I was supposed to start up with the homeschooling stuff today. I wanted to go back to forming that solid foundation work for my daughter so that she could move on to more her own level. I'm not sure if I'm going to go back to a more unschooling approach or if we're going to continue diving in with our make-it-up-as-you-go-along curriculum. I had planned to figure that out when we got there, but now I'm wondering if we're ever going to get there!
I'll be fair with myself. It's really not that bad. We took the week before we moved off of any school work because there were too many distractions. We took the week after off so we could settle in. Then, bright and early this morning, I was supposed to dive back in. We were going to finish the workbooks we had to focus on this week and then move on to more complex stuff. My daughter has been making so much more progress with this way of working that I'd thought about making it kind of our thing. Unfortunately, I'm at the point where I just want to scream because I've totally failed.
About 9am I dragged myself out of bed. The baby's got this stuffy nose problem, so he was up all night with bouts of screaming. I got very little sleep. I didn't mean to sleep in, but I woke up to two still sleeping children! I guess they needed their rest too! I didn't want to bother them, but they did drag themselves out of bed not long after. I had been trying to set myself in the mindset to dig out the books and get cracking, but I took one look at the kitchen table and wanted to cry. There's no way I can start doing school work with the kids if we don't have a surface to work on! I can't even pull out some crayons and paper to let them draw! There's barely even enough room for them to have their meals, and we certainly can't sit down at the table as a family. I just gave up then because I was too tired and cranky to really deal with it. That was my first fail of the day. Since then, let me tell you, inspired has not been my name.
Now, on the table, I'm not entirely to blame. Actually, very little of what's on the table belongs to me. For that matter, you can blame my room mates, but it's not really their fault either. Well, I suppose in a way it is. They've had plenty of opportunity to pack it all up and put it away or get rid of it. However, they didn't. More importantly, the people who left it all here abandoned it months ago. Yes, a part of me does still twitch that the house isn't baby-friendly yet and that there's still stuff that needs to be cleaned up from the house mates before us, but I can deal with that.
However, the real fail is that I said I was going to do these things and I still haven't done it. Yes, this was supposed to be our first day back into the swing of things, and I need to be forgiving. We did just move yet again, but I need to get motivated. I'd been so incredibly focused on getting things done and making progress around the house two homes ago, but now I've kind of dropped the ball. I need to get back on it again. I need to keep a focus on getting the house in order because a clean home really is a happy home.
What's most shocking about this (though I suppose it shouldn't be) is how incredibly connected everything is. I can't homeschool properly because I don't have a clean house. I had made that connection, but not like this before. I'd made the connection when I was the slob and the slacker. Now that it's not my stuff, it kind of gets my hackles up even more. Someone else is preventing me from raising and educating my children! More importantly, I'm just sitting here and letting it happen!
Here I was hoping to have a nice, kind of lazy day where I could do some knitting for warm stuff for the oncoming winter. I'd planned to do some work with the kids, but when exhaustion got in the way, I could accept not doing that. It just seemed like one excuse after another. I really just need to get on it.
So now, in order to start off a fresh start at homeschooling in the morning, I've got to assign myself a few tasks. I'm going back to the clean sink. I'm going to throw in a load of laundry. Then I'm going to spend a few minutes attempting to tackle the kitchen table. Hopefully some progress will be made and tomorrow won't be quite so much of a homeschooling fail day...
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