Learn To Fail

I read a lot. When I get hooked on a particular subject I’ll come home from the library with stacks of books and read all of them before going back for more. I usually cover the entire section in the library before I’m finished with a topic. When I wanted to learn how to get organized I read every book I could find about the subject. When I was pregnant it was baby names and parenting books.

Lately I’ve been interested in books about learning and teaching. I’m looking for ideas I can use while home-schooling my kids. An interesting idea that has come up in several books I’ve read is the idea of giving your kids a lot of safe opportunities to fail. If they learn while they're young that failure isn't the end of the story, it's only the beginning, they can go on to do great things.

Small children aren’t afraid of failure. I watched Kate try for months to do a walk-over. She didn’t care how many times she had to fall on her head. Quitting was not an option and she was going to keep trying until she learned it. At her final moment of success she looked as if she had conquered the world!

Somehow as we leave our childhood most of us begin to fear failure a little bit, or a lot. I say things I later regret so maybe I should just keep my mouth shut from now on. I spend hours on projects only to have them turn out so ugly that I want to hide them in a closet. I forget appointments and lose things and someone will say, “I thought you were supposed to be so organized.”

Let’s face it, learning can hurt and opportunities to fail never go away. But it’s that little bit of pain that comes with every failure that drives us to try harder. It’s those tiny bits of progress that makes us realize it’s not hopeless so we keep at it until we’re finally rewarded with success. I am learning to be less and less afraid of all those mistakes. I look at them as practice for the good things in my life. Every failure was worth it because every once in a while I say something brilliant, I make something beautiful and I find something exactly where I thought it would be!

Again With The Dishwashing

I’m still trying to figure out how to wash dishes! I’m not putting a dishwashing machine in our new home so I need to figure this out. I decided washing dishes by hand would be just as easy, and faster than washing them in a machine. Plus we would save energy and water which I like to do. I thought the problem with washing them by hand in our old house was that our sink wasn’t big enough. Well, this house we’re living in has bigger sinks so I’ve been washing the dishes by hand and I still don’t like it.

This is how I’ve been doing it: scrubbing and rinsing the dishes and piling them in one side of the sink until there is enough to wash, adding hot soapy water to the dishes and hot clean water to the other side, wash, rinse and stack to dry. Well, it occurs to me that I’m still handling each dish twice with the rinsing first and then washing, taking a lot of time and also using quite a bit of water.

Yesterday I thought, “Why don’t I just use a soapy brush in the first place when I’m rinsing the dishes, set them out to dry and I’m done”. That sounds easier, faster, and would save water. My last question is, is it going to bug me having clean dishes sitting out to dry? If I don’t like it then I can dry them and put them away. Or have the kids do it. That’s a bonus with this new system. Everyone can wash their own dishes instead of waiting for me to do it.

I’m going to have the kids start washing their dishes. I haven’t taught them yet because they waste so much water which drives me crazy. I’ll just have to get over while they’re learning or I’ll spend the rest of my life washing dishes myself!

Control Your Spending

This month is going to be over before I know it. I’ve been waiting till we got moved before I did any shopping. I need to sit down and figure out exactly what I need to buy and just get it done. So my goal for today is to make my shopping list. Is anyone else just getting started like I am?

I’m getting to where I don’t even like the Christmas Holiday. Just thinking about all the money other people spend ruins the whole thing for me. It makes me not want to spend any money to make up for the overspending everyone else does!

If you haven’t gone off the deep end yet, please try to control yourself with your Christmas shopping. If you have, then return at least half of everything you bought. Just remember, presents do not equal love!

Back On Line

I can’t believe we are finally out of our old house! What a nightmare that was. I knew it would be bad but I could only guess how much junk we had until we started trying to fit it into boxes and piling it on a trailer. The garage was the worst of it. Junk, junk, junk. I’d like to say things will be better at the new house but I’m not really hopeful about it. We were able to sell some of our furniture at the last minute. I put a “Furniture For Sale” sign in the yard and was surprised at how many people stopped to see what we had. Just getting rid of a few big pieces made moving that much easier.

We’re up and running again with our internet and we’re as settled as we’re going to get in our temporary house. I tried to keep what we brought down to a minimum but we still have more than we have room for. It’s a large home but with all of the owner’s belongings taking up the storage space, we’re left to live out of boxes. It’s pretty much an organizing nightmare that we get to live with for a while. We’re just so grateful that we have a place to stay!

Our new house is getting electrified and plumbed this next week. It’s been so cold up there that it’s miserable even going to the farm for an hour to check on things. Chris and the kids like to get a bonfire going in the driveway to try to keep warm. Our propane is hooked up so if we can get the last door in we’ll have a much more comfortable time of it and the subs will be happy too.

Our chimney is bricked. Picking out the brick went surprisingly well. We only changed our minds three times! We went driving around the city in a snowstorm comparing our brick samples to old buildings. Now we have the dreaded task of picking the roof color and the paint color for the siding. Are there any design professionals out there who can help us?

The kids and I have really missed going to the gym this last month. Chris has been on vacation all week and baby Love has been very sick and so we stuck to house projects. She’s finally feeling better and eating today so we may be headed to the gym soon. We took the kids swimming there yesterday and I got to lift weights for a minute. My legs are slightly sore from a very easy workout so I’m in for some trouble when I get into it full swing!