Cheri

I have tossed through my head all week long something I desired to write concerning purity, but our family hit a very busy season. Oh well, the thoughts will scramble around a little while longer, as I know this coming week I will not get to write either.

There are many women I want to feature as a "Wednesday's Woman" though, and I think I can squeeze some time in today for myself to write about Cheri. This is one woman I really wish I could reconnect with on Facebook, but I can't find her! She was an incredible woman to know and who spent some time teaching me, and I am certain there is so much more I could learn from her if I could just find her again!

When my husband was in seminary, I worked at Eastside Christian Academy in Louisville, Kentucky. There were twenty first-graders in my first class there. Several of them were pastors' kids. Cheri was one of my class moms, who also happened to be a pastor's wife. Her daughter did well in my class, but she also wanted me to work with her over the summer. It could have been a guise to spend some time with me, as she not only paid me for tutoring, but she also let me come all summer long to some aerobics classes that she taught at the YMCA and at their church. She gave me a book, Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life, and she gave me a couple of gift cards for some date nights for my husband and myself (all of this once her daughter had moved on to the next grade). Cheri taught me how to love my children by talking to me about setting goals. Every Thursday, she evaluated goals that she set for herself, for her relationship with her husband, and for each of her three children. I've been thinking of her a lot lately, as I'm needing to spend some time looking at the goals I have for my children.

I used to do this fairly regularly and post them where I could see them. Goals for children can encompass all sorts of areas, such as their physical development, social development, spiritual training, etc. At the time, the place I was getting the idea was in a series of books written by Gary Ezzo and Robert Bucknam. On Becoming Babywise is the first in the series, but the goal setting comes in one of the later books, either Toddlerwise or Preschoolwise. I used a book, Fit Kids, by Kenneth H. Cooper to help me evaluate where my children should be in their physical development and I read some of my textbooks from college and some resources online to determine what my children need to know before they start kindergarten, things like how to use scissors. Obviously, in the area of spiritual development, I ultimately want my children to come to love God more than anything, but I would make lists of what scriptures I wanted them to memorize, what catechism I wanted to teach, etc. I did not evaluate weekly.

Over this next week, I hope to re-evaluate and come up with some fresh goals and follow the progress each of my children make. I need to work on chore charts for one, let my middle daughter work on her scissors skills for another, and my youngest needs to work on her first-time obedience. My baby's been rolling right along here lately, now putting finger foods in his mouth on his own sometimes, crawling....my baby days are limited. :(

Anyway, I long to be the kind of mom that Cheri modeled to me and to be the kind of Titus 2 woman that she was for me, to take younger women along with me and teach them the ways that I'm training my children and how to love God more every day. Cheri, wherever you are, you are this week's Wednesday's Woman!