The Christian Homemaking Podcast: Simply Convivial with Mystie Winckler

So this season is about rest. All the rest of the episodes are going to be clips from a workshop that I did on getting rest as a mom because sometimes that just seems impossible. So, I thought today we would kick off that season by having a quick conversation about specific ways that we rest and recuperate from an intense day with the kids. And, I think that thinking about it in terms of recuperation really helps. It’s not usually a word that’s used in this conversation. We talk about rest or renewal or refreshment or filling our buckets, but I don’t know, I like the word recuperation.Virginia Lee: I do, too, it seems more like not a lifetime goal, a long term goal, but we can recuperate and get back into action.Mystie: Right, the focus is on rebuilding, almost. You know, getting back to wholeness because sometimes it feels like we’ve been a little bit deconstructed after an intense day.Virginia Lee: Yes, most definitely.Mystie: So, I am an introvert and Virginia Lee is an extrovert, so we can bring a little bit of a difference there. And, Virginia Lee, what are some of the things that you do after a hard day?Virginia Lee: You know, I almost always do the same things because they work for me: I pour myself a glass of sweet tea, I go outside under Silver Girl, which is our maple tree in our front yard, and then depending on exactly the extreme amount that I have to recuperate from, I either pray, or I would do a brain dump, or I get on a voxer and have a conversation with a friend.Mystie: OK, nice.Virginia Lee: And that seems to work every time. I choose one of those three depending of the severity or the seriousness of the recuperation that I need.Mystie: Beverage, outside, and conversation. Because, prayer is conversation with God. And, of course, it makes me happy that brain dumping is also one of the options.Virginia Lee: Yes, sometimes my recuperation needs to be a brain dump because the part that’s really torn me down is the fact that there’s just too much in my head from what I’ve seen in my day that I either need to tweak or add to, and it really helps me to refresh to just not have it all in my head any more.Mystie: My current refreshing beverage of choice in the afternoon is sparkling water. So, I will grab sparkling water, close myself off in the bedroom or somewhere, sometimes I go take a quick walk or just even pace in front of my house (and make a spectacle for my neighbors), but actually, I think the walking itself helps – it is the outside but it’s also just some movement, it just helps the blood flow to the right places again. It helps my brain think more clearly, kind of like the brain dump. I will do a brain dump. One thing that I started doing last year was a power nap, which I’ve tried off and on before, and I read about power naps, but I’m not really a napper, and I usually feel worse after a try to take a nap, but I just felt like I needed the end of, especially like teaching a class or something, I just needed to turn off. I almost actually never fall asleep but it’s kind of my version of an isolation chamber. So, I take one of my black pajama shirts and drape it over my eyes, sometimes I will even put in ear plugs and close the door and everyone knows it’s just 10 minutes, no one’s allowed to knock on the door or anything, but I also have no nappers. No one naps at all in my house. Quiet Time is a thing of the past, so this is mom’s quiet time. It’s amazingly helpful to just have 10 minutes with zero input. It’s not really the sleep so much as the being able to turn off for a little bit. It’s like a reboot. And, then I have so much more mental clarity when I get up.

Somehow, Berry makes you feel affection for all mankind, even those who aren’t likable and maybe even those who are wicked but especially for those who are foolish — which is each one of us.“Membership” with one another is the underlying thread in them both, and these novels have given that word much more depth and richness than I had ever seen in it.

As I’ve written before, the goal of education is virtue, and Karen’s first chapter jumps right into the heart of it. She proves that virtue – right acting – needs to be the end we are pursuing when we educate children (and also ourselves), and demonstrates this is the classical notion about what education is for.

Too often, when we start making goals around keeping house better or getting more done, our focus shifts too far and we start seeing these means as ends – which means anything that gets in the way of our ends is a problem to be overcome or a frustration to bear resentfully.And too often, that means grumbling against our husbands or shouting at our kids. We could reach our goals, we think to ourselves, if it weren’t for these other people getting in the way.

I recently finished Laurie Bestvater's The Living Page: Keeping Notebooks with Charlotte Mason, and I loved it. I bought it based on Brandy's reviews, and I'm glad I made the leap-of-faith, even though I am only a Charlotte Mason admirer and not a strict adherer. I think this book, with the history behind commonplace books and Mason's implementation of it, demonstrates more clearly than ever that Charlotte Mason was not an innovator, but was making methods and practices based soundly upon the classical tradition that had gone before.

One way we give in to perfectionism is to not start unless we know we can finish and get the results we want.But as busy moms, that is rarely possible.We can’t put things off until the perfect moment, because that moment will not come.Instead, try embracing 15 minute chunks.

It’s easy to smile at our newborns, smile at a cute three-year-old antic, smile at our bigger kids when they volunteer to help out. It’s good our life as mother provides us these opportunities to smile, because smiling is good for us and it is good for our kids.

“Cross to carry” is a phrase used to talk about suffering as a lot in life, but this portrayal of that cross, that suffering, as an active things in our life struck me. I have always pictured “cross to carry” as a passive sort of thing. But difficulty as a purposeful, active thing in our life, rather than a weight holding us down, is a much more biblical picture.

It’s paralyzed us all.Perfectionism.We wait to start moving forward with our plans because we aren’t sure if we’re doing it right. We aren’t sure they will work. We aren’t sure we like the colors we picked.We pull back and reformat the page or change the app we’re using. We make the list over again to ensure we didn’t miss anything.

If you are starting out homeschooling with a bright-eyed little 5-year-old – a toddler tagging along and another on the way – you eat up the stories of those ahead of you on the journey.When I was in that spot 8 years ago, I had my mom who had homeschooled 7. I also had other local older moms who let me browse their bookshelves and ask them questions. And then on my computer screen, I had Cindy Rollins, whose ninth child at the time was in elementary school, only a couple years ahead of my oldest. She was about to graduate her oldest, and she was funny and smart and real.