Planning The Plan, and Other Minor Successes.

This week was all about GraviTrax, recess and self-guided activities.

Mommy needed a week to get her sh*t together, so that was the focus instead of fumbling through lessons I’m not prepared to teach.

The boys started each day by building a new GraviTrax creation, sometimes doing this for hours. They worked together really well on it, there was no fighting, screaming or crying, and they were interested enough that they moved on to creating their own designs eventually.

That being said, the world is a tough and scary place right now, so I’m not going to apologize for letting my kids have a little extra Fortnite time. They haven’t seen their friends in months, and have had their whole lives turned upside down to protect our family.

I managed to rope The Teenager into helping the kids make cookies from scratch so they could work with organization and following a recipe. They’re becoming more capable with measuring and following directions, but nobody in this house likes to get their hands yucky. It’s amusing to watch them struggle not to touch the slimy butter and recoil from the cold, drippy egg whites.

Maybe I should have offered them some gloves.

Anyways, they made the cookies and it was all a success except cleanup. This is the one area my kids really fail hard at. And I know that’s largely my fault; I need to hold them accountable. It’s just so much faster to do it myself sometimes, and I don’t have a lot of time to waste during the day.

I feel a big cleaning “lesson” coming on so they appreciate how much work goes in to keeping things remotely sanitary around here. We can dedicate a whole morning to that one of these days, I think.

The boys still did reading and writing daily, it was just self-directed while I mostly worked on getting homeschooling stuff organized enough to comprehend. I really wanted to dedicate most of the week to school stuff, but a large part of that time has been spent working as well.

The problem comes with the balance, though – or lack thereof.

You can’t work and take care of kids and teach them and feed them and keep a house in order all at the same time without something slipping. For me, usually everything suffers and I end up doing less than my best in all areas, which can be devastating to my self esteem. I know I’m not the only one who feels this way. It sucks to have to choose between being an effective boss/worker/employee and a good parent and a remotely capable teacher. It’s impossible. Is anyone doing all of this well?

I did in fact get in touch with their contact teacher, who helped me through the ILPs and gave me a rundown for what a day could look like. That made things so much simpler. Now we have a checklist, and starting next week, we will be actually doing something resembling an organized education (knock on wood).

Wish us luck.