How I do it all
I’m sure many people reading along and even the new people I talk to sometimes wonder how I do it all when I am a home educating work at home country frugal back to land kind of mom.
The short answer is I don’t. Or at least not all at once.
The longer answer… well, I’m not sure exactly how to explain it in less than a thousand words, but I can try. It’s a lifestyle we’ve led for a long time – 14 years. I don’t think I ever mentioned specifically too, that the year we started homeschooling was the same time ron quit his governement contract job and I also started up plans for my craft sore. We tended to jump into things back then.
This was when we were also building our house as we lived in it. I had a 5 year old, a three year old, and a baby. In the country with no car. No cable. The closest unrelated neighbours were a ten minute walk (even without the kids).
But anyway, over the years we did our thing as we lived our lives. It’s a part of it.
My neighbours now sometimes ask about coming over and they clearly do not want to interrupt school time or work time. I’ll tell you a secret: there is none. We don’t have a schedule, just a very flexible routine. My days are based on a lot of what I feel like doing, or what I know I can accomplish. On high energy, full mentally-capable days (I have a.d.d too), I can accomplish more than some people can do in a week. The kids are the same – some days are better than others. The key in there though, is we work together.
I’m a mom, but as I have repeated more often than I care to remember, I am nobody’s slave. I am not here to coddle the children to the day they decide to move on. I’m here to whip them into shape so they can be productive adults.
I have two teenage girls still at home, and they do a LOT around here. Well, I sometimes thing they can do more, but compared to many of their peers they do quite a bit. They each have chores they do, including their own laundry.
This frees me up to do other things.
We are also fairly relaxed, so the house, in a word, is messy. Lived in. Comfortable. But things are also out where they can see them. Books are everywhere. “Stuff” is accessable (after a hunt usually) so we can create & explore. Tvs, computers, movies… all these things are educating as well. We don’t have our things seperated into Mommy or Daddy items and kid items – there’s a pile of useable things here, including whatever’s in the craft room – for ALL to use.
And I’m here. We talk. Almost constantly some days. The children see Ron and I working, they see & hear us discuss grown-up things and often they are part of the conversation. We’ve fallen more and more into unschooling and we follow the flow of *all* of our interests. Emma doesn’t just have me to “teach” her, and in reality, she’s such a sponge and we’ve always answered her questions (even did that with the big kids) that some days it’s hard to keep up. The big kids have all taken turns helping out with Emma, showing her cool stuff teaching her new things. (answering “hammer time!” to when they yell “stop!” notwithstanding.)
This ties in to the “not all at once” part. Some days my house IS clean (no really, it happens once in a blue moon), but I probably haven’t done much else. The next day, I may spend a lot of time working. And not much else. Sometimes work takes precidence, but we try and break that up. Even running homeschooljournal does not take all day. Most of the time, it runs itself. I take care of things as they crop up. After that, we may be at the library and do errands. Like today, I’m still catching up on lost sleep from the weekend concert Sarah & I attended, so I wrote this entry this morning instead of other things.
It all flows and we follow or veer as needed. If a neighbour drops by, we invite them in for a bit. It adds to our day, not subtracts. Every thing we do, every person we meet adds to our collective education. I have a to-do list, not a master schedule. Work is always waiting.
Life does not. So we live it.
(Written for the Canadian Home Educators Blog Carnival.)
13 Responses to “How I do it all”
This makes so much sense. I think being comfortable living without a plan is the hardest part of living this life. I’m in transition and some days it feels kind of crazy. But mostly, it is a good way to be.
Well, I think that’s it – you can only plan so far ahead. I like to think of it as a guideline.
And I try to remember that transitions are just that – they move on eventually.
Sometimes when we feel stuck we switch it up a bit – if you do the same things, you’ll get the same resutls, so that’s when we do something different.
My sister just decided to quit homeschooling after two years because she hates it. She was trying to do every activity in every piece of curriculum, all while trying to keep her house spotless and deal with a very busy three-year-old. She said she doesn’t understand how I can actually like homeschooling.
I tell her that I use my curriculum as a guideline, not a slave master. My house won’t make us sick, but it’s never all clean at the same time unless we’re having guests over. If guests drop in, they’re not surprised to see books scattered everywhere (and I do mean everywhere), laptops open on various surfaces, paper plates from lunch filling the garbage can, etc. I tell her that I love spending an hour to an hour and a half reading aloud every morning, and once I’m started, I don’t even think about the laundry that’s still sitting from days before.
Laundry, dishes, mopping – they’re not as important as sharing a wonderful story, or watching a video on tornadoes, or listening to Daddy’s memories of Mt. St. Helens erupting. That’s what our life is – not housework, not keeping to a schedule, not freaking out if we don’t finish our history book by the end of the school year. Sheesh – maybe I should’ve just posted this on my own blog – didn’t mean to ramble for so long.
Thanks Andrea ——– a good reminder of what’s important — now if those income tax folks would just read this maybe they would understand why I am late this year (again)
Wow. Sounds a lot like my life except I’m a single mom of 7 kids (blended family-2 non bios). This post makes a lot of sense to me. Altough I am a Type A personality, I’m also very creative and so are my children. I’d rather spend time with them, then making them scrub the house down. There will always be things to do in the home and at work, but they will grow older and leave the nest one day…
Thanks for this wonderful post.
I love your philosophy of to-do list but not a master schedule and that work is always waiting but live doesn’t. Great wise words. Thanks for joining the Canadian Home Educators Blog Carnival. I hope you manage to fit us into your to-do list again from time to time.
You are so right. Life doesn’t wait, so who cares if the bed is made? It does help me feel I have some control over the chaos that usually reigns, but it isn’t important.
Once a hair dresser informed me that if she died her mother was instructed to sneak into her house to clean before anyone entered. I tried to keep my jaw from dropping. What? Who will care what your house looks like when you’re dead?
Terrific post! I could maybe print it and tape it to my fridge for all of my friends and family who can’t seem to stop exclaiming “How do you do it? I’d go insane with kids around me all day. You need a break” To be fair, I’m usually in one of my :”I need a break’ frames of mind if they say that. But a break is good and being around my kids all day seems as natural as your post which explains it. Thanks
I LOVE this comment:
>> I’m a mom, but as I have repeated more often than I care to remember, I am nobody’s slave. I am not here to coddle the children to the day they decide to move on. I’m here to whip them into shape so they can be productive adults. So many parents around my neck of the woods panic if they DARE try to institute boundaries on their little darlins’….. Barbara
I feel that it is great that you are able to balance work/family/homeschooling and still remain sane. I’m also running on a to-do- schedule with a wish to do more/canalways intergrate chart on the side.
Andrea, I would like to invite you over for coffee. Or tea. I think we’d get along famously. Your household sounds quite like mine, except for the teen girls part. Oh, and I don’t expect you’re spending good chunks of your day teaching your kids the fine art of tracking gophers…
That’s my favorite answer to people, too: “I don’t!”
To get it all done would involve paying a bunch of people to do a big part of the “all.” I would have to have money to do that.
So … yeah … that’s gonna’ happen.
I keep trying to come up with a schedule, but the truth is that life with kids at home and two self-employed adults doesn’t fall into the neat and predictable patterns that our neighbors seem to follow. The ever-scrolling to-do list has become my tool of choice too.
Even though I had different ideas about homeschooling when we first started (only 2 years ago), we’ve evolved into very much the lifestyle you are describing. It makes us happy, and sometimes we wonder why more people haven’t discovered it!