Provoke Not Your Children

I looked up the word provoke yesterday afternoon on Meriam-Webster online. It is a transitive verb meaning:

1 a archaic :  to arouse to a feeling or action

   b :  to incite to anger

2 a :  to call forth (as a feeling or action) :  evoke <provoke laughter>

   b :  to stir up purposely <provoke a fight>

   c :  to provide the needed stimulus for <will provoke a lot of discussion>

   — pro·vok·er noun

Before that, I looked up a couple of scriptures. My search was for, “provoke not your children.” What I found was this:

Colossians 3:21 Fathers, provoke not your children to anger, lest they be discouraged.

And this:

Ephesians 6:4 And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.

Those both seem pretty clear to me. Parents should not provoke their children to anger. For one thing, it is very hard to learn self-control when you are being provoked. Not only provoked, but by one of your parents. Secondly, if we want our children to learn proper behavior, we ought not to provoke them. Thirdly, it seems to me that a provoker is also a bully and we don’t love bullies, do we? In fact, I think our natural tendency would be to fight back (although this is discouraged at school).

Why did I look these things up? You would ask.

It is because we had kielbasa with onions and peppers.

Yesterday was a fairly low key day filled with, as you might guess, sewing and school and that’s about it. The boys took forever to get their work done, well, that’s not really accurate. Seth got in and did his. Joseph was dragging his feet; for math we would discuss a problem, he would tell me what the answer was, and it would take him a full minute or two to actually write the answer down. That’s no way to get through the day. By lunch we were only half done and in spite of not wanting to keep at it, I knew we needed to.

At 1:00 I was looking at sitting with Joseph to make sure he got his work done and I was seriously contemplating not working on Laura’s dress. I wanted to start right after lunch to be sure I had enough time to finish what I wanted to do and that was just not going to happen. Fortunately, Joseph got through his afternoon work much more quickly than his morning and I actually got to start on the dress before Amena got home from school. Barely.

We took the goats out in the afternoon and I took a shower before working on the dress. Actually, now that I think about it, I’m not sure how I fit finishing school, goats and a shower in the two hours between noon and 2:00. Especially since I had to move all the stakes for the goats because Paul got some new stakes and cables. And I can tell you that staking out eight goats is not a fun job. They need a fence.

In the morning I also made bread because I didn’t get it done Saturday. The regular loaves didn’t rise as much as usual because I kind of forgot about it when it was rising in the oven so it overachieved which means it underachieved once I made the loaves. Still, I didn’t put in too much flour so they aren’t crumby.

Today looks like more of the same. I was going to get the dress done this morning until I started looking at it. The gussets didn’t come to the points they should have so I do need to fix them all so they do; otherwise, I’m afraid it would look funny and we don’t want that. So, it will wait until the boys have finished school. I think. I might just do it as soon as I’m done here.

Have a wonderful day!