Monday September 29, 2014

Just keep swimming. Just keep swimming. Just keep swimming.

Today was hard but not the hardest. We almost canceled home school once and took a few breaks to cope. The girls caught on that I was upset and finally got themselves to clean up so we could get started. I feel naggy and like it is pushing my buttons any time someone argues or doesn't obey (which seems to be happening a lot.) It seems a shift in my thinking and some fun positive time together is in order. This is when it's hardest to want to spend fun time together. My impulse is to want kids to go away.

Still, I am proud of myself for how well I have done and of the kids for how well they have done. And I'm glad school's over for today. I'm glad these days are more rare than they used to be and that I am coping better with school than I used to.

When talking to Matt about doubts and concerns, he reminded me that I felt inspired about how to do our school and that I am staying in tune for more ideas. That's why I've been happy with the school. So doubts are not the messages to listen to. That helped a lot.

So what we did pull off:

Choosing Day: Me

Opening Prayer: Noel

Move Your Body Class: Baby yoga with Benjamin and dolls and animals. (This turned out to be my favorite part of the day.)

The rest of opening routine was meh.

Class: Told the girls about pedigree charts. We want to make one. I want to learn which ancestors were the ones to accept the gospel on each line. Then we'll learn their stories and act them out.

Activity: Make sparks books. The girls' excitement for this is awesome too. This was an idea I heard on the Not Back to School Summit. I've heard of the ideas of sparks before (http://home-school-coach.com/). Mary Ann's talk I heard last week suggested helping kids 8-12ish take responsibility for their own education in part by keeping a sparks notebook where they write down things they want to learn about. Then the mom can help them learn about it or they can learn on their own. We started making ours. Turns out, the girls wanted me to color theirs the way I did mine. I didn't want to do that all day so I told them I'd do it during general conference this weekend.

Reading Class: Little Britches - less than 2 pages before I was too tired of kids interrupting and playing their own games.

Family Work: I was skeptical we could pull this off - especially me - with attitudes and feelings intact. The kids did better than I thought so that helped. We folded a load of laundry, and I taught them a little more of how to do that. (Not the kids' strongest chore.)

Lunch.

Reading/ Writing/ Drawing: Amy fell asleep. She has a stomach ache. Other girls are off playing. That's nice for me anyway. I wrote a letter to my parents. I did my study when I was up feeding and comforting Benjamin at 4 am today. So I think I'll just move on to some other tasks. Plenty to do.

I have hope that days like this will be less and less, that relationships will thrive and continue to grow stronger, that I will gain more self-discipline and capacity in my patience and parenting and ability to allow others to make their choices instead of trying to control them. I am grateful for hope.