I am finally feeling better after several weeks of not. It’s still not great, but it’s better, and I am thankful for those days when the better comes back. The boys and I went down to the beach in the afternoon. None of us were up for swimming but they played baseball in the sand and I sat on the dock and on the beach and attempted some exercises. We ended when one of the boys was accidentally hit in the face with an oar.

When we first started homeschooling, I had extreme thoughts about how we were preparing our kids to live in a war torn country that was different from the one we grew up in. They would need to know two important things in order to survive this or at least cope while enduring it. The two things were 1) how to work, and 1) how to sing. People don’t know how to work anymore. If they could know how to do the humble people work that does not fade, the cleaning toilets, the washing dishes, these kinds of jobs will always exist, and if they’re willing to do them they will always have a job.

The other one was singing. It’s how the slaves survived when they were working in the cotton fields. In their heart is where these songs would live, and they could carry these songs there wherever life would take them. When they were in their concentration camps, or stuck in traffic, or going through a particularly rough time in life, the songs would come back and help get them through. They would be uplifted through voice.