Rule of Seven 2019: #7 Restore

Currently, I’m sitting with my husband on the patio at a Starbucks. We are both working while we sip cool drinks and watch people. We are waiting for another couple that we need to have a meeting with. But I’m thoroughly enjoying the breeze. Usually, in late July, Oklahoma is blazing hot and steamy with humidity. Today is too beautiful to be inside. It feels more like our beloved Rockies than the plains of Green Country. 

We haven’t take a big trip this summer. Last summer, we spent the whole summer flipping our old house and moving to our new one. We finally ran away to the mountains to ski in February. Right after school let out, the boys and I made a fast trip to my brother’s house outside of Denver with my mom to celebrate Mother’s Day and to meet a new cousin. 

Since then, we’ve been at home. My dad has been sick, and so we’ve been doing his sizable amount of mowing. We’ve hung around the house and swam in our pool. We’ve had friends over often, and we have cooked many burgers and had long conversations on the back porch. We’ve sat in our library and discussed books, played games around the table, cooked new recipes, and hung out with grandparents. The boys have had way more screen time than I’d like. It’s been a good summer.

So, Restore looks very different right now than it has in the past, but we are starting our school year next year somewhat refreshed and very much ready for a more consistent routine.

Rule of Seven 2019: #6 Record

I haven’t recorded as well as I’d like in the past year. I have barely written anything except Instagram posts, and those have gotten trickier as the boys get older and have opinions about what I should and should not post. I’m happy to honor their wishes, but I do wind up with fewer things that I can write about in public. I have many other ideas for posts that aren’t just about my family, but I don’t have very many moments for writing them. This cartoon is my sermon notes from a month or so ago. I produced something imperfect, but I produced something. If the summarizing doesn’t seem quite right, just know I was capturing the big idea of the sermon in a tiny space.

They have all continued to produce something almost every day, though their media change regularly. Micah is a fan of Instagram and runs an entertaining account about being a musician and a theater tech guy. He does far better at editing photos than I do. He writes stories, poems, songs, musical compositions, and the required essays. Josiah and Gideon write their required essays and also are producing video game videos and other streaming shows. I don’t understand why anyone would want to watch someone else play Fortnite on YouTube, and I have strongly suggested that they NOT use their limited screen time that way. But they do use their screen time to make videos for other mothers to complain about. They have grandiose plans for international fame as video game designers.I’m having trouble wrapping my mind around a world where the money is made in ani invisible world that you can’t find on a map. What kind of weird world are they inheriting? 

Jon is writing on and off, though the Calculus book is finished and published.  He’s writing at Mind Matters, Blythe Institute, and other places. So, things are being recorded and ideas developed – daily – we just aren’t all writing in the same way that we were three years ago. I supposed it would be stranger if we were still doing everything the same way now that we were then.