Making Gifts in "School"

One of the things I love about homeschooling is that you can take the time to indulge a child’s interests. I tend to keep a fairly regular homeschooling schedule with my kids, but when we need to change things, we do so.

That’s what happened at the end of last week. On Thursday we devoted the day to Home Economics. What this means is that I found a really cool new bulk cooking cookbook at the public library (more on this in a future post) and decided that dd16 and I should do some major cooking during the day Thursday and count it as a school day.

While we worked in the kitchen, I mentioned to dd that I still needed to wrap presents for dh’s birthday the next day (one of those major birthdays….let’s just say an AARP card turned up in the mail right on schedule, lol). And she responded dejectedly that she had wanted to make her dad the perfect gift but had been unable to come up with anything. We discussed a few ideas, but nothing caught her fancy.

That night I heard her sewing machine humming up in her room and went to see what she was making. Sure enough, she had come up with a gift idea for her dad. It was a great one, but quite ambitious, and I wasn’t sure she would be able to finish it by the next day.

By the time she designed the project, chose the fabric and cut everything out, it had become obvious to me that she would not get done in time. But she got up at 7:00 the next morning to work on it, and after hearing her sewing machine humming for three hours, I made the executive decision that school would again be Home Economics that day, but this time sewing instead of cooking.

She finished her project after lunch. She chose the subject because one of her dad’s favorite Bible verses is Isaiah 40:31. Needless to say, he was quite taken with her gift.