The rest of Tuesday's Thoughts

OK, we're in between the park and Theatre and I have a few more minutes to blog. I'm not sure what direction this will go in and it may be a completely different direction than I was heading before, but we'll see. I posted this last year too, but today is the anniversary of when my parents met. My father was driving around with his friends (he was 17) and my mother was walking with her friends (she was 14). My father saw my mother and asked his friend to pull the car over. His first words to her were "What a nice day for a walk in the park".

Yesterday the story that I was reading to Jonathan and Madi from our "Parables" book was about a girl who was going to have a birthday party and chose to invite the most popular girls in her class. They had just begun to be friendly towards her. Her mother was trying to encourage her to invite her (slightly strange) friend from church and her younger cousin, but the girl insisted they wouldn't fit in and just wanted the popular girls. Little by little the popular girls called with excuses as to why they wouldn't be able to come to the party. In the end her "real friends" were the ones who came including the younger cousin and the slightly strange girl from church. The book used this modern story to illustrate Jesus's parable about when giving a feast you should invite the poor and lame people who cannot pay you back. It was a good story and they enjoyed it, but basically it is a foreign concept to them. By this I mean popularity in general. Yes they are both pretty popular, this is easily seen by counting the number of birthday invitations that pour in for them. But the wanting to be friends with someone who is popular just because they are popular is unfamiliar to them. I went to the same small town puplic school from 2nd- 8th grade. I basically spent seven years with the same 20 kids give or take a few. One girl was definitely the most popular...if she was on your side that week everything was great...if she wasn't, it wasn't so great. In addition to that there was always the picking teams for kickball thing. I was generally one of the last five--often one of the last three (just to be clear I wasn't as much unpopular as I was athletically uninclined {read-chubby}). These are the socialization situations that my kids are "missing out on". I touched on this topic in a conversation with someone earlier, and it made me think of the "hot house flower" with relation to homeschooling. "Sheltering" has never been one of our reasons for homeschooling (you can see that by how many activities we're involved in), but there is something to be said for the flowers that get to start out in the safety of the greenhouse and are not transported out into the cold ground until they are good and ready. They tend to thrive a lot more than the ones that have been struggling out in the cold since they were seeds. In my 20 kid classroom there was one boy who was ostracized more than the others. For years kids "sprayed" (like with an imaginary lysol can) anything that he had touched. I never did the spraying, but I never stood up for this boy either. Isn't that just as bad? I really hope that I am raising my kids in such a way that if someone is being picked on that they will do something about it. It isn't enough to just not join in.