We still have a week of school left, but already I’m gearing the kids up for summer expectations. More and more, Lee and I have felt pressed to teach our kids how to fill their time wisely. This is a difficult task as it requires us to fill our time wisely. That whole “leading by example” mentality that’s supposed to be so effective in parenting, you know?
As we head into the summer months, my goal is to have plenty of fun activities planned, with a fair amount of downtime built in. So, without further ado, I give you…
The Stuart Family Summertime Agenda of Awesome
I doubt this will drastically curb the desperate pleas for help entertaining themselves, but hopefully it will give them a reference to look to instead of tugging on me day in and day out with all their woes of boredom.
This sign hangs proudly on the laundry room door, right outside the kitchen. It is our agenda of all the awesomeness that’s about to go down this summer.
See how exciting I’m making it sound?! Think they’ll buy it?
So sprinkled in between visits to Adventure Island and the beach, my hope is that all of us will enjoy a little more downtime this summer. Time spent reading, relishing the silence, electronic free mornings and maybe…juuuuuuust maaaayyybeeeee, my children who love to hop out of bed before the sun even peeks over the horizon will sleep in just a teeny, tiny bit.
All I’m asking for is 7:00 WHICH SEEMS ENTIRELY REASONABLE TO ME!
I’m not holding my breath…feel free to send coffee and Peppermint Mocha Creamer my way.
So tell me – how do you keep your kids active, engaged, and free from the summertime boredom blues? Do share!
He proudly stood on the third riser, second from the end, and scanned the audience. Our eyes met and he grinned, his tiny mouth splitting his freckled face with pure joy and great pride. I pulled out the video camera, flicked open the screen, and as he waved proudly, I recorded the moment for posterity.
And to remind myself that these fleeting moments are worthy to be treasured.
The graduating kindergarten class regaled us with song, clapping and singing their way through the alphabet, the vowels, and the numbers. They proudly showed off all they learned in their first year of school, and I glanced around at the parents surrounding me. We wore matching expressions of pride, of joy, of deep love, and of the pain that comes with knowing a season has come to an end.
Between each song, his little fingers went to his mouth, wiggling furiously at a loose tooth – the first loose tooth. Soon it will fall out, followed by several more, and those tiny baby teeth will be replaced by the bigger teeth that will stay with him (hopefully!) the rest of his life.
Stages passing by as I try not to blink my eyes.
I lay in bed last night, long after the house grew silent, and I thought on this gloriously painful beautiful thing called parenthood. I remembered a few years ago talking to a neighbor whose dog passed away unexpectedly. She loved that dog dearly, and she sobbed as she discussed the final moments with her precious pooch.
A week later, she came home with a new dog – a puppy that looked exactly like his predecessor. I watched as she fawned over the new animal who had clearly become a balm to her wounded heart, and I shook my head in wonder.
“Why would she get another one?” I thought. “Why would she open herself up to that heartache again?”
Dogs get old fast and they die, and it’s sad. Why do we do that to ourselves? Why do we open ourselves up to heartache and grief?
As my mind drifted over that memory, I found myself weaving the narrative back to my children. Love is so mysterious and strange. We allow our hearts to be tangled and enmeshed, because the pure, deep joy that comes from love far outweighs the knowledge that love also leads to loss.
My neighbor’s dogs brought her deep joy. She loved them fiercely. She could have chosen, after the first dog died, to not get another. She certainly would have saved her heart from future grief.
She also would have denied herself the mystery of loving in the present.
We love because of the mysterious connection that comes with that love. When I married my husband, I chose to give him my heart, and I did so without fully understanding the ramifications. We’ve chosen to fight for our love, which means we choose, even in the tough times, not to tear away from one another.
But even if we fight to the very end, and we continue to walk this path as one flesh, someday we are guaranteed to be separated on this earth. We will face the heartache of loss.
We give birth to children, and we discover a love so deep and so profound that we cannot wrap our minds around it all, and yet we know that with each passing year, each milestone reached, we are walking toward the grief of separation. We will leave them in a college dorm. We will give their hands in marriage. We will say goodbye to the moment that is right now, and we’ll trade it in for a new normal.
A different kind of love – the kind that comes with separation and distance, and of a life filled with more silence than bustle, with more memories than present experiences.
The hope of any parent is that we won’t be separated by the death of a child, but for some that is a devastating grief that must be faced. And it hurts so badly because the love was so real.
So why do we love? Why do we set ourselves up for this known heartache?
My faith must dictate how I answer this question.
We love because we were created by the One who Loves. We love knowing that love brings both joy and heartache, because the One who created us, His most glorious of creations, faced the same joy and heartache. He faced the beauty and loss of Love first. He designed the mystery of it all. He faced the beauty, the separation, the pain, and the horror of death on our behalf.
But that’s not the end of the story, and this is why I keep opening myself to love. I know, and believe, that this life isn’t all that is promised. I know that the heartache and the grief of separation are necessary, but only for a time.
We were a rag tag group, a gaggle of teenagers, most of whom were leaving US soil for the very first time. It was 1995, and the dust was still settling from the fall of the Iron Curtain.
“Don’t get over there and be loud and obnoxious,” our leader advised us before we left. “Show them that American teenagers actually do have some self control.”
We tried to do this, and most of the time we succeeded. We avoided squealing and shouting over every new experience, although being tricked into eating cow tongue on our first night in Minsk, Belarus was just short of a cruel introduction into this strange new land.
The smells are what I remember the most. That and the cold. When we stepped off the plane onto a frigid tarmac, the sky around us was grey. For a brief moment, I felt as though we’d stepped into a black and white film as the grey pavement extended into the grey horizon in such a way that made all the land before us seem devoid of color.
Oddly enough, I felt right at home.
As we entered the concrete terminal, I listened closely to this foreign language. It was the first time I’d ever heard Russian, and the words sounded like poetry. At least that’s the way I remember it. At the time, I know I was a little shell shocked. Jet lag combined with an awe and fear of the unknown didn’t leave me much time to ponder the poetic nature of my current reality.
I just remember feeling like I knew that place.
For two weeks we toured the land, and as I remember those adventures, the landscape slowly fades into this technicolor memory. It lights up as I explore the moment that I first learned who Lenin was, and what he had done. It bleeds into the first moment I stepped into a Russian Orthodox church, and realized exactly what the word “history” means.
Suddenly 1776 no longer seemed that interesting to this All-American girl. Not when I was confronted with the stories of a land that dated back to 1067. I couldn’t even fathom the amount of story that the buildings I stepped into held.
The world changed for me on that trip. I stood in Red Square in Moscow, and I looked at St. Basils, and I had no idea how to process the world as a whole. When I walked through Lenin’s tomb, and viewed the body of a man both hated and revered depending on who you spoke with, I couldn’t wrap my mind around my smallness in this world.
All I knew was that I wanted to see and experience more of it.
Lee and I have been talking a lot, lately. Dreaming, really. We dream of exposing our children to more of the world, of opening their eyes to their smallness in this great, big land.
I’m so grateful to my parents for encouraging me to experience life to the fullest. I’m so thankful that they saw the importance of travel, and that they not only allowed me to explore this globe (usually without them), but they generally pushed it. Without their willingness to let me go and experience life through travel, I wouldn’t be who I am today.
Our kids are still young, and there are some boundaries within which we feel like we must operate as a family, but we have dreams. We dream of showing them the world, of giving them a taste of it now, while they’re young. Our biggest, most-unlikely-but-still-fun-to-discuss dream is to someday live overseas for a time. I don’t know if that will ever happen, but we do love to imagine the possibility.
We’ve started the process of exposing them to the world outside the United States, and we have hopes, dreams, and loose plans to do more traveling with them in the coming years. As we do this, I pray that there will come a moment for each one of them when the Lord gives a coming home moment – a slice of time that will serve as a technicolor memory.
I can’t wait to see how they use those memories in the future.
Tell me your story. Have you had the chance to expose your kids to new experiences through travel, either inside or outside the country? How have you done this, and how has it impacted your family?
One of the great joys of my job as a writer is the opportunity I have to connect with other writers and creative thinkers. Social media has made this ability to connect nearly seamless, and I find myself grateful and in awe of the people I can interact with on a day to day basis online. Some of those people I’ve even had the privilege to meet in person, and I can now call them friend.
And I have talented friends.
This week I’ve been reading Tsh Oxenreider’s book, Notes From a Blue Bike: The Art of Living Intentionally in a Chaotic World. The book is great, and has given me plenty of pause to stop and think about how to live this life with intention and purpose in a world that sometimes feels like it’s propelling you forward full speed ahead.
In her chapters on education, Tsh points readers to a TED talk by Sir Ken Robinson. This particular TED talk has been seen over 26,000,000 times, and after watching the 18 minute video, I can understand why. He’s funny, engaging, amiable, and he makes a heck of a lot of sense.
It sounds like it would be a terrible public school rant, doesn’t it? Indeed, it’s not. Sir Ken is not out to bash the public school system, so much as to discuss the need for a massive paradigm shift.
I was so enthralled by Robinson’s assertions in this video, that I went on to watch all of his talks posted at TED.com, and each one of them bore the same central message:
Education must feed the spirit, and the energy, and the passion of each individual child so that learning can truly take place.
For some students, school really can be a magical place. The structure, the books, the sense of accomplishment and the broadening horizons of new things known feeds their souls.
And for some, school crushes the spirit.
It’s very difficult to be a parent trying to decide how to best educate her children in this day and age. On the one hand, there are so many options. We aren’t relegated to a one size fits all approach if we don’t want to be. We can choose differently for our kids.
On the other hand, there is so much information being thrown at us about what is best, how children learn, how to cultivate a love for learning, and so much of it is contradictory that we start to feel the smoke billow from our ears as information overload quickly shuts us down.
So what do we do?
I don’t have an answer for you here other than to say, I don’t think anyone can truly claim that they have found the be all, end all solution to education.There is no one right way to educate all children, because they are all different. So how do we choose? How do we guide them down this path of learning that actually gives flight to their natural bent, and speaks to their individual spirit?
I will say that it is very, very hard to do this in a public school setting. That’s not an indictment against the public school. All three of my children are currently publicly educated, and for us, for now, this is what works. But I see the gaps, and I cringe at the holes. I see the cookie cutter mentality, and the severe focus on standardized tests that have crippled our teachers, and stifled education. My job as the parent of public school children is to fill in those gaps when and how I can.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this matter, and ask that we could do so with respect for one another’s different choices in education. Do you think that schools kill creativity? Do you see gaps in your children’s education and growth as individuals? How do you work to fill in those gaps? What are your challenges as you face the choice of where and how your children should be educated?
As a 20 year old college student living alone in Kiev, Ukraine, I had my fair share of alone time to explore. I loved every second of that independence, though I fear that I gave the Ukrainian couple I was living with a heart attack or five during that semester abroad.
I never said “no” to an opportunity for adventure during that time in my life. I was 20, after all. I was invincible. It never occurred to me that I might be foolish in my free movements from one part of the city to another. On occasion, I was even known to hop a train for a different part of the country, just because someone asked.
Looking back on that time of life life, I shake my head in wonder at my bravery, my naiveté, my seize the day mentality. Where did that come from? And where did that girl go?!
It’s true that adulthood brings with it an awareness of responsibility. I know now that I am, indeed, not invincible. I know now that it is only by God’s good grace, and probably my mother’s unceasing prayers, that I was not physically harmed on the train I took to Prague, when I was forced to room with a horny Iranian born German who tried to climb in bed with me more than once.
It’s grace that I didn’t find myself hurt or worse when I got lost in a back alley section of Prague after dark…alone.
It’s grace that I didn’t get radiation poisoning when I hopped on a train to visit one of the still functioning towns near the abandoned Chernobyl district.
It’s grace that I always managed to find myself with nice, amiable cab drivers when I hailed a ride home after dark because I’d gotten lost wandering the streets of Kiev…again.
At the time, I thought nothing of any of those experiences. It never dawned on me that those were dangerous situations.In fact, after the adventure to Czech Republic, I found a local cafe and emailed my parents, regaling them with my hilarious tales of fighting off the German, being chased by a man trying to sell me hash, and being groped by a drunk man in the dark alley.
“I’m having such an adventure!” I wrote – as if this were just another day at the local park. I still have the email with my mom’s response. It goes like this:
KELLI,
THERE ARE SOME EXPERIENCES THAT ARE BETTER LEFT UNTOLD UNTIL YOU ARE SAFE BACK HOME ON AMERICAN SOIL. CALL US.
MOM
I laugh, now, at that balls-to-the-walls version of myself. She was a trip. I kind of miss her, and yet I’m not sure I would ever take those risks again, even if given the opportunity.
Of course, if I hadn’t risked that trip to Prague and fought off those men, I never would have stood on Charles Bridge and seen the vast hillside that stretched beyond the waters. I never would have been enticed by the array of colors in the fall trees, or the sight of a woman walking a small herd of goats across the hill. I never would have tightened my backpack and started walking toward that hill, and I never would have climbed it.
And if I hadn’t done that, I never would have seen the city of Prague from such an interesting, unique and romantic vantage point.
Sometimes risks are worth it in the long run.
My first born and I discuss college a lot these days. He’s only ten, but he’s got so many questions. He wants to know what it’s going to be like, where he should go, what he should study, if it’s scary.
All I tell him is that I want him to work hard, to trust in his ability to decide where to attend college, to never be afraid to ask his dad’s advice, and to never shy away from something that feels risky.
Then I pray for him, and my other children. I pray that they’ll be confident and brave. I pray that they’ll have the opportunity to explore the world someday. I pray that they will take every chance they get to see God’s creation from a different angle.
I pray they will be wiser than I was, and that they’ll have grace and protection when they make foolish choices.
There’s still a bit of that risky girl buried inside me – the girl who loves the thrill of adventure, and the independence that comes with exploring new territory. She escapes in the memories, in my dreams, and in the secret hopes that I have for my children. She’s raising a new generation of risk takers.
Are you an adventure seeker? How do you balance the desire to explore with the need to be responsible?
