The Day That I Wish I Could Skip!

Have you ever had a day that you wish you could skip? Today was one of the days in our house. As a mom, I knew we were in for trouble when my 2nd born announced that he woke up super early(5am!!!!) and finished most of his school work. I knew this meant trouble because my firstborn is extremely competitive! He makes EVERYTHING a competition. Who knew that peeing longer could bring such joy? To my firstborn, life is a competition that must be won! This is part of what makes him so successful academically. I am quoting Ferris Bueller when I say that, "he is wound up so tight that if you put coal in his a@@, in two weeks you'd have a diamond." Maybe that makes me a mean mommy. However, I speak the truth.

The fact is, in homeschooling, we are going to have days like this. It is joyous and intimate and raw and gritty, all rolled up together. I'd say that most days, I go to bed feeling thankful and blessed to have the opportunity to educate my children(and more often than not, they educate me). However, you have to take the salt with the sugar. A good friend of mine recently, who is a seasoned homeschooler, told me some excellent advice. She said that it's ok, if you are having a really bad to stop and put it off til the next day. The world will not end if you finish before you got to everything that you planned every now and then. I should have listened to her today. I kept pushing and trying to "finish" instead of listening to my children. I was unable to accomplish much anyway. Thankfully, I reached a point that I realized that what I needed to focus on wasn't math or science. It was my children's hearts. 

That's the beauty of homeschooling. Being with your loved ones all the time forces you to deal with the nitty-gritty here and now. There is no putting it off until after school, when the intensity has dissipated. After calling my parents to vent they both, individually, said to me "well, maybe you should send them back to school then". I know that they were trying to help. They heard the frustration in my voice, and, like any good parent, wanted to remedy it. My gut told me that instead of pushing away, I needed to pull them closer. I needed to have a conversation about our bodies natural rhythms and how, while Andy is our resident morning bird(I used to put tin foil on the windows in his room as a baby because, if I didn't, he would be up before dawn), Nikolas is our night owl. I explained that it's a gift for both of them to be able to listen to their natural biorhythms. I wanted them to be able to work when their mind is at it's freshest. There is no RIGHT way. After, talking about how lucky we are to exercise those freedoms, Nikolas felt grateful to be able to stay up reading Harry Potter. Andy feels accomplished because he is finished "early". Being the 2nd born, after a highly competitive brother, that's a reprieve from the norm, for him. So maybe we didn't accomplish what we wanted today, but, in contrast, we accomplished what we were meant to. I'm ok with that.