Motherhood Parables: The Chalkboard

I have a big chalkboard in my kitchen on the wall that I use for homeschooling purposes. I wasn't sure at first what I would use it for exactly, but I know that I'm a visual person and I love having a place to show things, so I painted one up right after moving into our new house.

well, I found so many uses for it that there was no more room to write up a little scripture that we could focus on memorizing as a family.

As much as I would like to be that awesome family to memorize scripture every week, that is not the case. Although that is the ideal that I would love to shoot for, it's more like one a month. That said, I realized soon enough that I would need a separate chalkboard just for the scripture.

If I had one dedicated solely for a scripture we could ponder on/memorize – – ponderize--would be more likely to accomplish our weekly goal. So I covered a small magnetic board with chalkboard paper and use that for our ponderize board.

Anyway...I pulled the board off-the-wall this week so I could write our scripture on it and I realized that I love writing the scripture on this little chalkboard in a very visual way. It breaks the scripture down into a more simple and easy to understand visual definition. It's fun to organize it and draw in such a way that the icons, symbols, and words visually represent and speak more of the meaning of the scripture than just plain written words. It takes a little work, but the result is much more satisfying than just  scribbling something up there, or printing plain words ( which I normally would've just done ).

Here are some examples:

So… I was I was drawing this one, the fifth for the year I think… )Which is about one month. Ha ha) I realized that these words and the scripture brings beauty to our kitchen and to our family goal/activity of memorizing scripture.

And the only way I could do this, was because the boys were gone on a Saturday and I had some downtime with the girls. They were coloring at the table and I had an hour to kill. With extra time and a simple desire to bring beauty and meaning to a family activity/teaching, I could infuse beauty. (note, it did not take the full hour… Just 10 minutes or so. But then I also had time to write this post. :-)

Sometimes life can be so hectic or fast-paced or systemized or encroached on by outside expectations and events and standards that it's easy to forget (or not have time) to find or emphasize the beauty in life. When really, the things we own and the things we do can and should be infused with beauty and joy because in my eyes that is the purpose of life.

I am glad I have chalkboards, and that I bought a bunch of colored chalk, because now I have an outlet in which to beautify the home and in which I find enjoyment sitting down and creating pictures.

Sidenote: I've been starting to draw simple pictures for Nellie to color, rather than using a Coloring Book for her. And I find that I enjoy drawing them, even if I just copy a simple picture from the Internet coloring page, and that she enjoys coloring them just the same.… (If not more because we created something together). And that is beauty infusing our home even more, both from our creations we can display and our bonding time together.