The Other Side of the Story

Grinnell College has this strange, essentially antiquated alumni social network called Plans -- it's sort of an early version of Facebook, with no pictures, no "like" button, but even more bickering.  It's awful and wonderful all at the same time.

Last week, a friend on Plans asked me if I could write a blog post about how difficult homeschooling is, lest she be tempted to try it herself one day.  Fair question.

My initial answer was that it really isn't that hard.  Through no fault of my own, my kids are fairly easy to deal with, academically and behaviorally.  They're excited about learning, I've had a lifetime of experience teaching young kids, and the three of us generally have a great time together.  "Doing School" with them goes fairly smoothly.  

If I'm being honest, though, this is an incomplete answer.  The school part of Homeschooling may not be that difficult for me, but being a Homeschool Mom certainly is.

So now, for a moment, let's talk about the hard part of homeschooling...

I'm Wasting My Life

I know, I know, I'm investing in my kids, I won't regret this time, I'm making some sort of eternal difference, blah blah blah.

But let's be real: I'm an attorney and your garden variety over-achiever.  If you knew me for even five minutes in school, you know that I worked hard.  I went to one of the best liberal art colleges in the country (so what if our social network is rudimentary...), a top-tier law school, and graduated at the top of my class.  I put everything I had into becoming whatever (admittedly awful) thing it is that someone who obsessively does these kinds of things grows up to be.  

By all rights, now that I've successfully gotten my kids to a reasonable school age, I should get to drop them off in car line, trade in the workout-clothes-that-smell-like-spit-up for a tailored suit, and go do something lawyer-like that changes the world.  Instead, here I am still at home, still wearing workout clothes (but they smell a little better), trying to get one kid to read three-letter words, the other kid to hold his pencil correctly instead of pretending to jab it into his eye, and both kids to care even a little bit about where Egypt is.     

Once in awhile, I meet a mom in homeschool circles who tells me that, even as a child, she knew she would homeschool her kids one day.  It's her life's dream; it's all she's ever wanted to do (except wear long skirts, not drink wine, and perfect the fake Jesus Smile).

When I meet these sweet ladies, I smile politely and move away as quickly as possible (they're probably moving away from me, too).  If spending your entire life teaching your young children doesn't fill you with shock, horror, and at least a little nausea, we'll never understand each other.  If teaching mindnumbing first grade math to your (mindnumbing) first-grader doesn't make you reevaluate everything you ever thought about your life, we just can't be friends.

In short, The Who I Am in no way resembles Who I Thought I'd Be, and that's hard.  

It's Monotonous

We try to keep things interesting over here, but this homeschooling that I never really expected to do happens every day.  Every.  Single.  Day.  I have to wake up every morning and know that, give or take, my day is going to look substantially similar to the one before it.  I'll face the same struggles, in the same rooms, with those same small people.  

Seriously, it was a little demoralizing just reading about it, wasn't it?

Nobody Will Leave Me Alone

This is the hardest one for me.  I'm a girl who likes my alone time but it's become apparent to me that when you homeschool, you don't get any of this.

School is a marvelously guilt-free place to leave your kids.  So what if you spend the entire schoolday watching reruns on Netflix or...watching reruns on Netflix?  It doesn't matter, because you didn't ask for that time alone; the time was merely a byproduct of your kids becoming educated.  Really, you were just passing the time by yourself, depressed, waiting for your little angels to finish their self-improvement and come home to you.  

Now that I'm a Homeschooling Mom, my best option is to leave the kids with my husband when he's working from home.  If you've ever tried this before, you know that it begins with a fifteen minute lecture on what does or does not constitute an emergency worth interrupting an important conference call.  Then, you have to drive as fast as you can to the spa grocery store, buy only what's on your list, and race home before the kids start yelling through your husband's office door that one of them may or may not have scratched the other one during a particularly raucous game of Mountain Lion.

Just so we're clear, this does not qualify as Alone Time.

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Thankfully, there is grace for all of this mess.  There's grace for the occasional, minor setback -- the brief temper tantrums, the resistance, the exhaustion.  But even more than this, there's grace for the bigger, deeper, What Am I Doing With My Life moments.  Contentment in the mundane.  Peace in the chaos.  A sudden glimpse of purpose hidden in the day-to-day futility.  A few extra minutes to myself that I know without a doubt came through supernatural intervention.  Grace.

In all honestly, the parts of homeschooling that you see on my blog will probably always paint a picture of a light-hearted, homeschooling utopia where the worst thing that ever happens is that we make a mess.  Just know that before we did whatever that awesome thing was that on my blog, I was drinking a cup of coffee and asking God why I'm throwing my life away.  Know that after we wrapped the activity up, I was thinking of ways to get out of doing whatever it was I'd planned to do afterwards because I was running short on energy, patience, or both.  Know that throughout that entire day, part of me was threatening to die if a child said "Hey, mom" one more time.  

Know that homeschooling isn't entirely easy or fun, even if it looks that way on my blog -- it's just that the hard parts are internal and make for a boring story.  Quite simply, there are just better, more interesting tales to be told.

Choose Your Own Homeschool Adventure

While I've been sitting on the couch with my husband, pretending to watch the NBA Finals (yes honey, the Heat does seem to be lacking on their offensive rebounding), I've been debating between two very different blog posts.  

So, in the spirit of a good old fashioned Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-Book, I'll let you decide which one to read.  Ready?

It's summer and Normal Families are out of school, so our free time fills up quickly with playdates and fieldtrips.  If you want my kids to have a hilarious drama-free time at the weirdest zoo ever, while I fear for my life, skip to #2.  If you like to feel bad about the state of the modern world, proceed to #1 to read about Little Mean Girls, the Worst Sleepover Ever, and why I'm really homeschooling.

#1  Mean Girls:  I pretend that I'm homeschooling the kids to give them a great education, to spend more time with them, and to free up our schedule for play, travel, and fieldtrips (because clearly, those go so well -- see #2).  But let's be honest -- I'm really homeschooling them so I can shelter them from all of the harsh realities of life (not really...okay, sort of).  

Grace has a friend in the neighborhood who turned 7 this week.  Apparently, public school rising-2nd-graders are in fact basically teenagers.  They show up to trampoline places wearing what I swear is lingerie (it's possible I'm just being a prude, but really I'm not), they sing bitter Taylor Swift songs about breaking up with some boy named Trevor, and they roll their eyes and say that they're "bored" even though they're in a warehouse of wall-to-wall trampolines.

Had I known that this is the sad state of second graders today, I could have anticipated that perhaps my delightfully quirky five-year-old would have been out of her league in this crowd.  In case you haven't met her, Grace is either pretending to be a pony, or pretending to ride a pony, about 80% of the time.  The other 20% of her time is spent searching for pet rollie pollies, or telling knock knock jokes that only make sense to her captive bugs.  In short, she is absolutely awesome.  She does not own lingerie, and she's only interested in Trevor if he happens to be a Pegasus.

Thirty minutes into the party, Grace was in tears, we were coming home, and I was left with the crushing reality that I'm raising a girl who's growing up with girls just like the ones we all grew up with.  Mean Girls.  Let me just say that if I had any doubts about keeping my kids out of this world until they're old enough to navigate it with some discernment, those thoughts all but vanished on that car ride home.  

Don't get me wrong -- I'm not saying homeschool kids can't be mean.  They're human and struggle with all of the same human nature that all of us do.  Please also don't hear me saying that all kids that go to school are mean.  

To my mind, the difference is simply in the numbers: Homeschool kids aren't left to their own devices in a pack. Any group of kids -- especially girls -- will turn into Lord of the Flies when there aren't responsible, invested authority figures there to help them navigate the complicated world of feelings, social responsibility, and growing up, in a hands-on, authentic way.  

Homeschool Moms don't mess around with this stuff, you guys, and it's lovely to watch them parent their kids into becoming amazing people.  

Also, no self-respecting Homeschool Mom would let her kid leave the house in lingerie.  

#2  The Strangest Zoo You'll Probably Never Visit:  The kids and I love a good fieldtrip.  If you plan it, we'll come.  So this week, we met up with some awesome homeschool friends at the Johnson City Exotic Resort Zoo.  I'd like to apologize for not taking a single picture of this place -- I was honestly in shock.  

First of all, I literally do not know why they call this place a "resort."  There are no massages, no hot tubs, and the closest thing to a swimming pool were some old bathtubs in a field that perhaps used to serve as water troughs until they were attacked by the strange assortment of animals that make their home here.  To be fair, I heard that there are in fact "cabins" somewhere on the grounds-- cabins where people clearly out of their minds pay to stay at this bizarre place, surrounded by hungry goats and violent ostriches.  Please make your anniversary reservations early, guys.

When you arrive, they herd you onto a vehicle that I simply can't describe -- think hayride, minus the hay, but with bars on the side (to keep the wild animals from getting into the vehicle and mauling you).  Someone In Charge quickly and incoherently mumbles some instructions.  You and your friend next to you can decipher nothing from this speech except "Do not feed the zebras, they bite."  And then the Someone In Charge pushes the gas peddle and you hold onto your kids for dear life.

You're doing okay until you realize that the entire point of this expedition is for ostriches, bison, zebras, and what your over-the-moon daughter is calling gazelles to basically chase your vehicle through Texas ranchland while kids hold their hands out and feed them.  Let's be clear: these are not animals that the Good Lord intended should be fed by hand.  

Grace said it was her "favorite day" that she's ever had.  Micah wished that the animals hadn't slobbered on him quite as much.  This City Girl took four showers when she got home to her Austin suburb.  It was a win. 

Week in Review

Before we started our week -- our First Week -- I anticipated a lot of things.  Crying, screaming, hiding, throwing...drinking.  I guess we probably did have a little of all of that (mostly from me, especially the drinking) but I'm really a little surprised by how little drama we had.

In fact, I think we actually had fun.  It was a homeschooling miracle.

I think the kids each learned a few things, but I probably learned more.

1)  It comes much more naturally for me to spend time with my kids engaging in literature, history, and even math than it is to play a never-ending game of My Little Ponies.  Or Spiderman.  Or Spiderman Saves the My Little Ponies from the evil Thomas the Train. Sometimes, five minutes inside of our kids' imaginations can seem like an eternity, amiright?  

2)  One mom and two kids can cover an entire day's worth of Kindergarten curriculum in under 2 hours, including plenty of tangentially-related crafts.  Such as painting "like nomads" (clearly, only the most conscientious of nomads painted using washable paint on paper bags, while wearing smocks).  

3)  My girl draws a mean goose (which starts with G, just like Grace).  

  

4)  The "only things" my son can think of that start with the same letter as his name are "Megamind" and "Metroman."  The only things.

5)  Math is more fun when you do it in pajamas.  But we all probably already knew that, if we'd ever just thought about it.  What you might not have known is how good killer whales are at addition.  

6)  My daughter has some unfortunate perfectionist tendencies and her best is never good enough for her.  My son, on the other hand, does not share this problem and his mantra appears to be "Whatever, it's no biggie."  Somehow, we've got to meet in the middle.

Most importantly, I think we undid some damage this week - damage caused in large part by a school that asked parents to forego telling their children to "Have fun" in favor of "Work hard."  

So far, at our house, I think we're managing to do both and it is lovely.

The First Day of School

We bought our sweet little boy a "Spiderman-Big-Boy-Bike" for his four-and-a-half-birthday this weekend.  Yes, we celebrate his half-birthday, but I promise we don't also buy him presents on his real birthday; we aren't Those People.  Yes, we are.  

But he's so cute, how could we help it?

There were a few hiccups while he adjusted to the new bike.  He's an old hand at riding without training wheels, but adding a few extra inches to the wheel size threw him off a tad.  He could still sail down the street...once he got started...and until it was time to stop.  

An inability to start and stop gracefully runs in the family.  I do best when I manage to keep up what little inertia I had in the first place.  Slow and steady over here.  So when Grace's university-model school ended last week (praise the Lord), we took a brief week off and then officially started our own homeschool today.  

In short, I was afraid that if we stopped homeschooling any longer than that, we'd fall off the bike altogether, and might never be able to pick up enough speed to get our balance again.  

It isn't just a matter of inertia, though.  Since we don't have a farm for the kids to work over the summer, I feel no need to follow the traditional school calendar.  Instead, we plan on taking So. Many. Days. Off. during the lovely Fall and Spring Austin days.  To reduce my guilt about this (I wouldn't really feel guilty), you'll find us in the air conditioning this Summer, reading, counting, and learning about Ancient Egypt.  Once Fall arrives, you probably won't find us inside at all.    

So just when so many friends are posting on Facebook about their kids' Last Day of School, here I am posting about our First.

I have so many precious homeschooling friends with precious First Day of School traditions.  Favorite breakfast restaurants, a new pair of pajamas (a homeschool "uniform"), a fabulous field trip.  I love the idea of it but quite frankly, we don't do fanfare over here.  It just isn't how we roll.  So with nothing more than me saying "Hey, let's start our new homeschool stuff today!" we began.  And see how happy they look?

  

Don't be fooled.  About five minutes after this picture was taken, the big one started screaming that she was "bored with everything in the world," and the little one suggested that we give it all up and go bowling.  

But whatever, all in all, I'm calling the day a Win.  Slow and steady wins the race, right?