Not in any particular order:
1. No one I know and love is seriously hurt or dying.
2. My children are healthy and reasonably happy.
3. I have a wonderful husband to miss.
4. I have everything I need and many of the things I want.
5. I am not in serious financial straits.
6. I know the Truth of Jesus Christ and have been Saved by it.
7. My entire family (with the exception of Julia, who is too young to understand yet) has been Saved and will be together in Heaven.
8. I still have both parents, both sisters, and one grandma.
9. My in-laws live far away.
10. I am quite certain that if I ever had real need of help there are people in my church who would help me.
11. I am loved.
12. I love others.
13. I can see, hear, feel, think, read, walk, talk, and sing.
14. I don't have to go to work each day.
15. I have free time to write a blog.
16. God knows my name.
Ok, there are many, many more reasons than this. I just needed to list a few and remind myself of how good I have it and how much worse things could be.
I did not write anything yesterday because I felt whiny and didn't want to shame myself. I also was having a hard time getting outside of myself enough to write about it. I am doing a bit better today. No, I am not going to whine about everything that I was feeling and all that happened yesterday. Suffice it to say that nothing really bad happened, just a pile of annoying things.
I will, however, write about day one of the experiment, as promised. As I mentioned on Tuesday, I decided not to give Joshua any real work for the day. Rather, he began the morning with his Grandma as I took Jacob to the school, and then we all went to visit his Great-Grandma for lunch. This turned out to be a very good strategy, as he had something nice to tell Jacob about when Jacob was going on and on about his school day.
On to Jacob. On the surface, it appeared to be a good day for him. He enjoyed his art class, liked his teacher, did some work (although very little real stuff), and made some friends. It was not until we delved a little further into his day that the problems began to surface. Yes, he made some "friends," but these boys basically spent the entire lunch and recess period peppering him with questions about all the things he wasn't allowed to do and bragging to him about all that they could do. For example, they watch PG-13 and even a few R movies. They play all kinds of video games, and own several of the newest gaming systems. They watch Spongebob and Nickelodeon. They hardly ever read. Frankly, they sound like their parents let them do everything unwholesome and immoral that I have chosen not to allow him to. Fine. Of course they do. After all, this is not a christian school. What made me mad was the fact that they made him feel bad about the fact that he didn't do those things. As I said to him, it's like someone making fun of him for eating filet mignon because they prefer to eat poop! ( I find that introducing the word Poop into my illustrations from time to time really gets their attention. They always look up at me with a somewhat shocked, amused expression, like, wow, mom said "poop!" It's all about knowing your audience, and mine are 8 and 9 year old boys.) It's simply ludicrous for him to feel bad for ignoring the lesser things in order to do the finer ones. I think he was with me by the end of the conversation. Still, the whole thing just made me so mad! I know, I know, this is exactly what I should have expected. I just didn't realize it would happen on day one! I mean, Satan really didn't waste any time trying to get his claws into him once he left my safe little haven. And I know he's far from finished, too. This is just the beginning of a long, long fight.
Which left me feeling rather like I should just call the school and yank him out right then and there. Yes, I must let go sometime, but I may have jumped the gun a bit. I mean, he's only 9 years old. I'm not ready for this kind of daily battle against the world's influence yet. But no, I have to give this a little more time. Maybe he'll surprise me. Maybe he'll find it within himself to stand up against these sorts of bad influences. I will be watching very very carefully, though.
So that was day one. One of the longest days of my life. But I'm not one to whine...
