Home making

Okay, so those of you who know me are thinking, "House work? Clare? Are you sure?? Isn't her bedroom usually littered with piles of clean and dirty laundry, washing up and paper work?"

And you'd be right.

I've spent some time recently thinking about the topic of 'home making'. One dictionary defines it as "[The management of] a household." It sounds kind of dull, doesn't it? I thought so until fairly recently, when I realised that looking after a home can be a great way of serving the Lord, learning new skills and having a little fun along the way.

As a single person, one of the reasons I struggle with keeping things spick and span is that I have only myself to please. Or at least, I thought I did. Actually, that's a rather selfish outlook, considering I share a house with four others and have friends over fairly regularly. Without a living room, they're forced to sit (and sleep!) in my room. I do move the dirty underwear for them, you understand.

"¹⁴ For the LORD your God moves about in your camp to protect you and to deliver your enemies to you. Your camp must be holy, so that he will not see among you anything indecent and turn away from you." Deuteronomy 23:14

- Does that include dirty laundry? -eek! God isn't going to end his relationship with me because of the state of my house, but it is a way I can live to please him. Like a child and a parent, tidying my room won't make Him love me any more, but I think it would please Him.

I'm going post in chunks bits that I've been picking up that you might find helpful or just enjoy reading about. For me, it will be a way to spur me on. Procrastination is just poor discipline. Lack of discipline is just idleness by another name.

I leave you with this: If there was one thing you could change about the way you run your home, what would it be? This includes everything from finances, menu planning/shopping to laundry. Let me know.

Educating Rita? What about Pip?!

I have been thinking a lot lately about how little I learnt whilst I was at school. I really do bemoan my lack of general knowledge. I think my academic gaps have been caused by a combination of factors, though mainly from being unhappy in general whilst and not not being suited to the way most subjects are taught these days. Most teach from textbooks and I'm more of a 'living books' type learner (more on this later). They wanted to teach me about the fundamentals of science with boring everyday examples; I wanted to learn about the laws of physics from looking at the bigger picture of how the universe works. They wanted me to memorise dates, I wanted to learn about real people and their lives. Moving schools every few years didn't help, as I missed some topics altogether

Anyway, the upshot of this is that I would love to settle down to some real study again. I mean at home, in my own time, mainly just for the pleasure of it. I want to catch up on all the science, maths, history and geography I missed. The number of classic books and poems I haven't read is horrifying. I figured there would be a lot of people who had decided to learn just for pleasure, but searching the internet I can find no forums or groups aimed at adults who want to support each other in choosing and following their own curriculum. The closest is OpenLearn run by the Open University, but even their boards are pretty quiet.

There is plenty of material out there for those who want to brush up on what they learnt (or should have learnt!) at school thanks to the homeschooling movement, almost too much in fact.

Come, join the revolution: who else wants to indulge in some homeschooling for grown-ups?