Soundtrack for Springtime Homeschooling

SPRING FEVER! Out here in the west spring has arrived! Early and warm, it's making hanging around indoors to "learn something" next to impossible. If you are pulled in the direction of throwing off shackling schedules, here are some song lyric excerpts to roll (and rock) with.

"You Learn," by Alanis Morissette

You live, you learn
You love, you learn
You cry, you learn
You lose you learn
You bleed you learn
You scream you learn
You grieve you learn
You choke you learn
You laugh you learn
You choose you learn
You pray you learn
You ask you learn
You live you learn.

and "Rock Star" by Smash Mouth

So much to do, so much to see
So what's wrong with taking the back streets?
You never know if you don't go. Go!
You'll never shine if you don't glow!

I know, I know. These are hardly classic works of musical genius. But they make great ballads of escape from whatever is holding you back! Go live and learn on the roads less traveled. Have an adventure or two. Write your own catchy lyrics of rebelling against the status quo! Sometimes THIS sort of learning is just what the doctor ordered for spring fever! Enjoy the remedy!

Cleaning Tips for the Clean at Heart

Isn't it wonderful that God looks on our hearts! In my heart He is sure to find a well-ordered home....

This is a follow up post to another post I did many moons ago titled House Cleaning, a House of Order, and Homeschooling. Interestingly, housecleaning comes up often as something most intimidating to moms about homeschooling. "How do you ever get/keep a clean house?" they wonder. Mostly, as they are NOT homeschooling, or even over at my house as they are wondering this, I assure them I don't. It is rather difficult to live learning in any meaningful way without getting something out. And as we are here and learning, chances are if you stop by, everything will NOT be put away, which seems to be our cultural definition of "a house of order."

If my first post, I call into question that "things put away" is really what is meant by "a house of order." If you are interested, click the link above.

THIS post is for moms who DO homeschool and want to have a cleaner home than they currently enjoy. In other words, if you are already a "neat freak," you can skip this post because you have me beat! If I come over to YOUR house, I will revel and marvel at the order and beauty. And be secretly a bit jealous, because if anyone is clean at heart, it's me!

On the other hand, if you don't value having things put away, when I come to YOUR house, I will feel myself relax a bit in knowing my kids and the disaster they can leave in their wake won't be offensive to you. AND I will be secretly jealous of your ability to go with the flow and let go of the fleeting ideal of "clean."  

Now everyone knows how much jealousy is secretly in my heart (maybe it's NOT so great God is looking there!), I'll pass on to you my pointers on our "cleaning system" that has worked for a few years (NOT some incentive fad that my kids have yet to burn out on) and has brought our home into a livable level of orderliness.

First tip: give away things that have lost utility for your family. In our house we have a box high on the laundry room shelf where I can just toss clothes, toys, books, even kitchen utensils that I come upon while going about my day, look at, and think, "How is that out? We never use it!" Then, rather than return it to it's place, it goes in the box. (Which is high to prevent other family members from second guessing my snap judgement.) Yes, I do make the call in an instant, and I have made bad calls. But most things cost less than $5 to replace, should we discover we really, really DO need whatever it is that is gone. And meanwhile, less of life is spent tending to STUFF that keeps us instead of us keeping it.

In our case, this is not a large box, but it gets full about every month or so and then I toss it in the back of the car and drop off it's contents when I'm in the neighborhood of our local Deseret Industries.

I also make these snap decisions every time I help my kids organize the toy closet, or clean their rooms. Clothes that don't fit right, have a hole that bothers me, or cease to look good on whomever is wearing them disappear. If they are in decent enough shape to pass on to younger siblings or to friends, they are still placed elsewhere so I don't have to spend any time remembering, "that is for so-and-so."

This does mean we don't have a lot of stuff. Which brings me to my next tip: If your home allows, keep toys and clothes in separate spaces. We don't have toys in bedrooms. With the exception of a few items that are breakable or contain small pieces that should not be separated, all our toys are in our family room/play room. "All our toys" is about 3 shelves worth. Yes, we don't have a lot. But no toy is neglected. (And actually we DO have more than 3 shelves worth. But I keep toys in storage if I think they are worth keeping but MY kids seem to have lost interest. I may get rid of these stored toys some day, but in the meantime, it's nice to think I have something for grandkids to play with.)

Anyway, my kids share rooms. They aren't older, so we fit their clothes nicely in a few drawers and in their closets. They each have a drawer for their "treasures" - those toys that they want to keep safe from being lost or broken, and space for their "collections," but that is ALL that is in their bedrooms.

This means when friends come over that all the "play" happens in one spot. We have as a rule that friends don't go into bedrooms, simply because there is nothing in the bedrooms. Now my son is getting old enough that he tends to chat with his friends more than play with toys, I think we will adjust the rule to have friends in rooms to visit as long as the room is clean. (Which is much easier to keep with fewer clothes and no toys to sort out from everything else.)

We have a cleaning day once a week and on that day we try to have the whole house clean all at the same time so we know how lovely that feels. (I hope the feeling is something the kids pick up on. I would LOVE for them to be clean at heart too.) Outside of cleaning day, we let the toy room/family room be as trashed or as clean as the kids wish to keep it. And their rooms are similarly up to their own standards. Sometimes we try to clean up a bit before we have guests over, but as our guests have kids that pull toys out generally, we don't stress about it.

Next tip: Notice when your house tends to be more clean, and invite friends over around those times! I picked our cleaning day by noticing when the house tended to be the most trashed: after the weekends. So we clean on Mondays and enjoy guests on Monday evenings and Tuesdays. We DO have friends come over on Saturdays and Sundays, but prior to the invite from our family comes the understanding (and family discussion, if needed) that it means work to be done before guests arrive. If they kid gripe, my answer is always that we can forgo friends.

Tip #4: Keep cleaning efforts to emotionally manageable chunks. I remember when we were told to clean up when I was little. The room would be a total disaster and my parents would announce we couldn't come out 'til it was clean. That was DEVASTATION. In the first place, we had more stuff than we could manage, and everything was mixed together. The job we were locked away to do would take hours and we didn't have the attention spans to make it happen.

So not only does it help my kids that their toys are clothes are presorted, and there isn't too much of either, but when I ask them to clean, rather than make that direct request, I can ask them to "put their clothes in their laundry baskets," and follow that with, "now sort through that and get the dirty clothes in the laundry," and when that is done, "now clean off your dresser," "now make your bed," and finally, "get the garbage off the floor." 

"Shouldn't you be able to just ask kids to clean and have them do it?" you may ask. Yes. And when I've stepped them through these steps beginning when they are 3, by the time they are 6, they know how to do it, they know what comes next, they do it by themselves, AND (the best part!) they do it without a break-down or freak-out.

Even cleaning day (which can take anywhere from 5 hours on the mega-cleaning day once a month to one hour if we really focus and the house was mostly pulled together when we begin) is broken down into the kids doing their rooms, the play room, their bathroom chores, and their "after-lunch jobs." Four things. It doesn't sound so bad, right?

Bathroom tips: #1- keep cleaning tools IN the bathroom so when a kid is asked to do the work, the tools are where he or she needs to be; #2 - use liquid soap for body and hands to eliminate soap scum, making sinks and tubs as easy to clean as a wipe down.

Final tip/confession: It is SO worth it to call in professional back-up once or twice a year. After reading my tips, you may be horrified at how little is actually cleaned in the home of someone who claims to be clean at heart. It's true! There isn't time scheduled regularly for the fridge, the cupboard faces, the oven, the storage room, light fixtures, windows, etc. etc. etc. etc.. What I realized after trying to get to these things (and having sesame oil dumped on the carpet while I cleaned the fridge, for example) is that I already HAVE a full time job! I am a homeschooling mother of 4 children. They are my priority. No one benefits from crazy-high cleanliness standards and a mother gone crazy trying to keep them.

So once or twice a year I spend $100 and call in the pros. A team of women knock out in a few hours what would have taken me days of uninterrupted labor, or more likely, weeks of very frequently interrupted effort. While the pros clean, the kids and I join them, doing the stuff that is more easily undone, like the windows, or dusting the floor boards, wiping walls and doors, etc. Then, at the end of a very bearable length of time, I have happy kids, the energy to meet their ever-present needs, and the sparkling, truly clean home my heart craves. For me, this feels like money well spent.

Cleaning is NOT life. That seems obvious, but it is a lesson I had to learn early on in our homeschooling years. I found I could spend hours, day after day, pursuing my dreams of a clean home. I hope my tips might help anyone who feels similarly tempted to waste precious learning and childhood this way. And if that is NOT you, my admiration to your for sensing earlier than I what IS really important in life and finding the strength and courage to live it!

Pros and Cons of Intrinsically Motivated Learning

Learning is it's own reward, isn't it? Don't you love to experience learning that way? We roughly follow "Story of the World" for our history, and present our discoveries in Culture Club and Biography Club - giving us a fun way to remember, summarize, and present what we know. AND act it out - the ever-important costumed aspect of homeschooling in our home.

I was talking to my daughter's online school teacher recently about our woeful lack of progress through the free curriculum they provide. You see, however delightful learning is, when it's done for it's own sake, it can and often does get in the way of completing someone else's program or following someone else's time table.

We were lagging in medieval Rome. I just couldn't get the kids jazzed about it. But we went to Epcot and were fascinated by seeing mini Morocco. So in our learning we opted to skip Rome (for now) and we hopped over to catch a bit of Islam, another snatch of Africa, and supplemented with whatever we could get our hands on about Morocco in the library.

Having felt we wrapped our minds around Morocco, we voted to learn more about medieval Africa, and I hope that circles us back to the rest of Islam. And if it doesn't, between now and whenever, I'll be hunting for more reasons to get interested in all of what we may have missed.

We are blessed to be part of a school that is very supportive and understanding. As I explained this to the teacher, and offered no feedback on their incentive programs to facilitate curriculum completion, the teacher remarked, "I think it's wonderful that the kids can be intrinsically motivated."

I agree. And confess I haven't really tried to push any motivation beyond the fun of learning on my kids. I'm sure they would likely be interested in a "progress party" or their own personal pan of "progress pizza." It's hardly like my kids are immune to such bribery.

But I have concluded what you know doesn't mean much without a compelling, personal, "why this is important to me." In other words, I love that by homeschooling, my children's educations are filled with what is relevant, interesting, and important to MY kids. And I don't care much that whatever that is might be different from YOUR kids, or "Utah's kids" (a phrase that makes me cringe) or any other group of kids.

"But Stephanie," you might interject, spelling my name wrong, "don't kids need to learn that life isn't all fun? It's not all about what interests them? That sometimes they might have to just buckle down and do and learn something because that is what is done and known?"

Yes, kids need to learn this. But this is one lesson in a life-time of lessons, many of which WILL teach that very thing. THAT lesson should not underwrite all other learning. But too often it does. We drill that in so diligently in society these days, and never stop to consider first, that the rest of what we are teaching is weakened when we fail to worry about whether or not children care to learn what they are taught. So not only are we teaching that learning is an unpleasant, irrelevant task, but secondly, when we continuously disengage children from their own sparks of interest, we distance them from the self-awareness that brings meaning and joy to life.

I love homeschooling because we DO learn. It may not always be what some expert has deemed the most important learning of all the learning to be done. But the lesson beneath and through all other learning is always aiming to be: learning is a delightful journey you will enjoy in ALL the ups and downs of life. In fact, learning IS life! Today is a great day to follow the sparks!

Reason #1,687: Knowing the Whole Person

The schools are out today for parent teacher conference! Annoying! I miss my little town with no one out and about during the day but me and my kids and the other homeschoolers we bump into along the way. Oh well!

I've never gone to a parent-teacher conference, so I thought I'd share an experience from one my mother attended. :) She was visiting the teacher of my little brother who was in second grade at the time. The teacher told my mother that she "loved his outfits." My mother was completely unsure what this meant, as my family was not the sharpest dressers back in the day (or any day, as a general family rule)... and besides that, who refers to boys clothes as "outfits"?

How she arrived at the teacher's meaning, I don't now remember, but the reality was that my brother would head out the door looking like a normal kid and arrive at school dressed as a leprechaun, or old man golfer, movie character, or whatever else struck his fancy. My mother had no idea!

It's a funny story, but we likewise really had no idea about my mother's life while we were off learning about "more important things." Consequently, I had to wait to become a mother myself to figure out what being a mom really entailed. (Maybe SHE put on elaborate outfits when WE were gone too! I never thought of asking!)

Perhaps there were things I gained in school I might not have been able to learn elsewhere, but this understanding of my mother was one thing I lost. And she lost a fuller understanding of who her children were as well.

I suppose you can't have it all. There are pros and cons, gains and losses to all decisions we make. I am grateful I homeschool because I love seeing my children in their full selves. (Or at least as much as anyone outside another person can.)

I haven't met any parent that thought his or her child was perfect, but I cringe a bit when kids are described in terms of the problems they have or create in school, or like a set of talents and skills for the classroom. In defense of these parents, or at least these sorts of parental conversations, I think I would personally find it challenging to NOT see a child that way when my time with them each day was largely limited to how willing or unwilling they were to move through a set of tasks determined by adults who have a transient relationship with my children. And if seeing beyond the to-do's related to school would be difficult for me, how much more challenging would it be for a child to see a parent as more than the person who is constantly reminding them what needs to be checked off that to-do list?

A friend of mine a long time ago told me her 5 year old son reported that he would never get married because he didn't want a wife always telling him what to do. It was a funny comment, because every husband and wife know wives are not JUST people that tell husbands what to do. But we do see one another in terms of the roles we play. I love homeschooling because while that is still true, my full role is on display daily, AND I get to chose the rules, set the priorities, decide what gets put on my to-do list. Perhaps more importantly, and certainly leading to a fuller understanding of my children, they each do that for themselves as well.

I hope on MY to-do list often enough is spending some quality time with each child, coming to know his or her inner soul. Finally I hope to teach my sons and daughters THAT is what a mother is - someone who knows our inner person, and has time and love enough for whomever he or she is.

Reason # 37: Creating Perfect Moments

The thoughts below illustrate how wonderful homeschooling can be. While the perfect moments are not mine, they could be! Hope you enjoy this post from a homeschooling mom in my area... AND a few perfect homeschooling moments of your own!

*******

     I’ve been repeating in my head a phrase I heard a month or so ago:  “There are no perfect days, just perfect moments.” 

     Yesterday I was blessed to have some perfect moments—the kind that make me so happy I homeschool.  It’s THESE kind of moments that are, to me, the epitome of why homeschooling is so wonderful.

     My 4 boys were all occupied with chosen activities elsewhere yesterday afternoon, so it was just me and my 9-year-old daughter at home.  She is intensely musical.  I pulled out a new song I found for her to learn to sing and accompanied her on the piano while she sight-read it.  We then worked on her piano lesson.  And then, even better, my favorite moments came.  As you know, yesterday was beautiful outside.  She put on her rollerblades, and I put on my running shoes, and we took off into the sunshine.  As we sped-walked/skated our way down the street, we held hands and sang the times table (I got it for her to music because she’d learn it best that way).  Then I quizzed her randomly on multiplication facts.  All this while we’re cruising along, stopping now and then to notice signs of spring or the neighbors’ animals.  She became very interested in the clouds overhead, trying to identify them (we recently learned about cloud types and what they forecast).  I saw a robin and pointed it out and she said, “He looks like Ben Weatherstaff’s robin!” (We’ve recently read The Secret Garden.) Then we talked about where and how we might build our own secret garden at home.  Amazingly, in a one-hour walk we covered every “school subject” (including P.E. and health), personalized and assimilated them, laughed ourselves silly at times, and strengthened our relationship with each other.

     I hope everyone finds a few perfect moments today!

     Sasha

Unsolicited Love Advice (just a tad late for Valentines Day)

I'm trying to find a way to fit in to the context of my blog what I have to say about love. But this is, in fact, probably one of the most unlikely places to post this sort of advice. So all I can say to justify these thoughts here is that in life, and especially in homeschooling, most of what we teach really boils down to what we are. So though there may not be structured lessons on being a good spouse, for better or worse, you can bet that is what your children are learning at home with you.

Anyway, it's likely those of us who did not marry a high school sweetheart can relate to feeling like the people we thought we loved before we found the person we married, we didn't really love at all. "Ah," we said to ourselves when we found the right one, "THIS is what love is. What I thought was love before was something else, something less than what I have with this person."

I think we are right... and wrong. What we have found in the person we want to spend the rest of our lives, even eternity, with IS love. And it is more of it. What we had with former love-interests was probably, however, NOT the absence of love, but just a lower, baser form. That is okay. There are probably few 19 year-olds that can wrap their minds, let alone their lives, around the sort of selflessness that encompasses a more mature love.

Most of us are still at some phase of immaturity when it comes to love. THAT is okay too. Working, happy relationships can be found at every place on the continuum of love maturity. Often what strains a relationship is not where a couple falls on that continuum, but when one person falls noticeably behind another.

We watched a movie about Einstein, and it seems that his great mind was stuck in an adolescent capacity to give love. If you feel your spouse may be stuck right there with him, the first thing I would say is, it's time to embrace the reality that you have not married a perfect person. That is good news for all of us coming to this realization, because if our spouses were perfect, they may have wanted to marry other perfect people, and that would not have been us!

Yet we ARE loved, despite our imperfections. And our comfort is that while an imperfect spouse gives love imperfectly, we can still receive a perfect love from God to fill in the gaps. Remember that God loves us and waits for us to do our best and become better. We can practice becoming like Him while we wait for a spouse to do his or her best and become better.

So that is the first piece of advice: accept and forgive your spouse's place on the love continuum.

Next piece: Ask for the kind of love you need.

I think this is hard to do because we have all tried it, and instead of having our needs met, have been met with attack - because WE ourselves have made the people we love wrong for wanting more from us. We have taken a turn attacking, and being attacked. (Argh! I do this far too often with the needs of my children! But I suppose that is another post....)

(I do want to interject here, while I'm interjecting and filling this post with parentheses, that I'm not talking about physical or extreme emotional abuse. Blessedly, I don't have experience in a love relationship with people who resort to those tactics. I'm speaking here of love. Not of being used.)

So when you ask your spouse to grow in love, to progress on the love continuum, if he or she fails to act or change, you can continue to accept and forgive. And pray for him or her. THAT is HUGE. (As you have probably learned from homeschooling, the learner must be willing and ready for learning to occur. You can't coerce learning in academics OR in love.) We can even meet attacks with direct communication: "So what you are saying, essentially, is that you are unable at this time to love me in this way?" And importantly, add, "Okay." (I'm not saying you need to use those words, just that you communicate an attack - being made wrong for needing more from a spouse - IS a "no" to your request. And that you accept it.)

Final piece of advice: Never make the people you love wrong for needing you to love better or more.(In other words, never be the attacker. I DEFINITELY need to do better in this with my kids.) We MAY be busy, preoccupied, consider their needs immature or trivial. Their needs may be born of insecurity or weakness. We may have real-life time constraints in what we are able to do. And we might be right. But when we love someone, all of this "story" - our reasons and excuses - don't matter. What matters is what we are going to do about their needs. In the very least, those we love deserve our understanding, our empathy, and our desire to help. At times, this may be, in fact, ALL they need. For these demonstrate our own willingness to enhance our loving and progress in the love continuum.

I feel so blessed to homeschool, to be with my family right in the thick of what really matters. God has even said love - charity - is what matters most to Him. This month is a perfect time to up your loving game!

Travel Report: The BEST Souvenirs

We've been back from Florida for around 2 weeks now. I'm past telling everyone the trip was a bust - a view likely fueled post-trip exhaustion. But the highlights have also had time to settle out. And the ever-present critic inside has a list of the things she'd do differently for next time. So it's time to write and get a bit of all of it off my chest.

First, the background. While my hubby and I were regular world travelers in our BC lives (BC being Before Children) the most we'd done with 3 kids was a road trip. This was a 12 day trip with 4 kids in tow ON AN AIRPLANE. Whoa!

A few weeks before we left, the magnitude of the disaster we could be in for hit me. It hit as my not-yet-two-year-old was throwing the food he wasn't interested in anymore on the floor. Another wave of it crashed as my 4 year old whined for hours about a host of minor issues. And still another wave came on as I watched she and her older sister bicker about ridiculous things, and observed how I, with my small portion of patience, dealt with it all.

Fearing the worst, I enlisted my best parenting practices and constructed a count-down chain. On each link I'd written the behavior we would be practicing for the day - all behaviors attempting to lead up to children who would not bring shock and horrific awe to the lovely folks in the east who feel 4 children is a lot. I didn't want to confirm their biases with MY kids.

Anyway, among other things, we practiced:
Living on a schedule: The schedule was geared to keeping a routine for the trip. "School work" WAS required. It was brief (as always), anticipating that on the trip, I would have them do SOMETHING, like record what they did for the day and why they liked it. We also scheduled and practiced quiet time. That was to not only to give hubby and me down time, but so that they could grow in self-entertaining abilities in a confined space. (They self-entertain GREAT at home, but it isn't necessarily quiet or in one spot.)

This payed off. I did not, as I had anticipated, hold to any specific schedule OR require anything resembling school work of them. (Though I did suggest from time to time that they could write in their travel journals.) Anyway, this practice DID make the trip smoother, but, the added bonus was that it made the time leading up to the trip smoother too. When I get deep in projects (like prepping 6 people for a 12 day voyage across the country) I can tend to let our daily routines go to pot. That usually leads to the kids' needs being neglected (school needs, but eating, sleeping, and cleaning needs too) and the result is chaos. The chain and our decision to adhere as closely to a schedule as we could (after all, we have very little practice) payed off in pre-trip peace.

We also practiced increasing our gratitude expressed AND our complaints minimized, and taking no for an answer. (This too payed off as the sincere thanks the kids expressed DID make a lot of headache worth it, and we bypassed much of the energy-depleting pleading and griping.)

Finally, (and closely related to what I've just mentioned) we reviewed the concept of letting go - being at peace with what is. I explained that sometimes our trip would be fun, sometimes boring. Some things would live up to our expectations, and other times they would't. I told them we can be happy anyway.

I tried to practice this attitude before we left with my mantra: the adventure starts NOW. I found myself feeling a lot of stress as preparations intensified. (I imagine even seasoned travelers have situations arise where they aren't completely familiar with the rules/how to navigate the literal or figurative lay of the land.) Being absent from Orlando for 20 years, having never gone with kids, I worried. Would I find all the right hotels? Would my efforts to save money pay-off or wind up costing us MORE? Would I pick the right days to hit the right places? Would the weather cooperate? Would our fellow travelers look with admiration at the ear-piercing volume my baby can hit, or would there be daggers in their eyes? These worries dominated my conscious mind. They took energy to juggle and stress over.

Then it hit me: I WON'T maneuver every obstacle, challenge, and decision point perfectly. Period. There will be less than ideal moments. Some I will create. Some will be out of my control. And they are ALL part of the journey. ALL the ups and ALL the downs will be a part of our adventure together, and I can embrace it all IN the spirit of adventure, even before we leave the comforts of our home....

So?

I am pleased to report that the kids were amazing!!! My whiney one rolled smoothly with puking on the final leg of the trip out! All the kids were total troopers in their plastic ponchos in the rain for every Disney day. They even pleasantly suffered with the stomach flu, conveniently hitting only at night when we were on our cruise.

I, however, for all my mantra-ing, didn't fair so well. I just shifted from worry to disappointment. "Seriously? We ALL have to get sick on the cruise?!" "Seriously, it has to rain every stinking day we spend at Disney?" "Seriously? There are STILL lines MID-WEEK IN FEBRUARY IN THE RAIN!!!!?" "Seriously? I'm getting the pat down because there may be a chance this white, middle-aged woman traveling with 4 kids poses a terrorist threat!?"

Okay. So maybe it was less disappointment and more disgust. But I learned from that too!

Related to Disney, I learned, despite all the hype, IT IS AN AMUSEMENT PARK - ergo there is a bunch of over-priced merchandise and food around every corner AND yes! there are lines! Disney is not a life experience - unless theme parks are your life. No judgement if that's you. MY most magical place on earth so far is probably having a whole jungle island to myself and hubby off the coast of Taiwan.

I realized it was foolish, theme parks NOT being my life, to plan a vacation with one primary destination being a theme park. In the future, our family trips might seem more magical to me if we are somewhat remote, surrounded by nature and/or immersed in another culture. And there needs to be plenty of unscheduled down time to explore. This trip's highlight for hubby was a walk we went on to find food on Sunday. Along the way we saw a bunch of cool trees, relaxed with the kids, and saw a bird stalking and having for dinner an unfortunate lizard. So unscripted and in nature seem to be key for him too.

In the end, despite my late Disney revelation, AND despite our various misfortunes, the trip was a smashing success! Why? We benefited from our travel in the best possible ways. Though I thought we were vacationing to get away from the Cache Valley winter, or the post-holiday slump, or to take a break from our routine, or to do something fun, I learned by my experiences what travel really means, and why we need to keep traveling.

First, now I've got a trip behind me, I'm all practiced up and I think I can worry a lot less going into it. But there are more significant reasons than that.

Travel, when we take on it's challenges just right, means we grow in grace as individuals. As we see and know more of the world, we understand better what it means to be American, Mormon, human. We saw so many different people. We heard so many different accents and languages. We ate new food. We tried new things, experienced different climates.

When I was a missionary preparing to go to Taiwan, from time to time I would run into negative reports about the country. It was stinky. It rained a lot. It was so humid. When I arrived, I reported home that it smelled like New York, it rained like Seattle, and was as humid as Florida. Because I had been to all these other places for other adventures, I didn't need Taiwan to be like Utah. My acceptance of Taiwan for how it was didn't miss a beat, nor did my personal confidence to maneuver the uncertain. (Though it was certainly tested.)

I think of grace, among other things, as a confident approach to the unfamiliar, whether it be people, circumstances, or places. Growing up studying ballet, I was blessed to be so repeatedly thrown out of my comfort zone that being out became it's own comfort. The trip was a success, first, because I remembered this aspect of grace. And my children had the opportunity to grow in grace too, making the trip SO worth it because THEY DID.

PS: Other practical points:
Two year olds are too young for cruises. Unless perhaps yours is an only, or the only one traveling with you. Otherwise, cruises are AMAZING with kids. And be sure to order one of all the adult entres on the dinner menus to increase your dining prowess and skip the kid food they will kindly try to provide for your kiddos.

Tourist traps ARE great places to get little tastes of the whole world.

When everyone says "Stay IN Disney World - it's worth it," what they really mean is, "It is so miserable getting in and out of Disney World that even though your hotel has a free and convenient shuttle, it is crowded, not a brief ride, and your young kids, ripe with exhaustion will have their best melt downs there. In reality, what IS 'worth it' is to END the suffering of standing, waiting, and moving in a crowd." Could Disney have come up with such compelling reason? I wouldn't put it past them.