"I value this delicious home feeling as one of the choicest gifts a parent can bestow."

--Washington Irving

Art credit: A Family in a Drawing Room, Artist Unknown

Chesterton on the importance of mothers:

"How can it be a large career to tell other people's children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one's own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No; a woman's function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute. "

Art credit: Carlton Alfred Smith

I've had a phrase running through my mind the last few days from a story Zig Ziglar used to tell. He said his grandma made the lightest, fluffiest biscuits around. But one day he went and they were flat and hard. He asked what happened. She said she had accidently left out the baking powder and the biscuits had been 'baked in a squat'.

As I read many of your comments and concerns as you try and implement this philosophy in your home, I sense that you are 'careful and troubled about many things." I caution you to not let yourself get 'baked in a squat'. How would that happen? For one thing, by allowing planning and managing everything to become so tedious that you never actually enjoy the things that are going to make all of this 'rise'. Less planning is going to work in your favor.

For you perfectionists who need to make sure you are doing it just right, I challenge you to make a perfect mistake. Set out to pick the most wrong book or story you can find from the list I've provided. And create the most imperfect notebooking page you possibly can. Try and be perfectly successful in that! You'll soon find there are no mistakes, because you will learn from whatever you do, and that makes for a success.

Remember what our friend Marva Collins taught us: If you can't make a mistake, you can't make anything.

Don't allow your fear of doing this wrong make you get 'baked in a squat'!

Art credit: Ruckkehr vom Backhaus by Hermann Sonderman

"I will not follow where the path may lead, but I will go where there is no path, and I will leave a trail."
​
--Muriel Strode

Art credit: A Path at Les Sablone by Alfred Sisley

These are thoughts from an old 1840 text written to show how the Mothers of England influenced the great writers.

"Accomplishments and worldly attainments may be derived from others, but holiness, self-control, forbearance, love of truth, integrity, and all the other virtues of the heart, are only the Mother's gift....

"...so that that genius which some would produce in a preconceived system, or implant by stratagem, or enforce by application, with her may be only the watchful labour of love."

Art credit: Children in the Pasture by Luigi Chialiva

"It is easy to live in the world to live after the world's opinion. It is easy in solitude to live after one's own, but the great man is he, who in the midst of the crowd, keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude."

--Ralph Waldo Emerson

Art credit: An Idle Moment by Daniel Ridgway Knight ​

Amen to this. This is the perfect 'elevator speech' for the purpose of WEH::

"...if I look around and see some the things in the world, I’ve seen the hearts of men fail and become more discordant, less harmonious, less unified and I think people need a remedy for that.

“What is the remedy? The remedy continues to be about our refinement of our hearts and continuing to do the individual work that we need to do...There’s a beautiful promise in 4 Nephi 1:15 that says, ‘And it came to pass that there was no contention in the land, because of the love of God which did dwell in the hearts of the people.’ I can lay hold on that promise, that as we continue to refine our heart, as we make it more pure, as we make it more charitable, as we make it more understanding, as we seek for our hearts to connect with others, that the beat of our hearts, and the beat of the hearts of God’s children will start to be more harmonious again, that we will find that promise that we’re looking for — no contention in the land, unity and love — because we’re singing the same song, and the song is the song of love of God. And I testify to you that there is a light in this world, and that Jesus Christ is that light, and he is still the light of this world. As we seek him, and as we seek to listen to his invitations to do the work to examine our hearts, that we will lay claim to that blessing."

--Tracy Browning

Art credit: Two Young Girls Singing on a Park Bench by Minna Heeren

"The child who has never learned to act alone, to direct his own actions, to govern his own will, grows into an adult who is easily led and must always lean upon others."

--Maria Montessori

Art credit: Happy Family by Andre-Henri Dargelas

"The education of even a small child...does not aim at preparing him for school, but for life."

--Maria Montessori

Art credit: A Mother and Child in an Interior by Peter Ilsted

"Whoso strives for the regeneration of education strives for the regeneration of the human race."

--Maria Montessori

Art credit: An Italian Mother Teaching Her Child the Tarantella by Thomas Uwins