14 Things You Can Do In Homeschooling When You Just Can't Even.

Yeah, like it looks like this even when things are going well.  Right.

Sometimes it is expected, planned even, and sometimes it completely sneaks up on you, but if you are your child's teacher there will come a time when you just can't manage to teach in the style you prefer.  When (not if) it happens, you'll try and muscle through, and you will fail at that, and it will make you even more miserable, and then you'll panic, and imagine the children are falling behind.  But I'm going to sit with you here and tell you right now

Everything Is Going To Be Fine.

When I had my third child, I was trying to 'do kindergarten' with my then-four-year-old.  In hindsight this makes me laugh, but at the time I was very earnest and serious about it all and would have been terribly offended if anyone had suggested that 20 minutes of formal kindergarten a day was unnecessary when one was as ill as I was.  The techniques I used there to muddle through were very different from what I did several years later when my father in law had a massive stroke and lay in a hospital 10 hours away from us for a month before he died.  During that time we went through our savings traveling back and forth to him three times, and the reduced finances combined with the stress and uncertainty of the time and just the sheer amount of time in the car made my standard methods of homeschooling impossible.

These two occasions come to mind easily because of their enormity, but actually there are plenty of times I haven't been able to teach how I want.  The days I've spent cleaning in preparation for a visit, the illnesses that sweep through a house every fall, the emergencies that crop up, even the days I slept so poorly the night before I could barely see straight and yet...there's school to do, and I am in charge, so if it will get done, it will only get done through me.

 - Of course, if you enjoy an unschoolish sort of learning style, you won't necessarily have a schedule to interrupt.

 - Of course, if you are not going through a rough patch but entering a whole new season of life (becoming a foster parent, giving birth to a special-needs child, battling a chronic illness, beginning an entirely new lifestyle, etc.) techniques won't be a long-term solution; you will need to reevaluate your entire plan.

 - Of course, not everyone is going to make use of everything, and I teach a 9yo, a 7yo and a 5yo in a mix of Classical and Charlotte Mason styles so if you teach a 16yo with unit studies, then my suggestions might be of limited use to you.

Are those all the caveats?  I think so.  So here you go - 14 things I've found helpful in homeschooling when you just can't even manage.

1) Take a walk.  Call it a nature walk or a learning walk or an adventure walk or a ramble or a hike or whatever you please, but put shoes on people and walk around.  If there's a destination, that's great, and if there isn't, that's also great.  If you can't go for a walk, go outside to the garden.  If you can't go into the garden, sit on the front steps, or on the balcony, or at the park.  Or drive to the park for that matter, and wander around.  The children will probably mention things as you walk, but if they don't, you can if you like.  Talk about how that cloud over there looks like an elephant, or how you just saw a pack of ants go by with a dead caterpillar, but if nature is not so much your (or your child's) jam, then talk about the motorcycles on the road or the stop sign or whatever you like.

2) Play the Five Senses Game.  This one is good as a conversation starter as well.  If you're walking, find a good spot to get off the road/path and tell everyone to close their eyes and explain what they can see/hear/taste/smell and feel.

3) Ask 'I wonder' questions.  Instead of feeling the pressure to spew forth information, ask the children what they think is happening around them.  "I wonder why the flowers over there are so brightly coloured?" might get such responses as "So the bees can see them." "Because that lady painted those flowers." "So no one steps on them." and my personal favourite "I dunno."  You can respond how you please.  Often my children will run with this and start arguing their individual points, and I just respond with encouraging noises and nodding.  Don't feel obligated to have all the answers.

4) Examine one square foot.  Especially good if what you have is a very tiny outdoor space for looking at nature - everyone lays down on their stomach on the grass and peers at the tiny hidden world in front of them.  How many plants can you count?  Are there any creatures in your square foot?  Any teeny flowers?  If you have a magnifying glass, this is a good place for it, but the naked eye will see plenty.  This is also doable with house plants, by the way.

5)  Explore with errands.  Certainly don't try and do this with every place on your list of errands, but at least one time, explore around when you're at a mandatory stop.  Go down every aisle in the grocery store, slowly pushing the cart, even the aisles you need nothing at all in.  We have plenty of medical appointments, and there is one building in the nearby city where I have taken the children up to the top floor on the elevator, and then slowly descended the staircase, floor by floor, looking all around.  I can tell you there are two water fountains, and some planters, and one big window up at the top where you get a great view over the rooftops.

6) Go to the library and just sit.  This is such a foreign concept to parents, but really, bring your child to the children's section, wave your hand around and say "Look.  Look at all the books."  And then find a chair and sit.  They may come sit with you, or go colour a picture, or pull a bunch of books off the shelf and talk too loudly (the last two appear to be the main library behavior concerns, in my experience) but really, the majority of children are not likely to be destructive.  Loud, yes.  Destructive, no.

7) Read in full view.  Do this at the library, if you're there.  Say "I am going to get a book and read.  You may get a book too, and join me, and we'll read together!"  And then sit down with a book, in the library, and read it.  In full view of your kids.  Or you can do it at home.  You can pile a bunch of pillows behind you on the sofa and announce "I'm going to lie here quietly and read for twenty minutes if you would like to read with me.  But I am not doing anything else until the twenty minutes is done."  And then, read.  It will get easier.

8)  Share your interests.  I enjoy cross stitching and my 9yo son saw me with my craft and decided to try it as well.  So I shared it with him and taught him the basics and he happily cross stitched things along with me.  If you are overwhelmed and stressed and worried and pressed for time, don't try and learn a new thing to teach it - teach what you already know and love!  Much like reading, you modeling your interest in an activity is significantly more compelling to your children than any persuasive argument you put forth.  They want to do what YOU are doing.

9)  Share your chores.  I say this with some trepidation because this one can backfire in some situations.  I personally don't like cooking with my children (although I occasionally do, just so they have some kitchen experience and don't grow up to be awful spouses), but that is because when I'm in the kitchen I am focused and trying to get through the work as efficiently as possible.  But when I have been in seasons of needing to focus on my house and not on formal schooling, I have found having a child tagging right along beside me through the day to be invaluable.

10)  Watch Judiciously!  The party line is to separate a day into 'educational stuff' and 'television', but that kind of black and white thinking is unhelpful and wrong.  There's plenty of interesting, educational media out there.  Youtube videos and tv shows and documentaries and so forth.  Our public broadcasting stations have documentaries and shows on all sorts of topics that appeal to the children - whale watching and exploring great museums around the world and the science of light and on and on...watch tv when there is something worth watching and don't feel bad about it.

11)  Outsourcing education.  By this I mean using whatever resources you can to help you teach.   Audio books aren't exactly the same as you reading a book aloud, but they are helpful and portable and sometimes you can't BE there to read aloud.  A math computer game isn't a math curriculum, and it isn't the same as you teaching math, but it is a great fill-in.  Think of these options like the supply teachers of the overwhelmed homeschooling world.  My 9yo son plays a math game for 30 minutes a day but on a day when, for example, I am really sick or knee-deep in paperwork, he might play for an hour, or an hour and half.  Who cares?

12)  Get into strewing.  This is an unschooling practice of leaving out books and learning materials where kids can find them and explore on their own.  After years of trying this technique I have finally hit upon making a simple book display on a windowsill in my livingroom.  Every once in a while, when interest runs low on the previous display, I pull a bunch of books on whatever topic takes my fancy out of our substantial shelves, and I set up a little display.  I never mention it - the children find it in due time - and despite these books being ones we've had for ages they are always pounced upon as new treasures.  Sometimes I will also pull out a card game or puzzle we haven't seen in a while and just put it on a table.  Inevitably someone will start it or ask to play a round.

13)  Bring me the (insert latest interest).  The 7yo likes making clay charms, the 9yo is obsessed with Lego, whatever they are doing, sit down and join in.  "Tell me about what you're making." is all you need to say and you will be inundated with more information about the latest craze than you ever thought possible.  You may be on your third day after surgery and stuck on the sofa but "Bring me your Lego and you can tell me about what you're making these days" will, I absolutely guarantee you, have the affect of starting a conversation that will never end.  On hour eight of a car trip, saying "So I remember you started talking to me about that book/video game/whatever.  What did you say your favourite part was again?" will fill your hours.

14)  Embrace independent work.  A workbook that someone will enjoy and do, even if it isn't exactly what you want to teach, is better than no work at all and you upset because 'everyone did nothing'.  My children are practically incapable of doing independent work it seems, but I can still send them off to set the stove timer for 30 minutes of silent reading, and know that even if it ends up being a magazine or a Garfield comic - they did read for thirty minutes.

Is it you?

There is a funny saying, and I can't remember exactly how it goes but it's something like "There's always an odd person in every group.  Look around and if you don't see anyone, then it's you."  Something like that.

Anyway, I was reading the other day and for some reason this came into my mind.  And I've been trying to untangle why that should be.  Often this happens to me; I will have a flash of insight but then no real understanding of the bridges to get there from here, and then it takes a while to figure out the tangles and side roads.  But I have a thought about what this flash might have been about.

We are not just the ones who need to forgive, but also the ones who need to be forgiven.  If you look around your life and all you can see are the people who have wronged you and who you need to forgive, then you haven't recognized the many ways you have undoubtedly wronged others and need to ask for their forgiveness.  I think we're hardwired in a way to tend towards feeling upset and hurt; I know I am.  Christians, as much as the rest of the world, seem to spend a great deal of time being offended and upset about things and hurt by the thoughtlessness of others.  And yet, how many times do we look around the room and, not seeing someone who has recently offended us, cast out from our minds the possibility that we were the one who hurt another?

I think a regular, careful examination of our conscience is important, yes, but even more than that I think we need to cultivate the habit of seeing something through another's eyes and imagining the other person's life and how that might affect their behavior.  I have been working on this myself, and I assure you it is a truly awful and horrible and also useful and fruitful way of going about apologizing.

- Has someone been upset with you, and you have justified your words and thought "I don't need to apologize".  Have you even considered apologizing?  Can you imagine a world in which you did?

- When you think over your interactions with others, can you come up with a variety of ways in which you've been hurt, but if pressed to think of ways in which you need to be forgiven, you draw a blank?

- Does forgiveness always mean you forgiving another?

- Have you said "please forgive me" as often this week as you have thought "I'm upset at so-and-so"?

Of course, we have ultimate forgiveness of our sins from God alone, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't seek forgiveness from our earthly family.

"Therefore if you are offering your gift at the altar 

and there remember that your brother has something 

against you leave your gift there before the altar. 

 First go and be reconciled to your brother, then come 

and offer your gift." Matt 5:23-24

The Bible has a lot to say about you forgiving your enemies, but of course God won't leave it there, will He.  We are called in Matthew to reconcile ourselves to our brother if he has something against us.  Not if he has something against us that we agree with, or that we recognize as an issue that needs resolving, but if he has something against us period.  If he's upset about something and you disagree with it...you are still required to show up and attempt to reconcile, to work it out, to apologize, to be better.

One of the reasons why we don't think of needing to be forgiven is self-centeredness.  We can see our sides of things, but rarely can we look through another's eyes.  Another reason is pride; no one wants to say they are sorry or listen to another person's side when we feel so much as though we are correct.  Another reason is simply ignorance - we don't even notice that we need to be forgiven and just bulldoze over others.  There are more, of course, there are probably infinite reasons why we don't seek forgiveness, but they pale against the other side, which says, quite clearly: God Says Do This.  And if we are His followers, then that is enough.

Early Summer Nostalgia

Every once in a while I still get caught in the sweeping undertow of nostalgia for the life we (and I) used to have.  I think there's this unfortunate belief that Christians are just constantly happy all the time with wherever they live and, uh, that's not reality.  No, losing my old neighbourhoods and ways of life have been a tangible loss for me; a deep missing that I still feel, although not all the time, but especially in the summer.  It's getting warmer, and the sky is light for longer, and I was not surprised to discover a sense of sadness the other day when I left the children's swimming lessons and drove home.

I was raised in a city, you see.  I loved the city.  I know many people have dreams of leaving the 'urban sprawl' and setting up the little homestead lifestyle, but I did not.  I really enjoyed our holidays in the countryside, but I also really loved my life in the city as well.  When I went to university, it was in another city, and it follows that I met my husband in a city, we were married in a city, and we lived in a city.  Because he had also, you see, been raised in a city.

And let me tell you, cities are great.  They're amazing places.  They have architecture, and hidden neighbourhoods to explore and there are always new things to see and restaurants to try.  And museums!  Boy, I love museums.  And my husband loves movies, which are also great in cities because those city theatres get all the indie films and the niche films and the IMAX films and the documentaries.  You learn so much in a city - there are always lectures to attend or new people to meet and learn from.  And there are nice, big libraries and beautiful parks with things like baseball diamonds that are maintained and also that have TEAMS playing ON them!  And swimming pools! And ethnic grocery stores so you could possibly make a recipe that calls for an unusual ingredient!  Perhaps most of all, cities have choice.  If you don't like that cab company, you try a different cab company.  If you don't like that walking trail, you walk on a different trail.  You never have to say 'this is the only place to buy toothpaste, so if I need to buy toothpaste, I have to do so here.'  In a city, there are probably 200 places to buy toothpaste and half a dozen specialty stores with weird natural toothpaste brands and also at least a few seminars on how to make your own toothpaste and probably a farmer's market to buy it if you don't feel like making it and, and, and.

So that's a long love note to cities right there.  Which may not make sense if you knew me because...I don't live in a city and haven't for about 10 years now.

Shortly after we got married my husband and I moved for his school/work, and we moved from a big, vibrant, cosmopolitan city to...a town of about 4000 people.  It was a huge culture shock for me, let me tell you.  I don't even think I could explain how lost I felt for the first few years we lived there.  If I couldn't buy it at Walmart, it was almost as if it didn't exist for me.  There were three grocery stores in town, a small mall with...I can't even remember the stores, but nothing so exotic as a food court or anything, just a few little stores, and a thrift store, and a Walmart.  There were a couple of diners, and a McDonald's, that sort of thing.  I have trouble bringing up in my mind what stores there were now.  A hardware store?  And I can remember this intense sense of loss; where WAS I?  What was happening here?  Where was...where was LIFE?  It was very grey, especially in the winter, and I felt very little happiness about our surroundings.  At first we lived in an apartment, which was horrible, but eventually managed to move to a house with a backyard.  And about four years in to our stay in that town, which I never got used to by the way, even though everyone said I would, my husband was called to a church.

In a village of approximately 600 people.

Fortunately I could see better now why God had us move to that first town!  Comparatively speaking, going from 4000 to 600 was much easier than going from millions and millions to 4000.  Still, there were some more adjustments.  Now there was only one small grocery store.  There was a smaller, small town library.  There wasn't a hospital anymore, or a dentist or a vet in town.  Everything now required a drive.  I joked for a while that the next place he would bring me would be, like, three houses on a stretch of highway.

We have lived in this village for almost six years now, and in some ways it HAS gotten easier, or at least more familiar, but never comfortable.  After ten years away from the city you would think I would be thoroughly 'countrified', but I am most assuredly not.  I haven't embraced snowmobiling or owning a large dog or clothing in a camouflaged pattern.  I miss the city intensely, but at the same time I have had a few opportunities to be in large cities over the past few years, and I find them overwhelming in so many ways.  I'm not used to the press of a hundred people in a subway car anymore.  I'm not used to the huge amount of grime on everything, and the panhandlers, and the endless garbage and the TRAFFIC.  When I leave, it's with this frustrated sadness now because the city life I love is almost closed to me - I can't belong there because I've been away too long, and I can't belong here because my heart has always stayed in this semi-mythical past city that doesn't exist anymore.  

What sometimes hits me is realizing that my children are country children.  They've never lived in a city.  They haven't had the childhood I had, which I've also mythologized as some sort of Childhood Idyll.  My children say things like "Look at all the deer!" on the way to the grocery store.  And I can't stand when people tell me how 'lucky' we are to live here, even though I also say that to people, but I take it from others to mean "how lucky you are to live here, as opposed to in that terrible, horrible urban wasteland." And I wonder to myself if they have even lived in a city.  If they've seen what fireworks on Canada Day look like when they are put on in a big, impressive, thirty-minute, non stop display.  Or what it's like to order in a restaurant where the entire menu is in another language.  Or if they've gone exploring and found something new every single time, even in their own neighbourhood.  How can that be the terrible, horrible city?  When I say how lucky we are to live here, I mean 'How fortunate, that this place we live in, is such a clean, nice place to live', but I don't mean 'This is my favourite place.  This is the place I would be, if I could be anywhere.'

Book Review - Greenglass House (spoilers included)

Greenglass House - by Kate Milford

Published 2014

Read aloud to the 9yo 

The Good

A positive family story that shows interracial adoption!  Woohoo!  That isn't always easy to find, actually.  Also a book that explores the imagination and being who you want to be in the context of a 'Dungeons and Dragons'  type role-playing game the children play in the story.  I read a review likening the book to a youth version of an Agatha Christie novel and yes!  Very much so.

Milo, the main character, also struggles with what seems to be an anxiety-type disorder and yet he works to push himself and he shows healthy coping mechanisms.

The Bad

There are some instances of people smoking, saying "Oh my G-d", "shut up", 'stupid', 'idiot', and that sort of thing.  It is generally easy to edit these on the fly.  Milo is fairly petulant at the beginning but pulls it together for his family.  The chapters are veeeeery long, and often don't split up into easy sections so it's pretty hard to read for a bedtime read aloud unless you are prepared to invest some serious time each evening, which sometimes I am, and sometimes I am not.  Milo is older than my children so there is also some behavior that I don't deal with yet (like a feeling of being 'owed' a winter vacation from school) that might be more in line with an older child.  One of the characters, Meddy, asks impertinent questions about Milo's adoption.  Milo also wonders about his birth family and feels bad for doing so because he loves his parents.  Smuggling is recognized as illegal but is portrayed in a neutral to positive light.  There is a story told of a smuggler who is captured and executed.  There is mention of ghosts and other spooky things.  Toward the end of the story there is a 'bad guy' type figure who holds people hostage with a gun, although no one is hurt.

The big surprise comes in one of the last chapters and I did not see it coming.  I won't tell you what it is but I will say it has to do with a ghost.

My Thoughts

This book was a read aloud for my 9yo, who honestly was mostly interested in the mystery, the maps, the art, the clues.  For that, it was great.  If you have a child who is sensitive to ghost stories or suspense, this book would probably not be such a great choice.  

I had two problems with the story, and one is explained away simply by remembering this is a story for relatively young readers - Milo and Meddy were consistently, fantastically successful at coming up with answers.  You were 100% guaranteed that if they went to 'look for some clues in the attic' that they would find big ole' pieces of the puzzle.  If they interviewed someone, they acquired important, substantial clues to solving the mystery.  Etc. Etc.  Ad nauseum.  Now, did the 9yo notice that or care about it if he did?  Certainly not!  He probably would have been more frustrated and annoyed by a mystery that dragged on!  But as an adult reading it, it's worth mentioning that in terms of a mystery - this is very juvenile.  The equivalent of, say, those old Nancy Drew mysteries.

The second problem had to do with the ending.  I had read several other reviews about the book and there were multiple people unhappy with the ending so I'm not alone here when I say...it was lame.  And a little ridiculous.  And also not really an ENDING ending.  Again, the 9yo thought it was fine, this was the adult's opinion here.  I'm going to try and tiptoe around so I don't completely spoil it for you, although fair warning - the title of this blog post does say 'Spoilers Included'.  Essentially the problem is that a huge supernatural event happens...and no one seems at all bothered by any of it.  It was like if suddenly you wandered into a little coffee shop and there was, say, the entire cast and crew of your favourite tv show sitting there in full costume eating cake and you just shrugged and thought "huh.  Weird."  And walked away.  That's how much sense the ending had.  It wasn't logical.

But if you can look beyond the ending, and the fact that this is a middle school level mystery with a LOT of confusing elements and comprehension levels, this is actually a fun, interesting, worth while read for the 9-12 set.

Reading Notes, April/May 2019

Here we are, finally listing the books I've recently read.  I did mention in a Seven Quick Takes a while back about two of those books, The Witness by Grace Livingstone Hill and The Blue Castle by Lucy Maud Montgomery.

So here's what I've been reading the past few weeks:

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I want to read all of the Montgomery books that aren't Anne.  Some of them I own, some I do not, but this is a collection of short stories published posthumously that I reread in my Montgomery quest.  Like Emily's Quest, only more read-ish and less interesting.  That's a L.M.M. joke.  Anyway.  I haven't decided yet if I am going to include her journals in this plan.

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The Heroes of the Faith series is written for probably a middle school reading level.  I was stuck at a church event and that church had a library attached to it.  I was told to go ahead and borrow whatever I liked.  So I did.  I've always like Amy Carmichael, who was a missionary throughout Asia and helped to save a great many children, but I never knew much about her early life, nor about her stint in Japan!  It's been a fast read, but helped fill in some knowledge gaps; I may go ahead and see if I can find a most advanced biography of her.

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I think I knew that The Hiding Place had a sequel, but that information had become lost in the depths of my brain over the years so when I picked this book up I was surprised and pleased all over again!  The style of writing is very much like The Hiding Place.  It's strange how different this writing is, actually, to the book I mention next, Amazing Love.

Initially it was a strong enough factor for me to wonder if, since English wasn't Corrie's first language, she had extensive editing help with this title and The Hiding Place in a way she didn't have with other books she wrote.  But then I did a little research and discovered that Amazing Love was published in 1953 and Tramp for the Lord in 1971, so I suppose the extra almost two decade simply produced a more finished work.

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A Corrie ten Boom book I haven't read!  Of course The Hiding Place is her most well-known book, but she wrote quite a lot more than that, all with her trademark gentleness and soft humour.  This one was not her best writing - it felt rushed and not particularly well edited.  Also several of the stories are repeats from Tramp For The Lord.

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I started reading this and was not pulled in immediately.  But I bought it because Elizabeth George is an extremely popular Christian writer, so I'm going to sit down and make a concerted effort to finish it and come up with a better opinion than 'This book is so pink'.

Books Read Aloud To The Children

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The two Eleanor Estes books were our latest chapter book read alouds for the children, mainly the girls, who appreciated Jane Moffat's escapades the most.

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I won't write much about Greenglass House because it is the subject of an upcoming book review, but this mystery/suspense/fantasy fiction for middle schoolers really appealed to my 9yo and I.  

And in case you think we simply pick up books and plow through them like a rat in a grain silo, here is a book I recently started with my son, read two chapters of, and discarded because neither of us liked it at all.

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The Long, Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

My husband has just returned from a (hopefully relaxing or at least vaguely encouraging) trip to Cleveland, Ohio with several of his close friends, to attend the Basics Conference.  He deserved a break from everything else going on in life, and it is truly his last hurrah before starting on the two full time courses he is working on this summer, so I didn't begrudge him the trip.  But...ugh...if you've been the parent at home alone with the children for days on end you know of what I speak.  Ugh.

He left after church, and that first night I said to myself I said 'Amy, let's try and be fun okay?  Don't be all crazy like and sobby.  No one likes that.  Stop being a bum.'  And I inquired with false cheerfulness what everyone would like to do and it turns out that was play with my make-up.  And put it on me as well.  We all looked like slightly worse-for-wear college kids after a party.  Then we had hamburgers, which were part of my plan to buy all the easy food possible and feed it to the children.  I let them play video games and listen to tapes of Adventures in Odyssey and watch Paddington Bear and fill up the bathtub way too high for baths, and then I put them to bed and thought about how much more relaxing my life would be if I drank.  Just kidding.  Sort of.

I had stocked up on face masks the last time we were in town so I was well prepared to occupy myself with this:

I love these sorts of beauty products.  Are you kidding me?  Rub gold stuff all over my face AND look 'fresher'.  Can't beat that advertising for $3.19.

And I roasted a chicken, because I am on a crazy restrictive diet for very boring reasons I won't get into and one of the things I CAN easily and safely eat is chicken.  And I didn't need to be getting all hangry and sobbing into a cup of cashew milk.  So my evening was:  rub gold on my face, eat some chicken, and call a friend who knew the woes of the minister's wife and was happy to avoid watching Game of Thrones with her husband and chat with me instead.  I had emergency anxiety back-up, too - a laptop that played dvds and the complete series of Bless Me Father.  Just in case it was lonely all by myself.

The whole three days was essentially that, on repeat.

But then he came back and we had one long, glorious day just us as a family before we have been thrust into the chaos of a 7yo birthday, the start of two university courses, a complete renovation of the church office, and all the other odds and ends of life.

I need to stock up on more weird face masks.

Parenting will not make you happy

This hedgehog had six babies but she doesn't look very happy. 

Wanna read something very confounding?

Try this article published by The Atlantic on how many children is the optimal number of children from a 'happiness' perspective.

What a very...odd...way of thinking about children.  I can't say I understand it at all, actually.  My own personal views aside, I can see why someone would choose to stop having children for medical or genetic reasons, I can see why people would say 'I want to give my child this sort of life and so I will stop having children in order to be able to afford that, either financially or emotionally'.  I can see, even, why someone would choose to stop having children because they had 'always dreamed of having this many children.'  I mean, I don't think those reasons are equal at all to each other, but they are the sort of personal reasons that people give for this sort of decision.  But...how many children will make you, the parent, the happiest??

Darling, I think perhaps you haven't got a firm grip on child-rearing.

Let me tell you, your children, be they spare in number or multifarious, are going to give you plenty to not be happy about.  If what you want is happy, then get a dog.  Dogs are great.  Dogs love you and don't take off their diapers to paint their cribs with fecal matter.  Dogs don't pee all over your one nice upholstered chair and then stick a partially thawed yogurt tube under the cushions and jump on it. Dogs don't tell you, after you just spent a ridiculous sum of money on an outing, that you are a mean parent because you said no ice cream. You want fulfilling?  Grow a cactus.  But don't have kids, please, if that's the reason you want them.

Children are messy and imperfect and illogical and above all very, very human and unless you are willing to be torn apart and put back together again over and over while attempting to help them stumble into adulthood, unless you want to spend literally The. Rest. Of. Your. Life. crying and being unable to tell if it is from stress or sadness or sheer, unadulterated love, you will spend your parenting days fumbling to achieve a perfect ideal that will never exist for you.

If happiness is vacations and bliss and weird sounding coffee creamers and all the money for all the things and all the things for you, then parenting is UNhappy.  Parenting is sacrifice and pain from the moment you look at that stick you just peed on and think "that's...that's totally a second blue line.  Now what?" all the way to the last breath you take surrounded by, you hope and pray, your children and your children's children, calling you blessed and walking you home.

Now, if you want to talk about joy, then I'm all for that.  But joy isn't something you limit, it's something you greedily grab at.  You want more joy, more, and lots of swimming in joy moments, surrounded by it.  But joy isn't happiness!  

Joy is being offered the chance to look through God's eyes for a moment.  And it's a wonderful thing even in the midst of anxiety and depression.  It's the only thing, really, that lets us feel like this parenting thing is all worthwhile.  It isn't stuff.  It isn't money.  It isn't more.  It's just...joy.

Happiness, on the other hand, is a mighty fickle mistress.

Now, to be fair, the article has slightly more...realistic moments.  Where the author admits that the early, sleepless baby years end and where more things than how many kids can I fit in my car without having to buy another car should be taken into consideration.  Again, I think I could possibly understand, though not agree with, the sort of logical maze that is necessary to go from 'I would like a baby' to 'oh but the sedan can't fit another car seat so I guess no more babies'.  What I simply can't understand is why anyone would think that children exist solely to bring the parent happiness.  

Children, my friends, children are people.  You aren't acquiring a new accessory, you are helping to create a person.

Easter, Camp,

I joked with a friend the other day that since I've tried to become more consistent with blogging again, I've discovered a veritable WELL of things I'm annoyed with.  It turns out that subconsciously, all these years, I've been saving up my complaining.  Who knew I had it in me?

Cough.

Anyway, our Easter eggs are found.  My child only ruined Easter for one sweet old lady this year when she announced that 'Mummy is the Easter bunny!'.  I'm so sorry, ma'am.  We had a guest for Easter supper this year for the first time ever.  Eating supper at the pastor's house does not hold the prestige it used to in times past.  And it shouldn't, because I'm a passable to good cook depending on the dish but with a few exceptions (mostly other people's recipes) it's nothing to write home about.  Plus we have an ancient cat, and a lot of people seem to not like cats.  And I guess Jesus still wants me to love those people but it's iffy.

The 6yo (soon to be the 7yo) won a free week at a local Christian camp, which sort of solved the dithering I was doing about whether she should go at all this year.  I hesitate to discuss this because I know many good, wonderful, lovely people who really LIKE having their kids go away from them to things like camp.  But I don't.  And I never want to make anyone feel badly about their decisions just like I don't want anyone to make me feel badly about mine.  But this year the 9yo is mature enough that I feel okay about him attending a day camp near our house without me, and I was waffling about the soon to be 7yo.  And then she goes and wins this contest so okay then.  She can go.  The 4yo and I will hang out at home and try not to miss them.

Cumulative Homeschooling

In the words of the unsurpassed Gretchin Rubin: "What you do every day matters more than what you do once in a while"

And it ain't much different in homeschooling than in the rest of life.

When you decide to homeschool, you agree to play the long game.  There will be days, weeks, months, maybe years, who knows, when the progress you see is fitful, sporadic, maybe non-existent.  And while there is a time and place for re-evaluation of curriculum, plans, teaching methods and styles...eventually it might become clear that the one thing that likely DOES need to change is not whether you use X math curriculum or Y spelling workbook...but your daily use of whatever it is you do teach from.

I am not unlike the majority of homeschool parents in that I have fluttered from one technique or style or curriculum to another.  There was the disastrous semester we attempted to do child-led learning...and my kids forgot practically all of the math they had learned.  There was the year we started out with hand-illustrated reading lists.  There was the year of a complete free preschool curriculum from online, mostly consisting of colouring pictures of whatever letter we were supposedly learning (spoiler: it didn't work for us).  I have a copy of The Well-Trained Mind and a copy of Educating The Wholehearted Child and a closet full of Rod and Staff math workbooks sitting cheek-by-jowl with Saxon math up to Algebra 1/2 (my eldest is in grade 3.  What can I say - it was a good deal?).  Do you remember MEP math?  I do.  I printed out the pages and sat with my student and tried to explain why these two trucks were supposedly the same even though as hand-drawn illustrations there were slight differences that made me crazy.  Or, what was the other one...oh!  Starfall!  Remember Starfall?!  I haven't thought about them in ages.

The point of that somewhat depressing, and very incomplete, list of my teaching failures is that any one of those curricula, used in a rigorous and dedicated way, would probably have worked great for any of my students.  For the child who detested both Saxon's spiral method and also R&S's mastery method...was the problem really that two great, well-researched math programs with two different approaches were both equally awful for us?  Or was it because I sighed and said I didn't have time to explain something right now so just go get your spelling and work on that instead and then before I knew it three days passed by before we looked at the difficult problem.  Was that the fundamental issue?

Yeah, yeah it probably was.

Certainly there are good reasons to change from one program to another, and I wasn't trying to fall down that rabbit hole, but ultimately I have really come to think that the one factor that most influences whether a child learns from a book is...the teacher.  Which seems like it should be self-explanatory but has apparently taken me several years of homeschooling to discover.

This coming year we will be reading Story of The World Volume 2 as our history spine.  I'm excited to introduce the kids to the medieval time period but I have...well...I have found myself floundering a little in my excitement.  Downloading lots of free medieval notebooking pages, pulling piles of stuff out of the bookshelves.  The other day I bought an Usborne book about the history of the Celts, which, um...isn't medieval history but you can see how the spinning out is happening.  If we do the medieval period, shouldn't we go back to explain...well I guess that means the dark ages which also means we need to review the Roman retreat which maybe I can gloss over because I feel like the Romans are their own topic but then do I even mention the Britons?  Do I?  Do I mention the Vikings?  The Saxons?  Lindisfarne?  I should mention Lindisfarne...and before you know it you're on the Gutenberg Project and lo!  Henty wrote a book called Beric The Briton and I bet I could read that aloud!

But of course, none of that has anything to do with my ability to teach age-appropriate medieval history to a 9yo, a 7yo and a tag-along 5yo.  I could read my little book about Celts, say 'there were people living on that island before the Romans', and be done with it.

Likewise I'm starting to look into next year's curriculum choices and, sigh, it's all happening again.  The shiny new whatever that is luring me to do this exciting thing I totally should do for these little people.  We should make a book of centuries!  We should order and complete this 200+ page nature curriculum for children that is really pretty but comes from England and will almost certainly not work in Northern Canada.  We should get another math book!

I'm reminding myself, patiently, intentionally, repeatedly, that what the children need is ME, teaching them, every day.  And the rest is pretty, sparkly fluff.