Rule of Six

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Mary asked me to ponder this a bit.  In order to raise healthy, happy, holy children, I think they need these six things everyday:

  • Living Liturgy--children need to embrace the faith in all its wonder and glory.  They need to celebrate the liturgical year, to frequent the sacraments, and to have a deep family and personal prayer life.
  • Encounters with beauty--art, music, literature, nature:  while we certainly don't get to all four, every day, at least one a day is necessary.
  • Fresh air and exercise--children need an abundance of fresh air and plenty of exercise every single day (so do their parents).
  • Meaningful work--there is plenty of meaningful work to be done in a Catholic household.  Children can be taught to do it cheerfully and well.  And they must be told again and again how vital they are to the well-being of the family.  The work has meaning and purpose.
  • Ideas to ponder and discuss--I stole this one from Lissa, who wrote the original Rule of Six and got us all pondering.  One of the greatest joys of home education is unearthing ideas and discussing them with the people we love best.  Every day, for the benefit of all of us.
  • Focused attention and affection--every child, every day needs the focused attention of his or her parents and they absolutely need the parents' expression of unconditional love.

Empathy

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My husband and I were recently discussing a major goal in the raising of children:  the development of empathy.  We want our children to be empathetic.  As a matter of fact, I see empathy as crucial  to maturity.  If a child can't grow to see outside herself and to "feel for someone else,"  she will not be an effective parent or spouse or friend or minister.  You cannot nurture or love or serve without seeking to understand.

Adults who have little or no capacity for empathy are emotionally stuck.  They are children.  They are so self-absorbed that they cannot relate.  And often, they are unaware of this handicap.  Our job as parents is to ensure that our children grow into an awareness of other people and learn to empathize.

Like so many other things, we "teach" empathy by modeling it.  When we empathize, particularly when we are sensitive to our children, they learn to be sensitive to others. And we praise empathy.  When we see a child nurturing a sibling or even a pet, we call it what it is and we encourage more of the same behavior. There are many, many oppoprtunities to develop empathy in a large family.

I've noticed that some children have a natural tendency towards empathy and it takes just a little fine tuning on my part to encourage virtue.  Some children, though, are not as inclined.  We have to talk about empathy more.  We have to point out opportunities to understand and to serve.  And we have to correct self-centered behavior frequently.

Last night, I witnessed such tender empathy that I was inspired by my child.  Nicholas and Stephen are 22 months apart.  But they are nearly the same size.  Stephen, who is older, is actually a bit smaller.  They are inseparable.  And they delight in pretending they are twins. They both have asthma. Nicholas has had a rough road of it lately and has required frequent treatments using a nebulizer.  Last night, as he was holding the mask up to his face, his head began to nod and his eyelids grew heavy.  Stephen noticed, took the mask in his hand, and helped Nicky to put his head on the pillow.  There Stephen sat for twenty minutes more until all the medicine was gone and his best friend in the world slept soundly.

Marybeths_pics_3

A little row of lights went out...

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Just as we were celebrating the utter joy and loveliness of babies as a community, we were reminded that when we say "yes" to life, we also take a risk. We risk the heartbreak the Blessed Mother knew so well, the pain of loss.  Several of the mothers at 4Real have suffered miscarriages this week. As Alice so eloquently wrote, "One by one, a little row of lights went out, giving way to the darkness of disappointment and loss."  Please join us in praying for our dear friends. Alice has posted a beautiful prayer at Cottage Blessings.

Foss Family Home Companion

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Home_companion

Now that Kim has given you the history behind our home management notebooks, I'd love to share my details.  Kim and I discussed what we wanted out of these over the course of several months.  We're both very visual and we agreed they had to be pretty.  We had to want to handle them frequently and we wanted to be rewarded when we looked at them.  She's a graphic genius and she sent me my cover inserts and divider pages.  They were all the inspiration I needed to take off on my own.

We both had taken to heart stories like this one and this one, and since we were both pregnant, they were in the back of our minds as we sought to put on paper everything we knew would make our households run more smoothly.  The chance of our demise notwithstanding, there were other reasons for committing household routines and rhythms to paper.  We saw these binders as works in progress and we knew that they would become the living books with which we could teach our daughters to keep house.  That's why we both chose visual themes with our daughters in mind.  And we also knew that the exercise of thinking these things through would only benefit our families, not just in the long run, but in the near term.

When a bottle of red wine fell off the top of the refrigerator and onto the granite counter below, thoroughly drenching my copies of Heart of the Home and Autumn from the Heart of the Home, I cried.  Then, I blotted and reconciled myself to the fact that now I had lots and lots of pages to cut and paste in order to add graphics to my planning pages. I downloaded the same font she'd used for the dividers from Two Peas in a Bucket.  I wanted all the pages in the same font if at all possible.  For purposes of this post, I have saved all the downloads in a plain Word font, since you wouldn't be able to read them in the Two Peas font unless you'd downloaded it as well. Clear as mud so far?

I have already benefitted enormously from this book.  I had all these routines in place by midsummer and my children and I were well practiced before the fall and the stresses that came with it.  Within a two week span, my husband changed jobs (from one that had him traveling often and working at home to one that has him traveling still but working in a downtown office as well) and we added a baby to the family.  Add to that the beginning of the school year, a new activity schedule, and some nasty viral illnesses and I could have been looking at utter chaos.

Thanks to the help of some very dear friends and to the forethought of the plan, we are surviving rather well. It's not perfect and my house doesn't look like a Better Homes and Gardens spread, but it's functional and when we put our minds to it, it's downright lovely.

The book begins with some inspiration.  Kim sent this page:

and then I added this post to remind myself why I am doing this whole homemaking thing.

Schedulesscan

The Schedules section of the binder begins with a master schedule for the week.  I've listed, by day, where each child goes and how they get to and from.  Behind that are pages that include all the game and dance rehearsal schedules, directions to all the fields for the current season, my husband's travel schedule, the local school schedule and any correspondence from coaches or dance teachers.  I keep a few empty page protectors there so that I can file things the minute they get home.

Goodthingstoeat

The Food section includes:

  • a Basic Kitchen Inventory Download healthy_kitchen_basic_inventory.1.doc which I use to generate a grocery list
  • a three week cycle menu Download cycle_menu.1.doc
  • all the recipes that go with the meals in the cycle menu-- perhaps they will appear at Kitchen Comforts sometime soon (I keep promising Lissa)
  • the co-op order form (we order all our poultry, eggs, butter and many dry goods from a Virginia farm once a month)
  • an inventory of all the food in the upright freezer (twice a year, we order a side of beef)

Cleaningscan

The Cleaning Section includes:

Healthscan

The Health section includes:

Faithscan

The Faith section includes:

  • current novena prayers
  • The Mass schedule and contact list from my parish
  • All the great liturgical year ideas I've gleaned from places like the 4Real boards, the Cottage, and Jenn Miller.  This section is growing very fat.

Backpagescan

The Home Education section includes the plan for each child that I wrote this summer.  Those are all linked on the sidebar of this blog.

Contacts

The Contacts section includes:

  • the back page from our community news magazine which has all the names and numbers of local offices and merchants.
  • a printed list of the names, phone numbers, and snail mail addresses of all the 4Real Message board moderators.
  • a printed list of other frequently called numbers

Whew!  I'm having such fun reading others' ideas and plans for management notebooks and I'm sure glad that I bought a two inch binder from the get-go.  I see much adding in my future.

For more on Homemaking Companion Books click here.