Faith & Family, KidsSimple, Purposeful Living for Kids November 14, 2018Friends, we’re back with another week of our series: Thank you for your sweet comments on the mama post – my take on self-care. It’s powerful hearing how that resonates with you: how you tackle self-care and recognize its’ need in your own life. I still have a few things that relate to mama that I’ll share in the coming weeks as they fit with our themes. This week, we’re talking KIDS. This feels like a big one. As mama’s, we feel SO much weight with raising our kids. That’s why fitting in self-care as I talked about last week is a thing! We pour it all out for our little people because we know how they’re raised matters. Purpose and simple are two words that have continually come up this last year as our kids are growing and we’re focusing more on what they need. But, you guys, I’m still figuring this whole thing out and know I will be forever! So, I’m thrilled to also hear from my other co-hosts on what they prioritize with their kids. These ladies are some of the wisest, most intentional mamas I know and I just want to soak in all their wisdom (their posts on mama-hood from last week are linked below in case you missed those). Eileen from Eileen & Co. Jessica from Grace While We Wait Amber from Amber Tysl First off, let’s “meet” my kids. We have Rosie who is 3 and a half. She is full of life, very talkative, very into caring for her babies and “homemaking,” and has a deep love of dancing and twirling. Then we have Dax, who is 19 months old. He is so smiley. He loves to make us laugh and does often. He is so loving – his favorite thing is to hug and kiss…even when it isn’t requested. Sorry strangers! And he has a boldness about him. We currently see it through some pretty shrill screams, but we’re praying that channels into amazing strengths as he grows older, haha! These are our “current” kids…I say that because we hope more will join them someday. When asked how many kids we’ll have, my husband’s response is always “Well, Lindsay would have a small orphanage…” And it’s so true, y’all. There are so many things I want to talk about in relation to kids. Their routines we’re working on (will hit that in our routine week), their wardrobes, their toys, what books we read…but I realized that before I can get to any of those, I need to touch on the overall purpose we see for their lives. Remember, the simple living definition I go by? I have to know the purpose we see for them before I can craft their days and environments accordingly. The beautiful thing about this is that God has created us all uniquely and He has called each of us and our families to different missions. So our purpose and mission below may not be your exact family mission! But I hope sharing it can inspire you to create or hone your own. You may remember (especially if you follow me on Instagram) that Chris and I take a trip or two a year “just us,” if we can swing it. It may be a long weekend in some far away place or even just a night at an air-bnb close by. But it’s “time away.” Our purpose for that has three main goals: to connect just us and rejuvenate, to dream for the future, and to evaluate parenthood. How is it going? What do we need to tweak? All with the overall goal in mind. Last spring, on our trip to New Orleans, we talked through the emerging goals and callings we’d been feeling for our children and tried to nail down our family’s mission statement. It started by asking the question: What do we want our kids to leave our house with one day? Now that list could be really, really long as there are many small things like knowing how to budget, how to keep a home, how to function in the world. But we focused on the big ideas. For us, these are the non-negotiables. And all of the “smaller” things we want for them fit under one of these. Now…how exactly are we hoping to achieve this? Well, it’s going to take a ton of prayer and constant seeking God’s direction. For us, these three are very intertwined and truly go back to crafting a spirit of adventure in our family. Here are a few practical ways we’re working toward these goals: For this first one, we have to get them out in creation. We believe we were created to live in a garden and have both seen personally that when we’re outside in nature, something stills in us. Peace. And we’ve seen that with our children. We can be having a rough afternoon with a lot of tantrums and when I open the back door and we step outside, it stills. They change. We try to spend time outside everyday and as often as we can, we try to get out in some woods or wide-open spaces. Last week we were on a fall walk in some woods near our house and watching them truly amazed me. It struck me that they were stilled and more alive at the same time. To us, being in what God created is one of the best ways to connect with Him and to see the vastness of Him and our small, but purposeful place in His plan. Our hope is to return our family and their childhoods to the core that God intended as much as we can in this busy, broken world. That means nature, but it also means stilling other areas of our lives: simplifying. It means simplifying their schedules and what their days look like, their environments, their little “world.” We’re trying to quiet the “noise” wherever we can and let the ordinary, natural beauty shine. There’s a book that was really helpful in seeing the need for simple in their lives. It isn’t from a faith perspective as we see simplifying, but it’s amazing at talking about the psychology behind “too much” in childhood and practically how to simplify. We want our kids to see that God’s creation is beautiful, but that His heart is for His people first and foremost. And His people come from every nation, every tongue, every culture. We want to travel a lot as a family and see all of God’s unique creation. Yes, it’s fun to see and experience new places and things. But for us, we see a bigger purpose. We want our children to see that there’s a world and people beyond what they may see here and that God made them all and loves them all equally. We’ve done some local trips, but are so excited to expand and travel more as our children grow. And we hope to learn a lot about other cultures and places from home as well. For us, this is first talking about the Gospel everyday. Parenthood provides many opportunities everyday to speak to this: We are sinful. We use unkind words, we don’t share, we want our way, the list goes on and on. But God forgives us and calls us His anyway. And we bring glory to God by forgiving and loving each other. I definitely miss many of these opportunities – it’s so easy to in the midst of life. But I’m praying to be more and more in tune with them and watch for them. This one also means we want to watch for, encourage, and help cultivate unique gifts in our children. God made them uniquely for a purpose and we want to help draw that out. We want them to see us using the unique gifts He’s given us for a specific Kingdom purpose He’s called us to and as their interests and gifts emerge, we hope to walk them through how they might do that as well. As I said above, all of these truly go back to having an adventurous spirit as a family in our minds. We want to be adventurers in the literal sense of the word who get out in nature, who explore. We want to be adventurers who travel the world, try new foods, and embrace meeting new and different people. And we want to be adventurers who are willing to take risks, go against the status quo when God calls, and who step into unique callings He has for us even when the world says we might be crazy. We use the phrase “wild and free” a lot in our house. My husband jokingly and poking fun at me – he totally supports this idea, but I talk about it a lot. Discovering the Wild & Free community online has taught me so much about what we envision for these babies of ours and has given me a lot of practical ideas for how to cultivate that in their lives. And I have to say, this is our purpose and our direction. It is not our everyday reality. We’re human and fall short all the time and are constantly “righting the ship.” But that’s why it’s so amazing to have this purpose in mind! We always have it as a guideline to go back to. And I’m learning it won’t be a perfect upward trajectory. We fail all the time and even when I’m “proud” of myself for being super intentional, there are many days it feels like it isn’t working. But we’re headed in a direction and God keeps reminding me to just stay the course with the end goal in mind and leave the rest up to Him. A quick example of this: last week got off to a rough start. So many tantrums and disobedience and I kept thinking “None of this is working at all! Let’s just turn the TV on and be done with it.” And we did…way more than I like to. I lost my patience. I yelled often and had to ask for forgiveness. But then, we got out in the woods on a fall walk and the kids changed and explored and adventured. After fighting all week, they walked hand-in-hand for 45 straight minutes. Without prompting, they kept stopping to hug and kiss each other. And Rosie kept saying, “Mommy we love the woods and each other!” I felt like the best mom in the world. And then the next day, we were back to hitting each other over toys….but I had these pictures and memories to look back on and remind me to keep trudging purposefully toward the mission! We’re all in this together, mamas. It’s an imperfect, hard, beautiful, and worthy road. Glad I have you all to walk it with! I’m going to talk about toys, clothes, and a few other kids’ topics later this week in posts! Now, hop on over to my dear friends posts’ to see what they’re prioritizing with their kids: Eileen from Eileen & Co. Jessica from Grace While We Wait Amber from Amber Tysl
Paula Warren says November 15, 2018 at 9:32 am It is cold, rainy and icy in Columbus Ohio today but the pictures of the kids loving on each other in the beautiful setting warms my heart!! Thanks for sharing Paula Reply