Getting a New Schoolroom....

So, we're finally getting the basement finished.  It's been 3 1/2 l-o-n-g years, 2 contractors, almost twice the money planned for, buckets of tears, and many months of tension to get us to this point....but it's here.  We're moving things downstairs this weekend.  We've been without a school room since before Alivia was born...our old school room started out as being her bedroom until she decided at 6 months old that she didn't like her room and needed to sleep with us.  (Of course, how could she like her room?  It was filled with boxes of papers and books, a very large bookshelf, and a desk with a computer on it...I never got to make the room up for her because the room was still crammed with all of our school stuff!  A vicious cycle for sure...)  Right now, that "old school room" is home to the same boxes, bookshelf, desk and computer, but also my oldest and his cot.  He decided several months ago he needed his own room and his own space and would be happy to sleep on a cot to get that.  So we rearranged a bit and got him his own little space where the cot fits in that room.  (This room will be his own room when things get downstairs, but for now he's sharing it with all the other old school stuff.)

We finally have the basement mostly finished (aside from a bit of trim, a built-in bookshelf, a stair rail, and a cabinet in the bathroom), but the schoolroom is to the point that I can move things down there and start setting up shop.  Now comes the hard part:  organizing.  I have so many ideas and thoughts on how to do it and what I need to purchase and my mind is just spinning with all that has to be done when I start unpacking all those boxes of curriculum and supplies!  Terry will get the big stuff moved around for me and get our school desks brought back over from storage, but I have so much to still do when that all gets here.

So I wonder, what are your favorite items in your homeschool room that you are happy you spent the money to purchase?  Is there an item or a couple of items that you can't do without?  Is there something you didn't buy that you wish you had?  I figure this is my shot to have my room set up the way I want it so I want to make sure I have thought it through.

But, in the end, I have learned a few lessons from this last 3+ years and I wanted to share some of them with you.

1 -- I am a much more patient person than I (or anyone else!) thought I was!

So many times through this process, I've felt like a 2nd thought or an after thought.  I've been quite frustrated and sadly, I've vented my frustrations to a few people when perhaps I shouldn't have. Thankfully, I have vented to friends who were trustworthy and sympathized with me, but also encouraged me as well.  At one point, during this pity party I was having, my sister asked me, "What would you do if Terry came home and said that something happened and you'd not be able to get the basement done for at least 10 years?"  That really made me stop and think about how *I* was handling myself and how much patience I was offering my husband.  This was no picnic for him either...after all, he is the one who ends up with a then-2-year-old's feet in his back every night because she slept crossways in the bed!  God was offering me an opportunity to increase my patience and it was up to me to grasp that opportunity.

2 -- I am actually pretty good at this submission stuff!

Terry will laugh at me if he ever reads that (which isn't likely!) because he is always telling people I'm the boss in the family and that I wear the pants in our relationship.  But we both know that I only make most of the decisions in our family life because he isn't able to from a but-I'm-always-at-work standpoint.  I decide on things that need immediate decisions.  However, when it comes down to it, I defer back to him.  Always.  If he says "no" (flat out) to something, I obey.  {Yes, girls, I did say the word OBEY....look it up, it's in the Bible....we're to obey our husbands!}  If he wants something handled a certain way, I oblige.  Never has that belief or principle been tested more than in this basement project!  Several times throughout the last 2 years of waiting and dealing with a deceptive contractor, I asked Terry if he wanted me to call the guy or step in and deal with the situation.  Every.single.time he said no and said he would handle it.  His way of handling it often consisted of not doing anything for weeks.  I had a few people that said, "You're better than me!  I would have ignored what my husband said and just called the guy (or dealt with it all) myself."  Really!?  How can you do that in good conscience!?  Knowing what the Bible says about marriage and obedience and the wife's place, how can we?  Now, I realize that the Bible is speaking of spiritual matters and I've had several women who say, "Oh, I'll do what he wants me to when it comes to spiritual matters."  But would you really?  If you don't obey and follow his lead on things that aren't spiritual in nature, then why would you on spiritual matters?  And why would your husband think you would?  Why would he even try to lead you on spiritual matters if you buck his authority on everything else?  And really, when it boils down to it, isn't obeying your husband in general a spiritual matter simply because God told us to do it??

So....

February 12, 2014....

Here it is, all these months later and I'm just now coming back to finish this post.  The above portion was written back in August of last year!!  Truthfully, I forgot my password and had to track it down.  HA!  But my mind has been mulling over this whole post and I really wanted to come back and finish it.  We are in the basement and fully out of storage now...we completed the basement and began the process of getting the remaining items out of storage in October.  We finished the storage portion in December and finished the year of 2013 by being all in one location! 

The one last item I think I've learned greatly through this process has been:

#3.  I am a forgiving person, but it takes work.  

I have greatly struggled with the deception of the contractor we had hired.  It's something that I didn't like even having to go through...WHY was God putting us through this?  We only tried to help this person and here was how we were repaid?  But I slowly came to a point that I had to let him go out of my mind and focus on what *I* could learn through it all.  What was God trying to show me?  I think I learned to forgive and to really forgive.  I had to tell myself what I am always telling my children:  I am the only one in control of ME.  I control how I respond and how I react to things.  My not forgiving him, or holding a grudge, would not make it better for anyone within my house.  It wouldn't change him.  It wouldn't make a difference on whether or not he does the same thing to someone else.  He controls himself, I control me.  So, I had to make myself let go of that grudge and that anger so that it wouldn't spoil the good that was happening right within my own home.  I needed to refocus my energies on what I did have control over instead of the areas I didn't.

So in a nutshell...that's where we are.  We are IN our new schoolroom.  We've been using it for a few months and we love it.  There are multiple issues that we deal with (more in a new post!) here in the basement, but the kids and I love having our school area separated from the rest of the house.