and Alexandra, both in the same Spanish I class at the public high school last year, lamented how slowly they were covering their material then, waiting for the slowest student to catch on before going on to the next lesson. That class never did cover all the Spanish I materials before the end of the year. Once Jacob left public school in the middle of the year, he sped ahead of the public school class even though he took Spanish only twice a week. His sister, whom we pulled out of public school only this year, still sat through each painfully tedious Spanish lesson day after day, falling more and more behind.

Perhaps, despite my trepidation and insecurity, I’m not doing as badly as I’d feared.

IHIP for grade 11

2008-10-28T20:40:00.026-04:00

Sometimes I wonder whether I'm challenging Jacob enough. I push his younger sisters, but it's like pushing a wagon down a sidewalk. An even sidewalk. They're studious and conscientious. And they like to read. With Jacob, I feel like I'm pushing him up a steep incline on a dirt road with lots of potholes. He'd much rather be taking a computer apart than reading.

Because Jacob doesn't like to read, I have to give him daily assigned readings with page numbers; with the girls, I just say, "Read this book by Friday." Giving them daily page counts would drive them crazy; not giving Jacob daily page counts is too unstructured for him.

And he doesn't like foreign languages. Spanish is torture for him. Fortunately, Alexandra takes the same class at a friend's house and coaches him - if he asks her politely and she's in a good mood.

If Jacob had gotten into that auto mechanics class, perhaps there I wouldn't get the resistance I do with the more traditional subjects. But I'm doing the best I can. Which means I'm pushing that grammar and writing and vocabulary, history as a story rather than a set of facts, and lots more, as you can see.

IHIP for grade 10

2008-10-27T16:14:00.007-04:00

Alexandra was in Honors everything in public high school last year, so this IHIP surely looks like I'm not just pushing her, but drowning her in work. But she manages her workload better than my other two, turning in the most thoroughly documented labs and topnotch writing projects. And she catches her French tutor's mistakes (which is a little troubling, since the tutor is expensive...)

If only she were as polite as she is talented.

Here is her IHIP for this school year:

Finally - my IHIPs!

2008-10-26T19:11:00.023-04:00

At last, two months after I started school, I finally completed the IHIPs (Individualized Home Instruction Plans) for all three of my kids.

It’s not that I didn’t know what I was going to teach them or was that late in writing them. I was just putting the finishing touches on them when I got news of my brother’s accident. Then his death. After that there was the funeral preparation. The dozens and dozens of calls each day. The funeral itself. The thank you notes afterward. The phone calls canceling his credit cards, magazine subscriptions, phone service... I’m still dealing with the ramifications of his death - his estate, his bills… So IHIPs fell off my radar screen - until the school district contacted me last Friday. Oops!

So here is Larissa's eighth grade IHIP, hot off the computer. As I revised this plan, I added books to her English curriculum because she read five of them before mid-October! I suspect I'll have her read even more literature, but I won't commit her to it yet. Perhaps this plan is more detailed than those submitted by others, but for me, it serves as a chart across the unknown territory of an eighth grader’s education. I consult it when I don’t know where I’m going next.

I hope I do Larissa justice, pushing her, but not overburdening her.

Onward!

2008-10-23T22:54:00.003-04:00

Yesterday Jacob and Alexandra finally took – and passed! – the test for chapter two of our Chemistry book. We’re weeks behind, but we’ve made progress!

We learned the different units with which you measure energy. We survived calculations to determine specific heat of objects. Even I could recite equations such as q = m c ΔT (where q is heat absorbed or released, m is mass, c is the specific heat, and delta T is the change in temperature), and -q (object) = q (water) + q (calorimeter), which tells us that the heat lost by the object placed in the calorimeter is gained by the water and calorimeter.

Aren’t you impressed? I certainly surprised myself by memorizing those equations!

I was solving for that mysterious specific heat of an unknown metallic object or finding out how much energy was lost or gained, working out algebraic equations better than my kids were. Perhaps now – decades after being a new girl in my school and being forced to take Algebra a second time because my new school system didn’t believe that a seventh grader could possibly have taken Algebra – the Algebra that I had so thoroughly learned in junior high was coming in handy.

I don’t know why both my kids got so mired in that chapter on energy, heat, and temperature. I understood it. It was a painful three and a half weeks as I explained and reworked problems and sat with them, handholding them through equations, reteaching them algebra so they could solve the equations.

And through it all, my son shook his head and said, “Why do I have to learn all that? I’ll never need to know the specific heat of anything!” Deep down I could see his point, but… We plodded on.

And it paid off. They both got the same grade on the test, a 93%, though each got different problems wrong. I was so relieved.

On to atoms and molecules.

Sigh. I know what tonight’s bedtime reading will be for me.

Fall is...

2008-10-20T22:57:00.015-04:00

I gave another creative writing assignment to all three kids today titled "Fall is..." The kids could write prose or poem and about anything that the words "fall is" trigger.

This is what Jacob came up with:

Fall is…
Fall is a season, one out of four
Comes after summer and right before snow.
The cold arrives and the warm winds pass,
When colorful leaves fall, and cover the grass.

The raking begins, more work for me.
There’s so many leaves it seems like a sea.
A new school year, eleventh grade
Can’t wait for it to pass and fade.

The wood-burning stove creates some heat
So we can come by and warm our feet
The wood that we burn, I had to chop,
Bring from the woods and pile up.

Fall brings us more cold days
To stay inside is the best way
You bundle up, but your nose turns red
You go outside, “Put a hat on your head!”

The leaves twirl and flutter down
You can hear the rustling sound
To play outside they do insist.
The poofy leaf piles they can’t resist.

I wish you could like the poem I wrote
But I’m a failure, it will not float
Just please don’t give me a big, fat F
Because I’m special, my name is Jeff.

Very intersting. Jacob certainly got into rhyming today; I was expecting prose. But I did say they could be creative in any style or format they wanted. While my son's name isn't Jeff and he said that he doesn't really want eleventh grade to speed by, he made those up just to rhyme. He certainly got silly at the end, rhyming words that made no sense. We have a Rhyming Dictionary, and it's a great way to explore words, especially words that rhyme.

I'm glad Jacob enjoyed himself - after carrying in the wood he chopped so we could light a fire in the wood-burning stove and stay warm as he writes.

Black beans

2008-10-18T10:30:00.006-04:00

I inherited a stockpile of food from my brother: noodles and dried beans, fish sauce and rice vinegar, sesame oil and popcorn, canned green beans and canned tomatoes, a shopping bag full of exotic spices — and a whole case of canned black beans.

Black beans? I’d never cooked with black beans.

Larissa came with me to the grocery store last week. When they were little, all three of my children played with a computer in the store, a computer near the meats where you type in a keyword and it provides a recipe using that item. Larissa suggested finding a recipe for – what else? – black beans.

This is what came up on the screen:

* * * * * * *
Black Bean Chili

1.5 lb. boneless pork, cut into 1/2–inch cubes
two 14.5-oz. cans black beans, drained
1 cup chopped onion
1 cup chopped bell pepper
1 cup thick and chunky salsa
one 14.5-oz. can diced tomatoes, do NOT drain
2 cloves garlic, crushed
1 tsp. chili powder
1/2 tsp. cumin
1/4 tsp. crushed red pepper
salt to taste
sour cream and shredded Cheddar cheese for garnish (optional)

Combine all ingredients except garnishes in 3.5-quart slower cooker. Cover and cook on low heat setting for 7 to 8 hours.

Garnish individual bowls with sour cream and Cheddar cheese, if desired.

Serves 4 to 6.

* * * * * * *

Sounded good. Since we had all the ingredients but the pork at home, we printed out the recipe and bought the pork. I assigned cooking “class” to Larissa the next morning.

“Looks like a salad,” commented Jacob when all the ingredients were in the crock pot.

By suppertime, the “salad” had cooked down into a fragrant chili.

While we waited for George to come home from work, a neighbor came by to greet me as I worked on my new garden – a Greg memorial garden using hostas from my deceased brother's gardens – in the front yard. As she strolled up to me, George arrived home. Since the neighbor, a nurse, lives alone and was just coming home from work, I invited her in for chili dinner.

The chili was delicious! That recipe is a keeper.

I no longer wonder what I’ll do with a case of black beans.

What can one person do?

2008-10-15T00:17:00.016-04:00

I dug a well in a Cambodian village. I sent care packages to inmates in Middle Eastern prisons. I educated several Sudanese children for a year.

And that’s not all.

I bought uniforms, books, and writing paper for children in India whose parents barely earn enough to put food on their table; they could never have sent their children to school without help. I delivered live rabbits and chickens to destitute Indian families so they could raise them for food. And in Africa, I gave away dozens of life-giving goats, goats that provided milk, and thus sustenance, for impoverished families on the brink of hunger.

And I did all this from the comfort of my home.

It was a single incident during a trip to Kenya that spurred me to give in this way: In a church in a mountain village two hours drive from Nairobi, I watched as the poor gave their extra clothing to the poorer in their own church. Their pastor thanked them – and challenged his parishioners to give even more, to bring in extra bedding and blankets and beds to give to others in their church who had no bed or mattress to sleep on. “They sleep on dirt floors,” he announced to the church.

I had seen poverty before, but never a home without a mattress or hammock. I asked to be taken to such a home.

We hiked down a very steep red-earth path to an equally red mud hut. In the doorway stood a widow holding an infant; inside were three young children sitting on the earthen floor. Just sitting there – not chattering, not running around, not reacting to my presence.

Something wasn’t right.

“What is wrong with the children?” I asked my travel companion, a woman who had worked in refugee camps in Africa.

“These kids are starving. Literally.”

Indeed, we saw no food in the house, other than the flour, oil, and sugar that we had just brought as a gift. For furniture, the house had but one chair. For bedding, just a few rags. The “kitchen” was a few stones on the ground where ashes marked the remains of the cooking fire. The single pot was empty.

The children, we learned, were six, four, and three. The “infant” was over a year old. The three-year-old had not yet learned to walk. She just sat dull-eyed on the uneven floor without the energy to get up.

The scene haunted me long after I was back in Nairobi. I’d never seen starvation with my own eyes. I’d never seen a house with so little in it.

“What can we do for that widow?” I pondered aloud, discussing with my fellow traveler how we could help.

“If we send her more food, it’ll run out in a while. What if we bought her chickens?” I mused. “They could eat the eggs. But I’m not sure what they would feed the chickens. Hey – how about a goat? They eat almost anything, and they produce milk. If we buy her a lactating goat, the children could have milk right away. I read about tribes in Africa that subsist on milk alone for periods of time.”

The lactating goat, purchased for $35, was delivered a few days later – right during the funeral of one of the children. For that child, it was too late. But for the others, milk from that goat would make a difference – the difference between life and death.

It’s only by God’s grace that I was born in North America into a family that never knew the kind of starvation that is all too common in other parts of the world. Maybe, I once read in a book, God is testing you by placing you in North America. Maybe He gave you the wealth you have to see what you would do with it – spend it for your own pleasures, or do as the Bible says and share it with the less fortunate. “Whoever is kind to the needy honors God” (Proverbs 14:31b).

Sometimes the issue of poverty seems so overwhelming that we are immobilized. The problem seems too immense for one person. But if we each did our part, each bought a goat to distribute instead of purchasing another change of clothing or streaking our hair or dining out, we would make a huge impact. I know that I change the fate of many families with goats and chickens and wells and medicine.

And now my children, through my teaching and my example, are making a difference, too. They’ve heard my story and have seen the pictures. Now they, too, send in their coins or part of their tithe to buy a few more goats for the children of Africa. I can imagine the joy in the faces of the recipients.

Jesus said, “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.” (Matthew 25:40).

“Someday in heaven, Jesus will thank me for all the goats I bought Him,” 12-year-old Larissa said.

Relearning Chemistry

2008-10-13T10:18:00.008-04:00

Heat equals mass times specific heat times change in temperature.

Colorimetry. Calories. Joules. Atoms. Molecules.

Sigh….

My nightly ritual after work and dinner is to write up daily schedules for the next day of schooling, correct the kids’ assignments, grade tests – and then sit up and read Chemistry. Yes, Chemistry. I get out my highlighter, mark the important text, memorize the formulas, then using my paper and pencil, I figure out the examples and assigned problems.

Why am I relearning Chemistry?

We have a tutor for math. Another for French. A friend teaches them Spanish. And a music teacher gives them piano lessons. These are subjects I cannot teach my kids. But I was a science major in college – granted, in Biology, not Chemistry – and I can teach the science myself.

Oh, I thought I could hand off the book – Aplogia’s Exploring Creation With Chemistry – to the kids and have them teach themselves. I even found help on the Internet for scheduling the course. I thought they would read the small chunks of material, follow the examples, work out the problems, and learn Chemistry on their own.

But they got stuck in chapter 2. The only way to help them is to read the material myself. If I tutored Chemistry in college, I know I can relearn this stuff. So night after night, after the kids are in bed, I read my Chemistry, work out the problems, and follow along so I can explain the problems, the math, the concepts.

I hope that one day the kids will appreciate what I am going through to teach them at home because frankly, I’d rather be gardening or reading novels than relearning Chemistry. But one thing I’ll say about this: my brain is getting a workout, so I’ll be keeping Alzheimer’s at bay for a while!

Handicapped

2008-10-09T23:48:00.001-04:00

It's official: I'm handicapped.

When I went in to the company office recently, the long walk from the back of the company parking lot to the building, then up the elevator and through one building, then another and another all the way to my office was too much for me. By the time I got to my cubicle, my heart was pounding and the chest pains worsened. Granted, I don't have to come in often these days; mostly I work from home. But when I do have to come in, I'd like to park close to the entrance of the building. So this week I did park there – and got a note from Security warning me not park in the handicapped spots again.

I had a doctor appointment this past week to re-evaluate my health and my ability to work. I've felt ill with my lupus for so long that it's now "normal," but there is no way I could work an 8-hour day, not even if I weren't homeschooling the kids. I'm just too fatigued and my heart hurts much of the time. I feel comfortable working my six hours per day from home, but more than that would set my health back, probably to the point where I could hardly work at all.

So the doctor extended my part-time disability for another ten weeks. Meanwhile, I've asked for part-time status at work to relieve me from the pressure of getting well and getting back to work full-time. Part-time is all I can handle, and I'd like to have that be my official status. But we shall see. This is about being handicapped.

What a strange and unwanted status: Handicapped. Impaired. Disadvantaged. These words apply to me, a "supermom" who until lately was a full-time employee, mother, wife, housekeeper, Sunday school teacher, and singer in the church choir. I was a volunteer newsletter writer and photographer, and I went on international short-time mission trips almost annually. Sometimes twice a year. And I wrote about these experiences for my company's blog on a volunteer basis. I was a mom who took on homeschooling as well (after dropping the choir and Sunday school roles). Yes, I was someone who burned the candle at both ends – and still had time to read.

And now I have a tag in my car that allows me to park as close as possible to a building so I don't exhaust myself...

My doctor had offered to fill in the paperwork so I could get a handicapped parking permit the last time I saw him. I refused. During this week’s visit, I requested it myself.

So it’s official: I'm handicapped. And I have the tag to prove it.

New driver

2008-10-08T23:32:00.004-04:00

Jacob passed his driver's test this morning and got his driver's license. Now I have an additional item on my prayer list: his safety while driving.

Frazzled

2008-10-07T22:21:00.001-04:00

“Hi Nita. How are you doing?” I started my conversation, not knowing how to tell Nita that I needed to drop off my kids at her house at least half an hour early for their Spanish lesson with her.

I was feeling frazzled because I had to be at my company office for training at 1:00, but the work I was trying to do from home in the morning wasn’t working. The database wasn’t accepting my images, and I didn’t even know how to link an image in the new software program I’m learning. I had to go to the office to seek help – before my training.

Nita sounded rather stressed out herself. Nita homeschools her three children, who are about the age of my three. She helps me out by teaching Jacob and Alexandra Spanish twice a week.

“Well, it’s not a good day,” she admitted.

I could tell that by the tone of her voice.

“Things aren’t going well. It’s Peter. Again. I’m so frustrated that I’m considering sending him to the public high school next year.”

I’d heard that before, but Peter has been homeschooled all his life. He is now in tenth grade. Somehow Nita has managed to keep on homeschooling him despite some rocky periods.

“Or maybe a military boarding school,” Nita continued, venting her frustration. “He’s just not doing his work. I’ve taken away his iPod, his computer, I’ve taken away his privilege to use the phone. I’ve grounded him so he can’t go outside. I’ve taken away his books. He’s not even allowed upstairs because he goes up there and doesn’t do his schoolwork. I’m so annoyed and discouraged – he’s not doing his work!!”

I can’t say that I was glad to hear it. Not at all. But I sure empathized. My kids haven’t gotten to the point that they didn’t do their work; they sometimes do it more slowly than I’d like, turn it in days late, end up reading a book on horses instead of the Holocaust, or take homeschool less seriously than “real” school.

But I could sure relate!

Meltdown

2008-10-04T23:43:00.010-04:00

All the homeschooling blogs I’ve read paint a rosy picture of happy children with unruffled moms blissfully pursuing knowledge in the form of fun field trips or organized home activities. The kids are happy, the mom is happy, and learning happens almost as an afterthought.

So what am I doing wrong?

I have three teens at home – grades 8, 10, and 11. I’ll ignore for now the fact that they don’t always stay on course and get their work done within the timeframe I specify. That they distract one another with chatter. That on a nice day one or more go outside and putter in the garden until I herd them inside, chiding them for taking a break before finishing their work. And I’ll overlook that I’ve completely disrupted their routines – routines that we were just in the process of establishing, frankly, because we hadn’t even completed two full weeks of school – by putting schoolwork aside when I first heard of my brother’s tragic accident, then worked with my family to organize his funeral. I’ll ignore that because we’re back on track now, really we are. Back to doing all our subjects.

That means that Jacob and Alexandra are studying Chemistry again. I decided to have Jacob and Alexandra both do Chemistry this year because it’s easier on me to have them do labs together, and for me to keep up with two science courses rather than three.

Because of our disruption, it took all of September to cover just the first chapter of Chemistry: Measurement and Units. Now how hard can that chapter be? I read half the chapter to familiarize myself with the subject. Yep, it’s a lot of math. The chapter stressed consistency in units and significant figures. They beat significant figures into you. There were practice questions and review questions and pre-test practice questions. No, I didn’t hand hold Jacob and Alexandra through it. I expect them to review their answers and read the answer key and figure out where they went wrong if they didn’t get the correct answer.

In our home, homeschooling means self-study. Maybe it’s not the best way, but that’s what it is here. You read, you do the problems, you check your work against the answer key. I check the labs. If you have a question, ask me and I’ll make sure I find the answer and explain it; if you don’t ask, I assume you understand.

“Ready for your first test?” I asked. It was, as I said, way behind schedule. “It’s all problems just like the practice questions. Remember – always convert numbers so they have the same units – you can’t compare measurements in inches and centimeters, or centimeters and meters. An answer with no units is considered wrong. And always, always pay attention to significant figures. Are you sure you’re ready?”

Alexandra took the test before Jacob. She got a 95% – one problem wrong.

Jacob dragged his feet and studied longer.

“Yes, I’m ready,” he finally said.

He’s not as diligent as Alexandra, so I reminded him about the units and significant figures. Then I repeated myself. I had a bad feeling about this test.

He got the first few right. But then as I compared his answers with the answer key – correct answer, wrong number of significant figures. Unfortunately, that’s considered wrong. One wrong, two wrong, three… My stomach sank. Four wrong… By the time I’d marked the test, he ended up with a 69%. I was so disappointed. I felt I’d failed somehow.

“Jacob, I told you to pay attention to significant figures. That’s the one thing that they stress over and over in this chapter.”

Without missing a beat, he sassed back. “Stupid test! All along we’re taught in math to be precise, to have as many significant figures as possible! This is really dumb!”

“Yes, but this chapter is specifically about measurements and calculations with these measurements. If you measure a board that’s 3.1 meters long, you suddenly can’t do a calculation using the 3.1 meters and come up with an answer accurate to the thousandths of meters!” I explained.

“I bet they’re not doing stupid stuff like this in public school!” Oh, Jacob said more than that. Stupid book, stupid test – it’s everyone’s fault but his.

He grabbed the phone angrily and called his classmate from last year, who is taking Chemistry in public school. What I heard of the conversation suggested that in public school, they, too, learn about – and are tested on – significant figures.

Meanwhile, I confronted Alexandra about her Health test that she’d taken that day.

“Alexandra, this is a really easy test. You’re an A+ student. Last test you got an 80-something. This week you got an 86%. You can do better than that! Jacob got a 103% on this test last year – all the answers plus the bonus. Did you even study? I think you aren’t taking homeschooling seriously. I expect you to score in the 90s. You’ve always been a good student; you aren’t trying.”

Was Alexandra remorseful? Embarrassed? Did she vow she’d do better? No, she laughed! In a sing-song voice, she mocked, “Oh, let’s all be sad now.”

I lost it. Where are the happy, respectful kids? Don’t they have an ounce of appreciation for the sacrifice I make daily to homeschool them? (Yes, we know the answer to that.) For all my time and efforts, my late nights and failing health, they argue and sass and mock.

I left the house. I did not stay for dinner. I did not make dinner. (Fortunately, it was Larissa’s assignment to do that.) I went to my deceased brother Greg’s house and just chilled out there, alone with my thoughts, alone in his garden, alone with photos of him with his son.

And there I finally found a strange peace.

Empty

2008-10-03T18:40:00.010-04:00

My brother’s house stands empty now. The tools that I had to step over upon entering it the first time after his death are put away. His piles of motorcycle parts and papers – gone. Cleaned up. Boxed up or thrown away. All the things he considered dear or essential – unnecessary now. Left behind. He took nothing with him. No one does.

I’ve been to his house more times in the last two weeks than in the six years that he lived there. I’ve been there with my kids, with my husband, with my sister and brothers, with Cindi and her sister. And recently, I’ve been there alone. I walked through the chilly house, trying not to think as I saw the framed photos of Greg smiling with his son still up where he left them.

Of course he thought he’d be back.

Today I removed all the photos from the refrigerator. I couldn’t stand to see his memories on the metal door.

I’m still not sure what to do about the things that are left in the house. The lawyer said I’d be appointed administrator of the estate by the end of this week. But being appointed doesn’t give me sudden knowledge of what to do. Isn’t there a manual I should read, a brochure with easy 1 – 2 – 3 instructions?

But it’s not like that. What does one do with another’s estate? I’ve made a few calls, canceled some magazines and a credit card, but what do I do with the house and its contents? Sell them, I know, but where do I begin?

I can think about Greg now without crying. But when I go over and see his beloved gardens, his more than 80 hostas, most of which he could name – that is still very painful. Greg was the only other member of my family who liked to garden; none of my other siblings do. Sometimes he'd come to my cubicle and describe what's blooming that day. He loved to walk through his yard and marvel at the beauty of the plants.

Fortunately for me, Larissa has caught the bug. So we have dug up a few of Greg’s hostas and I’ve started planting a memorial garden in my front yard, a garden created from plants taken from his gardens and transplanted from mine. It’ll be a lovely garden, Greg, right under the redbud tree.

I wish you could see it.

Another note

2008-10-03T00:19:00.008-04:00

A grey-haired man approached me after the first Community Bible Study session I attended last year.

"I know you!" he said, waggling his finger at me. "You're Faith! I grew up around the corner from you!" He went on to describe his escapades with my brothers. Since I was older than the boys around the corner, I hadn't paid much attention to them.

But now, as adults, we reconnected. I often chatted with Ken after our weekly class, but by the end of the school year when my lupus flared up, I stopped attending.

After Greg died, I sent Ken a note describing what had happened. A few days later, he replied:

*****

Hi Faith,

After I had a chance to process your email and all the comments I read about Greg on the V-Nation forum, I came home from work today, lay down, and had a good cry. I was surprised how much Greg’s death affected me, but on reflection realized we did an amazing amount of stuff together. Your brothers Greg and John are part of the reason I'm so close to my brother Chuck now – even though Chuck is six years older than me, we all spent a lot of time together. The four (or five if you include your youngest brother Andrew) of us tried to do ourselves in in a remarkable variety of ways, including fireworks, rockets, airplane propellers, flash paper, firecracker powered BB rifles, and insane bicycle stunts.

It seems so unfair that some as well loved as Greg was taken so suddenly and so strangely, especially unfair to Luke and Cindi. This is one of those times you know God is in control, but you have to wonder what he was thinking.

Your family was such a big part of my growing up that I'm feeling a lot of pain for you as well. Please remember that I am praying for all of you, even the ones I've never met. We've published this on our family mailing list, so I'm sure many prayers are going up on your behalf.

The peace of Christ be with you,

kt

Gone

2008-10-02T23:08:00.009-04:00

"Now you listen to me," I must have been saying to Greg back when we were so very young in Toronto.

I can't even imagine the pain my mother must feel when she looks at these faded photos of our happy childhoods, childhoods long gone.

And now, not only are our childhoods gone, one of the children is gone, too... Gone. Never to come back again.

And that's what's so hard about the death of a loved one. You have so many things you still want to tell them, so many things to share that you catch yourself sometimes thinking, "Oh, wouldn't he like this," or "I can't wait to tell him that." But that's no longer possible.

Oh, how that hurts...

More letters about my brother

2008-10-02T00:03:00.008-04:00

In happier times; Greg is in

the middle, I'm on the right

Faith,

I am so sad that Greg has passed away. I am sad for his fiancée Cindi, and son Luke, and all your family. I am sad for myself because after years of detachment, Greg and I had resumed our friendship but now we are separated again. My 14-year-old daughter only met Greg twice, but she cried this morning when I told her about him.

I have known Greg about as long as anyone not directly related to him, and I can tell you he became a very good man. Life threw Greg a curve when Luke was born, but he took on the challenges of a special child with same grace and vigor as he took on a challenging ski slope.

One of the aspects of Greg's personality that I loved was his thirst for knowledge. Much of my intellectual curiosity I can directly attribute to the many hours I spent with Greg growing up. He was always into something fascinating, and I could only be amazed by his grasp of subjects that were years beyond me. I just wanted to play with the slot cars; he wanted to show me how the AC current was transformed into DC and how the motors worked. I wanted to play with the plasticine clay; he said, "Let's make an animated movie!" As you know, we did.

Greg was a superb writer. I have some email from him regarding his experiences in the Coast Guard. If you want I will send them to you.

Greg had a tremendous sense of humor that endeared him to me a great deal. He turned me on to Monty Python and other British comedy when we were kids. I have always been a bit of a clown, but with Greg the repartee was always a step above.

I will miss him for the rest of my life, but he is a pretty good part of what makes me who I am. I will take some small comfort from that.

Andy

Tributes to my brother

2008-10-01T09:43:00.026-04:00

Family photo: Greg, on the left, is the middle child with two older sisters and two younger brothers. The youngest had not yet been born when this picture was taken. I, the oldest, am in back.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

My brother touched many lives in his 49 years. His outgoing nature, his ready smile, his ability to talk with people and share part of himself with those he came across - these made an impact on people. His sudden death affected a great number of people. Childhood friends, coworkers, bikers, cyberfriends - many have felt compelled to write tributes to my brother, then share them. Since we were in the same department at work, I received this email that a work associate sent to her coworkers:

* * *

I finished writing this over the weekend and wanted to share it with you.

September 24, 2008

To Friends of Greg,

Some people touch your life in unexpected ways and leave you with a lasting gift. I knew Greg only as a work colleague and only for a few years, but to know him at all was to count yourself his friend.

What struck everyone immediately about Greg, of course, was his love for his son. When he spoke about Luke, Greg's face beamed. This little boy with all his special needs was perfect in Greg's eyes. And, just as his love for Luke was inspiring, Greg’s love for life was contagious. He made his teammates laugh in a way that put work problems in the proper perspective.

The large number of non-Ukrainian-speaking friends attentively making their way through the beautifully chanted service at the Ukrainian Catholic Church of the Epiphany last Monday was a testament to the kind of person that Greg was. He was adventurous and told of stories of the kind that, to my mind, "guys" like to tell: his Pacific experiences in the Coast Guard, his nights on the Bristol ski patrol, his motorcycle trips.... But, he could talk with equal enthusiasm about personal relationships in a way that many men in our culture cannot: his parents, brothers, and sisters – the "whole bunch of us crazy Ukrainians," as he affectionately called his family; his son Luke, who cannot walk or talk but would joyously crawl over to his father and babble happily when Greg came into the room; his upcoming wedding plans with Cindi, the beautiful woman who seemed his soul mate in so many ways and with whom he looked forward to spending the rest of his life.

As his love for Cindi grew, it seemed to flow over into his other relationships, even in some surprising ways. Not too long ago, he told me that he loved his ex-wife. At the time, it seemed such an unusual thing to say that I remember it almost word for word. He said something like, "I love her sort of like a little sister. We get along great now. Her husband is so good with Luke, and she's a wonderful mother. She and I...we just weren't good together."

The only shadow that I ever saw fall on Greg was the worry that he would not have the financial wherewithal to leave for Luke' care after Greg’s death. Probably all parents of special needs children worry about that. But, certainly, Greg's death must have seemed to be very far in the future on September 11th, when he was hit by a golf cart, struck his head, and lost consciousness. A golf cart? How could a golf cart fell a man like Greg, an expert skier, a man who "swam with the sharks" in his Coast Guard days?

"Impossible," his friends thought. "How unfair!" "Why," everyone asked themselves and each other.

Why? Why would a compassionate God take such a vibrant man, one whom so many people needed: his son, his aging parents, his fiancée, his siblings, friends, and coworkers. As human beings, we will never know the answer to that. We probably shouldn't even try. Yet, I'm the type who always wants to know that there is a pattern there, even if I can't fathom the weave.

Greg loved his life, and he loved the people who were part of it. He had fun, but not at the expense of other people. He made sacrifices without even considering them as such. He had his priorities right. He didn't just "make the best of a bad situation," he instinctively saw the good in every situation and he celebrated it. So, why would God take someone like that so abruptly and prematurely?

I don’t know. But I can't help thinking that maybe, just maybe, it has something to do with the idea that we are all sent into this world to learn to love one another. Maybe Greg just learned the lesson faster than most of us do. "Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends." (John 15:13)

Our memories of the way that Greg embraced life and danced with it are his legacy to us. This is the gift that we can carry into our own lives if we have the courage to do so. Let's not let Greg down.

- Catherine

Getting back on track

2008-09-28T14:23:00.002-04:00

My brother’s death derailed homeschooling for over a week. However, since family tragedies are part of life, completely ignoring them would not be normal. Had Jacob, Alexandra, and Larissa been going to school, I would have been writing excuses to the teachers. They might have been able to be physically present in school, but they would not have had time for homework. We congregated at my parents’ house almost daily since hearing of my brother’s accident, first to wait for news, then to mourn, and finally to plan the funeral. My parents needed them for moral support; the family needed them to babysit my out-to-town niece as the adults all ran errands.

But the funeral is over and it’s back to the homeschooling routine. I’ve added back all the subjects that were put on hold. Monday evening on the day of the funeral, I went back to spending over an hour per night writing up individual schedules. This weekend I’m working on weekly schedules for each of the kids. Managing their time and planning out the curriculum for each child over the course of the year takes more time than the “teaching.” In fact, for teenagers, I think that this planning is the majority of the teaching!

Since I’m homeschooling three kids this year, I have a new policy: that day’s homework must be on the corner of my home office desk by the end of the day. No more tracking down assignments. I haven’t come up with a penalty for not handing in an assignment by the end of the day though I realize that in school the consequences are either a full grade lower for a late assignment or a zero for not turning it in. I want to run a tight ship (it’s part of my personality and my role at work), but I don’t want to be so strict that it’s more about schedules than actual learning.

So I’m considering going to a weekly schedule – that is, still writing out the schedules for each day’s work, but allowing them the week to complete all the assignments. One day they can do all their vocabulary and math, another day spend the whole day reading literature, and still another day do their science. There are subjects, like voice and piano, that they must do daily. You can’t sing a week’s worth in a day. But whether I collect work at the end of the day or by the end of the week, I should come up with a penalty for late work, shouldn’t I?

I’ve read so many theories about homeschooling that I suppose it’s completely up to me how to handle late work. I do know, however, that for my job as a writer, I have schedules and deadlines, and the consequence of turning in late work could cost me my job. If my husband George promises clients a job will be completed by a certain date because the client is planning a party but George doesn’t finish by that date, they’ll never hire him again to paint or install a floor.

That’s the real world, and that’s where all kids end up someday.

Where’s the will?

2008-09-23T23:13:00.009-04:00

This is the question in the forefront of our minds. My two brothers, Andrew and John, and I converged on Greg’s house today and sorted through his things searching for that key paper. Andrew’s wife Tammy was with us. She was a filing genius. Andrew went through the three organized filing drawers that contained papers only up to 2004; Tammy sorted a box full of papers from 2004 to the present, organizing all those papers into folders. I realized a bit later that since Greg lived in that house four years, the papers in that large cardboard box were ALL the bills, etc., that came in since he moved into that house!

My job was to open and sort new mail. We found out more about Greg’s financial affairs than Greg would have ever been comfortable sharing. How much he made. How much he owed. How many credit cards he had and what he spent his (or rather not his) money on. It didn’t feel right finding out all those details.

The elusive will was not in the filing cabinet. Nor the box of papers. His divorce lawyer did not write one up. Greg’s ex-wife knows nothing of a will. Nor does his fiancée. Yet Greg had come into my office one day and demanded, “Do you have a will?” You don’t do that unless you have one. It would be like me asking, “Did you eat all your vegetables?” I can only challenge that if I ate mine. So there must be a will!

We don’t know of a safe deposit box (his credit union doesn’t have one). His will isn’t on file with the county clerk’s office. It wasn’t among the papers at work. (On a long shot, I drove to the company to pick up my brother’s effects.) We found no record of it on his computer when we did key word searches. Greg wasn’t the neatest guy, but there are only so many places you would logically put a will – aren’t there? Where or where can it be?? If we don’t find it, I will get appointed executor, and that’s a crash course I didn’t want to go through – while homeschooling children and working?!

Homeschooling? Oh, that. For the last week as I frantically took care of funeral details, I shoved a book at each of the kids (The Jungle, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and a book of short stories by Tolstoy) and told the kids to read. Fortunately, I’d started school with them in mid-August, in case we had guests that would distract them from working. Instead, my brother’s death distracted them.

But now I’m being distracted. What is a logical place to keep a will? Wouldn’t you put it in a place where others would find it???

Burial

2008-09-22T23:36:00.011-04:00

It’s very difficult to bury your brother – especially when he’s not a believer. In fact, he rejected God.

We grew up in a Catholic church. While I left the Catholic Church and joined an evangelical church, after Greg left home, he never went to church again – except for weddings, funerals, and the occasional Christmas.

I was assigned the task to speak in church about my brother, mainly because the Ukrainian Catholic church my mother attends – and where the funeral was – has a new priest directly from Ukraine, one who doesn’t know Greg and who cannot speak much English.

The turnout was huge. Greg was gregarious and well-loved – a ski patrolman, a biker (Harley Davidson, not bicycle), a veteran of the Coast Guard, an adventurer, a multimedia graphic designer in a large company where he and I worked in the same department – and a loving dad. So this is what I said to the congregation today:

* * *
…and the dust returns to the ground it came from, and the spirit returns to God who gave it. - Ecclesiastes 12: 7

We are gathered here to remember my brother, Gregory. Greg was a devoted father. From the moment that his son Luke came into this earth, Greg doted on him. Luke wasn’t like other children; he had special needs, and special needs required extra sacrifice on the part of the parents. Greg never complained about this turn of fate. Not once. He adored Luke, doted on him, and simply glowed whenever he talked about his son. Since Greg and I worked together for the same department, Greg would come to my office quite often and share stories about Luke – how Luke had a cough and how worried he was that the cough might go to his lungs. How Luke had finally learned to crawl. Then taken his first steps – but not at a year like most children; he was much older. Or Greg would describe how Luke laughed with delight when Greg would play the guitar for him. He described Luke’s teachers in Kindergarten or told me how good the other classmates were to him. Greg could mimic Luke’s giggles and squeals. He talked about getting him hearing aids. Braces for his legs. A special walker. There was nothing that Greg wouldn’t have done for his son.

Our Father in heaven loves us even more than Greg loved Luke. But how many of us return that love? Do we just think about Him once a week on Sunday mornings? Or perhaps not even that often? I think that if Greg could speak to us today, he would tell us that this is the most important relationship – our relationship with Jesus Chris, our redeemer – to work on while here on earth.

The Spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing. The words I have spoken to you are spirit and they are life. – John 6:63

What can I do to help?

2008-09-18T23:58:00.001-04:00

I hear this question often since my brother died. So many of us tend to say that we can’t think of anything. We think that turning down offers of help is the right thing to do. That way we won’t burden the other person. In reality, you are rejecting their love when you reject their offer of help. If you accept help, you allow them to serve you and you become obligated – or at least that’s the perception.

When folks have asked how they can help, I’ve accepted their love offering and suggested that they bring meals to my parents’ house. Many of us converge on their house now; it’s our central station for planning our brother’s funeral.

“You have such nice friends,” my mother told me after the parents of Larissa’s best friend dropped off some chicken and rice and a cake.

“I’ve taken them up on their offers to help,” I replied. And indeed, this visit and the visit of coworkers have cheered us and helped us in a tangible way.

But help on a completely different level came about from a conversation with Greg’s boss. I mentioned that in the past, especially after Greg’s divorce, my family would come over in the fall to rake the leaves in my brother’s wooded lot. He always had a LOT of leaves because of his 40 or so trees. “With Greg gone, we will have to do a lot of raking this fall,” I sighed.

“Now there’s a way we can help,” said Barb. “We’ll do the raking.” She had mentioned that the folks at work wanted to know how they could help the family, and this was a concrete way.

“Well, you can help even sooner. The windstorm a few days ago knocked off a lot of branches in his yard,” I informed Barb.

The next day when I visited his house, the branches were cleaned up, the deck and walkways swept, the lawn raked.

Today even more bags of leaves were by the curb. Like little secrets Santas, people had come and bagged leaves, mowed the lawn, and left.

While Greg was an avid gardener and had just painted his house and changed the roof, the inside of his house is a different story. It’s a true bachelor pad. When you open the front door, you step over his toolkit. Even though Ruby the cat is very timid and hides, you know that there’s a cat in the house by the white cat fur. (We took the cat to my parents for the time being.) Clothes are strewn on the floor in one room; in the office, you can hardly get to the desk. The linoleum floor is in need of replacement because it’s broken in places. The wall studs are visible because part of the wall is missing in the dining room.

The house needs an overwhelming amount of work. My brother simply hadn’t gotten to it. He was living life – biking, ski patrolling, and spending time with his sweetheart.

“We’ll need to do a lot of work on the house before we can sell it,” I mentioned to Barb tonight when I called to thank her for the yard work.

“Just tell us what you need done and when you want to do it. You’ll have to limit the volunteers to they’re not tripping over each other,” Barb said.

I’m humbled, truly humbled by this outpouring of help – of love. In large part, it’s a testimony to the type of person my brother was. My brother touched many, many lives in his short life. He was a dedicated father of a disabled child, and although his life was tough at times, he didn’t complain. He could always see the bright side of things, even about being the parent of a disabled child. “He’s always happy,” Greg said of his son. And Greg seemed like he was always happy, too.

Gravesite

2008-09-17T00:36:00.002-04:00

My mother and I got out of the van and looked at a plot of ground.

No, not good. Not enough shade.

We got into the van and were taken a little ways down a peaceful drive. I got out, still holding my morning coffee and the folder of papers that I began carrying with me yesterday. Mom and I looked at another plot of land.

No, too out in the open. Too stark.

We went around the corner in that van. I left my folder in the vehicle and gazed at a majestic oak nearby. A few browned leaves littered the ground, signaling that fall was imminent.

I looked at another plot, then turned away. Walking toward the oak, I gave in to my grief. Tears streamed down my face. I sobbed.

This was the spot, the place where my brother would be buried.

My brother, who a week ago was taking off on vacation on his motorcycle with his lovely fiancée-to-be. My brother, the optimist, the outgoing man who could bring out even the shiest, most reticent person. My brother, full of joy and life, who had a ready smile and a way with people. My dear, dear brother…

The sun shone and the day was warm. He would have enjoyed this day.

Oh, Greg, I never thought that I’d have to bury you! I never expected I’d stand by your grave someday. Oh, my dear brother, I thought that you would outlive me, your older sister! You were in such good health, had so much vigor, so much to give, so much of your life still ahead! My dear brother, how I’ll miss you!

Greg, I’ll take good care of your gravesite. We shared a passion for gardening, and yours, my brother, will be a lovely site with hostas and spring bulbs and many forget-me-nots from my garden. They will be watered with tears.

My dear brother, it will be very, very hard to stand by your gravesite when we bury you in a few days.

Meaningless

2008-09-16T00:45:00.009-04:00

My heart took delight in all my work, and this was the reward for all my labor. Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind; nothing was gained under the sun.

Ecclesiastes 2:10b–11

My brother Greg died late Saturday. It was a meaningless, unnecessary death, a tragic accident.

Since then, I haven’t been able to keep him out of my mind – all the things that he worked so hard to achieve (the perfect lawn, the lovely hosta garden) the material possessions he accumulated (two motorcycles, a boat, his massage chair) – all are now meaningless, a chasing after the wind.

All night I saw him walking, walking, walking. Greg had a unique gait, his knees bending slightly out with each stride. Unable to sleep in my grief, I saw him walking as I did daily in the halls of the company, coming to visit me in my cubicle. I will miss him so much when I return to the office. I used to have long talks with him daily. He wasn’t only my brother – my favorite brother of the three I have – he was also a coworker and friend. I will miss his tremendous wealth of knowledge, his generous spirit, his willingness to help.

The entire work group at our company is shocked and dazed. Greg was gregarious and well liked. Not only did they lose a coworker; another coworker is part of the grieving family! I’m out on leave because of death in the family; he is the family who died.

…and the dust returns to the ground it came from, and the spirit returns to God who gave it.

Ecclesiastes 12:7

Funeral preparations are keeping me busy; the kids are doing homeschool only part-time. They help cheer my parents in their grief by spending time there. Tomorrow, when the key to Greg's house arrives in overnight mail, the kids will come with me to his house capture Greg's timid cat and bring it to my parents' house. And I have to try to find Greg's will. I know he had one - but where?? Meanwhile, my sister is still working on shipping his body from the Midwest back home in the Northeast.

All those possessions, that perfect lawn that he labored over – meaningless!

“Utterly meaningless. Everything is meaningless.” What does man gain from all his labor at which he toils under the sun?

Ecclesiastes 1:2–3

Pray

2008-09-13T17:53:00.004-04:00

The call came at 3:30 AM. Four rings, and the answering machine clicked into action. It was the clicking that awoke me. Another wrong number, my groggy mind assumed, and I listened to the clicking of the answering machine, but no message.

I may as well go to the toilet while I’m awake, I thought, but walked by the answering machine to check it. The red light blinked in the darkness, indicating that the caller had left a message after all. Still assuming I’d hear a stranger’s voice on the machine, I wound the tape back and turned up the volume, which had been off.

It was my sister’s voice.

“Faith, pray. When you, George, wake up, pray. Greg had a very bad accident. They have to do surgery on his head and he has only 50% chance of surviving. He’s in Kansas City. A golf cart ran into him. Please pray. Pray.”

Greg is our younger brother. He was in Kansas City with his girlfriend at a motorcycle rally. Neither of us had known that, however. Greg realizes that none of us really understand his sudden obsession with his Harley Davidson, which he purchased after his divorce, a mid-life crisis sort of thing. He and his girlfriend had met in part because of that motorcycle.

Greg, always an optimist, has not had a charmed life. He and his wife had a severely disabled child. Then one morning his wife turned to him and said, “I don’t love you anymore.” And that was that. His marriage was over. Try as he did to patch up the relationship, she would have none of it. Her mind had been made up before she ever mentioned being unhappy. I got to hear the blow-by-blow account of my brother’s breakup, to be his shoulder in the time of crisis; I work for the same company and the same group as my brother. Our offices were a few aisles apart. We saw each other daily. He needed someone to listen, and I was that one.

He left the dream house on the lake and almost everything in it to his ex so she’d be better able to take care of their son, and started life anew.

The divorce was now many years ago, and things were looking up. Greg bought an engagement ring for Cindi and on Thursday at the rally was going to propose to her.

It never happened.

Greg was out walking. The golf cart was going too fast. It was raining. It put on its breaks and slid; Greg went flying from the impact and landed on his head.

He had a part of his skull removed to allow the brain to swell. These two days are critical. The life signs do not look good.

I am praying. George is praying. Our children and friends are praying.

Pray.

Can’t do this in a public school!

2008-09-09T18:00:00.004-04:00

Have you ever had a hard time putting a book down? Admit it. Hasn’t there been at least one time when you should have turned off the light, but you read halfway through the night? Certainly I have! I even pawned off cooking duties on my husband once when I couldn’t put a book down.

I suspected that keeping a steady supply of good books for 12-year-old Larissa to read would be this year’s challenge. It’s her first year of homeschooling, so I’m just getting to know her learning style. And I’ve had a few surprises.

I knew that Larissa is an avid reader, but she’s always been a conscientious student. I thought that when I gave her a list of the day’s assignments, she would get them done quickly, then have the rest of the day to do something fun – like read some more! But I’m going to have to change my expectations. Or my assignments.

During August, I started homeschooling on a part-time basis, giving the kids only reading assignments (literature), vocabulary drills, and one other subject – art for Larissa. When I gave Larissa Bridge to Terebithia, she read it the same day. It wasn’t a big surprise; she didn’t have many other assignments.

Yesterday I gave Larissa The Adventure of Tom Sawyer for her next literature assignment. She had a generous ten days in which to read the book. But once she got it into her hands, all other assignments – science, art, French, music… – disappeared from her conscience and she was transported to the shores of the Mississippi River to join the fun and frolicking of a bygone era. She didn’t stop reading until she’d finished the book.

So I can see that she’ll be reading way, way more than I wrote on her IHIP (Individualized Home Instruction Plan). And that I’ll have to give her a list of weekly assignments rather than daily tasks to complete. (She still hasn’t done yesterday’s science.) But the daily task list is something that my son needs to stay on track. So I’ll have to adjust expectations and assignments based on each child’s learning style.

But to skip all your classes and sit in your English class to read a classic – it’s just not done in public school.

Fuming!

2008-09-08T17:53:00.004-04:00

Last school year when I pulled Jacob out of tenth grade in January, I tried unsuccessfully to get information about enrolling Jacob in our local Career Center – a vocational school where high school kids go part of the day to learn trade skills, like automotive repair, welding, and cosmetology. But no one seemed to know much about enrolling a homeschooler, so I stopped pursuing it. I was, after all, the middle of the school year and trying to learn how to homeschool for the first time myself.

Learning a practical skill, like auto repair, is quite appealing. After all, I’m teaching my son Chemistry, Trigonometry, and other college-track courses; a practical course would actually supplement his education very nicely. Besides, he’d always be employable; cars constantly break down. And, of course, like my husband, Jacob would be able to fix his own car someday. Jacob loves working with his hands, so this would be a good fit for him.

So today I tried to sign him up for the auto repair class in the Career Center, a school subsidized by my tax dollars. Since I got only recordings when I tried to reach the Center by phone, I drove there.

The receptionist for the Center, which services ten school districts on the east side of my fair city, was very nice. “We’ve had other homeschoolers,” she smiled. “But you have to sign him up through your school district.”

Since I prefer meeting people face to face when trying to get something done, I drove to the school administrative offices and was directed to the woman to whom I send my IHIPs. I thought I was getting close to my goal with maybe another stop at the school, but she completed stunned me when she said that there’s a law against signing up my son at the Center!

I was stunned. A law against it?

Her supervisor gave me a printout from the New York State Education Department website, citing the answer to question 20. However, the printout she gave me had a longer answer:

Pursuant to Education law 3602-c, instruction in the areas of occupational and vocational education, gifted education, and education of student with disabilities may be furnished to students enrolled in nonpublic schools. With that exception, which is not applicable to home-instructed students, boards of education are not authorized to instruct pupils on a part-time basis (Appeal of Pope, 40 Ed Dept Rep 473, Decision No. 14,530; Appeal of Sutton, 39 Ed Dept Rep 625, Decision No. 14,332; Matter of Mayshark, supra)).

Was the Center receptionist wrong? Had they really had homeschoolers sign up through more lenient school districts? Is there anything more I can do?

“I called the assistant superintendent and superintendent,” said that woman I spoke to at the school district. She had taken it upon herself to pursue this matter and called me at home an hour ago.

So I’m really upset. Fuming. I know I sound like a toddler having a tantrum, but it’s not fair! Isn't there anything I can do???

Misgivings

2008-09-06T20:27:00.005-04:00

A new school year began this week. It was a breezy week of yellow sunshine, a few falling leaves, and end-of-summer warmth. The school buses rumbled down our street. They stopped for Larissa and waited for her to show up because the driver had not yet been notified that she was not returning to school. (Alexandra, who was in high school, was part of a group stop while Larissa had a bus stop for her alone right in front of our home.) I could see the girls looking somewhat longingly at the yellow buses that have been part of their lives since Kindergarten. Was I doing the right thing pulling them out of school this year to homeschool them?

I had a big internal battle over that this week. A large part of me said that their public schooling was high quality and that I could never do as good a job as trained teachers in expensive facilities with the latest lab equipment and books, and even math and science tutors available any hour of the school day on a walk-in basis. How could I match that? I was feeling frazzled over scheduling courses for three students – two in high school and one in junior high. Chemistry, physical science, vocabulary, literature, American history, global history, writing assignments, grammar, music, art, cooking… I’m responsible for these and more. I juggle scheduling time with tutors for math, French, and Spanish. I’m really nervous about taking on the kids’ education, stressed out over the long evenings of writing lesson plans and schedules, and worried about how I’ll balance this with work.

Yes, work. I was on a medical leave for a couple of months, but now I’m working again. Thanks to my illness and my doctor, I’m working solely from home now, and only 6 hours per day, but when the medical leave runs out and my health is no longer fragile, I’m expected to go back to my company office. And I really don’t want to do that. I’m much happier, and even more productive, when I work from home. I also want to cut back from full-time to part-time employment. Will my company agree?

So as I worry over the quality of my kids’ education, I question them over and over: What did you do in your English class? Am I covering what your History teacher would cover? How did you spend class time in science? Since my children were not homeschooled from early grades, they could compare what they learn at home versus what they were learning in school. And I’m just not sure how I’ll stack up.

One thing cheers me, and that’s that they will no longer have the setup/teardown time when changing classes, which ate a lot of time daily. After they switch classes, the kids have to settle into their new classroom, listen to announcements or write down assignments, take out their books. All this wastes time. At home, they just grab the next book in the pile, the next notebook, and continue on. Still, I feel that by reading everything they learn, they’ll get bored. Read and read and read all day long, punctuated by some writing. And playing the piano.

“I want to go to school,” Alexandra scribbled in the margin of her Health assignment last week. I’m sure she misses her friends. But last year she couldn't wait to leave the school environment and be homeschooled.

I’m just so torn…

Parlez-vous français?

2008-09-05T19:43:00.008-04:00

This breezy, summer-like morning, before the kids settled into their studying, the doorbell rang.

“Quick, Mom, she’s here! Hurry up!” my daughters urged me away from my computer where I was already checking the morning email on my company’s computer.

“I’m so glad you could come,” I greeted Karol, our new French tutor.

Karol recently retired from teaching French and Spanish in a nearby public school system. I had met Karol at a missionary prayer circle, and had sat next to her at a church luncheon back in April. I hadn’t known Karol, so I asked her what she did. When she said that she had just retired from teaching French, a language that she loved, I asked her whether she would consider tutoring my daughters this coming school year. (My daughters were taking French in public school last year.) Although she didn’t know anything about homeschooling, Karol sounded interested.

That was in the spring; would she still be interested in September? Perhaps, like many retirees, her schedule had become filled with volunteer work and visits to other cities, extended vacations and projects that she hadn’t gotten to during her work years. So I prayed before I emailed her last week (I didn’t have her phone number, only her email address.) And the result is that she came to our house today.

She is quite an exuberant person, as I’d expect a French teacher to be. Although Larissa has had only one year of French and Alexandra had three, Karol will be tutoring them together for the most part, giving Alexandra more extended vocabulary exercises and pulling Larissa along more quickly than she’d otherwise go. Larissa did mention that last year she doodled a lot in class because many classmates were slow in picking up the language and held back the class.

That’s the beauty of homeschooling – and tutoring, if you can afford it and have the good fortune of finding a tutor. Karol is not cheap, but with half of Africa speaking French, I want my daughters to keep learning the language. Why, I was stunned – stupefied – that after 30 years of not using French at all, I could still understand the language when I ended up in Senegal on a mission trip a few years ago. I could no longer speak French, but I could follow what others were saying all around me. It’s really worth learning another language.

So the girls had their first session of getting to know the tutor, and of Karol getting to know them. With her public school connections, Karol is going to try to borrow textbooks and materials from our school system. I even put in a call to Alexandra’s French teacher – the one she had for her Honors class last year and would have had again this year. Perhaps she can lend us some books.

“How about teaching them some Bible verses in French?” my husband chimed in towards the end of the hour-long session. Work has been slow for my husband George, a general contractor, so he’s been fixing things around the house lately. “After all, isn’t it the idea to use French on mission trips?”

“Excellent idea!” said Carol.

“I’ll try to find some simple Bible stories in French,” I volunteered. With the Internet, that shouldn’t be too difficult. I hope.

I would love some recommendations if anyone has any.

Sushi again!

2008-08-20T14:56:00.004-04:00

“This is the most embarrassing moment of my life!” lamented Alexandra yesterady when we got the call that our pastor friend from Ukraine was arriving in 15 minutes – just in time for dinner. He comes from a culture of potatoes and bread and sausage, but we were about to serve him raw fish! Alexandra was mortified – especially since she was the cook!

We had known since early summer that Brother V. was coming to stay with us for several days during his tour of the States, but we didn’t know when. August? September? For a week? A month? When we finally got the call that he was arriving the next evening to stay with us for 10 days, we were delighted – and frantic. We had to clean the house, wash the sheets, switch around bedrooms, and prepare for his stay.

Just why it didn’t occur to us that he might arrive in time for dinner is now a moot point. We knew that Brother V. likes plain foods. He’s told me so during a phone call a couple of weeks back. “I’m happiest with a hunk of bread, a piece of sausage, and a pickle,” he’d explained after telling me the exotic foods other hosts were feeding him.

But Alexandra wanted to make sushi again last night. She had just learned how to make it a few days back and, I guess, she wanted to practice again. Besides, this expensive treat that we rarely indulged in when we bought the prepared sushi had suddenly become affordable.

“Delighted” doesn’t quite convey the intensity of my joy that Alexandra not only wanted to learn how to make this treat, but that she spearheaded the entire effort. Alexandra had looked up the recipe for making sushi in one of my Japanese cookbooks, then began pestering me to buy her the supplies. I finally succumbed last Friday and took the girls to an oriental grocer for the rice, wasabi, and nori (seaweed), then to a Greek-owned fish market that sells sushi-quality fish.

Sushi became my favorite food when I lived in Japan in the early 1980s, and has remained so. Slowly my husband and children developed a taste for it, and now it’s a treat for all of us. Although I loved sushi from the first bite, it seems that most people develop a taste for it over time. So to serve sushi to someone from a culture where eating raw fresh fish seems barbaric – well, it’s embarrassing for a teenager, especially when she’s the cook!

Brother V. politely tasted the sushi (though we never did tell him it was raw fish), sipped the miso soup (avoiding the tofu and seaweed), and asked for some bread.

Object writing assignment

2008-08-19T13:50:00.004-04:00

I was a bit disappointed that both girls wrote essays about notes that they found in their room. I wanted them to find an object – a souvenir from their travels, a craft they made in second grade – not to copy me and write about a note and the friend who wrote the note. However, Jacob didn’t disappoint me, at least not in choice of subject. He chose an original object that I wouldn’t have thought of. The one thing he didn’t do is introduce the object, except in his title.

Piano / keyboard
When I was still a little kid, Dad always played. He recorded songs on the keyboard, and played all sorts of songs on the piano.

I remember we used to run around and try to dance to Dad’s music. Then he would start playing a song we considered sad and we would stop and ask him to play something fast and happy.

I sometimes listen to the songs recorded on the keyboard and remember my childhood.

These days my dad plays hymns and all of us sing in four-part harmony. When my dad has time these days, which he usually doesn’t, he’ll go downstairs and practice, or learn to play different hymns. Even though I sleep downstairs now, he still comes down and plays.

I know that when he passes away the thing I’ll remember best is his love for music and praising God through it.

-----

Now I just have to get them to write longer essays!

Another writing assignment

2008-08-15T10:52:00.005-04:00

Practice, practice, and more practice – that’s the only way to learn to write well. Thus I gave my homeschoolers another writing assignment this week. Although I won’t always write a sample essay for them, I feel that if they read an example of what I expect of them, they’ll be able to write a more meaningful essay. So I sat down last night and wrote.

ASSIGNMENT: Find an object around the house and describe the memories it triggers.

The card
I found Yuri's Christmas card buried in the pile of papers and books and old letters that are heaped on my nightstand in a precarious disarray. A pang of sadness came over me. I not only hadn’t written back, I hadn’t even found this card until summertime! I’d been off to Honduras on a mission trip when it arrived, wrapped up in my life, my dreams, my kids, my family. I’d only given Cousin Yuri a fleeting thought since I’d seen him last summer.

“I’m grateful to you for everything,” he wrote at the end of his note written on the card dated 19 December 2007. Those were his last words to me.

Oh, how I wish I’d written back.

I stared at the letter, the glittery, festive Christmas card wishing my family good health and good things for 2008. They now seemed like such empty words. If he’d known it would be his last card to me, what would he have written? Would he have bared his soul? Revealed his disappointments? Lamented his lot in life? Extolled his life and wife?

I can’t even remember when I began corresponding with Cousin Yuri, twelve years my senior. Writing letters to family in Ukraine was something my parents made me do. So from the time I was 10 or 12, I wrote to uncles and aunts whom I never met, and never will. They died long before I ever got the chance to visit Ukraine. Cousin Yuri took over correspondence from his mother, my aunt. I never met her, but on my first visit to Ukraine in 1999, he made sure I met him. I will always be grateful for the effort he made to get to know me, to welcome me into his home, his family, and his village.

Cousin Yuri was a letter-writer like no other. He didn’t write about the weather or the latest family event; he shared his thoughts, his dreams, things that could have been but never would be. Cousin Yuri was a thinker and a dreamer who revealed his inner self on the papers that flew across the Atlantic between our homes.

“I’m grateful to you for everything,” he wrote. Everything? What could he possibly be grateful for other than the monetary gifts I gave his family? Could my letters and the time I spent with him be that valuable?

I’m grateful to Yuri for over 30 years of sharing through letters.

I’m grateful that he came to meet me in Kopychyntsi in 1999 the first time I was in Ukraine, a bit overwhelmed by the extended family and the foreignness of the country that I grew up thinking of as my fatherland, but really it was a foreign land.

I’m grateful that he invited me and my children into his city home in Ivano-Frankivsk, that he invited his entire family over for a feast so they could meet me, and then he showed us around his city. And most of all, I’m grateful that he took us all to the village of Petryliv, his wife’s hometown, nestled in the hills by the Dnister River in an area so peaceful that even the dogs don’t bark at night. So far it’s my favorite place in all of Ukraine.

I’m grateful for the times we went fishing together and riding in the horse-drawn wagon during a downpour. I’m grateful that Cousin Yuri was so well-liked that villagers he knew let me jump in their wagon and collect barley with them in their fields.

I’m grateful that Cousin Yuri was so kind and so loved that the entire village of Petryliv welcomed me, accepted me, let me photograph them, let me be part of their lives.

I’m grateful that Cousin Yuri took the time to write and to let me be part of his life. Oh, I will miss him so much. That note in his familiar handwriting brought it all home when I sorted through my much-too-large pile of papers. Cousin Yuri, did I ever tell you I love you?
____

Cousin Yuri died suddenly of a stroke last spring while fishing, which was his favorite pastime.