In the fall of 2000, when my two oldest boys were 9 and 7, they started a business they called, "Micha's Marvelous Munchies and Terran's Terrific Treats".

All my children, but Terran especially just love to bake and he really enjoyed having an excuse to make cookies every day. Micha enjoyed the real-life math he got to do as well. It was a wonderful educational experience on top of getting to earn a little money.

We started by making an ingredient list for several kinds of cookies the boys hoped to make. We took the list to the grocery store and wrote down the prices for each one. Then we looked at the nutrition information on the packages to figure out how much was in each package. For instance, the four pound bag of sugar said it contained 567 1tsp servings! Micha had to figure out how many teaspoons were in a quarter cup - 3 teaspoons in each Tablespoon and 4 Tablespoons in each quarter cup, meant there were 12 teaspoons in each quarter cup. So we divided 567 by 12 to find out how many quarter cups of sugar were in the bag. This brought in a review on rounding. 47.25 is rounded down to 47 quarter cups. Then he had to find out how much each of those quarter cups of sugar cost. He divided the cost of the bag - $1.49 by 47 and got .03, so each quarter cup must cost 3 cents. Then he figured he needed 3/4 cup in each batch of cookies, so the total sugar cost was 9 cents. He did this with every ingredient over a few days until he had figured a total cost for the whole batch of cookies. If I remember right, the cost for a batch of chocolate chip cookies was $1.18.

Next, they determined how many cookies were in a batch. Of course, this required making - and eating - a batch of cookies. Keeping the cookies approximately 3 - 4 inches in diameter, they were able to get two dozen cookies, plus a small amount of cookie dough that found its way into their tummies uncooked. Micha divided the cost of the batch of cookies by 24 and got a cost of .049, or approximately 5 cents per cookie. So, if they sold their cookies for 25 cents a piece - not an exorbitant price - they would get a profit of 20 cents per cookie - not bad!

They were in business! Each afternoon they set up their folding table at the curb in front of our house. The school buses let the kids off right across the street, so there was a built in market for their cookies, and at least a few of those kids came over every afternoon to check out the special of the day.

As the days went on, Micha's math moved to keeping the books for their business. They started out with a $9.00 loan from me, which they quickly repaid. Micha would subtract their cost, which they paid me each day for their ingredients and add the total number of cookies they sold times 25 cents. They considered the cost of extra advertising, and rejected that idea. As it turned out, word-of-mouth worked so well that they ended up being visited by a reporter from the local newspaper and they got their picture in the paper!

I was proud that they had the self discipline to leave the money in the business through that whole season. When snow arrived and it was too cold to sit outside selling cookies, they closed business until spring. When they divided the money in the cash box, they each had more than $10. A jackpot for a 9 and 7 year old, and of course it was off to the toy store for transformers.

The best thing about allowing my children to do this, was seeing the wheels in their head turning toward more business ideas for the future. It was a wonderful way to teach math - both for Micha, who kept the books, and for Terran, who worked with the fractions in the baking department. Who needs Saxon? ;) So, encourage your kids. You just never know where it might lead!

--you can see the picture that was in the paper at http://www.geocities.com/kaetherhome/kids.html---

This is the time of year for looking back over the decisions that we've made and planning ahead for the year to come. One of the things that I've been doing the last few years, as you know, is Daddy's Little Princess.

For the most part, I wouldn't change it if I had it to do over again. There aren't a whole lot of people in this world who get to do what they are passionate about and get paid for it!

If there's one thing, one message I could shout out to the world on this New Year's eve, it would be that you CAN do it! Whatever God has put into your heart to do, you can do it through Him! So many times I hear people say, "oh, I could never do that!" be it in regards to homeschooling, or a home business, or whatever. And that just breaks my heart! You are a daughter of the King! And like most Daddys, He wants you to succeed in all areas of your life. In everything that He calls you to do.

So, if you're a mom who is struggling financially and debating going out to get a part time job, or if you're feeling useless at home - desperately needing to get outside of yourself and give to others, consider starting a home business/ministry this year. It may be something that's been niggling at the back of your brain for a while and you think, oh, I could never do that - or I don't have any skills that anyone would pay for. Trust me, I used to think the same thing!

So first of all, tell the voice inside your head that says, "I can't" to take a hike! Then pray. First, ask the Lord to guide you as to His will for your life. First of all for His timing. If you are struggling financially, He may be calling you to start a home business or He may be wanting you to learn to rely on Him alone. If you are feeling useless at home, He may be calling you to start a home business/ministry or He may be calling you to accept your role and give of yourself to your children and husband. His guidance will be for you alone and for you specific situation.

Second, ask for His direction. Take an inventory of your gifts, talents, and passions. No fair saying, "I don't have any." That's a lie from the Enemy himself! Even if your greatest passion is something "unproductive" like watching old movies, you could write reviews and send them out in an e-newsletter, set yourself up as an affiliate with Amazon.com or a similar company that sells those old movies and build a website with links helping people to find a place to purchase those difficult to find, but family friendly black and white and colorized films. Perhaps you could even go so far as to provide a rental service through the mail as some have done, but just for old movies. Hard as it may be to believe, people will listen to YOU and to your opinions in the area of your passion. Sure, not everyone will agree with you. This world would be a pretty boring place if we all agreed with eachother, wouldn't it? But, in any case, whatever your passion, there is something that you can do with it. Don't believe me? I challenge you to stump me - write to me at hmschlrof6@yahoo.com. :)

Third, continue to ask for His guidance as you do some research. Check out the laws in your state. Do you need a business license? Here in Wisconsin, only certain businesses need a license. You will probably want a checking account in your business name. Your bank can help you with that. The easiest way to get started in a business is over the internet. "Rent" consists of registering a domain name and having your website hosted somewhere - much less expensive than a store front downtown! Also check into tax ramifications. It's not as complex as you might think, though. It may be in your best interest to set up your company as an incorporation or an LLC. I am pretty sure that is where Daddy's Little Princess is headed this year, but if I'd worried about that the first year I got started, it's a pretty good bet that Daddy's Little Princess would not be in existence today. I would have gotten scared and run far far away! :) But, it isn't very hard to call your business a sole proprietorship. Tax time consists of filling out a form called a schedule C which basically boils down to your total earnings minus your total expenses - which you file along with your 1040. Not too difficult!

Finally, network with other Christian families to get the word out about your business. Write to me and I will put an ad in this newsletter about your family friendly business. Put your web page address in the sig line of all your emails. Frequent bulletin boards and e-mail discussion groups. Usually you can mention your business briefly in those places or others can mention it for you. One great place to get to know others who are "crazy" entrepreneurs is on a site like that of my friend, Rhea Perry!

Many parents have asked me over the years about teaching their child to read. There are huge amounts of curriculum out there - fancy schmancy phonics programs with flash cards and progress charts or scripted - say this now - kind of formats. How much should we expect to spend on teaching a child to read? How much time and tears should be invested? Is this kind of a formal setting even the best way to teach your child to read?

I'll admit, I looked at my share of phonics curriculums, and even liked parts of each one, but in the end I had to ask myself, "why should I pay a lot of money for something I can do myself?" Does teaching a child to read even have to be a formal process, or can it fit into my overall homeschooling philosophy based on Dt. 6:7?

In the end, my first son pretty much learned to read on his own while I tried to figure out how to teach him! Well, somewhat on his own.

Just as we took the next step when he was learning his first words and his colors and shapes, so we took the next step in learning to read. The first step was simply to read to him - as much as he would let me. We made it a habit to read before bedtime from the time he was born, so that at least was one time each day when I knew I could get my active toddler to sit down next to me and listen to a story. As we read, I might point out a letter here and there. "Do you see this, Micha? This is an A. We made our own alphabet books with pictures of things he was very familiar with for each letter and used these as our bedtime story occassionally.

Maria Montessori explains the didactic steps very well in her writings... 1. "This is". Show the child the letter or object and say, "This is a..." and tell him what it is. Do this naturally as God gives you the opportunity in your reading together and in your life. There are letters all around us. Use them!

2. "Which is?" Show the child two or three letters and ask "which one is the letter A?" Sometimes a child may know the answer but still find it hard to articulate. This approach gives him the opportunity to see the answer in front of him and even answer without speaking. This makes teaching a toddler to read possible even if he doesn't speak yet! Sound surprising? I've actually seen it done. One of my younger sisters was taught to read by my mom before she was two. If you showed her two or three phrases and asked her "which one says..." she could point to the right one every time. You could even write a phrase such as, "Where are my glasses?" and she would go find them. So it is perfectly possible. But I digress...

3. "what is?" Finally, you can ask them, "what is this letter?" and the child can tell you the answer. The important points in all this are to keep the learning sessions as natural and as short as possible and to have fun! If the child does not remember that this letter is called A, tell him - not in a condescending - of course you wouldn't remember - tone, but as if you just remembered it yourself. You can point out some of the clues like the pointy top of the letter and the bar across the middle that looks like the end of the swingset in the backyard, but in the end, if he doesn't remember, that's ok. He'll probably get it next time. After all, he is still pretty little.

When my oldest son was 18 or 20 months old, we started pointing out the letters all around him. When I made up some homemade flashcards to teach him his letters, I was amazed to find that he already knew most of them. We did find a use for those flashcards, playing matching games. Index cards are wonderful things! We found pictures in magazines that went with each letter, some letters we had many pictures for, some only one, and we glued one picture onto each card. Now we could play "concentration" - turning the cards all upside down in a grid format on the floor, turning up two at a time and checking to see if they were a match. If the two cards were a letter B and a picture of a bicycle, (or a bicycle and a banana) it was a match and could be kept. We could also just lay the cards out on the floor and match them up without any specific game format. I still remember the cards my mom made like this when I was little and stretching them across the livingroom floor from A to Z with all the pictures that started with that letter next to the letter cards.

My son wasn't even two years old, and didn't know his alphabet song, but he knew the name of every letter like they were old friends. No curriculum did that - and no genius intellect in my son - although I consider him to be pretty smart - just a natural learning environment. One of my favorite homeschooling authors, Marilyn Howshall, says that if you want to teach your child anything - no matter what the topic - you should simply fill yourself up with it, become passionate about it, and it will naturally flow out into the lives of those around you. If you fill yourself up with good books, if you are excited about reading, if you have fun reading with your child, you will hardly be able to keep him from learning to read.

So, my son knew his letter names. Now it was time to take the next step - learning the letter sounds. In Seigfried Englemann's book, "Give Your Child a Superior Mind" (I know the title sounds terribly prideful, but the information in this out of print book is wonderful!) he lays out a logical progression for teaching children the letter sounds. First start with f,l,m,n,r,s,and x. All of these letters have their sound at the end of their name. If you say the letter's name and just hang on to the end - like effffffffff - you'll hear the sound quite clearly. Second, go on to the letters b,d,j,k,p,t,v,and z. These have the sound at the beginning of their name. You could make some index cards with pictures of 15 children with these letters on their shirts, read the story of the Sneetches by Dr. Seuss, and then play a game about the end sounding letters who thought they were better than the beginning sounding letters. After my children knew these fifteen letters well, I next went on to the short vowels. With a,e,i,o,and u we could start building and sounding out words. We had a little song that we sang when we were sounding out a new word - c,a,t, say it faster, c,a,t, say it faster, c,at, say it faster, cat! Now he could read the word on the bathroom door that said MEN and he did, every time we were at a place with public restrooms!

Finally, there are the letters that you just have to memorize, c,g,h,q,w,and y. These took longer to learn, but that didn't hold us back from reading lots of books and playing matching games with the upper and lower case letter flashcards. Whenever there was a word I knew my son could manage in the book we were reading, I'd ask him to figure it out. Eventually he realized that he was reading more of the words than I was. What a revelation! He could read! And I found that he knew those difficult letters too, just by seeing them over and over again.

By then I realized that we didn't need a curriculum to tell us what to learn and how to learn it. I got children's books from the library and an old Dick and Jane type reader that had been my husband's, and we simply continued to read together. I never made flashcards for the letter combinations like sh and ch and ing. When we found those blends and diphthongs in the words in our book, I simply pointed them out, just like we had pointed out the green truck when he was tiny. When we saw a word like eat, we talked about the two vowels that stood next to eachother and how the a made the e say his name, but we never filled out a workbook page, circling the diphthongs in all the words on the page! I still remember hating those phonics workbooks and how pointless they seemed to me, even as a first grader, even as a child who already knew how and loved to read. As time went on, my children needed fewer and fewer reminders.

One of the disadvantages I've seen of working with a reading curriculum is getting bogged down on getting a particular phonics rule mastered before allowing your child to go on. I've found in every area of my life that when God wants me to learn something new He will drop the topic in front of me, maybe just in some aside comment made by a friend. I may not understand it right away, but while life goes on, in the midst of everything, God will let that topic come up over and over and over again. I will be reading a book or talking to someone after church and out it will pop. Until eventually I start seeking out more information and reading more and more about it, and it becomes a part of me. Learning to read is just like that. Each new concept is explained, and then the real reading continues. It will surely come up again on its own. There's no need to harp on it. And after a while, that concept will be a part of your child's reading strategy and suddenly one day you will be surprised to realize that he's got it! This drastically reduces the time it takes a child to learn how to read. While one child is spending day three on the br combination, the other is reading real books. And then the parents wonder why my child can learn to read before he's even "school age" and love reading while their son struggles with and hates br?

The sooner we learn that life IS learning and how to ask the Holy Spirit what the next step is, and then simply take it, the better off both we, and our children will be.

Have you ever noticed how many times in God's Word, He compares human beings to plants? Psa 128:3 Thy wife [shall be] as a fruitful vine by the sides of thine house: thy children like olive plants round about thy table.

Jhn 15:5 I am the vine, ye [are] the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing.

Mat 3:10 And now also the axe is laid unto the root of the trees: therefore every tree which bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire.

Not to mention passages like "Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not turn from it." - which I have come to understand recently also has tree/plant connotations - training in the sense of training a young tree and pruning it as needed!

Last weekend, our family devotion centered on the idea of trees, comparing deciduous trees (those that lose their leaves each year) to Christians whose faith seems to wax and wane, and conifers (evergreens) to Christians whose faith is constant. It got me to thinking all over again about the many tree metaphors the Lord has shown me over the years.

The author of the devotion urged the readers to be conifer Christians, always green and growing. But is this a realistic expectation? It seems to me the normal Christian life IS a life of cycles and seasons, more like the deciduous tree.

Like the trees, we are called to go through seasons of emptiness at times. God calls us to let go of certain things, idols or pet sins. He calls us to drop these things, as the trees are called to drop their leaves.

Did you ever notice that there are some trees that seem to drop their leaves quickly and easily? There isn't much color change to these trees. It just starts to be autumn and they know it's time to let go. Other trees hang onto those leaves for dear life. The maples around here are some of the last trees to drop their leaves, and they are also the reddest.

In my morbidly poetic teenage years :) I imagined that red color to be the blood of the trees fighting against the coming winter. But I realize now that winter is not the demonic, terrible thing that I'd imagined. It is a season, created by God, a necessary part of life, through which the only true growth can happen. So we have a choice; we can obey God's calling as He makes it clear to us, and let go of the sins and idols of our lives quietly and quickly, or we can fight against God's plan for our lives, hang on, and suffer the much deeper pain that comes from that choice.

In the stillness of the winter, after the leaves have been dropped, God's moonlit snow and ice transforms the barren trees into creatures of true beauty. Beauty that comes from God, not from ourselves.

The winter is often still a difficult season to be in. Some winters are harder than others, but God is there with us through all of them. Just as when a tree has been cut down, you can see by the size and shape of the rings which years have been colder winters or dry years, so God promises that He sees every tear and has written them all down in His book. The coldness of yet another miscarriage, the dryness of a move to a new home where you don't know anyone yet - God sees them all and allows them, in the hopes that we will snuggle in closer to him and allow His life to begin to flow through us.

As His life flows through our veins like the sap beginning to flow through the trees, our growth will begin to show on the outside and a new greeness will come forth with the excitement of a spring breeze, showing God's handiwork to all around.

The spring is such a beautiful season to be in! Everything sings with a joy that can hardly be surpassed! The love of God for us and our love for Him can be almost tangible. God's lessons of the winter have begun to show in our growth.

As spring moves into summer, it is easy to feel this green fullness will last forever. The warm rains and sunshiny days of God's Word and fellowship with other believers begin to fill out the fruit that has begun to grow.

And then, the autumn comes again. First the fruit ripens, which can be small and sickly or large and juicy sweet, depending on how much good or bad has gone into the tree/Christian throughout the summer. It's probably no coincidence that it is in the same season that the fruit comes to ripeness and then the leaves fall again. Just as in the parable of the wheat and the tares, there have been sins and wrong thinking mixed in with truth and faith. After all, we're human. So after the fruit has ripened and been harvested, the wrong that must be weeded out is pointed out by the Lord yet again and the leaves of sin must fall. Most plants are pruned in the fall too. And God will prune away all of the dead wood and selfishness, to help us grow so as to produce the best possible fruit for our type of tree.

That's one of the other neat things about trees. Just as there are many different types of fruits, but none better than the others, so God has made us all to bear different types of fruit. I may bring forth apples while another brings forth pears and another olives. The fruit we bring forth is determined by God to compliment the variety within the body of Christ. I can't wish to be an olive tree if He made me to be an apple tree, but through His pruning and watering through all the seasons of my life, I can be the very best apple tree I can be.

So, can Christians be conifers? I don't think so. I think that the evergreen is the perfect symbol for God, the never changing, always loving, always just, eternal Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. But at least on this earth, I think Christians have to be content to be deciduous trees. The letting go of autumn and the starkness of winter may be difficult to bear at times, but as deciduous trees we can bring forth the most wonderful fruit!

Yesterday morning, my five year old came up to me and asked for another band-aid. You know how band-aids just seem to be the cure- all for kids? Often it's for the tiniest little scrape. So I looked, and she had a fairly large scab on her ankle. It's actually been there a few days, but I noticed it was bleeding a bit again. She'd been picking at it.

I asked her, "honey, why are you picking at your scab?" She said, "I wanted to see if it was done yet. But God hasn't healed me yet."

Isn't that just like me! How many times God has promised me something, and I keep checking, "is it done yet?" - poking at it, "can I hurry things along?" Only making things worse in reality!

And maybe the band-aid isn't such a bad idea. No matter how small or large the promise that we're waiting for, perhaps putting it under a spiritual band-aid of sorts would help with the waiting process. It would be a reminder that, yes, God has promised this to me, and yes He is working on it. And it would keep my fingers out of the works, wanting to make God's promise happen in my own strength. Thank God for band-aids! :)

When I finished teaching violin and piano in December, my children were thrown a bit off by no longer seeing some of their friends that used to come for lessons. I was surprised to see some pretty ugly attitudes when they asked for so-and-so to come over and I said, not today. When being asked to play with a younger brother produced the same ugly attitude, I knew something drastic had to be done. :)

Tamara went on e-bay (a new adventure in itself!) and bought the least expensive instruments they could find for the most part - 2 violins, 3 mandolins, and a banjo! They found books of music and cd's at the music store and they are proceeding to teach themselves to play!

Perhaps one could make the argument that the NLT isn't purely the Word of God, but I can tell you that for myself, it "woke up" my sleeping Spiritual senses, and whatever was God's Word still in it, soaked into the dry ground of my heart. Not far into the year, I found I had a hunger for more and more of God!