Anna took the kids on a field trip one beautiful May day to harvest some delicious strawberries at a local strawberry patch. I think you can tell from the pictures that they enjoyed the bounty.

This weekend we were blessed to attend the Teach Them Diligently conference focused on christian homeschooling, discipleship and parenting. The conference was held at Gaylord Opryland.

The conference was initially Anna’s idea and I was just along for the ride. I could tell she was excited and so it was to my benefit to feign interest to keep from disappointing my lovely wife. However, I quickly realized that my wise wife had lead our family into a deeply rewarding and challenging weekend.

Along with all the vendor exhibits, there were also several of the primary thought leaders within the home education and family discipleship “movement” on hand to deepen our understanding, to clarify and to remind us of our primary purpose.

Stephen and Alex Kendrick spoke on several different topics related to Christian filmmaking. They also provided a brief synopsis of their next project.

One of the most convicting speakers was Mark Hamby. He spoke about the importance of leading our children from the front with our example and instead of from the rear with loud words and pointed fingers. I related to his struggles as a father and family leader.

Anna and I encouraged Chloe to listen to some of the speakers with us as we felt some of the topics would benefit her as well as us. One specific session was titled “Daring Daughters”. Ann Dunagan spoke about the need to see and appreciate other cultures and to hurt for things that GOD hurts for instead of the petty concerns we often wrap our lives around.

Some of the other topics we attended were “The Mission Minded Family”, “Raising G-rated Sons in an R-rated World” and “Courtship or Dating: What’s the difference?” These were only a small portion of the topics offered.

We struggled with how much time to spend in the lectures because there were so many of the top home education vendors on hand. Clark enjoyed looking around at some of the vendors and was certain to bring his $$.

One of the curriculum vendors that captured Clark’s interest was a company called Youth Digital. They offer online courses that teach children as young as 8 years old the basics of computer programming. The courses are expensive but judging by the light in Clark’s eyes as we discussed the possibility of learning how to make modifications to Minecraft, we may need to start saving up.

We were blessed to meet some of the folks from Seeds Family Worship which has been a tremendous blessing to our family. SFW makes music in a profoundly simple way. They take scripture and turn it into songs. Their songs are fun to sing along with and not in a cute VBS way. They are real songs that could be mistaken for anything playing on christian radio until you listen long enough to notice that the lyrics are straight from the Bible. They do a fantastic job of creating song melodies that serve as a vehicle to offer the wisdom of scripture into our hearts where it may take root and bless us time and time again as we find ourselves meditating on GOD’s word simply by humming the tune stuck in our head.

The folks who make the YouTube videos under the username Blimey Cow were at the conference and both Chloe and Clark were excited about that.

There videos are usually very funny but also discuss a topic from the teenage homeschooler’s perspective.

Josh Duggar and his wife Anna were also at the conference signing copies of a new book that has just been published. They were very welcoming even though there were may people in line and many books to sign. We’ve watched quite a few episodes of their show and so we were a bit starstruck.

Cole has asked us to read this book to him at bedtime so many times that he decided he could “read” it to the preschool class at Mercury Court when Anna took the kids recently.

As you can tell, he enjoyed himself.

We recently visited the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.

While there, we saw the original Wright Flyer. As soon as we returned home, Clark decided to make a model from memory using whatever he could scrape together around the house. I was pretty impressed.

Here’s another angle.

Here’s the original Wright Flyer.