Why I can't really tell you what we're doing for school

It's happened multiple times to me, and I imagine it must happen to other homeschooling families as well - the question of "What are you learning at school?" or its twin "So what are you doing/teaching this year?"  I'm a chronic over-thinker and these sorts of questions fill me with dread because I have no idea how to answer them accurately.

This year, sometime in August and well before we 'started school' (another phrase I can't wrap my head around) I wrote out a list of our curriculum choices.  I knew I needed a piece of paper that easily gave me a black and white answer to those kinds of inevitable questions for my own sanity.  And so I can tell you what it is that my children are theoretically using for school; on the other hand, here's why that piece of paper doesn't explain anything.

1.  I will not actually follow all of those curriculum choices as they are written to be followed.  If X science curriculum asks me to do two lessons per week there is a strong chance that I will do three lessons a week, or one lesson a week, or that some weeks I will do three lessons and the next week we'll be out of town and do half a lesson and then skip the next week and the following week we'll decide the scheduled lesson is boring and just do the experiment and then the fourth week we get on a kick about invertebrates and...you get the idea.  Am I using this curriculum?  I suppose so, roughly, approximately, but at the same time not really.

2.  I am going to add/subtract curriculum constantly.  The most carefully curated list of books for the eight year old will suddenly be unacceptable when he jumps ahead a few reading levels or randomly drops a few reading levels for no reason.  Or the six year old reads all of the books I picked for her for a month in three days.  Or we start on the handwriting selections and it is a vale of tears and I need to drastically reconsider everything.  None of my choices are set in stone and the majority of the time there is at least something that gets changed.

3.  I don't do all the teaching so actually I don't know exactly what everyone is doing every day of the week.  All three children have swimming lessons, for example.  I can tell you that.  But I can't tell you what they are learning, necessarily.  The eight year old takes piano lessons.  I get updates from his instructor but have only a rough idea what he's doing on a lesson-by-lesson basis.  He's learning how to play the piano.  That's what I know.

4.  A lot of the learning the children do is in their own time.  Every one of my children has their own set of interests and they tend to develop those without my assistance.  My son likes robotics, Lego, superheroes, learning sign language, origami, following NHL hockey teams, cross stitching, drawing comic strips, tv shows about history and archaeology, math videos, asking people trivia questions, playing the piano and numerous other interests and most of these things I have very little to do with.  So he will arrive at the kitchen table and launch into a lecture about hexaflexagons and I had no idea he knew anything about them.

5.  Finally, but maybe most importantly, there are days when it's hard to define exactly what we did 'for school'.  When a child helped me measure in the kitchen, were we doing math?  When we were all working in the garden and someone mentioned photosynthesis, were we doing science?  When a sick toddler asked for a book and I read to her, was that read aloud time?  A large portion of homeschooling, for me, has been accepting learning opportunities as they arrive, but because of that I have trouble explaining when we start or end our school day, or even necessarily what we're learning about.