Happy Mother's Day to Dana! I am so grateful to have a wife who loves to have and care for children. She is doing a great job! Here is a picture of her with her seven children (one born in three weeks!).
Important Moments
Nathaniel turns four.
Bethany's first piano recital.
Guy McDill (My Grandpa)
I recently received an e-mail from my Dad about his Dad. He died the same year I was born, so I never met him, but have heard so many great stories about him. We have always said that Grandpa and I greeted one another in 1973 as he was going up and I was coming down. Here is what Dad sent me: May 7 is the 100th birthday of Guy Vernon McDill. He was born in 1910 in Newton County Mississippi and died in 1973 and is buried in Beaumont. Attached are a few old pictures.
This is Guy and Ruby McDill in 1939
Guy, Ruby, and Wayne (my dad) on vacation.
This photo was taken in 1962 when Dad, Mom and Bob visited Blanchard, Louisiana at the birth of Michael (my oldest brother). Guy was 52 at the time.
Our Chicks Are Here!
We had an exciting new addition to our home over the weekend: twenty-four new chicks. As I wrote before, we are going to raise chickens primarily for eggs. We ordered twenty-five Rhode Island Reds (one didn't survive the trip) from Welp Hatchery. We received a call on Friday morning from the post office informing us they had arrived. I could hear the chicks peeping in the background as I told him I would be there in a couple of hours to pick them up. I was surprised how small the box was that they came in:
Here I am opening the box to put them in their new, cozy home.
It didn't take them long to adjust.
The children immediately wanted to hold them. This one Caleb is holding was good enough to look at the camera and smile.
NCHE Annual Conference
We just signed up online for the annual conference of the North Carolinians for Home Education! We love going to this every year and have made it a priority. We are encouraged by all the speakers, sessions, and talking with other home educators. We always meet new friends and run in to old ones that we would never otherwise see. The book fair is fantastic. We buy our My Father's World curriculum (so we don't have to pay shipping) and all sorts of other birthday and Christmas gifts for the kids. If you homeschool in North Carolina and have not been, you should seriously consider going. See ya'll there.
The Kids on a Hike
We enjoyed a picnic and hike yesterday at Jeffress Park on the Parkway, just a few minutes from our house. Here are some pictures.
The Girls
The Boys
All Six on the Bridge (Stairsteps)
Nathaniel - almost 4yrs
Organizing Chores for the Kids
Six kids (and two adults) can wreck a house in very little time. So we make the kids clean it up! We believe that kids are supposed to do chores just because they are part of our home (not for an allowance). It teaches them to take care of their own stuff, care about their environments, and learn to serve and be a part of a family and community. In addition, you just can't have a bunch of kids and expect (and thus train) them to all just be consumers in your house. Everyone pitches in.
But we have found that teaching and managing six kids in doing chores is almost as hard as cleaning the house ourselves. Overtime, though, we have developed a pretty good system for dividing the chores among the kids. This weekend we found ourselves seeing a need to reevaluate and reorganize what we were doing because it wasn't working as well as we need it to. Then Dana remembered that she bought a set of books from Steven and Teri Maxwell that included a book on how to organize your children's chores, Managers of Their Chores: A Practical Guide to Children's Chores. So I read it over the weekend; It is outstanding!
There are several chapters on the biblical basis, the current benefits, and the future benefits of chores for children. I was impressed with the way they placed something as tedious as chores in the context of loving and depending on God. So we are going to try out their suggested method of managing and organizing our kid's chores. I was especially pleased to find that they have a website, chorepack.com, with digital material, forums, and other resources. There is even an online service called ChoreWare that helps you organize and print your own personalized version of the system. Although we haven't tried it yet, I highly recommend the book. The online service is easy to use and highly adaptable to each family's needs. We'll let you know how it goes!