Family Love Stories
One of the most important things you are doing when you homeschool your children is simply being with them. Because you are together every day, you know their stories.
Parents love to tell stories about their children. As children grow older, they come to love hearing those stories themselves. Remembering and telling someone’s stories is one way to help them feel that they are valuable and they are loved.
Shared stories are especially comforting. One of the joys of a get-together with extended family is telling stories that many in the group remember. A sadness for people in their eighties and nineties is that there are fewer and fewer people who remember their stories from long, long ago.
My mother’s maternal grandparents had eighteen grandchildren. I remember one time when my mother and I, along with one of our daughters and her children (that made four generations), went to the funeral of one of my mother’s first cousins. The eldest of my great-grandparents’ eighteen grandchildren was almost ninety at the time, and we had a great visit with him at the funeral.
As we visited, he said, “I remember the day your mother was born.” He told of how his and mother’s grandmother (who was a midwife) had gone to help my grandmother with my mother’s birth, as had the aunts. He told of the men standing out by the granary while the women helped Granny.
I was excited to hear the story of my mother’s birth from someone who had actually been there. I wish you could have seen my mother’s face when I told her the story I had just heard. I remember how she beamed.
Enjoy the silly things your children do today. Just maybe you will get to witness something that will someday become one of the love stories your family will delight in for many years to come.
By You I have been sustained from my birth;
You are He who took me from my mother’s womb;
My praise is continually of You.
Psalm 71:6