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Help With Your Mother's Rule

Help With Your Mother's Rule is a forum for women who want trouble-shooting help with their Mother's Rules or about any aspect of the 5 Ps of the married vocation.
Ask Holly: This blog is composed of your questions.Contact me at the address listed on Holly's Notebook page and I will post questions and answers. Please share your unique ideas as well. The more ideas and experience we share, the more successful every mother will be in designing her own unique Mother's Rule.
Holly Pierlot

A Mother's Rule of Life Companion

Establishing Your Practical Rule - Printable Workbook

Where I Can Purchase the Mother's Rule Workbook

Saturday, April 14, 2007

How to Discipline a Child Who Lies

Dear Holly,
I was inspired by your talks recently at a Home Schooling Conference in St. Louis. Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts with us. I especially gained much from the talk on discipline. Already, just taking on the mindset of a teacher has helped. I realized that often I take the children's infractions personally. Thinking of myself as a teacher helps remove the issue of taking
things too personally. THANKS!!

I wanted to ask you a question about discipline. My daughter is 4-1/2. She is a very strong willed child--and has three older brothers which probably doesn't help much with that. Anyway, she has begun to lie...a lot! I've tried talking to her about telling truth. How it's important to always tell truth to mommy and daddy. It's not working. I even succumbed once to putting soap in her mouth (something I was subjected to as a child and I think it worked with me!!). I'm struggling to think of a natural consequence for lying that isn't too subtle for a 4 year old. Any ideas?
Labels: 4th P Parent

posted by Holly at 8:32 PM 7 comments

Monday, April 09, 2007

Struggling With Inconsistency

Dear Holly,
I struggle with inconsistency. What is at the root of inconsistency? I get enthused about trying something new, or setting a schedule, (ie. attending daily Mass, nightly prayers as a family, etc.) but find my ability to stick with it soon fades. It greatly bothers me that I never manage to follow through with these things and find excuses not to.
Labels: 2nd P Person

posted by Holly at 4:50 PM 2 comments

How Do I Find Time to Get Started?

Dear Holly,
I was fortunate to attend the recent Homeschooling conference in St. Louis, MO and greatly enjoyed hearing you speak. I've read your book all the way through once and continually pick it up to go through it in bits and pieces. I long for the balance and peace you found through your establishment of a Rule. However, with 6 kids, church work, homeschooling and just simply LIFE, I feel like I need a week to myself with no kids or husband bringing interruptions to get a Rule of Life in place. How do you, or others, suggest one contemplates a rule and then actually implements it amoungst the daily comings and goings? I find myself struggling to find time to even create a "To Do" list for each day, let alone the time it seems it would take to establish a rule.
Labels: About a Rule of Life

posted by Holly at 4:42 PM 1 comments

Large Family, Homeschooling, and Perseverance

Dear Holly,
I have read your book and am now rereading it. I think the first time I was looking for the magic fix and now, out of sheer desperation, I am looking at the spirit of the rule and trying to take it to heart. I have just had baby #6, who is 14 weeks, and I have 5 other children ages 2 to 11. We have had some major life upheavals in the past few months with emergency surgeries and hospitalizations of two of my children. As a result, homeschooling has become completely overwhelming but I know that I need to persevere. I am sure you hear these stories all of the time.

First of all, what do I do with all of my little ones and the unplannable interruptions. It is hard to plan demand feedings, fussy babies, and destructive, energetic toddlers into the equation. I have read so many homeschool ideas for babies and toddlers that seem like they were written by someone with 2 schoolkids and maybe one baby. I have 3 in school and 3 to corral. Every day, every hour is so unpredictable that I don't know how I could make a schedule flexible enough until my babies grow up.

Also, what in your experience is the best homeschool approach for someone with a large family. Again, so many great programs seem to be aimed at moms with more time and flexibility. I feel strongly about high standards educationally but there is only so much I can do. Do I need to lower my standards? After 2 years of Seton I have been using A Beka video school this year and just not doing the religion and history for the older kids. I replace them with Catholic studies. I love Catholic Heritage and Sonlight, but they are very time consuming. I know that outside acivities are a major time sucker and distraction so we have cut back quite a bit on those. I want you to know I could have written the first few pages of your book, I was soooo ready to quit last week. My husband encouraged me to keep it up with lots of prayer, and now reviewing MROL has given me hope that there is a solution, I just can't quite grasp it yet. I think that the particular problems of mothers of large families, especially homeschooling, are very different than those with 3 or 4. How does one know when it is in fact too much and that the kids really do need to go back to school? I had to pray fervently to ask God to change my husband's heart to let me homeschool and then when I wanted to put them back in school, he was the one encouraging me to try again. In my heart I do think the kids need to be home, but it is much more difficult than I ever imagined.
Labels: 4th P Parent, Homeschooling

posted by Holly at 3:22 PM 8 comments

Wednesday, April 04, 2007

An Early-Rising Issue

Dear Holly,
Is it virtuous to be an early-riser? I have a son who is almost 5 and is not at all a morning person. My original schedule/rule was to get him and his brothers up at 7:15, which is not really all that early by many standards. But even with this modest wake-up time, it is always a struggle to get him up and out of bed, and a cheerful attitude at this hour of the morning is non-existent. He complains, stays in bed until the threat of punishment is used, is slow to get dressed once he is out of bed, says he can't get dressed or make his bed with out help, and is mean to his 2 younger brothers. I have tried offering incentives if he is able to get up and dressed quickly. I have waffled back and forth between helping him and making him at least try to do things on his own. I have tried singing to him in the morning and tickling him to get him up. I have tried the gradual approach of addressing him only after I have gotten the other 2 boys up and dressed. I have tried getting him to bed earlier, but he only lays awake talking to him self and fighting sleep until 9:30 or so (normal bed time is 8:30). In short, I have tried everything I can think of to make mornings more pleasant for him. All to no avail. I have even let him sleep longer on some occasions, and he will usually naturally wake up around 8am, in a much pleasanter mood. So my question is, am I making this a bigger issue than it needs to be? We don't really need to be up early as we are planning on homeschooling, so should I just take the cues from him and let him sleep longer in the mornings? Or is it important to learn the discipline of getting up early? Is this a question of virtue? Or is there another approach to getting him up and moving that I haven't thought of? Do you or any readers have suggestions on things to try to that I have missed so far?
Labels: 4th P Parent

posted by Holly at 1:39 PM 6 comments

Supervision Quandries

Dear Holly,
Is it realistic for my 4-and-5 year old to handle jobs on their own, as we schedule the work to be done at the same times? For example, if I'm helping my daughter fold and put away her laundry, my son is not following my teaching of his specific job, although he is purely putting his best intentions, efforts, and time in doing his work, but things end up "wetter" in areas I trust him to clean (b/c I've watched him do it) than I like. Are my four-and-five year old precious joys capable (or I may not be as trusting) in the "kinds" of jobs I give to them from start to finish.

When the three of us are working in the home doing our very simple chores (putting clean laundry away), sorting some laundry, making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and "mopping" the floor with a Swiffer of all things, I come back to find that my son has "added" cups and cups of water to the floor while using the Swiffer mop and flooded large areas that I had been trusting him to do-- that's why I purchased the Swiffer so that he would not need to use a mop and bucket (as that was a disaster each time we tried that method). Now, this was all happening when I was helping my daughter to fold/put her clean laundry away (she's good at that but still needs supervision); for example, tonight I went to fetch a pair of what I thought were clean socks from her drawer for bedtime and found her disgustingly dirty socks, unfolded, in her clean socks drawer.

Having given you a small example of a typical tidiness day in our home, I don't know how I can make myself available to supervise and train each child separately, as they become distracted and competitive whenever they're together as I'm teaching them. I can't trust my daughter to do her best while she's learning, and I certainly can't train my boy to do his best and do it the way Mommy shows him over and over without him adding his own 'innocent' ideas of how he thinks the work should be done.

While these things are going on throughout small portions of my day, I can't seem to keep laundry going, dishes kept clean and put away, making breakfast, lunch, and trying to make dinner (which my poor husband most often has to finish up when he gets home around 7:00 each night). My friend dropped over a few days ago, unannounced of course.....yikes........, and although the house was clean it had little piles of undone/disordered places all over the different rooms of my house. I seriously do not have a room that is completed at any given time. This friend, in a warm and heartfelt loving attitude said, "I couldn't live in this chaos; and I don't know how you can either". I admitted to her that I can't. This truly got to me the entire rest of the day, though I felt God quite near me telling me He is sufficiently proud of my efforts.

With NO outside help or friends that I can trust to watch my kids, and my parents being older in their mid 70's and my mom having a life-long history of mood disorder (which greatly affects me to this very day; I'm 40 years old and changes the children's behaviour whenever they go over there), I feel ALONE in keeping this house. And almost tormented by the constant "Mommy, come here, I need you, help I'm scared, I can't do thus-and-such by myself, etc... I find myself stopping EVERY thing that I'm diligently trying to complete or get a handle on, and those things are left undone.
Labels: 4th P Parent, 5th P Provider

posted by Holly at 10:29 AM 1 comments

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