Morning Times with a Morning Basket
I’m in a lot of homeschool mom groups on Facebook. Lately there have been a lot of questions regarding “morning baskets,” popularized, I think, by Pinterest and Teachers Pay Teachers accounts I think most people have baskets full of ice breaker style worksheets for their kids to grab and go when they are otherwise busy with stuff. But our Morning Baskets have been a little different, organically grown over the years as a Morning Time over breakfast where we, as a family, wake up together. It includes our Scripture Memory Box (an idea I got from a Sonja Shafer YouTube video about four or five years ago. Our “basket” includes a poetry recitation, a hymn study, Thomas Aquinas’s Student’s Prayer (thanks to Kate Alva of The Atrium). The point is not what it is in our basket, however, it’s about the journey we took to get there.
First, I read Habits of the Household by Earley, which I read in 2022. My second child was one year old and I did a re-dive into parenting and homeschooling research to make sure that I wasn’t bringing old bad habits to a new childhood and that I was creating the family culture I desired now that I had more than one kid and stable household. I found Earley’s book very affirming as I was already doing a lot of what he recommended, but I wanted to add more and really dive into the idea of liturgies. Earley’s book and listening to the Literary Life Podcast led me to Morning Time: A Liturgy of Love by Cindy Rollins.
What I learned from those books is that starting the day with scripture and a morning prayer isn’t just my ideal, my kids thrive with it. I learned that my sudoku and logic puzzle routine could be substituted with other things from their education, taking something off their afternoon plate, as the season requires: diagramming a sentence, balancing a chemical equation, factoring a trinomial. Balancing a chemical equation every morning together as a family when my oldest was between 6th and 7th grades set her up to do high school Chemistry in 8th grade (with a high school aged friend of hers) with a lot less tears than I expected. Warming up to difficult subjects in bite sized pieces over breakfast just seems to be the most efficient way to tackle the idea that we can, in fact, learn to do hard things.
Over the years, our morning times have included Plutarch, various nature readings (like Gilbert White and Sam Keen), and the Ambleside Online Hymns and Folksongs. It has included the United States citizenship test (as recommended by Cindy Rollins) in seasonal cycles. It has always included the Catechism from the Truth & Grace Memory Books (that I bought while visiting a church led by Voddie Baucham. We have always included Grimm’s Fairy Tales, but after following Cindy Rollins, I was encouraged to add The Faerie Queene, previously I had planned to assign it in the upper high school years–I’m glad I didn’t wait. We enjoyed Dante’s Divine Comedy, as an extended basket time, in car rides on the way to choir. As I have had more children it has become something that goes until we have an activity that requires us to leave the house or the youngest children depart to play outside as their attention spans drop off.
No matter what you include in your basket time, if you’re overwhelmed in your homeschool or your parenting this is a guaranteed way to simplify it. Bring back the cozy, bring back core truths and beauty to your mornings. Adding these bits into the start of your day truly do take things off your plate at the end of your day. (Or if your kids are in public school, adding these enrichment activities to your evenings can bring back the togetherness you long for in your family and supplement their life at school.)
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Cross-Denomination Book Club
One of my favorite things is how the Body of Christ works in many places at once. I love when four or five churches in a community are moving to do the same thing at the same time. I love when men and women of God are studying and praying over the same topics, separately but together. I love pondering the idea that the Lord never does just one thing at a time and He instills passions into His people in ways that work together for His purpose, even if we’re not paying attention.
These are the things I enjoy paying attention to most.
Several years ago, this point was driven home to me when my church studied Blackaby’s Experiencing God. It is one of my favorite studies to recommend to people of all ages, and it was the first one my current husband and I walked the children through when we first began the habit of family bedtime bible study. (Training up our children in the way they should go is very important to me and I am so grateful to have a husband who leads us, rather than one who abuses.) Prior to my remarriage, even when married to my first husband, bible study was an activity kiddo one and I did alone. This “new” habit (two years and counting) has been refreshing.
But while we study as a family, I also find it encouraging to study with other women, both from my church and others. I enjoy being a part of online book clubs, but even more I enjoy discussing rich books with my personal friends. I’m not talking about sitting in a circle drinking wine and arguing over literary merits. I’m talking about each family reading a book, finding biblical truths in it, and sharing those truths with their friends. I’m talking about Christians who go to Baptist churches, Catholic churches, Lutheran churches, and more, all discussing God’s Word and books that point us to bits of God’s Word we may have missed.
My desire to write this particular blog post was born of two books and a series of interwoven events.
A woman at church passed me a note suggesting I read a book by Rosaria Butterfield called The Gospel Comes With a House Key. I got home from church, looked it up on Amazon, saw that it was backordered but hit the button anyway and largely forgot about it.
Then, The Other Half Of My Brain, as I call her (my college roommate) was reading Habits of the Household by Justin Whitmel Earley with a group of women in her town five hours north of me. She messaged me saying she was pleased with the contents, I should check it out. She had also shared it with her sisters, who all live elsewhere. I read it, I loved it! When I shared it with my friends, I told them what The Other Half Of My Brain had expressed to me: It’s full of fantastic tidbits that you can implement into your life with 45 spare seconds. Most self help books are all about waking up an extra 45 minutes here, or take an hour and add this to your week, etc. Earley, on the other hand, wrote a book full of biblical truths and household wisdom for tired, busy people.
“My greatest hope,” Earley writes, “is not that you sit down in a quiet place and read this book alone. […] rather, that you read snatches of it between toddler fits and soccer trips. I hope that you nod off during a chapter because the baby was up last night, and get distracted at a good part because your twelve-year-old drops a surprise question about sex.”
He goes on to say that he hopes you read it with your spouse, that you skip around, that you use what you can and ditch what doesn’t work. Make notes in it, spill coffee on it, etc. This book is truly a tool, something that I try to remind everyone about all books. It’s about raising kids to follow God in the midst of a chaotic life.
The thing that struck me most is how useful it could be for grandparents as well, even though it isn’t marketed for them. My mother-in-law proved this point without even knowing when shortly after I finished reading this book she added to the Sunday lunch liturgy for the children. Later that week I shared with other grandparents I knew, and slowly more people in my extended circle were reading the same material and implementing elements of Earley’s recommendations in their daily lives.
In Earley’s book he includes lists of additional resources. Lo and behold, one of the books he refers his readers to is The Gospel Comes With a House Key. I was still waiting on my copy when another friend of mine was toying with starting a book club at her church and one of the potential members recommended it as the first book. I was so excited, “I have that book on the way to my house, I’ll read it with you!” In the meantime, I discovered some friends from a completely different circle of people who had also already read Earley’s book.
Aside from an actual marketing campaign, these two books are making the rounds in the Christian communities I’m associated with and this excites me––not in a part of the in-crowd or bandwagon way. I think when books are leapt upon as more useful than the bible by church groups, trouble follows (think the 1990’s and I Kissed Dating Goodbye.) I don’t think anyone should pounce of Earley’s or Butterfield’s books and put them on pedestals above or even alongside their bibles. However, reading the books with fellow Christians, praying about truth revealed, and discussing the merits and flaws of each idea presented is an exciting activity, especially when it’s not even happening in a formal way. There is no “gather in the library at six, password candles,” happening here. It’s just people reading and casually discussing the books that have impacted their lives that week in passing. You’re welcome to join the club.
Anakalian Whims 