On the amazing feats of Houdini the Hamster

I am not sure how, but somehow our hamster managed to get out of her cage Thursday night. There were no open doors, no chewed-through wires, no logical openings big enough for her to wriggle through (and, yes, I know they can get pretty small if they want to, but believe me, not that small)... it's a puzzlement, to be sure.

We have not yet found her. And now, the race is on ... who will find her first? The cat? The dog? Or the human? If the poor thing has already met her untimely demise, I hope it's not in some hard-to-reach place. Dead rodents don't smell so pleasant, you know.

Of course, even if *I* catch her first, she might still meet her end at my hand after what I discovered in my search for our little Houdini. When I pulled out from the wall the bookcase upon which her cage sat, I saw dozens and dozens of little turds stuck to the wall, the back of the bookcase, and on the floor! That little stinker has been pitching her poop out through the wires of her cage!

(She obviously didn’t like the Craisins I gave her as a treat, either; some of those were stuck to the wall, as well. Ungrateful little fuzzball.)

After overcoming my initial irritation (and nausea), I just had to laugh. I found it fascinating that she did that dirty little deed out the back of the cage, and not the front or sides ... almost like she was trying to hide it from me 'cause she knew it was wrong! Stupid rat. Smart rodent.

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Your Fun Fact for the day: Did you know that it is illegal to keep hamsters as pets in Australia? They fear "escapees" could breed in the wild and become "feral" pest animals.

On cleaning up cobwebs

I used to always think, “Wow! What an amazing coincidence!” when the pastor’s Sunday morning message corresponded with a devotional I’d read that very day, or when a topic I was reading about for a weekday Bible study class ended up being discussed in our Sunday morning small group... and then I wondered, why am I surprised by this? God’s Word encompasses and is applicable to every area of our life, no matter the topic; His Word is never contradictory; and much of His divine plan for our lives and wisdom for living is repeated over and over again (just in case we missed it the first time, which we usually do) throughout the Bible, in various passages, books, subtexts, and parables.

Yet, I still get tickled when I read a blog and it just happens to coincide with the passage of Scripture I’m studying, which is exactly what happened (again!) this weekend. My friend, and worship leader (er, I mean, lead worshipper) at our church, wrote about the evidence of self-examination. If we claim to have examined our way of living, and profess to be making a change… well, we might convince some folks just by our self-proclamation, but those closest to us will know the truth, for they either will or will not see the evidence of the change.

Our Sunday morning small group has been studying the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. These books not only provide a fascinating history lesson, but are also rich with application for right living (specifically, how to overcome fear and obstacles in our quest for obedience).

After some fits and starts in their attempts to rebuild the city walls, Nehemiah comes in, gets them organized, and, under his strong leadership, they rebuild the wall in 52 days (which they’d been working on for some 70 years at this point!).Upon its completion, Ezra the scribe reads from the law, and the people have an incredible revival – a six-hour worship service that culminates in one of the greatest prayers in history (see Nehemiah 9). They are so moved, so convicted, so determined to live right, that in Nehemiah 10 we read that they signed a covenant, promising to keep God’s commandments.

As I prepared to help lead the discussion on this, I turned to Warren Wiersbe’s most excellent commentary, Be Determined. He opens his discussion on Nehemiah 10 with the following story:

In a certain church, there was a man who always ended his prayers with, “And, Lord, clean the cobwebs out of my life! Clean the cobwebs out of my life!”

One of the members of the church became weary of hearing this same insincere request week after week, because he saw no change in the petitioner’s life. So, the next time he heard the man pray, “Lord, clean the cobwebs out of my life!” he interrupted with, “And while you’re at it, Lord, kill the spider!”

When I read that, and then read my friend’s post on self-examination, I thought, “How true this is for us!” We take a look at the superficial messes in our life, those pesky cobwebs, and ask God to clean them up, all the while ignoring the true source of the problem – the spider!

When we pray for God to help us tidy up the messes in our life, are we serious about making the changes necessary to keep it clean? So often we try to keep that spider as a pet. We wipe away the cobwebs and try to destroy the evidence of the spider, but can’t quite seem to bring ourselves to remove the spider itself.

As my friend points out, some people will think we’ve exterminated the spider. We get ourselves ready for our guests by cleaning the cobwebs out of the corners and off the chandeliers, and they come in and think, “Wow! You really have it all together!”

But our family, the ones who spend the most time with us, who live with us day after day… they know that the cobwebs keep coming back. They know the truth.

So, as I thought about that, I wondered about my own sticky webs of deceit I’ve been spinning… the ideas that the spiders I have hanging around aren’t all that bad, not really a problem, only occasionally bite me and leave their venom coursing through my veins…

Hmmmm, on the other hand, maybe it’s time to finally call in the Orkin man.

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These spider pictures were taken in our backyard, around our AC unit. This friendly little orb weaver had made quite a home for herself and her two huge egg sacs, right under my oldest son's window. He's no pansy, but the thought of hundreds of little spiders hatching and possibly crawling into his room was more than he could handle.

On the completion of our first project

I thought you might enjoy seeing our cuneiform tablets – the one planned activity my son and I actually accomplished this week.

OK, so we didn’t get a 3D solar system mobile made, and we certainly didn’t try to rebuild the ark in miniature… but we did get to squish and squeeze and knead clay, then roll it and squish it and roll it some more… and then, when we got tired of that (and, frankly, I think we were both having so much fun that would have been enough!)… but, when we got tired of doing that, we used our wedge-shaped craft sticks to attempt cuneiform writing.

The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, I’m afraid. Like his mother, my son sat paralyzed with indecision over what to put on his tablet. “I can’t do this!” he wailed. “I don’t know how to write in cuneiform! I don't even know what to say!”

Once he saw that I was just “making it up” (after trying and failing miserably myself at copying the symbols in our encyclopedia), he tentatively scored the surface of his flattened piece of clay, then grew more confident, and tried creating his own versions of the chicken scratches known as cuneiform. I thought he did a pretty terrific job.

On time... and the lack thereof

“We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
- Pogo (Walt Kelly)

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Time seems to be my enemy these days. There is so much I want to accomplish before the end of our school year, but I am clearly not going to reach my goal. Every day we seem to run out of time and end up leaving one or more items “undone” on our list of subjects or activities.

Make our own cuneiform clay tablet? Not today. Create a 3D mobile of the solar system? Uh-uh, no time this afternoon. Build a scale model of Noah’s Ark? Not happening.

(OK, I made up that last one. I never intended to do that. Granted, it crossed my mind... but only for a moment, I swear!)

Actually, I don’t really plan all that many activities. I did plan for the cuneiform tablet project, because it was actually do-able (a little bit of air-drying clay, a chopstick, and a rolling pin to flatten the clay into a tablet shape, and you’re ready to go). But it’s more than just the fun activities that go by the wayside.

In part, I believe this is because I set some pretty ambitious goals for each day, perhaps bordering on unrealistic. Can you cover math, reading, writing, grammar, spelling, Bible, science, and social studies (history, culture, geography) every day? What about fine arts? Handwriting? Typing? Phys Ed?

At the same time, I don’t know how much time to allot for certain activities or for teaching a new concept. Should math take an hour? Should it take more? Less? If I plan on math only taking an hour, but we really spend 90 minutes on it, is that because I overestimated the amount of work that could be accomplished in an hour? Did I spend too much time on introducing the concept? Did I assign too much seat work? Or is my son simply wasting time daydreaming, dawdling, and generally procrastinating? (This last possibility is most definitely a contributor factor to our time problem, but not the sole cause.)

Veteran homeschoolers keep reassuring me, “Don’t worry! You’ll figure it out!” In the meantime, the perfectionist in me feels like a complete failure because we aren’t even coming close to completing our daily “to-do” list. I hate looking at my weekly lesson plans and seeing all these unchecked boxes and circled items with a big fat ? beside them – as in, when we will ever get back to this?!

If I were going to be perfectly honest, I’d have to confess that time, itself, is not the enemy… rather, it is my inability to wisely manage the time I do have. For now, I’ll chalk some of that up to being a novice at this homeschooling thing. Y’all are buying that… right?

On baseball and kids

This past Saturday, our 10yo son’s baseball team, the Red Sox, went up against the Nationals for the second time this season. In the earlier game this year, his team beat them, 11-7. Our senior pastor’s 10yo son is on the Nationals team, and Pastor is the coach.

Our son came up to Pastor before the game and asked him, “Are you a preacher every day?”

The pastor replied, “Yes, but today I’m also a coach.”

“Oh,” said our son. He thought for a moment, then added with a wicked grin, “Well, in that case, you’re going down.”

In retrospect, perhaps it was not the kind of bragging to do before a man of God. The Red Sox lost, 7-2.

On the start of a new adventure

Bless me, what *do* they teach them at these schools?
C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, & the Wardrobe

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No doubt it was bad form to write a lengthy article about perfectionism, and then not write again for two months, thus implying that I have, indeed, been paralyzed by my perfectionist tendencies.

While that is undoubtedly true (and certainly a contributing factor)… I have other, truly legitimate reasons for the lengthy delay between posts. I have recently entered into a new dimension, one replete with its own language: homeschooling.

Eight weeks ago, if you had mentioned Charlotte Mason to me, I would have replied, “Who?” Or, if you had asked me to explain the trivium model of a classical education – the grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric stages of learning – I would have stared blankly and said, “Huh?” If a homeschooling mom had told me they used an eclectic approach to their curriculum, I would have asked, “What does that mean?” If she’d then told me she measured her child’s knowledge through notebooking and lapbooks, rather than worksheets, quizzes and tests, I might have skeptically responded, “Um, o-kaaay.”

Now, these are the terms by which I am defining my days. And nights. And weekends. It’s been a crash course in elementary education. Everything else going on in my life came to a screeching halt as I dove head-first into this wild and crazy adventure. We hit the ground running, as they say – there was no time to prepare; it was learn-as-you-go.

My home office is now a school room; the artwork on the wall has been placed by world maps, the cursive alphabet, and posters of Ancient Mesopotamia. Books on public relations and graphic design have been temporarily boxed up to make room for encyclopedias, atlases, dictionaries, thesauruses, and tomes on ancient civilizations, astronomy, dinosaurs, oceans, and the human body, all in preparation for our next year of school.

I’ve owned it for only a couple months, but the most dog-eared book on my shelf right now is Cathy Duffy’s 100 Top Picks for Homeschool Curriculum, after having spent hours and hours pouring over her recommendations for math, grammar, reading, and writing. In less than 60 days, I’ve already formed opinions on the benefits of unit studies, spiral math curriculum, and the merits of teaching vocabulary by first studying Greek and Latin roots, prefixes and suffixes. That I not only understand but could also explain these concepts provides proof that my immersion in this new culture is complete.

Frankly, I’ve learned more in the past six weeks than I have in years, and I’m not just referring to the theories of education that I’m absorbing in my quest for the perfect curriculum. I made a somewhat hasty decision to purchase a year-long unit study that starts with Ancient Egypt, and takes us through the Age of Exploration; ultimately, it was not a decision I regret one bit. It ties in appropriate areas scientific study (e.g., a study of the human body while we study Ancient Greece; an oceanography unit while we study the World Explorers), as well as literature (we’ll read The Golden Goblet while we study Ancient Egpyt, and The Bronze Bow while we study Ancient Rome), spelling, grammar, writing… pretty much everything except math. It’s really an amazing curriculum, which we will begin in the fall.

In the meantime, for the remainder of this school year, I decided that we needed to cover world history up to and coinciding with the time of the ancient Egyptians; i.e., the other early civilizations: the Sumerians, Minoans, Myceneans, megalithic Europe, and the peoples of the Indus Valley – basically, civilization up to 1200 B.C. For science, we have studied the creation of the world (from a biblical worldview!), the solar system, and the layers of the earth, and will spend the last few weeks on dinosaurs (which, my 10-year-old son claims, he has never gotten to study in school).

Just preparing the lesson plans for this last quarter of school (which is when we began our homeschooling journey), has been an education. I’ve learned more about the origins of our universe and the life of early man than I ever knew before. I’ve learned facts about the layers of the sun that I never knew. In fact, I didn’t even know the sun had layers! I didn’t know that cuneiform was one of the earliest writing systems, I didn’t know that farmers used constellations to tell them the times to plant and to harvest, and I didn’t know that Stonehenge was being built around the same time as the ziggurats in the Middle East.

I didn’t know a lot. I still don’t.

But after this next year, I’ll know a little bit more.

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For those who might be interested in a unit study approach, I heartily recommend A World of Adventure! It is one of Cathy Duffy's Top Picks – considering the vast number of unit studies to choose from, and that only a handful (six, to be exact) "made the cut," that's high praise, indeed. I really wanted to start this study right away, but decided to truly go with a chronological approach to our son's studies, by starting with the creation of the world and the ancient civilizations that preceded/coincided with the Ancient Egyptians.


Find out more: A World of Adventure

On being perfectly imperfect

Artists who seek perfection in everything are
those who cannot attain it in anything.

~ Eugene Delacroix (1798 - 1863)

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“Why haven’t you written on your blog?” my friend asked the other day. “It’s been a month since your last post!”

I know, I know. I have a half-dozen, half-written posts, but can’t seem to finish any because they aren’t, well, perfect. None of them are perfectly humorous, or perfectly insightful, or perfectly inspiring, or perfectly relevant, or perfectly thought-provoking, or perfectly anything – except perfectly incomplete.

For as long as I can remember, people have called me a “perfectionist.” In my youth, I was secretly pleased at this label, for in my limited understanding of that word, I believed that meant that when others looked at my work or my accomplishments, they saw perfection in them, and, therefore, perfection in me, as well. At the same time, I never quite believed that could possibly be true, because all I ever saw were flawed, damaged goods – both in the things I created, and, sadly, in this person God created, this incredibly imperfect person staring back at me in the mirror every morning.

I take some small comfort in the fact that I’m not the only one who thought of “perfectionism” as some sort of positive trait, albeit one with negative undertones. I’ve read many-a “job interviewing how-to” article that suggested answering, “I’m a perfectionist!” when asked by a potential employer what your weaknesses are because, these experts reasoned, what kind of employer wouldn’t want to hire someone whose primary “flaw” was their desire for perfection?

What I’ve come to realize over the years is that it truly is a negative trait (at least, as it is manifested in me), and one that has severely hampered my ability to find pleasure in life. That sounds somewhat maudlin (perhaps this post will be perfectly depressing in the end!), but as I come to understand this undeniable trait of mine, I recognize that my perfectionist tendencies tend to rob me of joy.

While some researchers might suggest that perfectionism is a healthy motivator for reaching goals, I am living proof that, quite frankly, it has altogether the opposite effect. I do believe there are “healthy strivers” who desire to excel, but they are not to be confused with perfectionists, who will often not even attempt to reach a goal for fear of failure.

Why this sudden introspection? As I sat here in my office staring at my whiteboard, still covered with lengthy lists of New Year resolutions, I came to a startling realization: aside from a couple of items which were immediate, must-do tasks, I had not accomplished a single goal I had set for January, let alone for the year as a whole; nor had I even begun. My procrastination in getting started on my list had eventually led to complete paralysis.

Let me tell you: it was an ambitious list. And after doing a bit of research on what it really means to be a perfectionist, it made perfect sense that I would set these kinds of goals for myself. The Counseling and Mental Health Center at the University of Texas-Austin has a web page devoted to perfectionism, and they don’t pull any punches:

Perfectionism a double-edged sword… a duel with oneself, the ultimate “no-win” situation. Perfectionism is not a healthy pursuit of excellence. Those who strive for excellence in a healthy way take genuine pleasure in trying to meet high standards. Perfectionists on the other hand are full of self-doubts and fears of disapproval, ridicule and rejection. The healthy striver has drive, while the perfectionist is driven.

They then proceeded to list differences between perfectionists and “healthy strivers,” including the fact that perfectionists set standards (goals) beyond reach and reason (versus the healthy striver who sets high standards, just a bit beyond reach).

The site continues with a list of myth-busters regarding perfectionism, including this gem, which perfectly (pun intended) sums up my own inability to post regularly to this blog, among other things:

MYTH: Perfectionists get things done and they do things right.

REALITY: Perfectionists often have problems with procrastination, missed deadlines, and low productivity.

Psychologists find that perfectionists tend to be "all-or-nothing" thinkers. They see events and experiences as either good or bad, perfect or imperfect, with nothing in between. Such thinking often leads to procrastination, because a requirement of flawless perfection, in even the smallest of tasks, can become fearfully overwhelming. The perfectionist believes that the flawless product or superb performance must be produced every time. Perfectionists believe if it can't be done perfectly, it's not worth doing.

Such beliefs often lead to undesired results. A perfectionist student may turn in a paper weeks late (or not at all), rather than turn it in on time with less-than-perfect sentences. A perfectionist worker may spend so much time agonizing over some non-critical detail that a critical project misses its deadline.

What does it matter if one is a perfectionist or not? Because the costs are high: According to multiple sources, perfectionists are vulnerable to clinical depression, low self-esteem, performance anxiety, writer's block, workaholism, obsessive behavior, compulsiveness, suicidal thoughts, loneliness, impatience, frustration, and anger. And that’s the short list.

So, upon further reflection, I began to see a repeated pattern in my life – in my professional life, my personal life, even my spiritual life:

Perfectionism –> Procrastination –> Paralysis

No doubt identifying the problem is the first step towards overcoming it. And, so, a revised list of New Year goals may be in order. I’ll be writing those down… just as soon as I come up with the perfect list.