Responsibilities of Mothers — Rachel Weaver

Transcript Opening

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This is real to all of us. I'm a mother of seven children. The oldest is 15, the youngest is 10 months old. So I'm right in the middle of organizing a house and I don't feel like I always know how to do it any better than any of the rest of you.

I have the topic, but that doesn't mean that I know how. I'm working at it just like everybody else is. What we want to do is not give you a lot of schedules because my schedule might not work for you.

Your schedule might not work for me. I just want to give you some guidelines of how to get things louder. I should put it up higher. Let me put it up. Is this better? Okay. Now, get my train of thought back.

Seeking God for Order and Wisdom

I want to just give you some guidelines of things that work in our household and that I've observed other mothers that works for others to get things done in a godly, orderly fashion. Let's just stop a moment to have a word of prayer first because I feel like I need it.

Our Father, You are the God of order, the God of discipline, and You're the one who has planned our lives and given us our families. I just ask You, Father, today to speak Your words, and I pray, Father, for wisdom, for understanding, and for clearness of mind.

Bless each sister here as she struggles to fulfill her job. I pray, Father, that You would just bless her abundantly and give her wisdom for You're the God that wisdom comes from. We thank You for this in Jesus' name.

Amen. All right. Time is a gift from God. He is the one who is the author of all time, and we are to be stewards of our time. 1 Corinthians 4 .12, 1 and 2 says, Let a man so account of us as the ministers of Christ and stewards of the mystery of God.

Moreover, it is required of men and stewards that a man be found faithful. We are responsible for how we use God's time. I was impressed by the Psalm 90, verse 12. So teach us to number our days that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.

When we misuse our time, we misuse God's time, and it's a spiritual problem, it's not only our problem. I find that the first way to get organized is to seek the Lord. He will help you to find the priorities that you need to work out each day.

Your priorities might not be mine. Maybe you have a special calling. Maybe you have more little ones. Maybe you have a handicapped child. Each of us has our own needs. Seek the Lord. Allow God to show you your needs and pray about your goals and your ambitions.

James 1 .5 says, If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God which giveth to all men liberally and upbraideth not. I find that God gives me more than I ever expected. Some days when I'm struggling, if I just stop and go and ask Him for it, He just pours it out.

And some days I struggle through and forget to ask Him. And it doesn't go very well. Psalm 32, 8 and 9. I will instruct thee and teach thee in the way that thou shalt go. I will guide you with mine eye.

And then one more. Matthew 11, 28 to 30. Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest. God will help us organize our schedules so we can get through our days in a restful way.

Nothing is too small to speak to Him about. He cares about every little one. Every little activity. The first one is to speak to God. The second one is to set our priorities. We're going to allow God to show us what is important.

Quiet Time and Rest for Mothers

And one of the first things that is important is quiet time with Him. And that is a major problem for most of us. We have babies. Sometimes they get us up at night. Sometimes they do every night. And we're tired.

But somehow we need to find time to spend with Him. Because if we don't, we don't have a cup that's full. And a cup that's not full doesn't run over. And I find the early morning what's best for me. But sometimes I don't get it done.

Maybe I was up half the night with the baby. So what do I do? Well, I cannot say that I don't have any time. So I stop maybe at 10 o 'clock when my children are all occupied doing their math. My baby's in bed sleeping.

Maybe that's my quiet time. But God does expect us to speak to Him. And we need to hear from Him to make our days all right. Another thing that I think is important and a priority is an unusual one. It's a time for rest.

I think most mothers with babies and toddlers and home-sleeping children need naps in the afternoon. Now, I know I'm a radical. But I was raised with a mother-in-law who took a nap. And I find that if I take a nap 10 minutes, 20 minutes, a half an hour, whatever I need, I last much better till evening.

I'm much clearer. There are little squabbles and needs and the interruptions, the phone calls that irritate me half as bad. So some of you say, I don't have time to take a nap. I can't do it. But you don't really have time not to if you're weary.

Now, if you're full of energy, bless your heart. You just got to keep on going. But most of us really do need to stop and have a quiet time. How do you do it? Well, we put our babies to bed. We put our toddlers to bed.

We put our young children to bed. And we get our older children occupied quietly. It's like an hour of quiet time from 1 to 2 or whatever at our house. Maybe the older ones are studying sign language or a language course that they're doing themselves.

Maybe they're reading or writing letters. Everybody has to be quiet in our house. If they are not quiet, then the next day they have to take a nap. And that pretty well settles the struggle for the 8s and the 9s who don't need to always take a nap.

They sit quietly and read a book or go outside and do something so that the house is quiet. And I really find that it refreshes my day. Okay. My third point is an organization that we need to be disciplined.

Discipline, Schedules, and Household Order

We need to learn discipline in our own lives first or we cannot teach it to our children. Discipline brings order to a hectic life. It makes a structure and a framework for you to work with. If you don't have any discipline, if you don't have any meal times, if you don't have any bed times, if you don't have any order to your life, things don't go very well.

And so, although discipline is hard, it is important. Hebrews 12, 11 says,. And I like Deuteronomy 28, 1 and 2. It says,. Then there's a lot there that I left out. Now, I think it's important to have an orderly rising time.

We sort of have a set schedule that we rise at a certain time. Our time doesn't need to be your time, and I'm not even going to mention what it is. For us, it's reasonably early, except for Wednesday night, Thursday morning, it's late, so we set it back an hour.

And Sunday night when we have a service, we set it back an hour on Monday morning because it's like 11 o 'clock till we get to bed. And if we don't do that, well, we don't function as well. I have the blessing of my husband at home, so we can do that.

Now, some of your husbands go off to work and you can't change that. But, if you have an orderly rising time, everybody knows when to get up. There's no complaining and no grouching. It is the way it is.

You get up when you're called. We have orderly mealtimes. We, at our house, eat breakfast at 7 o 'clock, lunch at 12, and supper at 5. Give or take a little bit. Some days, breakfast is at 7 .30 because something unforeseen happened.

The phone rang. Oh, somebody came. But breakfast is at 7, lunch is at 12, and supper is at 5 for us. It doesn't matter if your supper is at 7. But have it in an orderly fashion so that everybody knows what is expected.

Your husband will come home. He will know that there will be a warm meal waiting for him or a pizza at home. He still knows it. Have an orderly school time. It doesn't have to be always on the dot. But have a semblance of order to your life.

And have an orderly bedtime. You can't get up at an orderly fashion if you don't go to bed in an orderly fashion. If you don't go to bed until 11 or 12, you certainly can't hop up at 5 and 6. So have an orderly bedtime so you can get up orderly.

How do we do it all? And my answer is, we do not. We can't keep better homes than gardens, houses, cook gourmet meals, homeschool our children, and do all our in-sewing, train them to be Godly, and be involved in lots of ministry and creative activities all at one time.

We cannot do it. We are human. And we are limited. And that is why we need to set priorities. And I want to stress that God has given each of us gifts. Maybe your gift is not sewing. Maybe your gift is not creatively decorating your house.

Don't go to other people's houses and look around and say, I don't know how to do this. Learn to find what your calling is and get good at that, and then God will lead you into other areas. We dare not compare ourselves with each other.

And that is one of our biggest problems that we face as mothers. We think we have to do it all, and we can't. First, you're a wife, and second, you're a mother. And that is one of the things you need to remember.

When you set your priorities and goals down, it's not about your husband. Because if your husband is like mine, he often sees holes, pitfalls, dangers that I didn't see. He gives me counsel. And sometimes he shows me what I thought was really, really important isn't, after all, nearly as important as something else.

And he's more objective. So when you get your priorities, run them by your husband. That went back under the priorities. I'm sorry, I missed it. I had written it down, and I jumped it back. In my priority list, with organized living, I suggest that you serve simple meals.

We can't do everything. And simple, nourishing meals are fine. Actually, they're better than fancy meals. I don't know if you get the general spirit, but if any of you do, take a little moment to see what Cheryl says about simple cooking.

Now, we don't have oatmeal for breakfast every day. Cheryl does. Or she did for a while. I think now she serves whole grains sometimes. But, you know, simplicity is the key to her having the ability to have, what, 10 children, 11, and run a business too.

Planning Ahead and Using Schedules as Helpers

And then one of the next things is planning and organization. And here we come to what our planning ahead is, my point. Okay? We only remember about 10 of what we hear, so we need to write down the things we hear and the things we read and keep them for ideas.

We need to take notes. The Chinese say the palest ink is stronger than the strongest memory. And for me, that's true. This, the children call my brain. And if I leave it or lose it, I have a real problem because it's my, it's just simply a weekly appointment journal, and I'm just going to open it up here in just a minute, with a column for each day of the week.

And what I do is I write down anything that's pressing, any appointments that I have, any phone calls I need to make. I write down chores that are important, errands, special occasions, cards that I need to send.

And then I try to look at this every morning before I start my day. I often write my menus in here. Sometimes I don't. But beside that, I have a sparrow notebook or a ring binder that has pages in it, and I have a to-do list.

And what I do is I list the things that I want to accomplish, either in the week or in the day. You have to break it up according to your needs. Some people have really fancy, neat ideas of organizing, but I do not have enough time to go into lots and lots of detail.

So I simply make a list, and we check off the jobs as we do them. I work out. I set aside about 15 minutes to half an hour every evening before I go to bed. If I don't manage to get it done in the evening because of a fussy baby or something that I need to discuss with my husband, in the morning I get up 15 minutes or half an hour early, depending on how fast or how slow you are, how detailed you do it.

Maybe you need an hour, when the house is quiet so I can think. I don't answer the phone then. I let somebody else do that, and I plan my day sort of. My days are rubber band days. I plan lots of things that I don't get done, but it helps still to keep me on track.

I work out a simple schedule for my family for the day, from rising to setting. I plan my menus in a greater or lesser fashion. Sometimes it gets trashed and something else takes its place because of time or failure or something.

I plan my lessons, either a day ahead or a week ahead, depending on how much time I have. I plan special times with the children and my husband. I plan daily chores. Those things all go down on my to-do book.

That is not this book. This book gets major things that I don't want to miss. This book gets anything I have to do. It's not fancy. It's just written out so that I have a thing to go back to. Oh, I have to do this yet.

Then I can give the next child the next job. Some mothers make a list, a copy or a master list of the chores they want that child to do, and they give it to the child, and they change it by the week. Some use little index cards and pockets, and they change it.

We try various things, but for me, the easiest way is to do this. Find a way that suits you and do it. It doesn't really matter what the way is. Just have a plan that helps you. Schedules are helpers, not rulers.

Some of you get very frustrated because you make a schedule and it doesn't work. Then you go to pieces because you feel like a failure. It isn't that way. God gives us interruptions every day. I find that when I learn to look at interruptions as divine appointments, I can handle my day a whole lot better.

Sometimes it's child training that needs to happen. Sometimes it's sharing with my daughters that needs to happen. Sometimes my husband comes up from the basement, and he just wants the honey where you sit down and talk a little.

I didn't have that planned in that hour. I was going to do something else, but I have to learn to be flexible. If we can be flexible, sweetly, we will teach our children something very, very valuable.

When my husband came home from teaching school to our house to work as a home business, there were many people that envied me. They said, Wow, your husband is at home. That is really neat. I wanted my husband to be at home too.

I was about a month into it, and I was like, Yeah. You don't understand. I wanted him to be there, but my life just fell apart because he had started a new business, and he needed my help. And he said, Honey, could you come down and help me?

I need you to set tight. Honey, could you run an errand? Before, from 7 in the morning when he went off to work to 5 in the evening when he came home, I was master of my house. I was no longer master of my schedule, and it was very frustrating.

And so, flexibility is a word that we really need to build into our schedules to be organized. When you're flexible, don't allow too much time on the phone. I find that people do have no idea how much time they spend on the phone.

It's a really interesting thing that I read in a book somewhere. Some day or some week, put a pad by the phone. Every time the phone rings, mark down the time that you answer the phone, and when you're done talking, mark down the time that you quit.

At the end of the day, add up how many minutes you spent on the phone, and you will be surprised. And so, some of us have gotten answering machines. Some of us have trained our children to answer the phone and sort of say that we're not available, and that is not a lie.

We are there, but we are not available until school is over or until we're done training that child. Phones are a blessing. We need them so that we don't have to travel as many miles, so that we can get in touch with somebody that's hurting, but they can be a real pain in the neck.

They really can. And they can be even an evil, I think, because we talk on the phone to the hurt of our husband because we should be spending time with him. Instead, we're gabbing with some sister. We should be spending time with our children.

I've seen mothers take their child and say, Go in that room and be quiet. I'm talking on the phone. And they do need to be quiet when you're talking on the phone. They must respect you, but you can't always shove them in another room because you're talking on the phone.

You need to remember that you're training your children, not at first. Talking on the phone is second. In organizing the day smoothly, I find that if you can learn to do more than one thing at a time, it will help you.

My husband calls it multitasking. That's computer language. Some computers can only do one thing. Some computers can do many jobs. And he thinks that we mothers need to be multitasking. We need to be able to stir the soup, talk to our children, and work things out.

We can't be one track because if we're totally one track, most of our husbands you will find are one track. They get to talking and they are one track. God gave them an objectivity and a one mind so they can keep on going and they're not distracted from something.

But we mothers can't do it. Our children, our babies would fall off the couch. Our soup would burn. If we would get talking to our husbands and not be able to think about other things, they would have a disaster in our house.

And so we need to be multitasking. We need to be able to do more than one thing at a time. Get a phone with a long cord or get a radio phone like I have that you can walk around the house with. And if somebody does call you, pick up the toys or fold the diapers or stir the soup or set the table or comb your daughter's hair.

I get a kink in my neck talking on the phone so I hold it like this while I do things this way. But try to learn to do as many things at one time as you can. Nurse the baby and read that book you need to read.

There's just a number of things that you can do. Okay, a couple other things right here. Now let's get into teaching your children to help you. Real quickly. I think that organizing requires that you get your children to help you.

They are your servants, not in a bad way but in a good way. And you have to start very, very early. And I think a lot of us underestimate how much our children can really do. Your 2 and 3-year-olds can pick up every toy they take out.

They are very capable of it. They can do it quickly. You need to teach them as soon as they're 18 or 19 months old. When they get a toy, they must put it back when they're done. Now, there are times when they don't.

But make it a point that if they make a mess, to help them pick that toy up and throw it away. They will, by the time they're 3, be able to sweetly pick up every toy that baby brother left out. And that really saves a lot of time for you.

Have the little ones put the spoons on the table. Put away the baby's dirty diapers. If you include your children while you're working, it takes longer. Sure, you can whisk around the house in 10 minutes and have it all done.

But when your child is 8, 9, 10, 12, 14, and you have not spent time getting him to help you when he was little, he will not want to help you then. And if you have, by the time they're 12 and 14, they can run the house almost without you.

And it is a real blessing. It frees you up. I made it a point to teach one of our daughters to sew when she was somewhere between 10 and 12. By the time she was 12, she was making her own clothing. It took me a while.

She did not learn to sew on her own. I did not say, go sit down and sew your dress. We spent time every afternoon, or a couple of afternoons a week, sewing simple projects. We graduated to bigger ones.

And now, I don't have to sew most of the time. I can say, do it, and it gets done. And people that thought I was unrealistic at 10, when I was teaching her to sew her own slips and nightgowns, would be glad to have the same blessing now.

And it didn't happen by accident. It's on purpose. When you teach your children to work, it takes time. Some of my mother friends say, I don't have time to do it. I don't have the patience to do it. Well, you better start getting it, because they can be such a blessing to you.

If you teach them this, order and discipline, they will help bring order and discipline to your house. In fact, I find that my children surpass me in areas where I am weak. They help to get me into shape.

Mother, don't you think that area needs a little attention? And it really does. And I was bypassing it. One older mother said, teach a child to do the job when he wants to do it, that is probably at 2 or 3 when he wants to wash the dishes, then he will know how to do it by the time he would really rather not.

Always by 7 or 8 or 9, there's a space where they just don't really feel like it, and you have to make them do it anyway. And if you help them when they're little to learn to like to do it, it goes so much better later.

Homeschooling Through Discipline and Diligence

School quickly. School is a daily blessing, a daily battle, and a commitment. And our commitment is to train godly children. And all the things we've discussed so far leads up to this. Discipline, good work habits, we have to do that first before they can learn any school at all.

And if you want to have school, you've got to train them to obey you first. That is the first thing. And then you have to train them to work well. Stick at it. And if they don't know how to obey and stick at their work, you may as well forget school until you teach them that.

It really doesn't work to have school with disobedient children. A lot of us have struggles with our little ones in school because we have 3 or 4 little ones and 3 or 4 in school. How do we do it? Well, Gwen's going to tell us a little bit about the toddler part, occupying them, but I think we need not to expect too much of ourselves.

We need to find a thing that works for us. The government tells us what we must accomplish, so we need to give them honor and respect. But we can find creative ways to do it. Maybe you can do most of the heavy schooling when the babies are napping, in the morning and in the afternoon, the things that really need drill and one-on-one attention, and then maybe the reading that they do for themselves and the social studies and science that you can discuss and talk casually about can be done when the little ones are awake.

Work on getting those things stacked up. But most of all, don't worry about the fingerprints and the corners when you have mostly little ones. I promise you that they will go away. I'm fine as a bird to come out of the woods.

Back when everybody was 10 and under, I thought I would never, ever have clean windows and clean floors again. I mean, we did sometimes, but it was a hard job. Now I can go to bed and I can get up and the floors are sparkling and the windows can shine and the children can be happy and even the first grader can have his reading lesson taught to him by one of the older ones.

And so you that are struggling, hang in there. Your older daughters, older sons will someday rise up and bless you if you teach them diligence and good work habits. It's a blessing. And I could probably say lots more, but I'm going to let Gwen talk now.

Toddlers and Preschoolers as Homeschool Students

And we have, write your questions down. We're going to have a question and answer period where you can ask any questions you want to. We won't print out the answers. My topic is our responsibility to toddlers and preschoolers.

And as you probably already know, toddlers and preschoolers have a habit of disrupting homeschool faster than you can say get out your log sheet. So we're going to try and talk about some ways that you can keep them from disrupting your house.

During the last 13 years that we have homeschooled, I've always had two or three preschoolers underfoot, and that's the way I felt about them for many, many years. They're underfoot. Why don't you go do something else?

Why don't you be happy? We're just not getting anything done because your children are just too naughty. That was the way I felt about them. But I think it was probably from the fact that I had taught in Christian schools for over four years, and it's so serene and lovely in the schoolroom, and you can walk out of the room, and all the children are just sitting at their desks doing their work.

And that's the picture I had taken along into my home, and it wasn't working out that way. So in order to gain some perspective, I had to first understand that the toddlers and preschoolers in my home are my students too.

And when I began to feel that way about them, my attitudes toward them changed. I started looking at their needs as possibilities and not as liabilities anymore. If I started to think about it, that I was given the opportunity to mold and shape these children in order to make further training a delight, then it became a challenge to do something with the children that would be interesting and fun.

And that's what got me started thinking about this whole thing. I found that if I could plan at least one project for the little children before I got the daily dogs out, you might say get them started doing something, something that interests them.

They'll play more happily for longer periods of time with much more creativity than if you just say, come on, children, let's go in the schoolroom, and you just sort of hope the little ones trail along on behind.

That doesn't work at my house. You'll find that children can be taught to play quietly. Not always do you have older brothers and sisters that have time or whatever to play with them. And if you take a little bit of time and a lot of energy, you can teach your children to play quietly, especially if you have lots of things around for them to do, and I'll talk about that in a little bit.

Often deciding what to do is half the battle. I found that over and over again that if I just have one little thing in my head that I can suggest to the littler children, our day starts out so much better.

So I started including the little ones in my teacher plan book just to make myself accountable. And I don't write everything in, you know, but at least their names are there and it helps me remember that they are my students too.

Establishing Rhythms for Babies and Young Children

So like Rachel said, scheduling is an important part of toddler and preschooler's life, and it's an important part of mother's lives too. Even a small baby can be guided into a structured life, a somewhat structured life.

At first the baby will sleep, and then it will wake, and then it will sleep again, and you feed it in there, it's about that part. You sleep, he sleeps, he wakes, he feeds, he sleeps, he wakes, he feeds.

That's the way a tiny baby is, and tiny babies don't make much trouble in a homeschool. They work out pretty well. But after your baby starts waking up longer times, I've found that if you feed them when they wake up, let them stay awake for as long as they're happy, then when they get grouchy, rock them or sing them to sleep without feeding them.

There's something about that pattern that establishes a pattern in their bodies or wherever babies establish patterns, that in several months you have a baby that has put themselves on a schedule. Now, I must confess I never had a colic baby, so I don't know if that would work for a colic baby or not, but I'm surmising that there is something to it about giving them a pattern, and eventually they take that pattern for themselves.

Our 9-month-old baby almost always is ready to go to sleep at 10 o 'clock in the morning, and almost always at 2 o 'clock. So we can all look forward to, and she's not a bad baby, but you know that you're going to have one less underfoot at 10 and at 2, more or less.

Another thing I've found that when babies are old enough to siften up and scream, they're ready for a little discipline in their life. And the sooner you start that, the sooner they respond to you. My little, this is the first baby, I must confess that I believe that.

My husband believed it, and I didn't. I didn't believe you could do that with a tiny baby, teach them to obey you, but you can, and I believe that she's my best baby. I only need to do a little bit of discipline with her, and she fusses just a little bit longer, and then she cuddles up, and it's really sweet, and I appreciate that, learning that.

You're never too old to learn. Try to get the whole family up at the same time in the morning, maybe not up at the same time, but together for breakfast at the same time, because this will ensure you that your littler ones are going to take a nap in the afternoon.

They're ready to go to bed after dinner. If you get them up for breakfast, that's almost a guarantee that they're going to be ready to take a nap. So I plan a story time for the little ones right after dinner while the older ones are cleaning up the lunch.

I lay down on the floor with the little ones, and they each can pick a book, and we'd lie there, and I read to them, and sometimes they're asleep before I get to the end of the books that they've picked out.

So that's part of the schedule that I have for the toddlers. Another time is to go outside and play. I don't do this religiously, but I think it's good for children to get outside, so it's good to plan a time, maybe after they get up from their nap, to just let them go outside and run in the fresh air.

Bible Stories, Prayer, and Materials for Learning

Another thing I've found is that our little children benefit a lot from their own Bible story time. At our home, we have family worship with the whole family in the morning, and they don't think about the things that the bigger children are thinking about.

They don't even understand them. It's good for them to hear it, but it's not really their time. So before they go to bed, I usually try to read them a Bible story, and we started this year prayer diaries.

All the school children started prayer diaries, so I started a prayer diary for the little ones too. I was rewarded with all kinds of insights and confidences that I never realized that were in there.

So that's been a real blessing for this year. Now we'll talk about having lots of things on hand for children to do. During school, it's important to have lots of raw materials around for your little children to play with.

If you want them to be happy, you're going to have to have things for them to do, especially if you can't spend time with them the whole morning. So you should have things like blocks and beads and masking tape, balls, balloons, boxes, dress-up clothes, beanbags, and don't try to write it all down.

You can't. I did put them together in a little book like this, so if you're interested, I have them with me. Ropes, magnets, toys. You can sort your toys in categories, put them in different baskets, and pull out a different basket for each day.

They like things like that. Wash lines, hammers and nails, and empty grocery boxes and cartons and cups and all that kind of stuff. Our children started collecting them this year, and they have a magnificent store in the basement, and they play and play and play in that store.

Sue told me of several raw materials she uses, and she might want to talk about this more in the question and answer time. She has what she calls a felt form, and she has a rice tub, so you can ask her more about that later.

You should have lots of things to create with. You could have art curriculum, colors, pencils, markers, scissors, glue sticks, chalk, not rubber cement. That one's for you, Bridget. Play-doh, paint, stamps, pencils, stickers, and the pre-addressed envelopes that come in junk mail.

Don't throw them away. Your little children love them. My little children know that there's a drawer with envelopes for them, and when they write their letters and draw their pictures for their friends, those are their envelopes, and they can have as many as they want, and it doesn't matter.