Lessons in Child Training, "Wife"-ing, Cattle Squeezing, and Bold Men

A couple of funny follow up stories from my kid experiment....

Because I'm seriously trying to crackdown on the bickering between the younger four, I've been more of top of it than usual.  Each time in the last week, as soon as I heard crying or someone upset, I called the guilty ones all in and we had a debrief on what happened.  Talk about cramping your playing.  That was almost effective enough, having a little court session when all you want to do is go back to playing.  Oh well!  After figuring out what we could have done, I pulled out paper and had them start writing the verses.  Turns out 10 times was perhaps a bit much and once was quite a bit of work for the real little ones, so at the end of the one verse, I had them dictate an apology to the offended person.  See how long this takes????  No wonder they had been fighting, it's a lot of work to really deal with it!  Perhaps I'd let too much slide in the past as it takes so much time to train!

At the end of all the writing, apologizing, etc., my 6 year old came up to me and said, "I don't think I'm going to say that again (the unkind word, that is)."  I said, "Really?  Why?"  "It was really hard to write all that down!  This was a great punishment!  I don't want to do that again!"  Perfect.  Mission accomplished.  And sure enough, the next time they wrote the verse down, only a day later, that was the last time I've had them in "court" in at least for A FEW HOURS!  Can't let up.  Must keep at it!

The goal, which I tell them all the time...is to get them married!  And that their siblings are practice for marriage.  They will probably end up marrying someone just like one of their brothers or sisters, so why not learn to get along with a future spouse now?  My prayer is they'll pick this up sooner than later.

On a different note, yet somewhat related, I was reading a verse on being a quarrelsome wife, which I had read many times before, but I had never seen one little section in the verse that talks about how it is "better to be on the corner of a roof than with a quarrelsome wife" (somewhat paraphrased).  Right beside the quarrelsome wife, there were two little words I'd never seen before...." and fretful".  I had never noticed that "fretful" went right alongside "quarrelsome".  I've noticed, too, that if I'm not being quarrelsome, I am being fretful.  I can make up problems that don't even exist in my head!  Sometimes these problems can actually wake me up at night and keep me from sleeping which makes me no good to anyone the next day, including my husband.

I'll give an awful example of how I played mind games with myself last week and put myself in a tizzy by being fretful, nearly making my husband nuts.  I noticed a car pull up to our road and then go to the telephone pole where it looked like he was disconnecting a wire.  Instead of not worrying and not being fretful, my mind went to the worst case scenario and made me think that this guy was disconnecting us for some reason.  I knew, or at least I thought I knew, that we were current on all our bills, but instead of remaining calm, I jumped to conclusions and thought, "Oh no!  He's disconnecting us!  I better run and tell my husband!"  My husband was in the middle of a big shipment going out, but I still interrupted him and, of course, he could do nothing about it at the time.  After he was done getting his things shipped, I ran out to him again and told him the internet wasn't working, just like I thought!  I told him what happened and he rebuked me on the spot, "Stop it, " he said, "Even if what you are saying is true, we can figure this out.  It's just a matter of a phone call.  Just stop it."  Immediately, I felt conviction and the verse actually came to my mind about being a fretful wife.  I apologized immediately.

Turns out it was a complete coincidence.  It was one phone all, just like he said, and it was all straightened out.  I have no idea who the guy was and what he did when he came to our house, but I'm convinced he was sent just to make me worried and I fell for it.  My fretfulness made my husband so upset as it made him second-guess whether we were current.  It interrupted his shipment and distracted him terribly.  It frustrated him that I didn't even try to remain calm!  I think he would have moved to the corner of a roof as it really would have been a better place at that moment.  I've been seriously trying to take all fretful thoughts captive since then, including my middle of the night worries, and what a difference it's been making.  Usually I think of myself as someone who doesn't worry so much anymore, but I realize, I'm still on the verge of falling into that trap if I don't catch myself right away.

Another financial blessing occurred this weekend, a real miracle as far as I'm concerned.  We had bought a cattle squeeze (you don't even want to know what that is for.....) a year or two ago and never used it.  It wouldn't work for our cows as they have huge horns, so it sat on our property collecting dust.  I was so sure that we were going to become one of those farms that collects old machinery for years and turns into a junk pit!  But we became convinced in our debt-termination that we should sell everything on the property that we can, so we listed this bizarre thing and unbelievably someone bought it this weekend.  He and his wife drove up and looked at it and said the funniest things, "Oh, this will work perfect for us!  It's just the right size!  I love that it's portable!"  You would have thought they were talking about a piece of furniture, not something that can help you castrate your bulls.  So funny.  They left and we had cash in hand, a beautiful thing.  Our farm gets decluttered and we can pay the piano teacher! Yeah!

I am learning so much, every day.  I see how God teaches me how much I still need to learn as a mom in training my children, where I lack, where I've made mistakes, how I need to put long hours in bringing them up.  I also see where I need much improvement as a wife, even twenty years into our marriage.  I guess you never stop learning to be a better wife.  I see where my faith is being stretched in our finances and how God is still so good to us despite our many mistakes in the past.  I love how He blesses us in spite of our mistakes.  One thing I read again in that devotional was a quote from Spurgeon that says, "The Lord will follow through on His covenant promises.  Whatever He takes and holds in His hand He will accomplish.  Therefore His past mercies are guarantees for the future and worthy reasons for continuing to cry out to Him."  I think He gives us those little blessings once in a while to carry us, as a "guarantee for the future".  And it sure does carry me.  I'm so grateful for when those blessings come.  They seem to occur just when I need them most.

One final great story.  We've been checking out churches in the area and have had a hard time settling on one in particular as it is such a big move.  I am the friendly one between RM and myself.  I love meeting new people, RM, not so much.  I wear a smile on my face and try to be inviting towards others.  RM has the bulldog look and isn't as inviting towards others.  I get approached by the new church members.  Not him.  He leaves feeling frustrated at the church.  I leave feeling frustrated with him!  So I prayed this week with Stephanie that some man would be bold enough to approach my bulldog husband, a man of courage, someone that my husband could respect.  If that didn't happen, I wasn't sure what would happen.  Would we have to leave, try another church?  Perhaps a dumb condition, but my husband needs strong men in his life and so far, no one was bold enough to approach him.  Does he look that scary?  Perhaps!

We had arrived late.  For some reason the service started 30 minutes earlier.  We didn't know because we aren't on their email list!  We nearly turned around, but then decided to go.  I think Satan would have loved it if we hadn't gone as God was waiting to work.  We sat in the last row with our whole crew.  My three year old had already done a great job in the middle of the service letting out a sigh that was soooo loud at the most inopportune time that nearly every person in the rows in front of us turned around and laughed so hard that the pastor said from the front, "Why are you all laughing?". He hadn't heard my kid's sigh!  Oops.  Well, the service wasn't over even 2 minutes when the pastor literally walked from the front, right up to my husband, gave him a firm handshake (that means a lot to RM) and wanted to know all about us, who we were, why we were there, that he had noticed us before, but hadn't had a chance to meet us, wanted to meet, to get together, etc., etc.  I nearly started crying.  He was a man of courage.  He wasn't afraid to meet my husband!  He made my day.  He was the best person that could have met him.  He was God's answer to my prayers.  Doesn't that just tell you how God cares for even the littlest details?  Needless to say, I think we'll be sticking around this church for awhile.