To tell you the truth: Homeschool

It’s been a really long day, at the end of a really long week.

Life has informed us that for now, our future is in Florida.  With that fact in hand plus the upcoming arrival of another little one, we have started to feel the push (maybe more of a shove) to find a new home for our growing family.  The week has been spent visiting possible homes, scouring the internet for available places and sleepless nights contemplating different places and whether or not they could work.

Add this on top of our usual weekly schedule of classes, meetups and life (you know, eating, sleeping, bathing…) plus my killer morning sickness and school has been a challenge this week.

Despite my best efforts to get the girls doing their work.  Despite my constant nagging for them to be on task.  Despite my begging other people to help them complete their assignments while I’ve been away.  We made it to Friday and the girls had only done about 1/10 of their WEEKLY work.

Needless to say, it’s not been our best homeschooling day.  Usually I wouldn’t worry about a day or even a week being a little bit off, but we’ve been off since starting back in January and I can sense I’m losing the routine and the girls’ interest and cooperation.  After a morning of taking care of other business, we returned home for lunch and got to work.

But it didn’t go well.  Constant reminding.  Yelling.  And even crying (me and Doodle mostly) we nearly got our work done.  And it made me realize something: I’ve not been honest about homeschooling on the blog.

I’ve explained why we made the choice; how much we love it and have achieved in a short time; and I’ve even listed 100 reasons homeschool is great (because it really is!)  But it is also really, really hard sometimes.

I’m in this completely on my own.  I am responsible for researching, planning, implementing, instructing, monitoring, grading, reviewing and assessing.  And I do it all without planning days (or evenings or weekends), without sick days, without an aide, without a principal or curriculum coordinator, without any help whatsoever.  And it’s not that I’m not up for the task, it’s just that it’s a lot of work on top of being a stay-at-home mommy to three and pregnant (and attempting to be a moderately legitimate blogger).

When my children act out, I can’t send them to someone else for discipline.  When they don’t complete their work, I can’t send it home or blame anyone else except them and myself.  When they’re sick (or I’m sick) I’m still responsible for their care.  And while we may only do actual school work for 2-3 hours a day, our days are 10 hours long.

And it’s lonely sometimes.  Just being a stay-at-home mommy can be isolating on it’s own (see “Mommying is Hard” which I wrote nearly 2 years ago) but add in the added homeschool factor and I feel like no matter how much we go out it is still isolating.

We’ve joined a very nice homeschool group and really enjoy the times when we are able to attend events (usually afternoon park dates) but I’ve come to realize that we don’t live as most homeschoolers do.  My kids don’t sleep in late and my toddler has to nap.  The schedule of most homeschoolers in our area which focuses on late morning and afternoon activities just doesn’t work for us.  So I’ve had trouble finding a “place” in the community.

And with me home full time with all three kids, we don’t have a ton of extra money for extracurricular classes. Sugarplum still does gymnastics and both girls do one dance class a week.  That is really all we have the budget for.  We can’t afford math, language, science, art or other classes aimed at homeschoolers in our area.

So I guess what I’m trying to say is, I love homeschooling.  The difference in our family from a year ago when we were struggling with kindergarten so much is enormous and I’ve not even really considered going back (for more than a fleeting moment).  But it’s not all sparkles and rainbows.  It is a challenge.