Encouraging Moms Who Homeschool

 For so many of us, prayer is a challenge. Maybe because it can be hard to find the time for an extended prayer session. Or there is a lack of guidance to help us as we pray. Sometimes the prayer meeting can feel more like a gossip meeting, and that has never helped anyone to grow a healthy prayer life. We may not even know what, exactly, we can and should pray for and about.  I don't want to make this one bit more complicated, confusing or challenging. What I do want, however, is to see more people pray more prayers and receive more answers. This blog post won't be written perfectly, and there is no well-mapped out flow for what I share here. There is just my heart for God's people and my belief that He is still in the prayer-answering business. So here I am, in all my imperfection, to offer you this brief and somewhat untidy word about prayer. Thought #1 -       God's promises are long lasting. They are imperishable. And they have a very long shelf life... as in, an e

 I think I had a sum total of 17 days during my homeschool years when I felt confident & qualified...maybe. 17 days plucked out of the midst of 25 years is not all that many days. I've heard that confidence is key, which may be true, but it isn't a key I have access to and so the doorway to completely confident living remains locked tight. In my daily Bible reading, I came across these words:  "We are confident...because of our great trust in God through Christ. It is not that we think we are qualified to do anything on our own. Our qualification comes from God. He has enabled us..."      - from 2 Corinthians 3:4-6, New Living Translation Even though the youngest of our five children finished her fourth year of college last month, in spite of the fact that I haven't done a single lick of homeschooling in over four years - nevertheless, I read those words this morning and thought about how they applied to my life as a homeschool mom. In and of myself, I wasn

 So, one pretty terrific trick of the trade that I discovered during my quarter of a century of home education was that the classes & online courses & lessons (including sports lessons) my kiddos participated in during the summer months could be counted toward their school days the following year. (In our neck of the woods, 180 teacher contact days were required to fulfill the academic requirements legally - so we aimed to hit that number each year.) Take skating lessons for my children - I would simply keep track of all the time spent at the ice rink during the summer in my planner and before we started the new school year, I would add up the hours spent on the ice and calculate how many days of "schoolwork" it counted for.  I also kept track of art camps, books they read, online courses they took, missions trips and service projects, and even things like rebuilding a lawn mower engine or painting a bedroom (small engine repair and life skills/home economics are real