Homeschool Day 2: St Patrick's Day

This will only come as a surprise to those of you who are more new-ish readers. I was actually homeschooled. Gasp, I know. I'm so socially well-adjusted now (ha!) that it no longer shows the way it used to (if you need a laugh, please revisit my high school years when it was revealed to me that my education lacked a couple important social memos by clicking here). So I kind of know how this goes. Which is one of the reasons I didn't choose it for our family. I'm not patient enough and I don't feel called to it. I'm too like one of my kids that being her sole educator feels like it would be a bit of a disservice to her. We would likely spend more hours in power wars than productive learning...as evidenced by the incident already this morning.

She was writing a letter to the next door neighbor with plans to pass it under the fence "through the bamboo forest," as they call it. That last sentence makes my life sounds so idyllic, does it not? Of course this upset the other sister, whose idea it was to implement this pass-through system in the first place. And so it began. Sisterhood fighting over who "gets" to write a letter and how it makes the other feel left out when one does without the other and on and on and on. We were supposed to be working on our St Patrick's Day math worksheets anyway. How did we end up letter-writing? Their teacher should really gain control of the classroom!

How I kept the kids walking this AM - distracted them with "Would you rather" questions

All that said, I said I would only choose to homeschool "if I had to." And so here we are. School is closed for an undetermined length of time due to COVID-19 and I am raising humans who really need structure (and I happen to need it as well). So I guess this is as close to "I kind of have to" as I'm going to get. It's early in the game but I'm actually really enjoying many of the aspects of homeschooling so far. Even amidst the sass and banter, I adore these little people and seeing their learning styles and unique creativity makes me love them 100 times over. I am enjoying being the "fun" mom and incorporating science experiments and art. I'm also loving this built-in pocket of (interrupted) time to throw on some headphones and attempt to write myself.

Emma's theory on how COVID-19 came to be

In this moment, I kind of love waking up and having every day be the same. This morning I looked at my days-of-the-week pill box and stared at it for nearly a full 30 seconds because I had zero idea what day it was. There is very little that differentiates a Tuesday from a Friday. We don't have any activities in the evening. Swim lessons, church, and baseball are all canceled. We are obligated to no one. And it's a little bit lovely. At least for today. I know it will get really old really fast but for now I'm soaking it up. It makes me wonder if perhaps my life was too lacking in structure before with all the kids in school. Or maybe it was too structured, but by things that didn't give me life?