Today was a really good day…because I held myself together :-)  and it wasn’t that big of a struggle!!!!!

We finally got up this morning about 10:00am.  We ate breakfast and the children were instructed to clean their rooms, really clean them and then take care of their personal hygiene by taking baths.  This took until about 2:30-3:00 for them to finish.  I know God has done a work in me b/c just 3 weeks ago I would have been so stressed and would have begun rushing them to finish, and then stressing them.  But I kept telling myself there was no rush and God was in control of our day.  I had all these plans in my head about what I wanted to accomplish as far as bookwork today…but I stayed relaxed and just let the day unfold.

When dh went to work about 3:00pm we sat down and did our long-awaited History lesson from MWOG.  We are on the Creation link and we finished up the principle GOD CREATED THE CONTINENTS FOR A PURPOSE.  We finished labeling and outlining the last 4 continents(we started this in Nov 2007) and we perused the World Atlas of each continent.  My dc seem to like this book, it has very colorful pictures of the people of each continent, how  they dress, each country’s flag, what they export and what region of the country/continent the exports come from…they especially love reading about what kinds of animals live in each continent.  This lesson took a while b/c my dc started telling me about movies they had seen that reminded them of what we found in these continents.   We even got into a discussion about evolution, that it is a theory, and how it goes against the bible and that the bible is our source of what is true….it was a really good time we had together.

My 8yodd then asked if they could have lunch(about 4:30pm) and she proceeds to fix lunch for her brothers…to my amazement.  So since I saw she had everything covered I went downstairs to workout.  After my workout, I saw they had cleared the table and so I brought out a bag of books for them to read thru and told them that while I shower they were to have reading time and for my 8yodd to read to her brothers if they asked her to.  I heard not one fight or bicker.  They seemed so content that I was able to spend time stretching in my room after my shower(since I had forgotten to stretch right after my workout).

After my stretching I sat on the living room floor with them and read some poems to them from THE HOME BOOK OF VERSE FOR YOUNG FOLKS.  We read and laughed at those until dh came home for his lunch(6:30pm) and they were all ready to eat again by 7:00.

After dinner I put 3yo in the tub and told 8yodd to begin her independent reading and I gave her a choice of autobiographies to read.  She chose Christopher Columbus…As I’m trying to wind everyone down for bed she reads one chapter and asks me can they make a boat in her room so they can sail the seas like Columbus???

Oh well,   I guess that’s what I get for letting her read an adventuresome story right before bedtime….I get sailing adventure at night!!!!!

So I”m gonna close this out now and go read the bible with my 6yo and then prayerfully everyone would have had enough of their booster shot of “mommy love” tonight and drift on into sweet, peaceful, dreamy sleepy bliss!!!!!

My dc announced to me and dh yesterday evening that they had a surprise for us. My dc are 3, 6, 8yo. So me and dh (remained patience with the mess we knew we’d have to clean up or at least oversee them cleaning) walked downstairs only to be met with cries of HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!!!!!!!!! We were directed to sit down at the makeshift dining table made out of their toybox and the lid to the toybox was the tabletop. The dining area they made consisted of chairs from our computer table and one pink chair with fringes from my dd’s room. The toybox was covered with one of our couch “throws” for the table cloth.

My eyes were met with bowls of prepared food which were the following: Chef Boy R Dee Spaghettios, Marshmallows, Ritz crackers and raw “diced” tomatoes and baby carrots. My dc served me and their father first as we spooned the desired amounts of each dish onto our plates. My dc then served each other.

Dh commented to the children this was a wonderful surprise, them throwing us a surprise New Year’s Day party like that!!  They chose the food and everything, even warmed up the spaghettios in the microwave and brought it downstairs to the party to await our arrival.    So after everyone was served we then went before the Lord in our first family prayer for 2008 as me and dh thanked the Lord for these our children and for their servants’ hearts to want to serve us and each other. Dh prayed blessings upon each one of them and my heart swelled with love, devotion, and thankfulness to God for working patience out in me…for breaking me the way He did….so that I could see the blessing of His miraculous power working in the lives of my children. You see impatience would have just seen a mess that had to be cleaned up and while I would have eaten the morsels of food they ‘cooked’ my mind would have been on how tired I was and how I longed to lay down and how this was just prolonging my relaxation….but I didn’t feel like that at all.

I continue to pray for and thank God for what little bit of discernment I have to see the almost imperceptible ‘movings’ of His Spirit. I long for more discernment and more patience and more of learning how to live and conduct myself in God’s agape love.

So that was our 2008 New Year’s Day Celebration and I thank God for it!!!!!!!!!!!