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Danielle Bean

Catholic Writer and Speaker

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One Little Thing at a Time

November 30, 2015 by Danielle Filed Under: Babies, Big Kids, Homemaking, School 2 Comments

1280px-Ladybug_walk(This is an old column of mine that originally appeared at Inside Catholic. Just like yours, my life is still ridiculous, but some of the details are different from what is described here. The message still applies, though.)

My life is ridiculous. Do I need to tell you this, or can you reach that conclusion all on your own when I tell you that I am a homeschooling mother of eight who also works from home?

Some days, the different roles I play meld seamlessly together.

“Of course I can do this!” I find myself thinking as I take a phone call from the pediatrician while the toddler plays peacefully with poster paints, the 11-year-old memorizes prepositions, the 15-year-old completes her algebra, and the 10-year-old whips up a fresh batch of banana muffins. “Who couldn’t do this?”

But other days? Other days, my seamlessly melding roles collide. They crash, smash, and burn.

I’ll never forget the time I was on the phone with a work colleague – one whom I had just met and hoped to impress with my “professionalism” – when I heard a knock on my bedroom door. One rule I have to keep me sane is that if I am on the phone for work, I can lock my door and that means NO BUGGING MOM.

I knew that the insistent knock meant something important was going on, so mid-conversation, I took a deep breath and opened the door.

There stood my oldest son with one hand over his nose. Blood dripped through his fingers, ran down his arm, and formed a small puddle on the floor at his feet.

“Do you understand what I am saying?” I remember the man on the phone asking me then, “Because I’m not sure at all that you do.”

I mumbled something about a bleeding boy and hung up the phone.

I am not exactly proud to report that the cause of the furiously bleeding face was another one of my sons. An argument over a ball game had turned violent. Younger brother’s fist managed to hit a lucky spot on older brother’s nose where there happened to be a willing vein. To me, the worst part of the whole messy incident was the fact that they were supposed to be working on a geography quiz.

I still talk to the colleague from that interrupted phone call sometimes, and to this day I suspect he believes I am a brainless loon. And he’s probably right about that. But it’s not my fault. It’s the bloody children.

When people on the outside ask what daily life looks like in my home, I think many of them picture me working in a pristine office with a mountain view while my children recite the Pledge of Allegiance and sit in neat rows of desks in our classroom.

We do have a classroom. But like many rooms in houses that belong to men who build, it is unfinished. It has no floor yet, and it is the current home of my washing machine and my husband’s weight bench. It also features a sizable collection of half-empty paint cans. Because we will need them someday.

My husband sometimes has the older children sit in the classroom for math lectures, but they need to kick empty laundry detergent bottles out of the way and brush aside saw dust from the nearby circular saw (did I not mention the saw? The one my husband keeps in there for trimming firewood?) before they can sit down. On the weight bench.

Welcome to our home school. We do and learn all kinds of things all over the house. And the process is not always pretty.

I don’t pretend to be the only person on the planet with a crazy life, though. I know plenty of people who, in my estimation, live even crazier lives than mine. I have nutty friends who have reached double digits in their child count. I know wild women who work outside the home. I know crazy moms who care for aging parents or homeschool children with multiple disabilities.

I think we’re all crazy in some way. Many of us, in our own hidden worlds, are taking on daunting tasks and tremendous responsibilities.

I can’t do all of this, I am sometimes tempted to think – particularly on days where my various roles and responsibilities seem to be in conflict with each other. But what I fail to see at those times is that no one is asking me to “do all of that.” Not all at once, anyway.

I think about this sometimes as I wipe down the tiles in my kitchen. I long ago stopped pulling out a mop to clean this spot that needs cleaning at least once a day. It’s just more efficient to get down on my hands and knees with a damp cloth and wipe the floor by hand. One tile at a time.

Cleaning an entire sticky floor can seem like a daunting job, I always notice, but anyone can wipe one square foot of tile at a time. If I keep working, all those tiles eventually add up to a clean floor.

“Faithfulness in little things is a big thing,” St. John Chrysostom reminds us.

I need to remind myself more often that one small thing at a time is all God ever asks me to do. All the little things – spilled juice, phone calls, grammar lessons, e-mail replies, laundry piles, baseball games and other fun games (learn more about them here), Band-Aids, and sticky tiles – add up to God’s great big will for me every day.

One thing at a time. I think I can do that. And you can, too.

You Might Be a Homeschooler

April 22, 2012 by Danielle Filed Under: School 4 Comments

Kateri sent this to me today and I laughed out loud watching it. Only because it was so very inaccurate, of course. Ahem!

New England Catholic Homeschool Conference

April 18, 2012 by Danielle Filed Under: School 1 Comment

Will you be there? I will! I will be sharing “What Happy Homeschoolers Know” and there will be other terrific speakers as well. There are also vendors and hundreds of amazing families just like yours. Come! Spend the day! Bring a friend or meet some new ones!

Here are the details:

New England Catholic Homeschool Conference

Date: May 19, 2012
Time: 9:30 am to 3:30 pm
Location: St. Monica Parish, 212 Lawrence Street, Methuen, Massachusetts 01844

You can register online. See you there!

Love & Phonics

October 5, 2011 by Danielle Filed Under: School

Danny had a three-letter word before him this morning. We are practicing sounding out.

“H-O-G … H-O-G … H-O-G …” he repeated, over and over again.

“Now put the sounds together,” I told him.

“HO-G … HO-G … HUG!” he shouted with delight. And then he turned to give me a great big one.

I’m not worried. We’ll get there. Right now, I’m just enjoying the process.

And Back Again

August 31, 2011 by Danielle Filed Under: School

You would think this would get old, but it doesn’t. Because it keeps changing.

At the start of each new school year, I worry, in varying degrees, about curricula, schedules, chores, time management, reading skills, math facts, socialization, sports, faith formation, state requirements, and educational philosophies.

But my biggest challenge this year is none of those.

Today, I dropped off my oldest daughter at the local public high school. Where she will be taking American Literature this semester. A first for us.

“Are you sure you know the way to the classroom?” I asked one last anxious time as we pulled up to the school.

“Up the stairs and to the right,” she rolled her eyes. But it was a gentle eye rolling. One that seemed to recognize an air of tender feelings and mercifully danced around them.

“So … you can call me if you need anything …” I stopped myself.

She was standing beside the car now, looking back at me with one eyebrow raised in amusement.

She wouldn’t be needing anything.

I watched her walk away — backpack slung over her shoulder and hair blowing in the wind — and she entered the school without turning back.

Of course she didn’t turn back.

I blinked back tears as I drove away. Stupid kindergarten tears. The ones most moms get out of the way the first time they wave goodbye to a 5-year-old at a bus stop in September.

But some of us save up those tears instead. We hold onto them for years and then spill them when our kids are 16. We cry then, not so much because of the letting go — though of course because of the letting go — but because we are hopeful for our kids’ futures and proud of what we’ve learned so far together. Only a little bit of it from books.

From the first moments of parenthood, we hold on. Our eyes meet and we lock on. Instinctively. It’s a painful struggle to establish a firm grip on ourselves, our children, and our family lives. Once we think we have it, we hold on with all our might.

Almost as immediately, though, life pulls back on our white-knuckled fingers. One small bit at a time, it loosens our hold on what we think is control. What we don’t pause often enough to appreciate, however, is that it’s an illusion we hold on to. So tightly sometimes it hurts.

The tears are stupid. But I will spill them anyway.

When I pulled into the driveway at home, my seven other children greeted me at the door with an assortment of wants and needs ranging from transportation to youth group to computer privileges to missing laundry items to scheduling parent meetings for the golf team.

I was all done crying now. And back again.

Learning and Love Notes

March 31, 2011 by Danielle Filed Under: School

Here is something I will show to the next person who asks “how I do it” with homeschooling.

It’s a love note. From my 4-year-old boyfriend. The child whom I have not gotten around to teaching to read or write yet.

Some things get easier. When you’re the eighth child in a brood of homeschoolers, you pick up some things by osmosis.

It only takes two minutes and I’ll be your best friend.

November 13, 2010 by Danielle Filed Under: School

My husband and a colleague of his are designing a multi-media middle school science course for homeschooling families. They are in the beginning stages and would like your input in order to create a product that meets homeschooling families’ real needs.

If you are a homeschooling parent of a middle school student, can you spare two minutes to take a brief survey and share your opinion?

Thank you!

My Annual Homeschool Freak Out

September 7, 2010 by Danielle Filed Under: School

Tomorrow morning we start our homeschool year. I often choose the Nativity of Mary as a starting date because leaning on Our Lady a bit helps me fight off that choking feeling of panic that rises in my throat every year at the beginning of September.

So, here we go.

I have written before about my ambivalence about homeschooling (Darn that new Inside Catholic site — it’s very cool and all, but I can’t seem to make the links to my old columns work anymore). My husband and I have prayerfully determined that homeschooling is the best choice for us in our current circumstances, but I don’t at all pretend that homeschooling is the ideal or that it’s for everyone.

It simply isn’t. No system of education is.


My precious charts! Nobody touch my precious charts!

The truth is, I think I find homeschooling especially stressful because I have never been a “planner.” I am a “do-er.” I see homeschooling moms who oooh and ahhh over curricula, who have nifty little planners all filled out with liturgically-themed popsicle stick craft projects, state capitals poetry exercises, and recipes for Cooking Your Way Through Roman History, and I wonder at the vast variety of God’s creation.

Because I am not sure at all that we are of the same species.

It would appear that some of us are genetically pre-disposed to be homeschoolers. I am not.

There is something about the broad responsibility of homeschooling that makes me feel like, no matter what, I must be doing it wrong. Or not enough. Or I am using the wrong books, or I shouldn’t be using books, or my kids aren’t getting out enough, or they are getting out too much, or I have too rigid a schedule, or I have too loose a schedule, or I am doing too much housework at the expense of the kids’ educations, or I am educating the children at the expense of basic sanitation, or I am paying too much attention to the little kids and not enough to the big kids, or I am paying too much attention to the big kids and not enough to the little kids, or …

Well, maybe you get the idea.


The white board in our classroom.

Whether I am comfortable in my role as a homeschooler or not, I have to admit that God put me here, and that it is His will for our family to learn at home for yet another year.

Would I rather be dancing through the aisles like those parents in the Staples commercial? The Most Wonderful Time of the Year?

Maybe.

But when I consider the idea of sending my kids to school, an entirely different kind of choking panic rises in my throat.

Which leaves me to think that it’s not homeschooling that is especially hard. It’s just plain parenting that is especially hard.

All parents, whether their kids learn at home or in a classroom, should lean hard on God’s grace. Because though our details might differ, God calls every one of us to sacrificial love through our family lives. And that’s not likely to come easy to any of us.

Perhaps it’s time to mom up. Perhaps the time for analyzing our schooling decisions for this year is done and what’s left to do is only work hard and pray harder — whatever it takes to live up to God’s particular call for me here in this particular family.

Hang on tight, kids. Here we go.

(cross-posted at The Anchoress)

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