BIGGER

The kids and I stood on our front porch taking in the fresh air and watching the downpour of rain. The thunder was loud and the storm was right above us. It was exciting! Suddenly lightning struck the tree in between our house and our neighbor's. It sounded like a car bomb went off and I could feel the vibration in my chest. We all jumped and clung to each other in fear as we darted inside! My five year old went up to my husband who was in the living room and said, "Dad, God is really powerful!"

With so much distractions in this world, it is easy to forget to look up at the beautiful sky and all realize how small we are in this universe and how big God is and indeed how powerful!Surrounded by concrete jungles and with our noses constantly in our ipads, facebook, and cell phones, it can be easy to overlook or ignore nature and all that God has created. But we must not. Just look up and look around you and you will see God in all he has created!

We went to Stonybrook state park a couple of weeks ago. It was beautiful and humbling. We looked up and saw huge cliffs and towering trees above; and below, people that looked as if they were the size of ants. When we get things in perspective it is humbling. Glorifying God in his creation not only teaches our children to realize how big God is but it teaches them about God's love for them. God loved us so much that he made this world and everything in it for us. He painted the sunsets for us, gave us big beautiful tree's for shade, I think he even created the bugs and snakes for the enjoyment of my little boys. By speaking to our children about how Great God is when we are in the midst of his amazing creation we are instilling in them God's love and a reverence for Him.

Psalms 145:1-10

" I will extol you my God and King and I will bless your name forever and ever. Every day I will bless You and I will praise Your name forever and ever. Great is the Lord and greatly to be praised; and his greatness is unsearchable. One Generation shall praise your works to another, and shall declare your mighty acts. I will meditate on the glorious splendor of your majesty and on your wonderous works. Men shall speak of the might of your awesome acts, and I will declare your greatness. They shall utter the memory of Your great goodness and shall sing of your righteousness. The Lord is gracious and full of compassion, slow to anger and great in mercy. The Lord is good to all and His tender mercies are over all his works. All Your works shall praise you O Lord, and your saints shall bless you..."

Psalms 104:1-7

"Bless the Lord oh my soul! O Lord my God you are very great: You are clothed with honor and Majesty, Who cover Yourself with light as with a garment, Who stretches out the heavens like a curtain. He lays the beams of his upper chambers in waters, Who makes the clouds his chariot, Who walks on the wings of the wind, Who makes his angels spirits, His ministers a flame of fire. You who laid the foundations of the earth, so that it should not be moved forever, You covered it with the deep as with a garment; the waters stood above the mountains. At your rebuke they fled; at the voice of your thunder they hastened away..."

If God is so big that He created the universe and all in it then He is for sure bigger than anything we would face in this life and there is hope and comfort in that too!

GOD IS BIGGER than ___________ (fill in the blank)

-Shannon

Discouragement

Discouragement paralyzes motivation like a deadly snakebite.....


He whispers in our ear.....


You are small, Look at the amazing things others are doing, why even bother, there's nothing that hasn't already been done.


Almost 3o now, life is passing. face reality there are many better than you, you are not original.


Then I hear the quiet whisper of the spirit of God ........


I never meant for you to know of every way I am working through others in the entire world. you need to be doing what I called you to do in YOUR WORLD.


You can make a difference for me


All the little things DO matter.


You are the most magnificent, original, special and BIG person to the three little people I put in your care.... THEY ARE YOUR WORLD.


Don't forget my word....



Phillipians 4:13, "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me"



John 15:16a, "You did not choose me, but I choose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit, and that your fruit should remain."



Jeremiah 29:11, "For I know the thoughts I think toward you sayeth the Lord, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope."



Psalms 40:5, "Many O Lord are thy wonderous works which thou hast done, and thy thoughts which are toward us; they can not be reckoned up in order unto thee. If I would declare and speak of them, they are more than can be numbered."


Psalms 139:14, "I will praise thee for I am fearfully and wonderfully made."



And HIS peace settles the soul and quiets the accuser's voice.


Isaiah 26:3, "And you will keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you/"

-Shannon

Our Recent School Drama Continued!

Ok, so I know I have been terribly inconsistent and slow at keeping this blog up to date and for that I am sorry, but hey, atleast I get to it at some point, right? lol. So let me share with you all what happened with Domenic's School a couple of months ago.......


Domenic was in class and he drew a picture of two people with word bubbles. The one person was calling the other a name, and the other was saying "I'm going to kill you. That may not have been very appropriate to draw in school, but it was just typical boy behavior. Now, at this point in the story, we recieved two different accounts of what took place. One account from Domenic's teacher, who was there at the time, and another account from the school psychologist. The teacher said that another student and Domenic came up to his desk and that the one student told on Domenic that he had written bad words. According to the teacher, he took the paper and gave it to the assistant principle as was procedure for anything "violent" or questionable. and that was the end of it as far as what he dealt with. So the story continues......


Later that day, Domenic was called out of art class and taken down to the psychologist's office and was questioned by the psychologist and the social worker without our knowledge or consent!!! They basically did a psych evaluation on him. They asked him questions about every area of his life and even asked him, "do both your parents live with you?" and "do you sleep in the same bed with your brother?" as well as, "What happens when you get into trouble at home"

I only learned of this later that day when I got a call from the school. I think it was the assistant to the principle that called. She informed me of the drawing and said that he was talked to about it and that he didn't give them much information, but he did say that he was sad because his father was gone. BRYAN WAS IN NYC FOR 2 DAYS!!! Not gone like they were obviously thinking! It was very obvious to me that they were asking him leading questions and infact doing a psych eval on him. Domenic gave us a list a page long of questions that were asked him.

So, Bryan, having a law degree was not happy! According to the constitution of the United States of America you cannot interview or question a minor without his or her parent's consent. There are reasons for this. For those of you who have children, you especially know that a child will oftentimes say things they don't mean, mix up definitions of what they do mean, and may not always recall things accuratly. But the school district thinks they can do whatever they want. After meeting with the principle and social worker and expressing our concern for the handling of the situation this is what we got....

Basically, if your child is deemed a possible threat to another student or staff the school has the right to question your child without your knowledge or consent. Ok, soooooooooooooo they determined my child was a possible threat......because of a drawing. Ok, so they can basically say that anything is a threat. There are no guidelines. One question, if they thought my child was a possible threat, why did they let him continue on with his day to later take him out of art class? If a child is a possible threat to someone shouldn't they immediatly be removed from the classroom and sent to the principle office? I sure wouldn't want my child in a room with another child that could possibly be a "threat"! The corrent handling of the situation would have been to send Domenic to the principles office. contact us, and then deal with the situation with us involved. They took a simple thing, a drawing from a good boy who is exactly that, a BOY and turned it into this big fiasco! This whole thing could have been avoided by a simple phone call. But no, the school thinks they can do whatever they want, even usurp our children's constitutional rights!

But wait, it's not over yet! There is still more to this story. Stay tuned!

-Shannon

RAISING BOYS IN THE PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM AND OUR RECENT SCHOOL DRAMA!!!!

Well, I have not blogged in a while, but this one should be pretty interesting and make up for it! We have our children in public school and recently had a situation occur with our seven year old son that would make any parent sick to their stomach! But before i go into the details, I just need to vent about some observations about raising boys in the public school system that we have noticed the past couple years. This will be a two part blog. The next one I do will tell all the drama we've been dealing with. OK, here we go.

Schools nowadays do not want boys to be boys, and if they behave like boys they then assume that something is wrong with them. Now of course their are children who do have problems and need medication, but we have heard numerous stories, especially with boys, where the child is very active like boys often are and the school wants to put them on Ritalin and label them with ADD or something. Now this is not what happened with our son, but there seems to be this mentality in society that boys should not behave like boys, but like girls. Yet people do not understand that God created boys differently then girls for his special purpose!

Modern secular society says that children are the way they are because of how they are conditioned by their environment. So give a boy, boy toys when he is little and he will gravitate towards those things, give a boy baby dolls and girl toys and he will develop a love for those type of things.

Well, these people obviously do not have children. I have two boys and a girl. When my oldest was three we were debating whether or not we should let him play with toy guns. Some boys in the neighborhood played with them and he wanted one. The poor child carried around a wood chip for 2 weeks and pretended it was a gun! He even made his pretzels into guns! And no, we did not let him watch anything violent where he would have learned this, other then observation of other boys playing. I gave in and got him one.

Now on the other end, my youngest is a girl and after having two boys, it has been so fun having a girl and she is sooo different. Before she was even two years old she was putting on my shoes and jewelry and pretending to be a little mommy to her dolls! And she definitely had her choice of guns, dinosaurs, and cars to play with having two older brothers. So, my point is boys and girls are different. We have come across this mentality on more than one occasion with our son who is now 7 years old and in second grade.

Now Obviously since Columbine, things have gotten a lot more serious in school when dealing with behaviors and possible problems. And they should be dealing with these things more seriously. The school district we are in has a Zero tolerance policy which basically says that they will not tolerate ANYTHING, even if your child just defended himself, he is at fault too! Another issue I have with this is that the school our son is in seems to think that they have the power to take away a child's constitutional rights if they think that there is any kind of possible threat to another child or to the school. And when I say threat, I mean it according to their definition, which could be ANYTHING!!!!! a drawing, something someone said someone said someone said, any kind of child to child conflict, as well as anything else. This is a problem! If this is already starting in our schools with our children, what is next? What if the government started behaving this way with our rights?

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH. ok, done venting. stay tuned as the drama unfolds and make sure every parent you know with children in the public schools reads this next blog. And follow me!!!!

Catching up

Hi everybody! I know I haven't blogged in a while. The summer had gotten busy lately. We had a family reunion to attend as well as a wedding, an army ceremony up at Fort Drum, a trip to my cousin's campsite, a big get together with old friends (that included all of our 16 children!), and I'm sure there's more that I forgot to mention. I also have been babysitting more which has been great for my kids! They love having people to play with. Soooooo I know I wrote a few blogs that were to be continued. But things have not gone as planned. Here is the sandbox update and the example prayer update:

Sandbox

I dug out the area for the sandbox and put some wood boards over top to keep the dog out until I filled it. Well, they are still sitting there and I have not filled it yet. Bryan decided he doesn't want me to put pea rock in it because he says the boys will get it all over the grass and he will have to mow over it. Valid argument, but I think it would be fine. I also figured that it will cost over 100.00 dollars to fill it with sand or rock, and right now, well, car repairs and rascal flatts tickets take precedent. Sorry kids! But it has turned out alright. Some frogs and toads have decided to make the sandbox their home and every day for the past couple weeks the boys have been going out there and catching them, and then returning them to their home in the evening. It has really kept them busy and entertained! Well, minus that one little toad that the dog ate! Poor thing! So for now we will keep it as a frog/toad habitat and then in the spring make it into some sort of sandbox for the kids. Oh, and did I mention I found a whole bin of sand toys for 3.00 at a garage sale?! The bin was even included! There must be 20 or more digging and scooping toys in there as well as multiple buckets and trucks! The kids have hauled alot of them up the hill in the backyard and have been digging in the dirt in our "woods" Yes they have gotten dirty, but the benefits of them pretending to be archaeologists and actually getting along for a good amount of time outweigh that. They have found lots of cool rocks and things.

Example Prayer


Well, things don't always go as I would prefer them to. The plan was to go over each part of the verse, but we made it through the first couple and then I ended up just doing the rest of it all at once and talking to them about it. I think they had a hard time taking the concepts of the prayer and making it their own. Domenic did try to incorporate it when he prayed, but he just said the words of the Lord's prayer. I believe he understood what he was praying and it was easier for him to just do that. However, the last thing I want for them is to just repeat mindlessly something that they memorized in prayer. I told him that he did not need to say those exact words, but what was in his heart. The first part of the prayer "....hallowed be thy name..." speaks of giving glory and praise to God, and both the boys did good at this. I helped them by talking about all the words we could use to describe God. Awsome, cool, powerful, loving, forgiving and kind are some of the words we came up with. Then, in prayer they worshipped Him by telling Him one of these things. It was so cute to hear them speak to God from their hearts. Here is an outline of the Lord's prayer that can help us and our children to know how God wants us to pray. Christ, in Matthew 6:9 says, "pray then this way" it says "this way" not "these words" It is meant to be a guide. God wants us to talk to him from our hearts, he cares about the details of our lives!

The example prayer

Matthew 6:9-13

"Pray then in this way....."

"our Father who is in heaven, hallowed be your name" (Give Glory and Praise to God)

"your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven" (Pray for God's will, not our own)

" give us this day our daily bread" ( Pray for our immediate needs, and for God's provision)

" and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors" ( Pray for forgiveness)

" and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil" ( pray to not be tempted with sin and for protection)

"For yours is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory forever" (acknowledge his Godhead and submit to his control over our lives and over everything)

Well, thanks for reading. Now that I am all caught up, I have some other thoughts and Mom friendly ideas I would like to share! I plan on posting again soon! Love you all,
Shannon

Children put on your Respirators, it's time to play in the sand box!

SANDBOXES AND CARCINOGENS

So my most recent project is a sandbox for the kids. I have been working on digging it out the past week or so and am finally ready to start shopping for Sand. Well, little did I know how complex this would be! It turns out that the PLAY SAND that places like Home Depot and Wal-Mart have are labeled with carcinogen warnings! Seriously? And they label it as play sand? One label I saw even said, "Don't inhale without a respirator!" Ok kids, go play in your sandbox, but don't forget to wear your respirator! LOL! So basically any sand containing Silicates are harmful and sand containing Carbonates are not. I also learned that there are other things to be concerned about. If your going to have a sandbox it HAS TO BE COVERED!!!! I read a couple articles talking about racoon's doing their business in sand boxes and some sort of worm they can transmit to our children that causes disease and mi grains! Also, bacteria can grow and contaminate the sand if the children's hands are dirty or if they are eating in the sand box! There are a couple options available for safe sandbox's. Sterilized Sand is one option but it is hard to find. You can get some at http://www.safesand.com/, but it will cost you about 60.00 per 50lb. bag, which is a lot considering you will probably need about 200-300 lbs for an average size sand box. The option that I am leaning towards is not sand, but PEA GRAVEL. It is basically just a variety of tiny rocks. You don't really need to worry about animals getting into it, and it will not cause cancer, and you can get different sizes and types of rock. I am pretty sure that any landscaping company can deliver pea gravel right to your sandbox. You can also buy it at Lowe's or Home Depot. The smallest variety looks almost like sand. I am headed to Lowe's tomorrow and I will let you all know what I end up with and how much it cost me! For some good info on using pea gravel check out http://hubpages.com/hub/Geology-101-for-Toddlers I found a lot of good info here! Another Blog on toxic sand : http://livegreenmom.com/2010/04/sand-box-toxic/

LOVE,

Shannon

FAMILY UPDATE

Michael with the frog that he and Dom found in the backyard

Strawberry Picking

Relaxing in the backyard

Pool Time!!!

FAMILY UPDATE / July 2010

So I thought I would do a little family update of what has been going on around here lately. The kids are enjoying their summer vacation, and have already made several trips over to Gramps and Nanna's house to swim. Samantha loves the water and is already trying to "swim" (in her own way) Her hair is looking really blond lately, and it is actually growing and curly at the ends! Not at all what I pictured my little girl's hair to be like, but soooo cute!!!! Dom and Mike are sporting Mohawks for the summer! I made a deal with them that if they let me get some nice pics of them, then afterwards they can shave their heads, it worked. The silly band craze has hit our house also recently and the boys arms are decked with stretchy pigs, tools, fish, and any other thing imaginable! They have been fighting a lot lately and it has been driving me crazy! I have been trying to think of creative ways to get them to get along. The other day I decided that we were going to go to the store and buy water guns. They were still fighting, but fighting happily that afternoon! A good investment on my part for some sanity and peace ( inside at least!) Michael had his first dentist appt awhile ago!!!! He was soooo good and even whispered to me "mom, this is fun" when the hygienist stepped out for a sec! Samantha is still teething and I am wondering when she will ever get those last few teeth, but until then she will probably continue to try and chew everything, including bars of soap, candles, my lip gloss, dog food, random pieces of wood found outside, erasers, markers, crayons, play dough, and just about everything else! Oh yes, I cannot forget to tell you all about Soccer! Dom is DOMinating! this year! It is ridiculous and almost embarrassing at times. He really should be in the higher league but his birthday is in Sept. and they are strict about it! Ugh! He headed the ball the other night and then followed it though with a goal! Just about every time someone from the other team would get the ball and head towards the goal Dom would sweep in and turn it around, bringing it right back to score! Here's an example of borderline embarrassing (but yet proud!) parent moments Bry and I have been having lately! Everyone (even OUR coach!) is cheering for one of the cute little small boys on the other team who finally gets the ball and is headed towards the goal ahead of the crowd (mind you everyone is excited because this is rare!) Then comes Dom, from the other end of the field, flying by everyone headed for his target. All I am thinking is "Please don't knock him over! Please don't knock him over!" Well, he sweeps in and steals the ball turning it around. The little boy trips over his toes and falls and you can hear the sighs of parents as their hopes of a goal is taken from them..... What am I to do?! I have to cheer for my little soccer pro! It's ridiculous! Well, he played a great game that night! He is great at soccer, but I like that he is also kind. He never pushes or does things maliciously and he really does try to use teamwork. He passed a bunch of times tonight, and had some goal assists along with his goals (which I really didn't keep track of the exact #) Ok, enough about soccer. Some other things we have been up to..... strawberry picking, wild berry picking, visiting the Children's Museum, hitting the summer community sales, getting together with friends and fireworks! What have I been up to? Hmmm, I guess I have been enjoying our yard a lot this summer and have been making an attempt to grow some fruits and vegetables. We currently have Roma tomatoes, blackberry bushes, raspberries, grapes, blueberry bushes, red peppers, and strawberries. It looks like we will be getting a lot of tomatoes, but as for everything else, I am holding out hope for next year! A good friend told me a little saying about perennials, "First year they sleep, second year they creep, third year they leap" So in two years..... can't wait! I am really beginning to love gardening! I just picture the kids next year running around playing and snacking on all the fruits we will be growing! I have grapes growing next to the boys playground "Fort" and in a year or two they should cover it and make it look really cool! I know the boys will love it. I am also working on a sandbox for the kids. I actually just finished digging it out today so now all we have to do is get some sand. I was really excited last weekend when I found a whole storage bin full of sand toys for 3 bucks at a garage sale (bin included!) Well, Bry has been up to his usual stuff: Enjoying the Yankee's games and doing BJJ. He is now also teaching BJJ (Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu) at our church in a self-defense/fitness class. And then there's the furry child. Leo really thinks he is one of the kids and does everything with them. He was even in the kiddie pool with them the other day. Sam is his baby and she always lays on him on the floor and cuddles with him, it is so cute! He is very gentle with her and lets her pull his ears, bounce on him, ect... He is a great dog and we are blessed to have him! Sooooooooo that is about it. We are planning on doing some fun stuff this summer around here with the kids... Sea breeze, Red Wings, state fair, and maybe a short out of town trip. I hope everyone is doing well and enjoying their summer! Keep in touch! Love u all! ~Shannon