Tot-school | Week 12 | Letter LJanuary 10, 2017
This week’s tot-school…
…was back in action!
Though it was still the Christmas season, which for us is sandwiched between 2 Christmas days’ (the second Orthodox) and New year had barely finished ringing us in, I was eager to get back into our routines. Adam took to the activities with gusto, I suspect he’d been missing it. It’s clear that he’s much further on that when we started and so this week I trialled a few new activities.
While the letter ‘L’ is easy to resource we kept this week quite striped down concentration on our new elements and limiting the number of activities. Limiting the mess helped when on Thursday night we ended up carrying the cot into the sitting room and embarking on 3 days of living in one room. It happened just as temperatures dropped dramatically (we’ve been on Red Warning for Extreme Low Temperatures) so it was a real mixed blessing. However, Tot-school suspended on Friday left me realising how much we’d left undone.
The pack I’ve made is available for download at the end of the post.
This weeks read more questions:
Restarting has to be high on the list but the lion mask was soon separated from the rest of the totschool paraphanalia and much played with.
The ladybug trails and the big letter pages were pretty much ignored. I think this was mostly because the letter itself is fairly dull in construction and I’d made the trails too short.
Letter baskets, or sometimes called ‘discovery baskets’ are something I’ve shied away from in the past so it may be odd for me to choose to use them now. Adam loves to empty and fill things rather than root though them. As he gets better at recognising that things ‘live’ in certain places this basket was a litmus test of sorts. He responded really well and I’ll probably continue to do this but they simply wouldn’t have worked earlier than this.
flying by the seat of our pantsJanuary 5, 2017
Our security is divine, the Lord will provide for all our needs, we will be like a well watered garden, we will flourish under his steadfast hand, the well of Christs riches will never grow dry.
Isaiah 58:11 and Philippians 4:19 are comfort indeed. Mission isn’t really sold as flourishing though, more denial. We should give up, walk away, choose a tougher path. Mission is about facing the unknown sure that God wants you to walk through that door and opening it… is’t it. Our banks shouldn’t know the security of large black numbers, our dreams never tie us down for too long, our stability be held loosely in open hands. It’s true that at times mission is about just that. But sometimes it’s not. Sometimes it’s about living a lifestyle that’s really not all that dissimilar to the one we left, just with a whole lot of substitutes. Sometimes it’s about building a long term life in a place you never expected. Sometimes it’s about digging in your roots, and growing oaks not daisies.
Speaking of Oaks, have you every watched one grow. There is a great 8 month time lapse of an acorn growing into an oak. It takes months before anything other than a crack appears. Mission is so similar. The initial crack with it’s bucket loads of anticipation and potential is often a tough first step but then everything plateaus. Out of sight something could be growing, but we are never sure. Even when we are months and months down the line, years even, it’s still such a fragile thing, so easily destroyed. It may have a foothold but it’s far from where you’d want to hang a swing.
And one day I’d love a swing. I’d love a house that didn’t come with landlord restrictions. I’d love to have all those normal thing like insurance and pensions and keepsakes to pass onto my grandchildren if we were ever blessed such. So this year I’m pulling the break. I’m not going to live as if any day we’ll be called away, with our seat-belts loose, flying by the seat of our pants into another year of uncertainty. I’ve never had the joy of staying long enough to watch the tree grow ever day, I’ve never seen a full decade in one place. Perhaps I never will, but I’m so sick of always being ready to run. So this year I’m going to invest. I’m going to build by digging foundations, resharpening old tools, putting new ideas aside to develop what’s already with us. Perhaps I’ll find I’ve been sitting on buried treasure, perhaps I’ll get part way through and everything will change, but it’s about time I put my running shoes away and bought some gardening clogs.
Tonight Santa comesDecember 31, 2016
He’ll arrive in a similar style and with an much magic as he did on December the 25th, but here Santa comes on new years eve. Adam is still blissfully unaware, he’s unconstrained by dates, he had many an unopened present left on Christmas day, the whole shebang means little to his world. As aspects creep in we are deliberating what Christmas will mean to our family. I like the idea that Santa comes on a different day, that the birth of the saviour and the flying reindeer are separated somewhat.
This years Christmas for me was a stripped back affair. Slowly as the years have passed I’ve had to choose what events I’ll keep up with and which will knock my ‘feeling Christmassy’ by their absence. This year for the first in many I had no church family to return to, something that left my pillow damp many a night. There was no nativity, I neglected to even make a crib scene, I sang no carols prior to Christmas day, and entered no church building during advent. On Christmas morning our family entered a strange church with a warm welcome that wiped much fear and lifted more than a few prayers of thanks from my lips.
I did celebrate advent, delving deep into the big story that weaves it’s way through Abraham, Isaiah, John and Mary to the child that flails in it’s straw lined manger. As years pass I find myself clinging more and more to the church year, a calendar of faith that spins with as much certainty as the Gregorian system we use. In a land of multiple calendars, to choose to follow yet another must seem very odd. Somehow it roots me, even if it makes major church celebrations harder to engage with locally.
In just a week we’ll be once again celebrating the saviours birth as the world I grew up in will be reaching day 13 and wiping clean all traces of Christmas. Somehow this elongated season is much closer to the church year than the ‘big day’ concentrated one I was so familiar with. It’s something I’d come to appreciate long before this years word focus, it’s a season where the baby is born and the celebration continues, we are not so eager for him to grow old and walk to Calvary, rather we sit in the moment and like a new mother stare at the gift we have been given.
So 2016 ends. A year I’ve tried to ‘appreciate’, though moments of joy and times of struggle, though things I could control and aspects beyond me. It’s been a great word for the year and one I’ve found much growth in. 2017 dawns and I’ve already chosen the word that will adorn the year – Invest. I want to invest in building our own traditions, invest in the lives of those around me, invest in the objects we keep and the space we keep them in, invest in long term plans and fleeting seconds. But today I’ll sit and appreciate my little world as the new year rings in around me. Happy New year friends.
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