Next Monday Chris and I will be the proud parents of a Valley Christian High School Senior. I am incredibly unsure of what we are doing, but absolutely sure that what we are doing is 100% the right thing.
A some point of every day Chris and I look at each other and say "what would this situation feel like if our student where here?" and I am always encouraged by my husbands answer of "we would treat him like a member of the family". We intend to hold him to the standards of our family and we hope he will embrace us as a home away from home.
With two young kids that we can tote around here and there during the week, we have never allowed ourselves space for our life at home. We have never intentionally thought through our use of technology, we have never settled routine eating habits, we have never created a structured expectation of our evenings as a family. The impending arrival of a high school student has caused us to reflect on our lives in ways that the addition of our two children hasn't. Chris and I are really really good about talking about the changes that we want to make, but not so good at pushing ourselves and each other into enforcing them. We want to eat better, we want to exercise more, we want to spend more evenings playing cribbage over a cup of tea. Unfortunately the chaos of two kids, Chris taking two sets of classes on top of both of us working, we are mostly just living, day to day, getting by. When we talk about our lifestyle we rarely regard it with a smile, but almost always point out the things we desperately want to change. But when do we make our family life a priority and how? How do we start making changes when we have become so comfortable just getting by?
Well for us, I think it is going to be adding another child. We are going to skip the years of waking up in the middle of the night and go straight to calculus homework and cell phones. When we started talking about housing a student we realized there was a lot more to the conversation than just needing an extra bed and a desk. How are we going to manage use of technology and will we have to hold ourselves to the same standards? Can we still make peanut butter and jelly for Scarlett and call it good, while Chris and I scarf down a bowl of canned soup and a tuna melt on the nights that we just have too much going on and can't imagine making dinner? Do we start chore charts and include our student? Do we need a family calendar for social events? We decided yes, we will recenter our lives around the lives that we want to live when our kids are grown. By hosting a student we have forced ourselves to be intentional. We are testing our idolized visions of our future as a family on this new addition.
I am still a little nervous about the changes we will need to make, but I am also excited to start living an intentional life style. This is one crazy jump, but after almost a year of prayer regarding our home and how we can best use it for His good, I know we are exactly where God wants us.
So if you see a random Korean kid popping up in our photos, this is Heon, the newest member of our family.