This Homeschooling Thang...

... Is for the birds!

I love being home with the kids. I love waking up in the morning, cuddled in bed as Colin leaves for work, nursing the baby, and hearing the older two breathing deeply and beginning to stir in their beds. One of them always begins to stir a bit more, and gets up, makes the sleepy-eyed, dizzy-headed trip to the bathroom. Eventually they stagger into my room, climb up over the side of our hand-hewn local maple bed, and snuggle up to me and the baby. Sooner or later, the other child climbs in, too. We smile and giggle, laugh and enjoy the early morning hour before breakfast, which is a good hour later than it was when they had to get up for school.

Sometimes it is hard to believe that even this beautiful moment is worth the cost. I can't work with them home. Some days I have to decide if I am Mama, or teacher, or house-cleaner/homemaker, or buddy, or soon-to-be-grad student. Do I wash the dishes? Do I make ooblek? Do I read a book? Play a game? Change the baby? Wash the g-diaper wraps and diapers? Prepare a dinner we can eat in six hours? Slaughter the duck? Finish cleaning out the garden? Study times tables with Aidan? Help Sage read a book on her own?

It's only October, but sometimes the idea I held in my mind of the hours of well-packaged fun I was going to devise for us all, while simultaneously enjoy the growing baby seem lost under the piles of laundry and the tense, worried words of my ex-husband. "Are they learning enough? The art museum is great, but why can't Sage read basic words? Why can't Aidan crank out a page of math in half an hour?"

For me, this is what we kept them home to escape. I didn't want to drive an hour away to send them to Waldorf school. I didn't want to pick them up at the end of the day from public school, sobbing. I do want them to see their friends and play sports and enjoy their day. After years of cranking out curriculum for early childhood and after school programs, why can't I write one for my kids? Why can't we stay on topic?

But that's just it, isn't it? Life is a journey of "what ifs" and "here and now". So as I sip my strong espresso, and watch the Sunday-afternoon clock, counting the minutes until I have to rouse Nadia to get in the car and go pick her half siblings up from their dad, I know that this week will be what it is. Masks, Hallowe'en art projects, night walks in the woods staring at pumpkins, Rural Vermont Hallowe'en party at the Outdoor Center, and trick or treating through the village with friends. The math and reading will just have to be embedded in our everyday, along with silly songs and stories, campfires, discussions about life and death as our very small of ducks becomes a very small dinner, and the honesty of a life lived with good intention. Perhaps the best lesson I have to offer them.