When God Uses Our Kids to Teach Us

I just had an encounter with Joy.  It involved foot stamping and yelling, "No!"  (Her, not me.) After she spent a short quiet time in her room, I went and sat on the bed to talk with her.  She picked up her storybook Bible, opened it up to a verse printed on a page and said, "What does this say?"  I read...

"The Lord your God is with you.  He is mighty enough to save you.  He will take great delight in you.  The quietness of his love will calm you down.  He will sing with joy because of you." Zephaniah 3:17 (NIRV)

I looked at Joy.  "Did you hear that?  When you get upset and yell at Mommy, God's love can help calm you down."

"Ok, Mommy.  Can I read my Bible?"

"Of course."

Joy carried her Bible out to the living room, sat down on the couch, and I overheard her talking to William, "I'm reading the Bible.  It helps to calm me down.  The Bible tells me good and bad."

Truth.

How I Work From Home

I've been getting a ton of questions via text, email, Facebook, etc lately about what I do.  I get it: who wouldn't want the ease and flexibility of working from home?  Especially moms who want to be home with children!  So I thought a blog post might answer questions for any one else who might be curious.

I am a home health medical coder and auditor.  I have an HCS-D certification (home health ICD-9 coding) and a COS-C certification (OASIS-C, which is Medicare documentation for home health).  I work full time from home, with full benefits, on my own schedule, and I make almost 3x what I made in my office job before.  I have a monthly quota I have to meet, and anything over that is paid in a bonus check every 3 months.  I have been extremely blessed by this job.

It was a long path to get to this point.  In college, I took a part time job as a medical records file clerk at a home health agency (my mom worked for the same company, but in the hospice branch).  After college, I continued at the same company but was promoted to CRC: doing data entry and tracking doctor's orders and such.  Anytime I was caught up on work, I would help our quality assurance person with chart audits, and so began to learn some of the ins and outs of the home health world.  After about a year, the lady who does our coding was planning an extended medical leave, and they decided to train me to take over the coding.  I took it on enthusiastically.  I learned on the job, studied at home, took an online anatomy and physiology class, and attended a 3 day home health coding seminar.  I ended up passing the HCS-D certification exam and became the permanent coder in the office.  After another year, I took it on my own initiative to study, attend a seminar, and take and pass the COS-C exam.  I did not formally use that certification in my job description, but it helped me with coding and additional responsibilities in the office.

The year before we left California, we needed more income.  I took a second job as a remote coder/auditor.  With my experience and certifications, they were eager to hire me, and I was able to start immediately. It was a contract position, pay per chart, and I worked either early in the morning or late in the evening.  When we moved to Texas, I kept the contract job and started requesting more charts.  Last November, I was offered the full time position.  Since Omar was still job hunting in Texas, I took the the full time position.  Right after, Omar got a job offer, too, but I kept my full time job.  I'm glad I did, because we were all miserable with Omar working outside the home again.  We are grateful that when his contract ended, he was able to come home to homeschool the kids, and we can live comfortably on my income now.

How do I juggle working from home?  I have to be honest and say that when Omar was working outside the home, I could not do it.  I tried so many different things, but there was always something falling behind, and I was hugely stressed out.  With Omar home shouldering most of the responsibilities with the kids and house, it works out great.

I get up and spend the early morning with the kids, fixing breakfast and such.  I try to get a couple of hours of work done in the morning.  I break for lunch with my family, and I put Elijah down for his nap (sometimes I sneak in a little nap with him), and I get the bulk of my work done in the afternoon.  I break again for dinner and bedtimes.  Some days, I get all my work done in the day.  Most days, I have just a few charts to finish up after the kids are in bed.  Some days we do a big family outing, and then I stay up late to finish my work.  I enjoy being able to take frequent breaks in the day to spend with my family and take care of my kids.  It is also easy to rearrange my schedule for shopping trips, doctors appointments, or anything else we need or want to do as a family.  We don't have much of a schedule or routine right now.  Omar is doing a little schoolwork to keep the kids going over the summer, but he is focusing on a few home improvement projects right now, so some days I watch the kids more while he is working on the house, and some days he watches them more while I am working.  Once we get school going in the fall, we will have more of a routine I'm sure.

Having two parents at home works so well for our family.  We just like to be together.  If we need a few things from the grocery store, it is not uncommon for all 5 of us to jump in the car and go together.  The kids are thriving in their schoolwork with Omar as their primary teacher; he is just better at that than I am!  And I love that I can still be so involved.  My desk is set up in the main living area, so I feel like I don't miss a thing! Sometimes Elijah comes and sits in my lap for a little bit while I work.  Joy likes to bring the toy laptop over and set up shop next to me so she can do her work. I will take a short maternity leave when Baby Grace arrives, but I am so thrilled that I will never have to put her in daycare, and I won't have to pump 3-4 times a day.  I plan to babywear a lot the first few months.

Our current situation seems almost too good to be true, but when people ask me how they can do what I do, I have to say it wasn't easy for me; my certifications are very specialized and best learned on the job in an office. Don't be discouraged, though; I can offer a few suggestions. Medical coding and medical transcription are two great fields for work from home opportunities.  The general advice I have seen on forums is that medical coding pays better, but usually requires some office experience before you will be able to get a work from home job (similar to the path I took; you have to work your way into it).  Medical transcription doesn't pay as much, but you can usually start working from home right away.  Both career paths have tons of online opportunities for classes and certifications.

I feel so blessed to be able to do what I do and be home with my family. I enjoy my work, and I work for a great company.  There were times over the past 6 years that I struggled with my office job: I didn't enjoy it, I missed my kids, and we didn't have enough money.  Now I can praise God for those years and the way they prepared me for all that I can do now. Blessed, blessed, blessed!  I've been using that word so much lately, because every time I pause and think about where we are now compared to where we were a year ago, all I can do is praise God for his abundant blessings!

Music of my Heart

Each of my kids has a song. The births of my children are some of the highlights of my life. I will never forget all the details and circumstances surrounding each birth. Afterwards, as we held our new miracle, Omar and I always agreed on one song that captured our feelings in that moment. It wasn't  something that we planned to do or discussed at great length, but music has a power of expression that spoke to our hearts in those moments. Even today, when I hear these songs, I am taken back to those first days of their lives. 

William's song is "How Can I Keep from Singing Your Praise?" by Chris Tomlin. There is nothing like becoming parents for the first time. We were overwhelmed and frightened. The first week was difficult. He was 4 weeks early, and we didn't even have all the basic supplies we needed (my baby shower was scheduled for the following Saturday).  My mom was out of town when William was born. And William got a bad case of jaundice. He wasn't eating well, and we had to have him on the bili-lights. I had no idea what to even do with a baby; I didn't even know how to change a diaper. But we came through, and we could not stop praising God for this precious gift and getting us through that first week. 

Joy's song is an obvious play off her name: "You Are My Joy" by David Crowder. When we first heard that song at a concert while we were dating, Omar leaned over and whispered to me, "One day, I want a little girl named Joy." And that never waivered. While William's birth story was marked by all the difficulties after his birth, Joy's birth story was difficult before she was even born. I had HTN and preeclampsia. I was on bed rest in the hospital, and they were going to induce me at 36 weeks.  But at 35 weeks, Joy was tired of waiting and arrived in her own time, and she truly brought all the joy with her. Despite being 5 weeks early, she had zero health issues.  After birth, my blood pressure and labs quickly returned to normal.  We both left the hospital together two days after her birth. She continues to be such light and joy in our lives. 

Elijah's song is "Blessed Be Your Name" by Matt Redman. While I was pregnant with Elijah, we learned that my grandmother's breast cancer had metastasized to her brain. When I was 5 months pregnant, we made the trip to North Carolina to see her. The day of Elijah's birth, I had a doctor's appointment. I was in early labor, and he sent me home with instructions to call when things started to pick up. I arrived home to find my mom in her room packing. My grandma's hospice nurse had called and told her to come right away. She had a flight leaving at midnight. Labor got going at 7pm; Omar and I headed to the hospital and my parents followed. Elijah was born 20 minutes before my mom had to leave. She was there for the birth, and she got to see him and kiss him. The next day, I learned my grandma passed away a few hours after my mom's arrival. As I held my new baby and cried, that chorus played in my heart over and over, "You give and take away; my heart will choose to say, Lord, blessed be Your Name."

Precious, precious moments that I never want to forget. I'm grateful for music to stir my memory and my heart. And with every baby, as I held them close to my heart, I always sang to them the second verse of the hymn "Because He Lives:"

How sweet to hold a newborn baby

And feel the pride and joy he gives

But greater still, the calm assurance

This child can face uncertain days, 

Because He lives!

How Does She Do It All?

Honestly, I have no idea, and I wish some one could tell me the magic solution. Omar has been back to work for three months, and I am seriously floundering. I've got three main jobs: work (meaning chart audits that I get paid for, which is a full time job), housework, and caring for and teaching the kids.  I've come to the conclusion that I can only do two of the three successfully.

I can keep on top of my work and spend quality time with my children, and the house is a disaster (and that is not an exaggeration). Or I can spend quality time with my kids and keep the house clean, and then spend most of the weekend trying to catch up on my work.  Or I can stay caught up on my work, keep the house clean, and the kids watch movies and do whatever else all day long.  I can't seem to find the balance between these three extremes, so I just keep rotating between them and getting stressed out.

So I have come up with yet another plan in a long series of attempts to get my life more organized so I can "do it all." But I'm pretty excited about this one.  I think it might actually work if I do it right. It is less structured than some other plans I've created, but with more visual aides so the kids can be more involved. There will be a board with a short list of daily tasks to be completed with clothespins that can be moved to indicate when things are done. This will include items like Bible study and picking up at the end of the day. Also, instead of stressing about doing "schoolwork" everyday, I'm going to make it a little more informal and list a task called "exercising our brains." My kids love things like moving clothespins, so I am hopeful that this will help them to help me stay on task everyday. 

The other new visual aide will be a chore board.  The kids help already with things like cleaning out the dishwasher and putting away clean clothes, but I want to expand their responsibilities. Omar has already set a great example: he recently suggested that he take on the chore of cleaning the bathrooms every weekend, because he knows that is my least favorite chore. So I am going to assign each of the older kids one chore that they can learn to do well and be responsible for every day (Elijah still just gets to be the helper).  William is going to learn to sweep, and Joy will learn to vacuum. I know they have the ability to learn these tasks; the challenge will be whether I have the patience to teach them. I am gearing myself up for lots of repetition until they master their new chores, reminding myself that investing time now will pay off later.   

In my head, this all works out great, and I know reality is harder, but I think the key is getting the kids more involved. It will teach them more work ethic and responsibility, as well as taking some of the load off of me as they become more independent with their assigned chores. So here we go: a new week, a new plan, and a fresh start. Maybe I don't have to do it all if I rely on my family to help. 

Home

I've been reading recently from a few different sources lately  about having a "word:" one word that symbolizes a goal or focus in your life. Especially with the New Year and resolutions and such, this idea has come across my path again. I never really stopped to give it much thought, but at point I did finally ask myself what my word would be, and very quickly, I realized my word is "home."

Still fresh from my busy California life where I was a working mom, always running, when "home" just meant a place to eat and sleep, I am still actively appreciating the blessing of having "home" be the center of my life. Home is where I spend most of my time and pour out my energy, service, and love. 

The first focus of my home is my family. If I'm not giving everything I have to my marriage, and to my role as mother, then I am missing the point of who God created to me. I am made as a helper to my husband. I want to support him and encourage him. I want to make home a wonderful place that he looks forward to returning to at the end of every day. By keeping home clean and orderly as he likes it, by giving him my attention, respect, and care, I want this to be his favorite place to be. After my role of wife comes mother. I want home to be a refuge for my kids from a world that seems to be getting increasingly hostile and scary. I don't want home to be a shelter or bubble to protect my kids from every evil, but I want it to be a place where they can learn about the world from a proper perspective, so they have the confidence to go forth and explore because they know that our God is in control of everything. I want home for them to be a place where they learn how to love God and love their neighbors, and give them a foundation strong enough to stand against everything the world throws at them. 

The second focus of my home is my neighbor, the Biblical view of neighbor that includes every one who crosses my path that I can serve in some small way. I want my home to open and welcoming. I never want to shy away from having company, and I want every one who walks in the door to feel God's love and peace in this home. I want to teach my kids to be gracious hosts and to serve others. I'm slightly obsessed with feeding any one who walks in my home. Food is such a beautiful way to serve: it is such a basic need yet can also be one of our greatest pleasures. But ultimately, I desire for our home to be a place where people know they can come for help or shelter or food, or even just for happiness and playtime and love. 

I'm not saying I have reached any of the lofty ideals described above, but these are the goals I am striving towards, and "home" is my word. Love starts in the home.  If we can't show God's love to our family at home, it will never reach the world beyond our walls. 

Homeschooling in the Cracks of Life

I was corresponding with one of my sisters-in-law recently, chatting a bit about homemade granola and homeschooling.  She homeschools her 4 kids, and as I asked her about how she juggles it all, she at one point said that she prefers to do school "in the cracks of life."  I liked the sound of that, and the phrase has kind of stuck with me.

We have definitely found a rhythm to our homeschool life, and I am much more relaxed and lenient about it than I thought it would be.  At the beginning of the school year, I had actually composed a daily schedule broken down into half hour increments from when we woke up, to when we did school, what time we ate, etc.  It was impossible to keep.  And I have found that I enjoy "real life" much more than any rigidly crafted structure.

I do have a loose structure.  At the beginning of the year, I organized all of the Abeka worksheets (for William), and I scheduled them all out in a planner, also setting out our days off.  That gives me a base, and from there, I just plan one week at a time.  Over the weekend at some point, I sit down with all my planning things.  I look over the Abeka material, add from any extra relevant material I may have (mostly BOB books and a simple math activity book), and make note of which activities I can involve Joy in.  I also have a separate column for Joy where I plan out activities for her letter of the week.  It usually takes me less than an hour to transform my skeleton lessons into full plans for the week. 

"School" usually happens in the morning. After I've slept in as late as possible, and lingered over my coffee, I gather every one together. We have our circle time, and then work on various worksheets. William has a lot of independent work. Joy mostly works with me, then she just goes off to play while I work with William. Elijah likes to be in the room and usually in the way. Sometimes Omar takes him out, and sometimes he gets an episode of Yo Gabba Gabba, but I hate to use the TV too much. I also make little grab bags that I fill with miscellaneous items to entertain him. He loves pulling stuff out. It works so well, I keep one in the diaper bag, too, to use whenever we're stuck waiting somewhere. 

I've learned to be very flexible with that hour of formal work.  William loves to watch Omar doing his woodwork and projects. When I went looking for William to start school one morning, I found him in the garage watching Omar build something. I decided to leave him there. I spent extra time working with Joy that day, and just caught William up with a few worksheets when he came in that evening. I'm not very good yet at pulling the lessons out of every situation, but I am trying to realize the learning potential in every simple activity. How many lessons of hard work and dedication and even practical skills will William learn in the garage with his dad? Or he can practice simple reading and math skills reading a recipe with me to make dinner. Joy in the same situation would be learning to follow directions and sequential steps. I think this is the beauty of homeschooling: realizing that learning goes far beyond the classroom.

Most of our lessons are pretty tame. We use a lot of worksheets and flash cards.  We read tons of books. The kids really enjoy our weekly library trips; we always go on Wednesday mornings for Storytime. I've always got an eye out for educational apps for the iPad that the kids might enjoy. Joy and I use the iPad at least once a week to do google image searches for things that start with our letter of the week.  We also have language skills, math, reading, and spelling apps, as well as some interactive story books that the kids love. 

Every now and then I come up with a "big idea" to break the monotony. We all really enjoyed learning about the how the mail works.  We took a family walk to the mailboxes; William read street names and house numbers, and we learned how addresses work, and we mailed postcards to grandparents. We've started science journals like Sid the Science Kid. So far, we've just observed gravity by dropping balls, and tomorrow we will see if different kinds of balls bounce the same. I think that science experiments will begin to happen more in the new year. We learn about healthy foods during meal times, and we even had a tea party when we talked about manners.

One of the best things about homeschooling is being able to bring the Bible into every subject. Omar will set a theme for the week that goes with our Bible story, and we emphasize it in every area of living. For the month of November, we have been talking about gratitude. We have a thankful tree, and our memory verse this week is Psalms 118:1. I do memory verses and catechism questions with William and Joy during circle time, but the real meat of their religious education comes from Daddy during family Bible time every evening. The theological discussions get pretty deep. It's amazing what these little sponges can soak up, and I am so grateful we have this chance to be so involved in building their characters and love for God. 

And that's how it goes. If we decide we need a few things from the grocery store, it becomes a family trip in the morning, and formal lessons don't happen until the afternoon.  If family is in town, we'll just skip the lessons completely and make them up later. I think doing school in the cracks of life means realizing that learning is happening all the time, and while worksheets and flash cards can be good and useful, they aren't the goal, so it's ok if they get pushed to the side sometimes. Especially when my kids are this young, they are learning more outside the schoolroom than in it, and my goal is to help them realize that, cherish it, and become lifelong learners. 

The Heart of the Home

Our kitchen is right in the heart of our home. As I type this, I have a pizza casserole in the oven, lasagna noodles and quinoa cooking on the stovetop (in separate pots), and some butter sitting out to reach room temperature to make cookies later. I can hear my husband working in the garage, and watch my kids darting back and forth from bedrooms to living room as they play. Since moving to Texas, I have been able to spend so much more time in the kitchen, and I love it. Besides just enjoying cooking and baking, more time in the kitchen is translating into feeding my family healthier food and dramatically reducing our food budget.

About a year and a half ago, I  came across this website: 100daysofrealfood.com.  I already knew that our eating habits weren't the best, but I began to realize just how many chemicals and artificial foods were in things that were even promoted as healthy. I love 100 Days of Real Food because they are not critical, but very encouraging that every small change starts to add up and can make a big difference. 

I keep it simple and prevent it from becoming overwhelming by focusing on one small area to change at a time.  For example, the very first thing I did was start buying whole grain pasta. The kids didn't even notice the change. Very slowly (remember this started a year and a half ago, and we aren't done yet!), we are changing our diet to healthier, less processed foods, mainly by cooking from scratch and eating more fruits and vegetables. Sometimes it just means reading labels: if you can't pronounce it, you probably shouldn't eat it!

I'm pretty happy with where we are now. We are not 100% "real food," and I don't think we ever will be, but we are eating so much better than we used to. I've been making our own bread for a couple of months now.  It's not completely whole wheat, but better than almost all store bought bread that has a gazillion ingredients I can't pronounce. I never thought I would be the kind of person who keeps two kinds of flour in my pantry. We have recently stopped buying cereal, and I make a homemade granola that we all love for breakfast and snacking. Sometimes the kids like it with milk (like cereal), sometimes with plain yogurt sweetened with a touch of honey. We go through fresh fruit faster than I can buy it. The kids are even getting better about eating vegetables; Joy is like a rabbit the way she gobbles up salads. 

I've even made some personal sacrifices for the cause! I've given up my artificially sweetened restaurant espressos. Omar got me an espresso machine for my birthday, and I make my own lattes with just espresso and milk.  Sometimes for a treat I add honey and cocoa powder or pumpkin pie spice. I've also given up microwave popcorn, and I really prefer our air-popped popcorn with a little butter and salt, or a little ranch seasoning (on my to-do list: make my own ranch mix instead of store bought packets).

But all this real food and cooking from scratch means I'm spending a lot of time in the kitchen. I make bread about every other week (two loaves at a time, one goes in the freezer), and I make granola at least twice a week.  I usually try to make muffins or some similar grab and go breakfast for Sunday mornings in case we are running late and need to eat in the car on the way to church. I keep lunches simple: usually sandwiches with fresh fruit and veggies. And then there's dinner (and other miscellaneous baking and cooking). And I still need time to teach the kids and do chart audits. So to save time, I finally got into freezer cooking. 

I wish I had figured this out a year ago when I was working full time; we would have eaten so much better and would have had so much less stress in the evenings trying to figure out dinner!  If you have not heard of this before, the basic idea is that you spend a few hours prepping a bunch of meals at once, then put them in the freezer, and when it's time to cook, just pull out a meal! I have mostly done crockpot meals. The night before, I move the bag from freezer to fridge, then in the morning, just dump in the crockpot. In the evening, I usually just need to cook some pasta or warm some veggies. So easy, and we have discovered some really delicious recipes. This month, I am doing a couple casseroles, too.

Not only has this saved time, it has saved us money, too.  For one, we have meals planned and ready, so we don't eat out nearly as much as we used to.  Almost not at all.  Two, shopping in bulk and planning our meals has helped us save on our grocery bill. We have cut our grocery budget in half since moving to Texas. 

Simplify, plan, and save. This may sound a little hokey, but the changes happening in our kitchen really reflect the changes we are making in our lives as a whole. We are simplifying our lifestyle by focusing on what's important, planning for the future, and working hard to save money, pay off debt, and be good stewards. So the kitchen really is the heart of our home.