What I have found through the years

What I have found through the years--
[Update -- As a Christian, never forget your first love, our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. If you keep him first in your life, all else will fall in line. If you don't, things will begin to fall apart. Don't let outside relationships and events stir you from your relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ and from what he wants you to do. Stay on a straight and steady course not wavering off the course to be "friends" with someone else. Stay on course. Others are welcomed to join you on the course that God has set for you, but you are not to leave the course (or keep it quiet) in order to maintain a relationship. It has taken me too many to realize this and I have had to greatly pay for my errors. Lay hands suddenly on no man and be discreet. Fathers and mothers should do whatever the Bible tells each parent to do (e.g., Father rules the house and provides for it and Mother guides the house). Live quietly and simply. In your homeschool, read the New Testament even while you are looking for Christ in the Old Testament. Pray, read, and take communion when it is seasonable. Take time to talk to the Lord. Read your Bible. Seek deliverance from any of your besetting sins (deliverance articles 10, 11, 12, 14 apply to most Americans today--and maybe 8 and 9). Love your family and spend time with your children just enjoying them. You are all in this life together (including the little pets that depend on you) for just a little while. Enjoy what you have.]
The Old Testament accounts and narratives are perfectly suited to infant learning. We read about sun and moon, day and night, men, women, children, the earth's topography (mountains, deserts, rivers) etc. The scriptures actually open up the perception to the whole world and even the things that men do. As a preschooler Hannah once asked why Shechem (Gen 34) did not ask to marry Dinah instead of lying with her. Her point was that he could have married her instead of defiling her. That knowledge of your secrets being secret outside of marriage came solely through the ministry of the scriptures. We occasionally used A Beka flashcards and Betty Lukens flannelgraph figures for texture and introduction to foreign lands but no pictures of God, Jesus, and angels.
Hannah did not mind big words and did not need them explained. The context of the reading gave her the meaning. Children don't want you to keep stopping the story to explain every detail.
Because the Bible was important to me it was important to her. She wanted the same Bible that I had. She wanted the same Spanish Bible that I had. As she was learning to read, she would get a Bible and read the words she knew. I remember her once pointing to the big chapter numbers and reciting them out loud. She'd turn the page, see a number she didn't know, stick her little finger on it and say, "What's that?" I'd tell her and she'd continue on to the next number.
After Hannah's reading course was over, she and I read responsively through a Survey of the Gospels so that she could know Jesus. She was four and still in preschool.
She confessed the name of the Lord when she was four (with no prompting from me. I was frying chicken at the time, as I recall, and she asked me to keep explaining a certain tract.).
She asked to be baptized when she was seven (again, no prompting from me. I was scared at this request and had to look up scriptures and ask her questions to justify a little one being baptized.).
When she was seven, her spirit demanded the epistles. The epistles are are written in high, lofty, elevated English with all kinds of high grammar structure but this provided no roadblock. I taught her how to break down each verse into its phrases and extract the meaning. She had been reading several years and this was a time when she could grasp more weighty doctrines. I created worksheets for her to help her draw out the meaning. She'd independently read the passage, and answer the questions. She really dug down in the studies and even did followup studies on her own--including searching questionnaires for her father and I to see how we measured up to the qualifications laid out in the scriptures.
She can still remember truths and doctrines we explored in Year 1 and Year 2--and can rightly apply them.
Early on I thought that since children's minds are like a sponge when they are very small, that would be the time to teach them a lot. My thinking was that when you get older you can't learn as fast. With these things in mind, I felt that preschool and those first two or three years of formal school would be packed and then there would be a relaxation. This has proven to be true. She was taught to read and do mathematics in preschool and for the first 1.5 years of formal school, we had year-round school. Before the end of the second year of formal school, I knew that her basic education was COMPLETE. She was not 6.5 years old yet. It was April and our school year was not over, but I knew we had done enough. I was amazed at how much had been packed in. It was time to ebb. This also proved true with my niece, who was taught the same way by my sister-in-law.
Having heard hymns from infancy, Hannah knew the tunes. After learning to play by ear, she had a collection of music already inside that she could play and musical experience on which to draw when improvising.
She is able to minister to me through music, something that has relieved me and quickened me at various seasons.
She can help me and has been able to do so for a long time. As a baby, she was cute and she let me kiss her. Soon she could clothe herself and make her bed and fold up socks--she was about two. Before you know it, she could cook dinner for my husband when I was in a bind. She can weed. She was scanning for me at a young age and today, she'll format the pictures and show me how to use software. She can write html and some of what you read, she has formatted. Blessed is the man's whose quiver is full of children. I only have one, which not my goal in life, but it seems that that was the design for my life. It has enabled me to focus on fully reporting what I did with one. Perhaps this would have been impossible had I been given more children. It is my hope that this information will benefit multitudes.

If I had it to do over again--

I would have spent less time trying to teach others during those early years and stayed at home--God took care of that in 2006 and now I'm in the house with very little outside contact. I have my stresses but this is the most relaxed I've ever been in my whole life.
I would have prepared my own baby milk (breast feeding was not an option) and food. I would have mashed my own carrots, potatoes, rice, etc. and not bought them in teeny, disposable jars.
I would have paid closer attention to Hannah's dental hygiene and not let her suck her thumb. I'd tell her to brush her teeth and assume the job got done, but at some point I realized that it wasn't. I don't know how I could not perceive this at first--probably too many superfluous things in my head.
I would have let Hannah use a ball board/abacus before 1 year old, count and string beads, and learn our modified manual counting system very early on. This would allow us to explore counting without the hinderance of zeros. THEN I would have started her with the paper and pencil algorithms at 3 when she could read like what we did. I do like the RightStart program that we used. It allowed her (and me) to learn sound modern mathematics early on while her brain was like a sponge--she didn't learn the strange, inane, "number sentence" mathematics that is out today, she learned traditional mathematics which includes the terms that are needed in our society.
I would use teachings we've recently developed (Infant Reading in Three Easy Steps and Counting Exercises) to replace or enhance some of the resources we used
I would talk less and study to be quiet and to be slow to speak. I did not do this early on and we are both still trying to recover from this great transgression. Children will take on your ways.
Hannah would have read fewer books. Reading can be an escape and can be dangerous--even if only Mennonite children's books and testimonies. They can make you just want to be cozy and read.
She would learn more basic skills, skills that I didn't have back then and have come as a result of our schooling--growing all our own food, building, knitting, crocheting, etc.
I would make customized homemade books on good topics, e.g., a collection of pictures of animals in the Bible or farm animals that we rely on. Just get some used magazines from the library used book section, cut out, tape on paper and bind. Things that she should know. and, for thick books, use the bookbinding method developed in our school. You can see it on the Bible download page.
I'd give her our own homemade hornbook (has ABCs on it). In our travels we discovered it and made a replica out of left over cardboard and printing paper overlaid with a sheet protector. One day, I would like to add more and more information to this site about these various projects for the use of others.