Day 11. Work Together.

This past summer our pastoral staff and families went on a retreat to Lake Tahoe. This was new to me. Not the retreat part, the family part. Previous churches have done the retreats, but children were always left at home. I was prepared for nothing. No idea what to expect.

Our Pastor did a great job in putting this retreat together. One of the most interesting things that happened was family projects. We had a couple different ones. One was to pick a family verse, memorize it, and recite it for the others. One was to select a bowl of objects and make a sculpture with them. Another was to make a prayer calendar. The retreat was awesome, but these projects a bit hideous for my family. Our strength is not in sitting down, making a plan and doing it. In fact, I really do not remember ever doing this before. When we spend time together its almost always spontaneous adventures. Fly by the seat of our pants. Stop and smell the roses. That's how we roll. In fact, I didn't even know we may have an issue with this. All three projects in our little corner of the room....did not go well. Two of my children are strong willed and had their own ideas, my other child needs to make everyone happy, I was disappointed, and Shawn frustrated. Ever since that time, it has been on my to do list to work on this a bit.

Right away, when home schooling became a reality...I knew I would work this into our day somehow. It's something I want to improve. Yesterday was the day. The kids first "work together" project. I gave them 60 minutes to build a fort. They had instructions on where and what they could use. They would be graded on creativity, attitude, and following instructions. If anything broke, their grade went down.

I sat in the other room and listened. It was great for about 40 minutes and then it went down hill FAST. Screaming was involved. 1st and 3rd child war with middle child trying to mediate. Typical. I was listening and trying to figure out what the problem seemed to be. Bottom line youngest was acting like a 5 year old and the 10 year old didn't like it. No surprise.

After the fort was built, they had 15 min to write a report card for themselves. They had to give their grade and justify why they should receive it. INTERESTING!

They had 30 minutes to play in the fort and then 15 to clean up. All in all, it was a two hour project. It flew by. Tomorrow we will sit down and have a meeting about how things went and what we can improve. Good news is that my oldest flunked himself in following directions..he writes "We argued a lot" for the reason. He gets it. That's the first part. Looking forward to sitting down tomorrow and talking through some ways we can work on listening to others. A skill everyone can improve on. Just 159 school days until summer.