Steve Demme conference

I am so sorry; I completely forgot to take pictures of the Steve Demme conference! I didn't remember until it was time for the Ultimate Frisbee tournament afterward. So that's all that I got pictures of! However, we may be getting a recording of our singing, and if so I will post it on this blog!

The conference was really good. Mr. Demme is a great speaker; he was able to keep even our little Thor who hates to keep still interested, and Papa was taking notes! I think that when a person is able to keep an active seven-year-old interested and at the same time impress a man who listens to sermons and conferences and things like that all day long on his MP3 player at work, so much that he takes notes, he's a really good speaker! Sorry if that sentence was hard to follow. :) I might not be making too much sense because I am exhausted! :) Therefore, I will post the Ultimate Frisbee pictures and go to bed!!! :D

The silver stripes on Thor's shoulders were to show which team he was on. They used different-colored duct tape for the teams. I think there were orange, silver, red, blue, green, and either purple or pink.  

 Bjorn playing with his little friend Abigail Clayton

 Sooooooo cute!!! :)

Oh, yes. After Ultimate Frisbee, Papa and Mom dropped us (Cecily, Thor, Gloria, Bjorn, and I) off at home and went to a dinner of the homeschool group leadership team. Knut was going to a birthday party and Rosemary, of course, went with Mom. Two more cute pictures taken during kitchen cleanup before I go to bed...

Bjorn saw that Thor got his picture taken, so he wanted his picture taken, also! I took Thor's picture because he looked cute putting away dishes with his hat on, so when Bjorn saw that he went and put on a duplicate of that hat and told me to take his picture!

Lyceum

Gloria: I like to be with Marlie in Choir. She's my friend. I like Five In A Row. It's my first class. I like Learning Centers. C's also make the sound of 'sss'. And the other sound C makes is 'k'. I learned that just in my reading lesson in school. Mom said that I could read whenever I want to, except for lunchtime and when I'm doing my chores. I love to read. Just sometimes I can't read when it's lunchtime and when I'm going to do my chores.

Thor: I like Lyceum. My first class is K'NEX with Mrs. Clayton. Cecily is with me. My second class is Cooking for Boys. My first time there, what we made was not very good. It had rice on the outside, and a block of cheese on the inside. But I did not like it. My second time, it was much better. There was apples, and some dough. And it was really good. But although it looked more like a baby diaper. And also, we got to try a lot of kinds of apples. After we finished Cooking Class, we went to lunch. After lunch, we did choir. Knut does choir, and Cecily, and Gloria, and me. Our mom teaches it. And after choir we go to Aldi to go shopping. And same with the Claytons. And after we go to Aldi, we come home. The end.

Cecily: My first class that I have in Lyceum is K'NEX. Mrs. Clayton is the teacher. We just build things with K'NEX. That's all we do. One of my other ones is Keepers of the Faith. And in it we do quilling. And memorize scripture. After that class, we eat lunch. And after that, we do choir.

So... there's Lyceum from three perspectives! Check back in one week for three more! (Mine, Knut's, and Bjorn's)

Buddies and Rental Properties

Has it been mentioned anywhere in this blog that Papa and Mom own a rental property business? They own it jointly with Mom's parents, Grandpa and Grandma Davis. At the moment they own three houses, and one of them they just bought and Papa has been fixing up. There's still quite a bit of work to be done, and the renters want to move in on Monday! Papa has been working like mad this week to get it finished on time, and Knut, Cecily, Thor, and I were over there this afternoon helping do some painting.

One of the neat things about homeschooling in a big family is that the older students get teaching experience by helping with the younger kids. For example, this morning Gloria did all of her schoolwork with me. She needs pretty close supervision on all of her work, so she gets lots of breaks in between the times when Mom is available to help her. When she's with me, though, she has to buckle down and do it all! She doesn't mind, though. She was very excited today because she finished her reading lesson book! Now she'll start reading various short books that Mom picks for her, or maybe even just any book she chooses. Or, Mom might turn her reading lessons over to me, and then I get to choose the book! I think I'll ask Mom about that.

We use a sort of buddy system, switching buddies for different occasions. Gloria and I are buddies at home, I making sure she gets up on time, does all of her chores (brush teeth, make bed, get dressed, etc.) in the morning and before bed, praying with her before bed, doing her hair in the morning, and as I said before, helping her with her schoolwork. We share a room, which is why I am her buddy instead of Knut or Cecily. Cecily shares a room with little Bjorn, so she is his buddy. She helps him get dressed in the morning and do his chores, and she's especially helpful at night. He's just finished potty training, but still requires some assistance. He also needs help brushing his teeth, but his favorite part is when Cecily sings him a song and prays with him before he goes to sleep at night. Sometimes she also tells him a story and acts it out with his stuffed animals.

Thor is Knut's buddy. Although he's officially one of the 'big kids', he requires some reminders about finishing his chores in the morning, and since Knut is the one with the alarm clock, Knut has to wake him up in time for school. Knut's real buddies are the kitties, since he's in charge of feeding and watering them. They're not considered part of the family, though, and Knut does not consider them his 'buddies', just his charges. (They've been misbehaving lately.) :)

When we go on an adventure, we usually have different buddies. For example, when we went to the St. Louis City Museum with our homeschool group, Bjorn and Gloria were both my buddies, and Knut, Cecily, and Thor stayed together. For other things, we have other buddies. And sometimes we just forget about the buddy system and do whatever we want!

Hopefully I'll get some pictures posts here soon. I can't take pictures at Lyceum, but I'll try to arrange for some pictures to be taken at the conference on Saturday during our performance. If I can't get any of our performance, at least I'll get the rest of the conference!

Singing plans

We're singing this Saturday at the Steve Demme conference at the First Assembly of God church in Belleville. We're singing three times, for fifteen minutes each time. I'm not sure exactly what times we're singing. Go to our homeschool group's website for details about the Steve Demme conference. We've made a few changes to our program; one piece we've added is really funny and very difficult to sing.

Yes, this is a little late, but...

We went to the zoo last Sunday. I didn't get too many pictures (camera has been acting up lately) :P but here are the ones I did get!

Climbing on the statue outside of the ape exhibit

Right outside the primate house was a little exhibit about different kinds of primates. There were fake skulls, which you see us holding, and a lemur fur which Gloria is holding.

Lyceum!!!

We are all just recovering from exhaustion. The first day of Lyceum is always pretty tiring, but it's worth it. Poor Mom had a really difficult day. She was teaching three classes, trying to get seven kids to their different classes on time, trying to find where her classrooms are this semester, getting set up, writing her stuff on the dry-erase board, getting nametags made for all of us... you get the general idea. She was busy! Next week will be better. Now everyone knows where their classes are; we all have nametags, and the set-up crew will have most of Mom's stuff in place.

Bjorn is actually doing Lyceum this semester for the first time!!! In the past he has just gone to the nursery during hours when Mom teaches, or else hung out in her classes, but now he's taking two classes: Lyceum for Littles and Wee Little Rest. Gloria has taken Wee Little Rest several times and loved it, and from her talking about it Bjorn has gotten excited about it. I think he came with Gloria once or twice last spring, also. The little toddlers are supposed to bring a blanket, and they have snacks, a story, a craft, and a 'rest time' on their blankets during a movie. Lyceum for Littles is a new class with songs, stories, and finger plays.

I'll get everyone else to write about their classes... as soon as I can hunt them all down. Which may take awhile! :)

Bright Lights

Sylvia and Cecily here, (Sylvia sick in bed and Cecily in Sylvia's room, on the laptop computer from the great room)

The day before yesterday we went to Bright Lights. It's being led by a girl named Allison. It was a really neat program!!! After we prayed we sang a couple of the songs from the Bright Lights songbook: Bright Lights and Higher Ground. Then we played a game to get people to know each other better. Next was the lesson, which was about not being a typical teenager. We made up a long list of words we think of when we hear the word teenager. Some of these were: wild, cell phone, disrespectful, immodest, and crazy. Then we talked about how God has much better things in store for us than what the world does. Allison illustrated her point by putting water, dirt, hand lotion, vinegar, and a lot of other things in a plastic bowl and sirring them together. It looked and smelled horrible. Next she put a rose in the bowl and showed it to everyone. It was dripping with greenish, grayish, brownish gooey yucky stuff. This shows how we can be perverted by the world. Then she showed us a clean rose and asked us which one we wanted to be. The perfect rose is harder to be but it is worth it. Last of all we drank tea and ate cookies. They were very very tasty.

There is a blog post on our Bright lights group website about this meeting, and you might want to read it! Here's the link: http://www.brightlightsofallon.blogspot.com/
She has some great pictures on there; I (Sylvia) had a seat at the wrong angle and so didn't get many good pictures. Also, my camera was acting up. It didn't like the lighting in that room.

Manliness

Josh here,

In the Christian Men’s Network videos by Ed Cole, in one of the videos he talked about ‘identifying with Christ,’ mentioning that true manliness was synonymous with Christlikeness. That made me think about what it means to be a man – a real man.

Society tells us that a man sits around drinking beer and watching football - selfish and lazy, uninterested in the world around him. He only stands up for what he believes when it interferes with his own comfort, then he loses his temper and becomes abusive and unreasonable. True, there are many examples of that kind of man, even among our Christian brothers, and I won’t deny that my own sinful flesh desires to act that way.

While I agree with Ed Cole about Christ being the primary example of true manliness, there is one other figure that I greatly admire and would like to suggest is perhaps among the greatest examples of true men: Pa.

Not my own pa, although I think he’s indeed a very great man. I’m speaking of Pa Ingalls – Pa of “Little House on the Prairie.” Those of you who have read the books (not the TV series) will remember many things about this great man: How he knew just about everything useful a man could know, how he attacked a bear at night with nothing but a tree branch (turned out the bear was a stump, but he didn’t know that until he whacked it), how he walked 200 miles to find work to feed his family, how he built several cabins and buildings with his own two hands, he saved his family and property from a prairie fire which surrounded them, how he stood up to a huge crowd of angry railroad men, how he survived for 3 days outside in a blizzard, and how he worked extremely hard every single day except Sunday. When faced with devastating setbacks and hardships, he stood up to them with iron fortitude and bravery.

But there’s more to Pa than that – he also went with very little food so that his starving family could eat, he repeatedly risked his life in The Long Winter to haul hay for burning to keep his family warm enough to survive (and then spent all day every day for weeks on end twisting the hay into sticks to feed the fire), he stood for principle regardless of the odds, he walked 5 miles to town to buy himself some new boots only to give his boot money to the parson to help pay for the church bell (and in those old boots he walked another 200 miles to find work). He was respected and admired by the entire town, he could play the fiddle and sing like nobody’s business, he spelled down the entire town in a spelling bee, and when his daughter Laura was frustrated and bored with constant studying, he roused the whole town to put on weekly entertainments to please her. He had a great sense of humor, trained his children very well, went to church every week (when there was a church to attend), and never complained about all the hardship he suffered. He was always whistling and singing, and made friends with anyone who was willing – white man or Indian.

So what makes Pa such a man? His physical strength? His knowledge? His wisdom? All of the above? When one boils down the essence of manliness, I think a good term would be ‘sacrifice.’ A real man sacrifices himself to help others. He helps his wife, his children, his neighbors, his community, his country and his world. He fights the ‘inner battle’ of selfishness and gives up his own comforts to help, encourage, and strengthen others. That means when he gets angry, he keeps his anger in check, rather than letting it fly out in some way. When he’s tired, he keeps doing what needs to be done rather than rest and relax, until he’s truly tired. When he’s hungry, he makes sure others are served and fed before himself, and when he’s in need, he does what he can for himself first so as not to be a burden on others.

Pa fitted this definition splendidly, and Christ fitted it perfectly. I don’t fit it nearly as well as I should or as I would like, but I can say that I’m getting better. Hopefully, every man that reads this will also admit his own failure, and strive, with God’s help, to become more manly and remember to sacrifice himself daily for others. Sacrifices can be as small as playing with a child when you’d rather read the news, but sacrifice we must in order to be considered manly in God’s eyes.

Lyceum

There is a nasty sickness running through our family. Everyone has a bad cold, and Cecily, Knut, and I have each spent a couple days in bed. Poor little Rosemary has been feeling really nasty; she is usually very happy and cheerful, but she's been really fussy lately. When I tickle her stomach, which she usually loves, she starts to cry. Hopefully we'll all be better soon, because this is going to be a busy week! Tomorrow night Cecily and I have our first Bright Lights meeting, and on Friday Lyceum starts! I'd better get busy and explain. :)

Mom, Cecily, Rosemary, and I went to a meeting two weeks ago and signed up for a Bright Lights group near here. We're really excited about it! Several people we know from our homeschool group are planning to attend (partly through our influence) :). There are lots of girls we don't know, so we'll get to make new friends!

Lyceum: it's a sort of co-op our homeschool group does. It's every Friday and there is a fall semester and a spring semester; both semesters last ten weeks. Many of the moms offer to teach different classes for the kids or sometimes other moms to take. Other moms are helpers at lunchtime, playtime, and in the nursery. This semester there are about 66 classes in the four hours that classes are available; two hours before lunch and two after.
Mom is teaching three classes this year: two choirs and K'NEX engineering. The choir she's teaching first hour is for 7th-12th grades. She calls it Lyceum Singers to keep it from getting confused with the other choir. Then second hour she has K'NEX engineering, which is for 4th-8th grades. Her other choir is third hour; it's for 1st-6th grades. She says that she thinks she's in over her head, but she says that almost every year and she does wonderfully. Her classes are among the most popular in Lyceum! :)
We all really enjoy going to Lyceum; we get to see our friends, take fun classes, and experience classes in a group setting. It's certainly a switch from there being only one person in each grade in our entire school! Not that we would want to go to a public school all day long, but once a week at Lyceum, gathering with other homeschoolers and taking classes from someone else's viewpoint other than Mom's is neat! Some of the classes, including one I'm taking, are even taught by some of the teenagers in the group. I'm hoping to be able to teach one sometime; but for now there are just too many classes that I want to take!

Babysitting

Mom was invited to a 'mothers tea' for Mrs. Clayton. The Claytons have three boys and a little girl and now are expecting again! Their boys are great friends with ours, and are in CCC with us. Since we live near where the Mothers' Tea was held, Mom volunteered our house as a dropping off place for kids and left me in charge. The Clayton kids didn't come... they were taken care of by their grandparents. However, even without the Claytons we had 8 kids come over, so it was pretty crazy! Mom took Rosemary, but that still left six Petersons! So altogether there were 13 not counting me. They sure did have fun! It was such a wet day that no one could go outside, but inside is pretty exciting. Up in the attic, which Papa has transformed into a beautiful library with paneled walls (those which are not covered in bookshelves) and ceiling, is a secret room and secret passage. The entrance to the secret room is a bookshelf which, when you pull on a 'Bible', opens into a little playroom! There is a little tunnel opening in the corner which leads to the kids' library, a small room with picture books and some of the children's chapter books. In the kids' library there is a beautiful painting on the wall of a queen knighting a soldier. When you push on this painting, it opens to reveal the other end of the secret passage!

The secret room and secret passage are always a hit with guests to our house. However, it's not the only attraction. Knut and Thor have a large room in the basement which is their Lego room. There are... um... I think three or four Lego tables, one constructed by Papa and painted with grass, roads, ponds, and streams. In the middle is a hole for Knut to stand in when he plays there to reach all over the table without moving from that spot. Whenever Knut has friends over, they disappear to the Lego room and usually don't reappear for quite awhile. However, when they do reappear they usually head straight for Knut's room where there is play armor and weapons and a large dress-up box. Then life becomes dangerous as they have play battles and swordfights and slay dragons and capture castles and everything else you can do with a group of boys armed with wooden swords and shields which Papa and Knut make.

As for the girls, older ones go with Cecily to her room to play dolls or dress-up. There are beautiful gowns Grandma Davis made Cecily and me years ago, a Japanese kimono and Indian beaded dresses made by Mom, and much more. Then, when they're all dressed up, they usually go upstairs to the secret room which is their castle. Or, instead of dress-up or dolls, there are board games to play and plenty of unimportant things to be talked about and giggled about. When Cecily's friend Kira comes over, they have been known to just sit and look at each other and giggle about nothing at all.

Gloria always takes charge of younger girls immediately. They usually play with all of the dolls in Gloria's and my room, but sometimes they dress up in the finery from the box in the boys' room. I don't know what all they do; it's usually somewhere where I don't see them except for occasional glimpses. I think Gloria brings them on a tour of the house, stopping to play whenever they see something interesting.

Today, though, after playing for awhile, Knut set up a puppet show- without puppets. He has written these hilarious little skits called: the Adventures of the Llama Brothers, the Further Adventures of the Llama Brothers, the Further Further Adventures of the Llama Brothers, and the Further Further Further Adventures of the Llama Brothers. Instead of having puppets, Knut puts his middle and ring fingers on his thumb and locks their joints, then sticks his pinky and index finger up in the air to create... a llama! The main characters in these skits are two llama brothers named Luke and Lucas. They get into all sorts of trouble with tigers and talking tennis balls (with mouths cut into them and faces drawn on) and all kinds of things. Anyway, Knut set up a puppet theater in the living room and put on all four of these skits. They were very well received.

Piano Practice

Rosemary loves to help me practice the piano.

One problem... when she's on my lap she gets in the way and I can't play correctly. So...

she sits beside me on the bench. Much better!

P.S. Isn't she adorable? :D

School

Cecily here,

Today for a history assignment we made a paper tabernacle model. Inside it there is a miniature Ark of the Covenant, a seven-branched golden lampstand, the table of Showbread, and an altar of incense. Inside of the Ark of the Covenant, there is Aaron's Rod, some manna, and the Ten Commandmants. The Ark of the Covenant is in a different room that is separated by a curtain and this room is called "The Most Holy Place" or "Holy of Holies."

Knut here -

Quack. That's one of my favorite words. Papa read us poetry at Bible time tonight. Sylvia went to the dentist this morning. Sylvia did not like the dentist. Cecily is sick. I am happy. I am happy because I am able to say quack; not because Sylvia had to go to the dentist and Cecily is sick. The End. Goodbye. P.S. I am cuckoo.

Sylvia here -

I know; I have a brother who is somewhat strange. Knut always makes life interesting at our house; I think you can see why. Although Quack, Tadpole, Chocolate, Lego, and Llama are among Knut's favorite words, his very favorite is Frogmeat. Just thought you might like to know that. On our website, if you look at part of the spoken portion of our program, you can see that our entire family loves silliness. :)

We had a short CCC meeting today. We're thinking about doing a Christmas play this year if possible for the community, and making it as good as possible! That would mean starting rehearsals really early. If there's one thing I've learned being the daughter of church musicians, it's that you start rehearsing for Christmas so far in advance that you're sweating from the heat of summer. We haven't really decided yet, but the Claytons will talk it over with their parents and think it over all week and then we'll discuss it next meeting. We may also be doing a short presentation at a nursing home soon.

Wednesday

As you can see from the bios on our WEBSITE and on this blog, Papa and Mom are the music directors at Troy United Methodist church. Consequently, we are pretty involved in the church programs. We usually only go to church twice a week; Sunday and Wednesday. On Wednesday after a delicious dinner they have youth groups, activities for kids, Bible studies, chancel choir rehearsal, handbell choir rehearsal, children's choir rehearsal, etc. Naturally, being the music directors, Papa and Mom direct all three choirs. Papa directs the chancel and handbell choirs, and Mom accompanies the chancel choir and directs the children's choir which Gloria, Thor, Cecily, and Knut all go to. Afterward they go to the kids activities. Bjorn sometimes goes, also, but other times he just hangs out with Papa 'helping' direct choir. I do chancel choir, the first half of handbell choir, and go to small group time in the youth group, making up for lost practice time in handbells earlier in the day while only the staff is in the church.

We usually leave for church at about 2:00 in the afternoon. Often some of us have unfinished schoolwork, so we bring our books along. There is a nice little play area downstairs with games, coloring books, Legos, and dolls for the little ones (and not-so-little ones like Thor and Cecily) can play, and the youth room with the nice couches is available until 5:00, when we go down to dinner and the youth start to arrive. We usually finish our schoolwork there. If we have music practice, we can either do it in the Sanctuary or the rehearsal room. Rosemary loves to lie on the floor and listen, no matter how badly we play! She's very encouraging. :)

Bible Time

Josh here.

In the evenings just before bedtime, we do our family 'Bible time.' We've been going straight through the Bible for many years, and we're now up to 2 Kings. After reading, I ask the younger kids to say in their own words what it was we just read. For the older ones, I ask theological questions or practical application questions, and we discuss the verses.
Other times I read from a Bible trivia book, and the kids try and guess the answers. That's a little more enjoyable, if not more 'filling.'
Sometimes I'll read from a couple of other books: an anthology of children's songs, stories, and rhymes, and a book called "Treasure of the Familiar" edited by Ralph Woods. It's a wonderful book full of poems, scripture, verse, plays, speeches, songs, quotes, and other prose throughout all of history.

The big question is WHY do we do this?
The Great Commission is that we should 'go make disciples of all nations...and teach them everything I have commanded you...." (Matt.28:19-20)
So many of us who claim to be Christians fail to disciple our own children, to say nothing of discipling those outside our home. Proverbs tells us to 'train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.' (Prov. 22:6). As 90% of Christian kids leave the faith by the time they are 20, my goal is to be the 10% that retain it, but it doesn't happen by accident. A couple hours of church each week is no match for 40 hours of government schooling, numerous hours of anti-Christian filth on the TV, and the bad influence of unbelieving friends.
On the contrary, we home-educate, have no TV, monitor our kids friendships, and we disciple our children, training them up in the way of the Lord. With such guidance, how can we lose?
True, it's still possible for a child to reject the faith when they're older, but at least they've got a far greater chance. 95% of home-educated Christian kids retain their faith. What a glorious statistic!
But there's more to it than education. I would say that the 5% of failures in that group are those who only educated, and didn't disciple. We've heard many testimonies of homeschool parents who wished they would have spent more time on character training.
What good is knowledge without wisdom and character?
Anyway, back to the WHY. Reading the Bible and discussing it has countless advantages, which I don't need to go into here. But what about the poetry and speeches? Those teach us verbage - the use of words to maximum effect. Reading the statesmen of old is like taking a walk through a verbal treasure garden. When one develops a desire to be able to communicate clearly and effectively, one is naturally drawn to those who have mastered the concept, so I read this stuff not only to introduce my children to it, but to also make up for lost time for myself! I'll never match even the least of the old statesmen or poets, but at least I can send my kids farther along the path than myself, in the hopes that they will send their kids even farther along.

Fathers, I exhort you, if you call yourself a Christian, to get into the Word with your kids. If you fail to do this, you will (9 times out of 10) send them to Hell, rejecting the very beliefs that you claim to hold dear. If you don't have the time, then MAKE or TAKE the time. Job keeping you too busy? Get another job and trust in the Lord to provide. Your family is your top priority. Live the Christian life for all it's worth, for there "you will have life, and have it to the full." (John 10:10)