Take Every Thought Captive

Hubby and I were laying in bed Saturday night chatting about the kids.  I told him about how the way the kids do math is the perfect example of their individual personalities.  Friday morning all of the kids were sitting in the living room working on math.  I asked all of them if they needed help with their lessons.

David insisted that he didn't--but he really did but only admitted he needed help after working himself into a total frenzy where he was super upset.  Lizzy insisted that she did need help--but she really didn't and then moaned and groaned for ten minutes about how she didn't get it when she'd just done pages of the same problems yesterday.  Joy said that she could do it herself, but I read the directions to her anyway--which she completely ignored and just colored in her math book however she wanted.

Then I expressed my concerns about David's lack of writing and spelling skills.  For a highly gifted child who can read at a very advanced level and can do math like it's nothing, it makes no sense to me why he cannot spell and why all of his writing assignments look like chicken scratch with atrocious grammar, sentence structure, punctuation, capitalization, etc.  I've tried just about everything I can think of to help this child and nothing sinks in.

I should have seen it coming.  The doubt and thoughts of my homeschooling abilities not being good enough. That David would be an excellent speller and writer if he were in school.  Trying to come up with a way where we could afford to send him to private school in the fall since I'm clearly failing him.

I was praying in church, these thoughts running through my head, and I recognized them for what they were--Satan's attacks on my confidence.  Filling me with doubt and confusion and fear of failure.  I told those thoughts to shut up and go away, that I refused to believe the lies.  The thoughts vanished in a puff of smoke.

And then I realized something further.  I hadn't had a moment like that in a long time.  This used to be how I thought all. the. time.  I was paralyzed by every decision I had to make.  I could not make a decision without analyzing every minute detail, second guessing myself, worrying that I was making a mistake, a captive to fear of failure.  I was the reed blowing in the wind.  I used to drive my Hubby crazy!

I came home from church with a plan.  Our current spelling program clearly isn't working, so I ordered a new one, All About Spelling, that I had been considering for a while and had even gone so far as to purchase the teacher's manual last year to look over.  We're going to approach spelling like I approach math--an essential subject that we do every single day no matter what.  We will review the phonograms over and over until they are permanently embedded in David's brain.

I will make Hubby teach David all his spelling tricks--apparently there is a secret word code that I knew nothing about until last night.  When you encounter a word you have never seen before, you can look at the word and try to find patterns or roots from other words--like parsimony.  Hubby asked me how I would say that--par/sim/uh/nee.  Wrong!  He pointed out that he'd recognize that "imony" is also found in alimony and testimony.  So he'd know parsimony is actually--par/si/mone/ee.  Huh.   You learn something new every day.  And this is why Hubby always skunks me whenever we play any word games together.

I'm so glad that today's brush with stinkin' thinkin' was short lived and that I can now recognize it for what it is--lies.  That I am no longer a slave to worry and stress and anxiety.  To be able to come up with a plan in less than 24 hours is nothing short of a miracle considering where I started from.


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