Joy School

I love doing Joy School with my kids. This year I’m doing a group with Bella and a group with Isaac. I love the concepts that are taught in Joy School, but even more I love being able to have my kids and their friends in my home and the opportunity to teach them important concepts. Bella and Isaac get so excited every time they know Joy School is at our home. There are so many fond memories I have of all our little groups over the past several years. 

That being said, sometimes it is crazy! Yes, it is a challenge trying to teach a lesson or do a craft with the other young kids at home. Sometimes I daydream about how easy it will be to do Joy School when Jenna is the only one at home. But then I won’t have as many funny memories of all the chaotic moments.

One of my favorite parts of Joy School each year is reenacting the nativity. The kids all love it and we do it over and over and over again with everyone trading costumes and parts. What you don’t see from this picture is that Jenna is sitting in the kitchen sink so I could hurry and snap a picture (and of course it’s a little blurry because I was in a hurry and just turned my camera on auto – not a good idea with a low aperture lens!). Jenna was obsessed with the baby and kept trying to remove the baby from the manger. The girls were insistent that the baby stay in the manger. There was a lot of crying on Jenna’s part and a lot of creative moves on the girls part. These are memories I won’t forget!

I still think one of my funniest memories of a chaotic day at Joy School was my first year with Samuel. The lesson called for a craft using pudding to paint. Sounds fun – unless you have 5 Joy School kids all age 3, a not quite 2 year old and a 6 month old baby. We went outside on the driveway to do our creative pudding paint project and as I got kids cleaned up, much to my dismay, Samuel and the twins locked me out of the house. I finally talked them through letting me in only to discover while I was dealing with that problem that Bella had got in the pudding and smeared it all over her body and in her hair. I scoped her up and quickly ran some water in the tub, telling the other kids to play with the toys for a few minutes. In the mean time Isaac, who was just a baby, needed to be nursed. It was one of those moments where you stop and think, I’ve got to be crazy, is this really worth the effort? My answer then and even more so now – yes! So until I only have Jenna at home I’ll just continue to embrace the chaos.