My Personal Learning Experience - Dealing with My Son - Part 2

I have a very energetic first born. He is strong-willed, impetuous, and lazy. He is also fun-loving, energetic, very bright, a very gifted speaker and guitar player. I, so unfortunately, used to think of him as the bane of my existence. I could not see him as the gift which God has given to me. He is another agent of change from the Lord.

I asked a very wise, and very unlike me, friend what she would suggest that I do with Ian. After taking some time to answer, she suggested that maybe the problem wasn't only an "Ian" problem, but a "Karen" one as well. While I was not at all offended, I brushed her answer off as being very well meant, but a little naive to the situation at hand. I did not have six hours in the day to devote to keeping my son on task at school while I had three other children to deal with. I refused to consider her answer because I refused to change.

Meanwhile, I was irritable and even angry when every time I would walk by him that he would be staring out the window or lost or not on task in one form or another. Why did the Lord give me such a stubborn child. None of my other children are prefect, but compared to Ian, they seem quite tame in most cases.

One day when I was tired of being frustrated with my son, I sat down with him for him to copy a composition that he had written the day before into his composition book. I went over every stroke with him, pointing out what he was doing wrong and praising what he was doing well. While the recopy of a 9 sentence essay took two hours, with me at his side, he stayed on task, his handwriting which is often barely legible was definitely better, but TWO hours?!? Was it really worth it, I asked myself. Those two hours exhausted me, but at least I was not raising my voice in irritation or frustration with him. I was actually able to praise him during that time.

I have a cousin who told me that God had better never allow her to run from her circumstances (which she knows are God-ordained) because while she doesn't want to deep down in her heart, she knows that she would. I feel the same way with spending at least two hours or more with Ian working on his school. It is right. it is good. He actually gets praise instead of just remarks asking him why he isn't done yet, but I feel like if the Lord would in some way open the door for me not to have to sit there for two hours with him, I'd take it in a heartbeat.

I'm learning a lot from all this however, and God continues to show me that He's not done with me, and like I am learning about my son, He isn't going to give up on me just because I'm being stubborn and willful.

I'll share more in my next post.

My Personal Learning Experience - Part I

I've never written here about loosing my little girl ten days after she was born, but it was a heart-wrenching experience. After four years of trying to get pregnant again, and while not preventing pregnancy having all but given up hoping, we found ourselves surprisingly pregnant again.

The Lord had been dealing with my heart (and still is) especially over my usually irritated (at best - overtly angry at worst) reactions to my children when I would be interrupted in whatever it was that I was doing. And in all honesty to my children, I was always 'doing' something. One of the things that I would do oftentimes was to turn on Netflix to watch something during the afternoons when they were outside playing. As children do, however, they would constantly come in, every other minute all the time they were outside and continuously interrupting me in what I believed should have been my down time.

Well, finding out that I was pregnant again, and having nagging fears in the back of my mind about Meagan, I "made a deal" with the Lord. Yes, I know He's not obligated to do anything. Call it His agent of change in me. I told the Lord that I would give up any form of movie/TV show watching via Netflix or any other online medium, or our own personal DVD collection while my children were awake. Instead, I watch a half of a TV episode on Netflix after the children go to bed or before they get up while I'm walking on the treadmill. This has done two things for me. First off, it's made my exercising during this pregnancy very regular unless I'm really under the weather. This has also removed one of the temptations for me to escape from my children (which is what it really is being unnecessarily busy). Secondly, it's cut back any visual media consumption to a bare minimum. At most I see 45 minutes of "TV" on any given day. Most days, it's 25 minutes or nothing.

While I am thankful for these little changes, the Lord wasn't done with where He wants to take me or what He wants to teach me. I'll share my continuing journey next time.