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Sunday, August 2, 2009

Mike's Garden

I still get nervous being passionate about homeschooling. I know that God has not called everyone to it, but He has called me and I know that if I'm not passionate, I'll never last. I want to share what we're doing this year, our curriculum and schedule, but first I want to share a quick story.

Mike has a garden. He has loved this garden well. At the beginning I got nervous because I thought I was going to have to be responsible for the garden and everything else...not so. It is Mike's garden. He has done a great job. He has learned a ton and we've enjoyed some fresh veggies in the process. One of the main things he has learned about are squash vine borers. These nasty little worms are the larva (or does that need an "e"? larvae) of a moth that lays it's eggs on the vines and when they hatch they bore their way into the vines and eat it. You can't see them. Mike has to look for their "signs." I know when he's about to do "surgery" because he puts his gloves on and then asks when dinner will be ready...he knows he'll be a while.

Alright...for the middle two weeks of July we were out of town and we had our neighbors taking care of our garden. Our neighbors have had their own gardens before and are extremely kind and we knew that they would take good care of the garden. We came home after 2 weeks and everything was still alive and we even had a pumpkin! To the naked eye, all was well. After we unpacked, Mike headed out during the remaining minutes of daylight to inspect his mistress (that's what I call it because when he's not with me, he's with her). There wasn't time to do surgery until the next day, but he knew surgery would be imperative. The vine borers were having Thanksgiving dinner!

The next day, sure as the world, he was with her and digging out so many of these little pests that he says he lost count. I thought, "That is why we homeschool." We entrusted our garden with a very kind man who knew about gardens, but he doesn't love our garden like Mike does. He wasn't going to spend hours carefully removing worms from the inside of the vines. We didn't expect him to, either. That was our job.

I told Mike, we homeschool because our kids have vine borers. There is crud in their heart that is naked to most. We love them and have a vision for their lives that God doesn't just give out to anyone. He gave it to us. We are the ones that are responsible for carefully inspecting their hearts being careful that the sin that can so easily entangle does not have time to eat them from the inside out. We are not crazy. We know there is sin there. We are not keeping them from school to keep them away from sin...if that were the case, we'd have to kick them out of our house cause' it's here too! We are all too aware of their sin and desire to check on them daily. We don't just want them to be alive, we want them to be alive with the ability to produce fruit(or veggies in this case).

So, with that picture before me, we start our year. I'll do that separate...

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