Socializing our Teenagers

Ever since we've started homeschooling, we've gotten questions about various aspects of homeschooling.  Friends wonder how I'm able to get it all done (a combination of delegating and paying a housekeeper to do some of my work for me), family members wonder if we'd consider sending the kids to high school (so far, nope - and that was Kathleen's decision), and strangers wonder how crazy the house is (very crazy some days). 

One of the most frequent questions I've gotten is about how we'd 'socialize' our children.  It hasn't been much of question that we've worried about.  There are enough children that they get lots of lessons in sharing, conflict resolution, taking turns, working together, making compromises, and being kind.  I can't speak to how well they've learned these things at home versus how well they would have learned them at traditional school as they've never gone.  But it's worked well enough.  

The children have always managed to have just enough friends that they aren't too lonely.  Usually their friends have come through church.  Being a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is really a huge advantage for homeschooling, as the children see each other at church every week and so friendships are easier to form.  I'm friends with the mom, they're friends with the children, and everybody gets a break from seeing each other all week long.

We've had a couple of families - one from church and one from not - that have had enough children that matched up with our so we were able to get together for a weekly playdate.  Between those get-togethers and church, everyone was pretty happy.

But now we're entirely on our own.  Every week we've got nobody to look at but the same eight faces we've been seeing all week.  The younger children haven't really minded that much; in my experience younger children are pretty content with siblings.  They're a known quantity - no surprises from people you've spent your entire life with.

But I've come to realize that my teenagers need more than what we can give them.  I've never raised teenagers before, so I'm learning as I go.  Both Kathleen and Sophia are pretty low-drama most of the time, so I haven't had accusations of ruining their life, being the worst mom ever, or wondering why we had to move to this terrible country where they don't have any friends.  I consider myself very lucky.  But they have told me that they'd like to see some friends on a regular basis.

If we were in the US, this would not be a problem.  Between weekly church, weekday seminary classes, and weeknight youth activities, they would be quite busy with friends.  It would probably be an almost perfect balance of having some space and being able to be with peers.  

But we're not in the US, and we won't be there for many more years, so we have to work with what we have.  Thankfully, the one family that lives within walking distance of our house has a daughter who is Sophia's age.  This summer, I started encouraging them to go and see if she was free to hang out.  They confessed that the first few interactions were kind of awkward - "It was so weird to go and do things on our own!  Like, you didn't set up a playdate or anything.  We just walked over, rang her doorbell, and asked if she wanted to come swim."  But now they have a semi-regular afternoon to meet up, go on a walk, talk about whatever teenaged girls talk about, and go to the store for ice cream.  I'm often grateful that they have one friend close by.

After we got back from our trip to the US this summer, Sophia (with some encouragement from me) decided to start setting up social outings with a group of people.  Tashkent has a lot of activities that are fun - amusement parks, bowling, laser tag, ice skating - and they're not very expensive.  It's been interesting to coach her through all the steps of making a plan, contacting people, arranging dates, and all the other things that are so easy for an adult and so daunting for an inexperienced teenager who's never done this before.  I've come to realize that this is also part of my job as a mother of homeschooled children.  They don't have the opportunity to learn this on their own, so I get to teach them.  I sometime wonder if their friends find the tone of Sophia's emails and texts a little strange, as I only know how to write like a middle-aged mom and am not up with the way teenagers talk.  

Their first outing was to a local amusement park.  They got themselves there by taxi, rode a bunch of rides, made some new friends, ate food, and got themselves home.  Edwin tagged along (or was forced to, as both girls they invited had brothers who are Edwin's age) and was pretty dubious about the value of this so-called "socializing."  I was a little nervous too, as I'm not used to sending my children out on their own, something that most moms are very used to.

But when they came home, everyone was full of smiles, stories, and excitement for the next time they got to go and hang out with their new friends.  So yesterday they met them again, this time for bowling, and had a great time again.  Kathleen reported that she had the high score, a 60, and that was with bumpers.  It was fun to listen to all the stories they had to tell and see how excited they were for what they had done.

I know that both girls would like to see friends even more often then they do, but I'm happy that they have at least a few opportunities so go and practice socializing away from their parents and family.  Kathleen's departure for college is starting to appear on the horizon, and sometimes I wonder what kind of intense shock to her system everything will be.  So if I can prepare her as much as possible, hopefully it will help some, although there's never been anyone who is prepared for all of the changes that college brings.  

It's also fun as a parent to see them get older and see them get to start to do some things on their own.  Homeschooling gives me the ability to keep them closer for much longer than I would be able to in traditional school, but there is still a time when everyone needs some more distance so they can start to practice running their own lives and making their own choices.  Before long, I'll be almost entirely on the sidelines, cheering them on as they become fully independent.  Thankfully I have a long time before all of them go off and leave me, but it's strange to see the first one begin to think about their departure.  But that isn't for a few more years, and so for now I'll just enjoy watching them take their first steps.

High School

 Kathleen started high school this year.  It's crazy to have a child in high school, as I clearly remember my own time in high school.  Even crazier was realizing that Kathleen, who is four years away from starting college, is five times closer to her freshman year than I am, who started at BYU twenty years ago.  I guess this is how getting old happens - you're young until suddenly it's someone else's turn to be young.

Whenever I've had conversations about homeschooling, high school is always brought up.  "But what will you do about high school?" the person will ask, "Won't you send her to traditional school then?" I had thought that perhaps we would consider sending Kathleen in for a few classes that were more hands on or instructor dependent, like science or math.  This year, ironically, that decision was taken out of our hands, as nobody here is attending school in person anyway.  So it's a moot point.

We hadn't really considered it anyway, however, as I've found an online academy - The Well-Trained Mind Academy - that offers individual online classes that follows along with the curriculum and learning philosophy that we've been using since Kathleen started kindergarten.  

When I started thinking about how Kathleen would do high school last year, I considered several options.  BYU offers an online high school that I looked in to, but I've heard from a friend who uses them that the instructors are not understanding about time differences, going so far as making students take exams at two in the morning.  We are twelve hours ahead of Utah, so that was not going to work very well.  

Also, I didn't like the classes offered.  The Well-Trained Mind is a classical curriculum that is built on four-year cycles that are repeated three times, with the culmination being in high school when the real in-depth learning happens.  BYU high school doesn't follow that cycle and so Kathleen wasn't going to get the final, most important cycle.

We also considered having her doing some classes as independent study through BYU University.  We plan on encouraging all our children to attend a Church of Jesus Christ school for a variety of reasons (one of them being financial), so it made sense to start getting credits now instead of taking AP tests for college credit.  That option isn't off the table, but we decided that freshman year might be a little early to start college level classes.  

So instead Kathleen is taking almost all of her classes through the Well-Trained Mind academy.  I'm busy with the smaller children who need in-person, hands-on instruction, so I decided it was better to have Kathleen learn from teachers who are paid to deliver in-depth high-quality education.  They were going to be more stringent than me, more thorough than me, and more knowledgable than me.  Also, it is good for her to get used to having to perform to someone else's standards and get used to doing things according to a deadline.  I knew that I would be inclined to be lazy with her education, and didn't want her to suffer for my laziness.  

She is also doing seminary online, through an expat class that is based in England.  I had hoped that there would be a weekly online live class, but it isn't set up that way, instead being self-study.  If we are overseas next year, I will find a US-based class that has live classes that she can attend a day or two per week.  And with the time difference, it won't even be held in the early morning. Seminary is much better with other people.  

Kathleen's favorite part of high school is getting to ride twice a week instead of once a week like the rest of her siblings.  Horseback riding is her after-school sport, so we decided that she could practice twice a week.  I don't like a lot of time commitments so we're keeping it to twice a week, but she's happy for the change.  I already ride twice a week, so we'll have some mother-daughter bonding time.

I feel somewhat sad that she won't have the typical fun high school experiences that I had in my high school days, but I'm also glad that she won't have to deal with so much of the negative ones that happen along with the good ones.  When she laments the lack of constant social interaction, I remind her that in four years she will get to begin college and be around peers all day, every day.  I know that there is no perfect option for schooling, and we are all happy with the one that we have chosen, despite its downsides.  Selfishly, I know that she will be gone in four years, and I want to keep her close while I can.  

So that's high school this year.  I'll let you know next year how it has turned out.  

First Week of School, jet lag edition

All of the children started school this week.  I really hate the first week of school.  Summer is not only a break for the children, but for me as well.  Our tight schedule relaxes, I don't have to chase people around to do things they don't want to do, and everyone gets a break.  But all summers must come to an end, and ours did this week.  Only nine more months until summer again.  Sigh.

At the end of school in June, I did a smart thing and prepped everything for the beginning of school this year.  I ordered school books, organized notebooks, wrote out schedules, made new grade spreadsheets, printed out workbooks, and arranged school tables.  This turned out to be a good move, as we started our school year less than seventy-two hours after returning to Tashkent.

Usually I deal with jet lag reasonably well, helped out significantly by prescription sleeping pills.  Brandon will complain of having been up half the night, and I will smugly commiserate, having gotten a full nights' sleep myself.  This time, however, was less successful.  I can't blame the baby, as she only woke up once or twice the first night.  I guess I'll just blame getting older.  In a reversal of fortunes, Brandon was the one who blissfully snored away while I tossed and turned all night.  I suppose it's payback for my years of smugness.  Thankfully we are more than a week back in Tashkent, and the sleepless jet lag nights and even more terrible days are safely in the place for bad memories that includes newborns, young motherhood, moving, and potty training.  

At the beginning of last week, however, we were still in the middle of bleary-eyed days filled with thick-limbed creeping around the house under clouds of exhausted despair.  If being jet lagged is anything like a bad hangover, I'm perfectly happy to not be a drinker.  So instead of full start to school, we had more of a graduated beginning to our academic year.

Kathleen, in her first year of high school (how did that happen???), had already started school two weeks earlier with the collection of online classes I signed her up for.  Sophia and Edwin, who have three online classes apiece, also got to try and fit those in around playing with friends and family in Utah.  It turns out that the trade-off for outsourcing teaching to someone else is having to stick with their schedule.  Sigh.

I hadn't finished a few last administrative things off this summer, so I spent a the first few days of the week arranging those.  Then I fell into the time-wasting planning of my eventual dream house (even moms sometimes get distracted and don't want to do their jobs).  So I didn't start actually teaching school until Thursday, and not quite all of the school at that.  But I did start school, and less a week after we returned home, so I felt like I got a solid high-five for that accomplishment.

Thankfully, each school year's start goes more smoothly than the last one, and, shockingly, this year was almost free of yelling (by me), crying (by the children), or screaming (by everyone).  Each year I add a few more improvements to the schedule and tweak things to make everyone's day run more smoothly.  Often I will introduce a new program to help keep everyone organized after a few weeks of chaos, but this year I haven't yet found anything that could use improvement.  I guess nine years of perfecting my systems has finally paid off.  

There was one morning that I finished my work by eleven and I wandered around the nearly silent house looking for random household tasks to fill my time until lunch.  It was almost eerie.  I'm very happy to be a mother of older children as well as little ones.  Life is just so much easier than it was five years ago.

This school year looks to be (hopefully) pretty quiet as we finish up our last year in Tashkent.  I'm happy that our last baby has arrived and I won't be pregnant or delivering this year, instead just continuing on with our quiet, regulated lives.  And I'm completely okay with that.  

How We Do Homeschooling

Recently I've gotten a lot of questions from friends about homeschooling.  With the announcement of online or online-hybrid schooling in a lot of school districts, many parents have decided that homeschooling is the better option for their children.  I've been very happy to pass along my own advice, as giving advice is one of my favorite things to do.  Having gained my knowledge from countless mistakes, I'm glad to see someone else profiting from my hard-won experience.

I started homeschooling over ten years ago, when I taught Kathleen to read at the age of three.  This fall I'll have a freshman in high school, a seventh grader, a fifth grader, a third grader, and a first grader.  

I've always used The Well-Trained Mind, a book that Brandon brought home from the BYU bookstore when I was pregnant with Kathleen.  We had both wanted to homeschool, but I was very apprehensive about being able to teach everything myself.  For every year in school, the book laid out what I should do, how I should do it, when I should do it, and how long I should do it.  It was a huge relief to me.  We've been using it ever since.  

Choosing homeschool curriculum can be very daunting, as there seem to be endless options, but in the end it's a decision about preferences.  Some curricula are more academically rigorous, some are more exploration-based, others are religious, and others are secular.  It's just a matter of choice.  Most are perfectly reasonable, so it's just what works best for you and your family.  

I like The Well-Trained Mind because we're an academically rigorous type of family, and the curriculum is based on a classical education, with Latin and logic being included in the recommended areas of study.  That said, however, I've found that I've dropped a few things over the years, including Latin.  

I used to be very concerned that my children would be able to learn the most possible things they could physically stuff into a day, but over time I've realized that that wasn't the best method for me or the children.  Now that I have a child in high school, I can see that the subjects are repeated enough time that if Joseph hasn't memorized the definition of a noun in first grade, he will have memorized it by sixth grade.  He's going to read the History of the World series twice by the time he's through with middle school.  And the Saxon math books spend the first third of the book in review, so we'll see long division quite a few times.  

So in elementary school, I make sure that the children are able to: 1. Read fluently and capably.  Reading is the basis for everything, so it needs to be solid or the child won't be able to do anything else very well.  2. Know their math facts, how to count, add, subtract, multiply, divide, and tell time.  3. Write with decent handwriting (I hate messy handwriting, so I get a little fussy about it) and be able to spell correctly and write a summary.  Writing, like reading, is the foundation of almost any other discipline.  It's how we communicate, and if you can't write, nobody takes you seriously.

Science and history are fun subjects and are less important because they can be made up for later if you don't get around to them.  We do science and history because we've got time, but if you don't have time, these are the things you can skip.  Art and music are really extra.  We don't have any formal art curriculum and the kids take piano for music, as long as singing together as a family for church and Family Home Evening.  

In middle school, the children start taking online classes, through the Well-Trained Mind Academy, for history, writing, and math.  It's a good opportunity for them to learn to work for someone other than me, keep track of assignments, and have deadlines.  It's also nice for me to give the more time-intensive things to someone else.  I can teach writing and pre-algebra, but I'm busy teaching small children how to read, write, do math.  It's better to have someone else do those things.  Once the children are in seventh grade, they also teach their buddy science and history.  It helps me out and gives them the opportunity to review the material again.  

Kathleen is taking almost all of her classes online this year, only doing Russian, Logic, piano, and horseback riding not online.  So by high school, I'm not teaching them anything at all.  It is only homeschooling in that she's doing school at home and I'm just there to answer questions, check up, and offer moral support.  

So that's our homeschooling in a nutshell.  I'm happy to answer any questions in another post or answer questions sent along to me.  Homeschooling can seem pretty daunting and can get pretty chaotic depending on the day, but it's worked well enough for us that we have no intention of quitting.  There are many things I enjoy about it, but most of all I like that we get to be together as a family.  Every morning we have a hot breakfast together, and every evening we all eat dinner together.  After dinner, Brandon reads to the children and they all go to bed at eight.  I don't play a taxi driver, we don't high five each other on the way to different activities, and nobody stays up to the middle of the night doing homework.  It's a pretty good setup.  

First Week of School

This past week was our first week of school.  We have been doing this for some time now; I started with Kathleen in Kindergarten nine years ago.  I guess I can say that I've had a reasonable amount of experience homeschooling.  

The beginning of school is always crazy.  It's a bit of work to get all of the curriculum ready and organized and there's always something that I've forgotten.  The children have to get used to a new year and a new schedule, which is another element of chaos.  Every two years we add a new one to the mix, which means one more child that I have to keep track of one more more child who needs help and asks questions while I'm trying to help someone else.  This year Eleanor started Kindergarten, so I now have five children in school.  That is a lot of children in school.

I got to enjoy my very first real summer vacation this year, a summer with no school, no R&R, and no moving.  It was absolutely wonderful and exactly what everyone needed - especially me.  In addition to reading a lot of books, lazing around in the swimming pool, and taking very long naps, I was able to prepare for the beginning of the school year.

I printed out school work, organized it, and arranged it in everyone's notebooks.  I pulled out last year's school work, last year's school books, and last year's trash and cleaned out the bookshelves.  I put all the books for this year neatly on everyone's book racks, right next to their newly organized notebooks.  After thinking about how to keep the girls better organized, I came up with a new accountability system.  I did everything possible to get everything ready for the first day of school.  Since we only have three weeks of school before packing everything up and heading a third of the way across the world, I didn't have the time to spend getting everything slowly settled in.

And surprisingly, all my preparations paid off.  Monday morning everyone was downstairs around 8:30 and the girls and I started off the school year with going over their new accountability charts.  Then we had their first grammar lesson.  Things went a little sideways from there, as I realized that I hadn't downloaded files on to the school profiles of the laptops, but I was able to complete all of Edwin's and part of Joseph's school also.  I even got a reading lesson for Eleanor in before stopping for lunch (and a much-deserved nap) at noon.  I was very proud of myself.

The rest of the week only improved from there.  I don't remember completely losing my temper a single time, which is no mean feat for a seven-months pregnant woman who is running a five-child school circus with a toddler thrown in for good measure.  I think that I can say that the high point of school craziness has passed and our school days are entirely reasonable most of the time.  I'm glad about that.  I'm even happier that school will only continue to be manageable as more and more of the children get older and more responsible.  There's a lot to be said for children who know the program and can stick with it.

The girls both admitted to me that perhaps it was nice to get back to a schedule, and I had to agree with them.  Summer was wonderful and I'm sure we'll get thoroughly sick of school soon enough, but for now it's okay to get back to work.  

The winding down of summer

When I wake up each morning, the sky is a little darker.  The mornings have gotten just a little bit cooler, and in the evening Brandon and I can take a walk without sweating to death in the heat of a city recovering from 100+ temperatures.  All of the children sport stark tan lines, and Joseph's hair is now quite a few shades lighter than his skin.  If it were a normal summer, we'd be at the beach this week.

In two weeks we will start school again, and that's probably okay.  Everyone has been enjoying a break from their full school day since early May, and three and a half months is a nice long stretch of long summer days.  

Normally I hate the beginning of the end of summer, but this year I'm surprisingly okay with it.  We have had a nice, empty summer filled with mornings in the pool, long naps (for me), and lots of books.  It's been a wonderful break.  This year has been the first summer we haven't moved or schooled through the summer, and it's been really nice.  Everyone who homeschools has their own preferences, but I confess that I like the traditional school calendar.  The whole family has enjoyed having a long, relaxed summer.  The school year is very structured, with a tight schedule that I keep everyone following, so having something different has been a good switch.

I've had enough time this summer to get things organized for the coming school year and also to do some prep work for our upcoming medevac in September.  The beginning of school is always chaotic as I print out thousands of pages of workbook, redesign grade systems, order books that I forgot to order earlier, and find new curriculum when I discover that what worked for one child doesn't work for another.  There's always something that I've forgotten.

I'm hoping that the beginning of this school year - the ninth year I've been homeschooling - will be a little less chaotic as a result of my prep work.  Fingers crossed.  

We're only going to be schooling for three weeks before the children and I hop on a plane, fly almost halfway across the world, move into a house less than a third the size of our house in Tashkent, and then pick up schooling again as soon as we're halfway over jet lag.  But as crazy as it sounds, I'm looking forward to it because that means that we're that much closer to coming back home and settling back in.  Also, I'm a closet adrenaline junkie and crazy situations are oddly appealing to me.  Maybe it's because I can slip the structure of regular life for just a little bit.

But I'm still going to enjoy the next two weeks of lazy summertime.  The pool is nice and warm, the sunshine is roastingly hot, our schedule is wonderfully open, and I'm in the middle of a good book.  I intend to work on my tan, take two-hour naps, and finish my book and maybe start another one.  I know that when school starts and fall comes in I'll miss these long, lazy summer days and long for hours in the pool instead of hours spent teaching children.  But it will be okay.  Because that will make next summer that much more precious.

Getting into a Rhythm (Finally)

This school year has been the school year of the new schedule.  Because my children are all two grade levels apart (sadly, William broke the pattern and will be three grades behind Eleanor), our school years go in two-year cycles.  The first year is the more difficult year because everyone has increased responsibilities.  The second year is easier because we have the same routine, just different grade-level curriculum.

This year Joseph started first grade, which is always a shock to the system for a child when they've previously spent most of their days doing whatever they liked.  Edwin started third grade and most of his school work is now done independently without my direct oversight.  Sophia started fifth grade and started taking online classes which meant deadlines and assignments graded by someone other than me.  Kathleen started seventh grade and in addition to her own school work, got to help Joseph (and therefore me) with his history and science assignments.  It's been a busy year.

Third grade is one of the hardest transitions for my children.  They move from fairly strict oversight to being mostly independent, and with that independence comes lots more ability to waste their time.  We've termed this the 'third grade slump,' and I get the joy of experiencing it every other year.  It starts when they realize that nobody is making them do their school work and maybe they can just play instead.  Their school work piles up and they get increasingly onerous punishments which they believe can be put off indefinitely.  Then they actively fight against having to do their work and won't work even when I try and help them.  At this point I start fantasizing about traditional school.

Eventually after multiple try fail cycles, the child realizes in the core of their being that schoolwork is something that is as unavoidable as death and taxes, and maybe you have a better chance of escaping those things than you do escaping your school work.  My sanity returns to normal levels, everyone breathes a sigh of relief because mom isn't yelling all the time, and my chocolate consumption goes way down. 

Edwin and I reached that happy place a few weeks ago and our lives have become so much better.  Every morning he does his chores, comes down to the school room, and pulls out his work for the day.  Usually his finishes everything before lunch and then has the rest of the afternoon to himself.  I had to leave mid-morning last week for an appointment and his moral will fell off as soon as I left.  But the next day he applied himself and was able to finish nearly two days' school by one o'clock in the afternoon.  He is so much happier knowing that he can get the job done and I am so much happier having a relationship that isn't dominated by discussions of why he hasn't gotten his work done.

I've definitely learned a few things on this third cycle of the third grade slump.  As much as it feels like yelling at your child will work, it doesn't.  Sadly.  I really, really felt that if they were just scared enough they would get their mind right and get to work.  I still don't quite understand all the psychology behind it, but it doesn't work. 

Same for getting angry.  I realized that I was mostly getting angry because I was afraid that Edwin would never ever learn to get his school work done.  If I took a step back and thought about it, I wouldn't actually believe that, but in the moment it was a real fear.  The best reaction to yet another failure is shrugged shoulders and an insistence on getting the work done.  Emotional hysterics actually aren't as effective as they feel they should be.

You have to have some sort of consequences, but they don't have to be terrible.  I thought up the most amazing things to do to Kathleen, including cutting her hair and taking away her toys.  Brandon took her for walks to the local bazaar to show what she would be doing as an adult if she didn't do her school work.  Sophia got to write sentences (which just made the work longer).  Edwin got fined a lot.  But really the most effective consequence is losing free time.  Edwin spent months inside while everyone else was playing because he hadn't finished his school work.  I knew that I was finally getting to him when he sighed to his brother, "I wish I could go play outside.  Instead I'm stuck here doing school work."  After all, as an adult, the you get the same exact consequence when you don't do your own work - you just have to do it when you could be resting instead.

I also learned that success is the biggest motivator.  It has to be real success, not something manufactured by forcing the child to do something.  They have to have put in the effort and see that it has paid off.  However, you can help make circumstances be more conducive to success.  After letting Edwin do things his own way (and fail) for awhile, he was willing to work with me to have  more structured oversight.  And once he realized that the structure worked well for him, I didn't have to be nearly as involved because he knew that the system benefitted him.

Most of all, however, I learned that you just have to be patient.  Learning is a process and it takes time to really understand things.  You can tell your child that getting their school work will benefit them, but they don't really feel it until they actually get it done.  We all learn by running into the negative effects of our actions, but it takes quite a few times before those consequences are a pattern and not just random effects that maybe won't happen the next time.  But eventually, like water wearing away at a stone, those actions and consequences will start to form a pattern and they will see how to get things done.  It just make take a lot of secret chocolate breaks to get there.

I am very glad to have a fully functional third grader who knows how to get his school work done.  This is an essential skill that gets learned in elementary school, but it sure is painful to go through the lessons.  I'm going to enjoy my break until Joseph enters third grade.

School's Out for Christmas

Last Thursday I finished reading Greek myths with Joseph, put away the book, and then went upstairs for lunch.  I looked down at the (very messy) school room and bade it farewell for the next two weeks. 

When I started homeschooling, I was very conscientious about schooling year-round.  School kept the children occupied and really there wasn't any need for long breaks.  After all, the more we schooled, the more we could get ahead and getting ahead was a good thing, right?

But over the years I've gotten worn out more relaxed and have started taking more breaks.  The children are perfectly happy to entertain themselves for days on end without causing too much trouble for me and more than anything I need the break from herding cats running the circus keeping everyone on track for months on end.

Because of local holidays and when Christmas falls this year, Brandon has three days off the week of Christmas and three days off the week of New Years.  We only school four days a week anyway, so it's really pointless to school one day a week for two weeks.  So instead I just declared a two-week Christmas break.

And boy am I happy that it has started.  I remember reading a description of homeschooling with older children and the mom described it as being more like a ringmaster running the show and less of doing the actual work herself.  At the time I remember thinking, 'Wow, that will be great when I don't have to do as much work! I can't wait until then!'  [Insert hysterical laughter]

And it is true, these days I spend much less time actually teaching children, especially now that Kathleen as taken over Joseph's history and science lessons.  But I also have a lot more children to manage than I did in the days when I taught all of the school myself, and it turns out 'teaching themselves' is not the same thing as 'managing themselves.' 

When you're sitting right next to the child, helping them do all their work, they always get it done and they always stay on task because you're right beside them watching them like a hawk.  But when there are four (and a quarter) children doing school work, it's not possible to do that anymore.  Or advisable, really.  Seventh graders really shouldn't have their mother sitting next to them, helping them with all their school work.

So my day is very much multi-tasked.  I have a timer app that gets used constantly, and sometimes I have four different timers running at once, keeping track of four different children's tasks.  While I'm helping Edwin with his math corrections, I'm also testing Sophia on her spelling words and yelling at Joseph to keep practicing the piano because it doesn't count if you spent half of your time staring off into space.  Occasionally I remember that I used to sketch with my extra time while schooling the children and I wonder how that was even possible.

The insanity usually hits its maximum during lunch time when seven people are talking, complaining, crying, fighting, and getting lunch all at the same time.  I also used to eat lunch all alone while reading a book after the children had finished their own.  That was a long time ago. 

So I think that I'm more excited for this Christmas break than the children are.  I'm looking forward to sleeping in, reading books, avoiding cooking dinner for as long as possible, going horseback riding, spending time with friends, having Brandon home for dinner for multiple days in a row, and - most of all - not chasing the children around.  It's great to have a break.

School 2018-2019

Tomorrow morning I start school with the children.  This year I've started a different approach to the beginning of school.  Usually the first week of school is completely insane as I try to make everyone do all their school work every day while I rush around trying to answer everyone's questions about the new curriculum, fix the problems with materials, change schedules on the fly, and print out the materials that I forgot to print out earlier.

This year I've decided to have a graduated start.  The children were getting bored (they would disagree with that, but when they start fighting and squabbling, that means they're bored) and I still had things to finish, so I gave them a few subjects to begin that that they could do independently.  I added a few more the second week, and this week (the third week), I'll start schooling them in the areas they can't do independently.

I had planned to have all of the curriculum printed out this year, but my printer decided, after I'd only finished printing out history, that six months was a reasonable life span for a printer and it died.  I've had it with inkjet printers, so I just ordered a laser printer instead.  At this point I don't care about price, I just want to have a printer that isn't constantly having problems.

So I'm not starting all school tomorrow, since I'm still waiting to print out grammar, writing, science, and Latin.  But I will start the school that I have the materials for.

This year I have two children in the grammar stage and two children in the logic stage.  Kathleen is in seventh grade, Sophia in fifth, Edwin in third, and Joseph in first.  Kathleen and Sophia work almost entirely independently; I only teach them grammar.  They have some online classes - both have history and writing online, and Kathleen also has creative writing and music theory.  Sophia has decided to also take science online.

I enjoy the break that online classes give me - I don't have to be everything to everyone and also I don't have to grade their work.  I don't feel that I have been teaching expository writing very well, and I know I can't teach music theory, so it's nice to have someone else's help.  It's also good for them to get used to working for someone other than me.

Edwin is working mostly independently this year.  I teach him grammar and writing, but otherwise he does his work alone and only comes to me with questions.

Joseph is in first grade, so I do pretty much everything with him.  But this year I have a helper with school - Kathleen.  She has been given fewer morning chores and now teaches Joseph his history and science lessons.  They have been working together for two weeks now, and I've been very pleased with how she works with her brother.  He is honestly getting a better lesson with Kathleen because she has more time than I do.  None of my children have ever done the history activities, but so far they have made a cave painting, the whisk and crown of an Egyptian pharaoh, and a Sumerian cuneiform tablet.

Eleanor begins reading this year, which I'm not looking forward to.  Teaching a child to read is one of my bottom three favorite things to teach them, along with potty training and sleep training.  Hopefully Eleanor's cheerful temperament, lack of educational impediments, and my experience will lead to lessons with fewer tears and yelling.  Fingers crossed.

William's schooling this year will be learning how to play without bothering the rest of us.  Hopefully he'll be good at it so that I can take care of the other five children.

In addition to academics, the four oldest will be taking Russian three times a week and piano lessons.  I've arranged for the teachers, so this week we'll be starting everything.

The children have never taken any PE classes, although I've considered it off and on.  I used to ride when I was younger, and when I heard that Tashkent has several stables, I decided on behalf of everyone that our family sport will be horseback riding.  The children will take lessons, I'll get to ride myself, and we won't have any games to ruin our Saturdays.  I imagine that some of them will tell their therapist one day that they never got to choose their own sport, but they can add it to the other list of deprivations that come with part of our family.

I'm looking forward to having an entire school year without interruptions, something that hasn't happened since the 2015-2016 school year.  We're not moving and no babies are being born, so we can just settle down and be very steady.  I'm sure I'll wish for something to mix things up come mid-January, but overall it is nice to be stable.

School gets a little easier every year, and this year I'm going into my seventh year of homeschooling, so I'm hoping that this year won't be too crazy.  I'm a little apprehensive about juggling four different children's needs and education, but I'm very glad to have Kathleen's help.  As with everything in life, we will eventually figure it out and settle into a workable rhythm.  But until that happens, wish me luck!

Almost There

This past week Joseph started reading My Father's Dragon.  He is on lesson 190 ("The Soft Sound of the SC Blend") of 234 reading lessons, which means that he will finish the book in four and a half weeks.  And when he finishes the book, it means that I will have one more child who can read.

Eight and a half years ago, Kathleen also learned how to read.  After Edwin was born and we returned to Cairo in February, I decided that it was high time for Kathleen to learn how to read.  She was almost three and a half and time was wasting.  Every morning we would sit down and do our reading lesson together.  There were usually a lot of tears (I've yet to have a child who actually enjoyed learning how to read) but I was very diligent.  That summer at the beach, my mother gave Kathleen a bunch of "I Can Read" books including Amelia Bedelia, Uncle Elephant, and Mouse Tales, for Kathleen's fourth birthday.  As soon as she got those books in her little hands, she ran off to a quiet place and read them all in one go.

I remember being surprised with how easy it was to teach children to read.  "You can teach any three year-old to read," I confidently told everyone, "It's really easy!"

Then came Sophia.  After a year and a half of spotty instruction and a year and a half of very diligent instruction, she too go to start reading My Father's Dragon - at the ripe old age of six.  With time and experience I've realized that she was dealing with other problems that made learning to read much harder, but at the time I thought that I was going to die of frustration.  When I thought back to my jaunty assurances that someone could teach any three year-old child to read, I just laughed.  It was a good thing I got an easy one to start with because I think I might have given up altogether with Sophia if she had been my first.

Edwin didn't start his instruction until he was four and also finished at six.  He could have probably started and then finished earlier, but I was busy fighting his older sister's fight and he just had to wait his turn.  Such is the life of a large family: an amalgamation of compromises that try to cover the important bases and sometimes leaves the other things out in the cold.

After having started first grade twice with children who weren't fluent readers, I decided that Joseph would not be the third mistake.  A few months ago I added up the number of lessons we had left in the reading book and then looked at my calendar.  This school year has a very definite end date.  We leave Dushanbe the second week of May, pack out the first week of May, and so school has to be finished the second week of April.  There is no way I am going to try and finish the last straggling bits of the school year when we finally unpack in Tashkent.

When I did the mental calculations, I realized that Joseph's reading was now going to be that part of the daily schedule that was non-negotiable.  On most days all of the school work gets done, but occasionally some crisis occurs and I have to start shedding the non-essentials.  And in addition to swapping out a grammar lesson for a reading lesson, I would also have to start doubling up on lessons.  On top of that we would start reading a chapter of Frog and Toad together before nap time and before bed.  It was very intense.

But of course that much reading (some days it was two hours of agony) really steps up progress and here we are with a little more than a month left of lessons together.

It's kind of crazy to look at my children and realize that all of them know how to read because I taught them the letters, taught them the sounds, and sat down and took years off my life helping them to put it all together.  Reading is one of the hardest things children ever learn how to do, and it's one of the hardest things to teach them; it's one of my Three Most Hated Thing to Teach.  But for the first time in seven years, I'll get a short break before starting Eleanor in the fall.

Joseph's ability to read marks the change of reading from minority to majority skill in our family.  This is always a happy point for me.  Most of our children are out of diapers (and even better, most of our theoretical children are too), most of our children dress and feed themselves, most can fold laundry, and now most can read.  I'm looking forward to packing suitcases, cooking, and cleaning up becoming majority skills.  It's a happy thing to train your own replacements.

But for now, I'll take reading.  I've certainly earned it.

2017-2018 School Year

A few weeks ago the children started school again.  We didn't get a really long summer break this year because of that whole William-being-born-living-in-America-for-three-months thing, but between packing, traveling, and getting over jet lag, we got about six weeks which was enough.

Or it will have to be enough because this year we have to (again) school hard and school fast.  We'll most likely be leaving at the beginning of May, which means that I have just a little over seven months to squeeze an entire school year of learning in.  This isn't a problem for some subjects (grammar, reading, math, spelling, Latin) because they have ongoing lessons that aren't tied to a specific grade level or can easily be doubled up.  But it is a big problem for other subjects (science, history, writing), because there a set number of lessons that have to be finished, especially in the case of history.  Because if you don't make it to the end of one book, the beginning of the next isn't going to make much sense.

So this means that there's going to be a reasonable amount of doubling up lessons.  It turns out that I have an annoying conscience about completing schoolwork.  Leaving subject matter unfinished gives me secret anxiety attacks about that little gap in their knowledge that will make them miss just enough questions on some test that will then lead to not getting in to college, etc, etc, etc.  I know that's not really going to happen, but it doesn't keep me from feeling that it just maybe one day might be a problem so we'd better make extra sure.  I think that maybe homeschooling is more stressful than traditional schooling because every gap in your child's ability and knowledge is 100% your fault.  Excuse me for a second while I go get a paper bag.

So, this school year.

Kathleen is in sixth grade.  If she were going to school in North Carolina, where I grew up, that would be middle school.  I am so glad she's not in middle school.  Not for her, but for me.

This year she is continuing science, writing, vocabulary, math, logic, Latin, Russian, handwriting, piano, singing, history, and grammar.  And new (because sixth grade means electives! That I choose!) is music theory and video editing.  I'm finally getting to the fun part of homeschooling, where you get to make your own curriculum.  Kathleen is really excited about video editing, and has a teacher that will be working with her remotely.  Yeah for the internet!

This year I'm trying something new - that first child is always the guinea pig - and I've signed her up for three courses online through the Well-Trained Mind Academy.  We'll see how they go.  If anything, they will move some of the burden off my shoulders and get her used to the idea of having someone else grade her work.  I'm just afraid that they will be less strict than I am.  There was already some breathless reports of getting graded on only completion.  Heresy.

Sophia is in fourth grade.  I remember when that was so old.  She is doing pretty much everything that Kathleen is doing, minus music theory.  Almost everything she does (excepting grammar, some writing, and some spelling) is done independently.  I check her work every morning and go over corrections with her, but she's in charge of getting the rest done.  And I have to add, Ritalin is the best thing ever.  It has made all of the difference in the world for Sophia.

Edwin is in second grade.  He still does most of his work with me, completing math, history, spelling, and writing worksheets independently.  It's great to see the difference between his ability at the beginning of this school year versus last school year.  Last year he could hardly write a sentence independently and now he writes pages-long stories in his free time.

Joseph is in kindergarten.  He's working on learning how to read, about halfway done.  I don't start anything other than reading until first grade, something that Joseph is quite happy with.  More time for him to play.

And Eleanor and William are in independent play preschool.  They are working on keeping themselves entertained and out of my hair while I'm schooling.  William does a better job than Eleanor as he is asleep more than she is.  Right about the time they have mastered this skill, they'll have to start school.  But not yet.

And that is our school year.  Sometimes I daydream about the eventual time when I won't have babies underfoot and most of my children are running their own school independently and I'll be able to get back to some of the things I enjoyed doing before I started the full-time job as mom/teacher/cook/household manager.  That time, however, is a long long way away.  And plus, I don't have any free time for daydreaming.

Year Five Wrap-Up

We are almost done with the school year, although 'done' is somewhat of a relative term.  Some children have finished some subjects (Sophia has finished language arts and history but not science), some have finished none (Kathleen) and some have finished all (Edwin).  But everyone has two weeks left and then we're off for a month before starting the whole rodeo again in the fall.

This year has been somewhat of a difficult one.  I added another child, Edwin, to the mix and started Kathleen on the next stage, the logic stage, of her schooling.  It took quite a while to figure out how to do all of the new curriculum with Kathleen, how to organize it, and how to grade it.  Edwin had a difficult time starting out because he wasn't fully literate.  He could read, but only slowly, and it took awhile for comprehension to kick in (sometimes it's still not all there for math problems).  Then, right as things started getting into a good rhythm, we picked up and left for three months, having a baby for fun in the middle of things.

Homeschooling is always a balance between what the children need and what you are capable of giving them.  When I started homeschooling I wanted to do all of the everything, and be the best homeschooling mother ever who only had brilliant children who knew all the things in the whole wide world.  I think that's pretty standard for homeschooling parents.

Now I've become someone who wants to make sure her children are perfectly adequately schooled.  Extra projects?  Maybe if they want to do them in their free time, but I'd rather take a nap.  Extracurriculars?  Russian counts for that, right?  And swimming occasionally at the embassy pool (when it's not broken) totally counts for PE.

I always make sure that they get the basics - math, language arts, science, and history are all covered - but it turns out that I just don't have enough time to get too crazy about the other stuff.  The girls do study Latin and Russian, but not in any kind of serious way, and that's just fine for me.  I had wonderful plans for starting Kathleen in some serious drawing study, but somehow those never quite panned out.  It may have something to do with the five other children I have.  Yes, I do feel mom guilt about not doing all of those things, but no, I don't let it interrupt my nap time.  We all have the right to a little sanity.

I'm happy to be through with this year and am looking to next year, which is an off year.  I have managed to have all my children (except William, who spoiled the pattern) two grade levels apart, so right when one is starting first grade (kindergarten has never been real school), the one just older than them is starting third grade.  Third grade is when they do almost all schooling independently and mostly I am involved in checking and correcting work.  So that means that the off year is when the youngest is in second grade, which is pretty much exactly like first grade except they can already read and work some things independently.  It's the payoff for surviving first grade again.  Seriously, I have all of those poems memorized down cold along with history up to the end of the middle ages, all the prepositions, and counting in whatever pattern you like.  I'll probably be able to recite all of the lessons from memory by the time William gets to first grade.  He'll be so impressed.  But probably not.

But for now, I (and all of the children) am counting down the weeks until break time.  Because it turns out that when you're the teacher you're even happier than children are about summer break.

Homeschooling: (Finally) Finding our Stride

We just finished the second week of October.  Last week we had a holiday on Monday (hello, Columbus Day!) and then schooled for the rest of the week.  On every single day I started on time(ish), checked all the girls' work, and got all of Edwin's school done.  This is the first week I've done all of these things on all four school days.  Just in case you were wondering, we started schooling the third week of August.  So it's been a long time coming.

This school year has been somewhat of an exercise to get going.  Edwin started first grade, which meant that instead of doing an hour or so of reading each day (did I ever mention how teaching a child how to read is my number one least favorite part of homeschooling?), we have reading lessons plus math lessons plus history plus various language arts things plus science (okay, science has yet to start yet.  It's animals and plants this year.  I'm not that concerned).  With a child who is still working on their reading skills.

Kathleen started fifth grade this year.  Which means that pretty much everything she does, with the exception of math, is done in a completely new way.  And so not only does Kathleen have to figure it all out, but I have to figure it out before (and then with) her so that I can know how to answer her questions about how things are done.

Over the summer I worked on figuring it out, but we all know about how long battle plans last once the battle has begun.  So then when school started I began round two of figuring things out.  One of the very first things I did was ditch our science curriculum, which I didn't find thorough enough for my liking.  And plus, it was much too disorganized.  So that, of course, necessitated finding a new curriculum, figuring out that one, and then ordering everything for it.  And then explaining it all (at least ten times) to Kathleen.

Then we had to work out grading.  Our umbrella school requires grades to be submitted each semester, and we did a pretty miserable job of keeping things recorded and organized last school year.

 I have some sympathy for first children as they are always the test case for everything that happens.  There's a lot more angst when you go through something the first time that when you go through it the second (or third or fourth or fifth or sixth).  Which is why it's nice to have so many children - lots of opportunities to first perfect and then implement the things you learned on the poor hapless first one.

This year I decided to pay Kathleen for her grades.  She is also responsible, starting this year, for her own clothes and miscellaneous expenses, so there's a pretty good incentive to do well on her school work.  Her sneakers and church shoes are too small and it's starting to get cold.  Need some new shoes?  Well, you'd better make sure to do well on your school work! [Insert evil mom laughter]

That, of course, meant more work getting that system worked out.  Everything takes some time to learn and implement.

And then Sophia started third grade and independent work.  Which just added another layer of complexity.  It turns out that managing people may not take as much time as doing it yourself, but it still takes time.  And a whole lot more chasing people around to get things done.

But finally, after over a month and a half of working out the problems, I think we've got it down pretty well.  Which is good because in less than four months there is another wrinkle named William showing up on the scene (while staying three months at my parents' house in North Carolina).  I'm a little relieved that our original plan that called for William's arrival this summer didn't work out.  Because combining all of the above with the post-partum insanity of a newborn?  Not the best idea I've heard of recently.

So, that's school for now.  Always a little crazy (what household with five children isn't?), but much less crazy then it was a few months ago.  And I'm always happy to take a little less crazy in my life.

Homeschooling Update

Today Kathleen finished up her fourth grade standardized tests.  We now use an umbrella school for homeschooling, and part of their remaining accredited is having their students take tests every year.  Kathleen has had no problem with them so far (I remember thinking they were a bit of a joke when I was in elementary school), so I'm happy to go along with the rules.

I'm not one for changing horses without extreme provocation - we're using the same homeschooling book that Brandon brought back from the BYU bookstore when I was pregnant with Kathleen - so Kathleen will probably graduate from this umbrella school (along with everyone else).  So it's probably good to start the transcript early.  The thought of Kathleen graduating is a far-distant prospect, but I imagine it won't seem quite such a long time when she's actually graduating.

For the first time since we started homeschooling, we're having a summer break this year.  I've always schooled non-stop, figuring that there's nothing else better going on.  And also, there hasn't been a school year without a significant event to take a large chunk out of the year, necessitating summer schooling whether I wanted it or not.

But we've spent the entire school year in the same house, city, and country, so this year everyone's actually on track to finish their school by the beginning of summer.

Kathleen has already finished her writing program and Sophia is only three weeks away from the end of hers.  Both girls are reaching the end of history (this week was the Korean war), and the science books are just about finished, too.  And Sophia is less than two weeks away from the finishing Math 3, which is one of my favorite milestones because Math 4 is done independently.  I love independent school work.

So this means that we'll actually have some time on our hands this summer.  My childhood summers were spent at the pool and I have very fond memories of those long, hot, wet summers.  The embassy here very conveniently has a pool, so we're going to recreate my summers and spend every day at the pool.  It's the summers at the pool that make my mom job definitely better than working outside the house.

The children will still do some school - Russian and Math (the ones that don't require my input) - and I'll continue working on teaching Edwin to read.  He starts first grade in the fall, which means a whole lot of reading, which means that he has some work to do before that can happen independently.  So unlucky for him, we'll be spending a lot more time reading in the summer.  But that's what happens when you grow up - you have to do horrid things like reading instead of fun things like playing with Legos.

The children know about this plan and are all eagerly awaiting the pool opening - projected to be the first of June - and I am too.  We've worked hard this school year and everyone will enjoy the break.  Most of all me.

Mt. Vernon, With Friends

I am a very bad tourist.  Since we've gotten to DC in late February, Brandon and I have taken the children to see one (1) point of historical or touristical notice - the Museum of Natural History.  This is the exact same museum we took them to last time we saw something of note in the area - which was three years ago, during the Arab Spring evacuation.

We have, however, seen a lot of parks and gone camping three times.  So that's something.

Recently I reconnected with a good friend from high school who is now living in Richmond.  It turns out that she also has five children, all about the same ages as mine.  We almost got the same gender mix, only getting out of sync on the last children, who were born within two weeks of each other.  And since she homeschools her children (with the same curriculum we use) we decided that a reunion/field trip would be in order as soon as we recovered from the babies.

So a few weeks ago I got to play tourist and meet up with her and her own five children at Mt. Vernon.  I think that perhaps I could hear George Washington rolling over in his grave when we all showed up.

Thankfully, my friend's mom was in town so we had three adults versus ten children eight and under, which was a slightly better ratio.  I was very grateful that most of the day was outside and the weather was cloudy so that there were much fewer people to give our rowdy children the stink-eye as they tore around the estate.

We didn't help much because we were too busy catching up and comparing notes.  It's funny how you can not see some friends in over a decade and pretty much catch up right where you left off.  We were of similar mindsets and temperaments in high school and it was pretty obvious that things hadn't changed very much.  

I don't remember that much about the actual historical side, but I do remember having a great time and being surrounded by a continual swirl of motion and chaos that drifted around us as we strolled through the grounds.  Like I said, it was a good thing we came on a cloudy October weekday.

By the end of seven or eight hours together (we only left because it was closing), we decided that we had to do it again before I took off to the other side of the world.  Hooray for friends and hooray for history!

And Suddenly, Life Got Busy

This year  This month  Last week Sophia hasn't quite started school all of the way yet.  She's supposed to be in first grade, and first grade is when all of the real work starts - Math, History, Science, and Writing.  I was planning on starting after we came back from the beach, but then I decided to make Kathleen's baptism dress.  Then Brandon and I took a whirlwind trip to Seattle.  Then I got back to work on the baptism dress.  And then we went camping.  So last week was the first full week of school we've had in probably two months.  Maybe since Eleanor was born.  Just in case you're getting stressed about my children's academic future, don't worry - I've got it covered.  I can feel the looming fear of totally incompetent semi-adults camping at my house for decades haunting my dreams already.  Maybe if I ignore it hard enough, it will go away.

So this past week was The Week.  Sophia and I have already done some math lessons and she's been joining in on history with Kathleen (nothing like the good old beheading of Mary Queen of Scots to spark a young student's love for history!) so I've not been completely incompetent.  But I guess only accomplishing math, reading and handwriting isn't much when theoretically I'm supposed to be doing spelling, grammar, writing, and literature also in the same day.

But like I said, this past week was going to be the one where I squashed every bit of learning required in between the end of breakfast and the beginning of lunch - which meal, by the way has gotten increasingly later throughout the years.  Back a long time ago when we lived in Cairo, Kathleen and Sophia ate lunch at 11:00, I ate at 11:30, took a nap for thirty minutes, and then had several hours of alone time before the girls got up from their naps.  In Baku, after Kathleen started school lunch drifted to 11:30 for the children and noon for me.  Now that Kathleen and Sophia are both in school and Eleanor has to eat too, lunch now starts at noon (if we're lucky) and I no longer get to enjoy a peaceful lunch alone with my current favorite reading material.  Lunch is no longer a pleasure, it's a source of calories (that is interrupted every three minutes to help someone use the bathroom, clean up a mess, get more of their own food, get a swat to keep them in their chair, or get sent to the corner) that keep Eleanor from dipping below the 15th weight percentile she's currently hanging out in.

Did I mention that this past week was going to be my glorious return to awesomeness?  You know, where I would show the world that you can do it all and still get a nap?  Let me just paste in an email I sent to Brandon Friday, around lunch time.

"It started with Math.  Kathleen did  three tests (which she had forgotten to do earlier) yesterday, which I graded and she had to correct.  The scores were 70%, 60% and 50% - all because she didn’t pay attention or, in some cases, didn’t even work the problem.  Then I had to correct and watch her re-work her homework problems.  Then we had a long discussion about being thorough, paying attention, not wasting time, and not getting distracted.  In the middle I re-registered the car, which necessitated 1. trying to do it online 2. finding out that the county tax was never paid last year 3. calling the county and getting the account number 4. trying six times, unsuccessfully, to use their phone system 5. calling someone who offered no help but checked that yes, I did have the right account number 5. calling back and having it magically work (and finding out that we’ve been paying interest on the tax since JANUARY - this is because my parent’s renters never felt like forwarding the bill to us).  Then I moved on to Edwin’s reading lesson.  He did fantastically.  Then it was Sophia’s turn, which was interrupted every three minutes by 1. the boys fighting 2. Kathleen asking questions about her math homework (she wants to get them all right and a gold star) 3. me giving her a tutorial about long divison (she didn’t understand dropping the numbers down).  And I got Eleanor up, changer her diaper, and fed her.  Then we finished.  Then we ate lunch.  I tried to eat lunch and was interrupted every three minutes.  I’m now putting Joseph down to bed before going to bed myself.  Then I’ll get up and beat the children into cleaning up the apartment so it can be clean for the lady who is coming at 2:00 (hopefully she’ll be late).  

So, you know, just another exotic day in the life of a mother of five.

I’m looking forward to a movie and pizza tonight.

(just so you know, this is a rant, not a call to fix the problem.  I think that the problem started about nine years ago when we started trying to have a baby and then was subsequently compounded every two years or so afterwards.)

Love you!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Ashley

Maybe, just maybe public school isn't such a bad idea after all?  At least my children will learn something, right?

Homeschooling and parks

I go to the park a lot.  When you live in a two-bedroom apartment and homeschool your children, you have to go to the park a lot.  Thankfully we live in an area with lots and lots of parks.  Every time we come back to the States I am amazed at how many parks there are.  It seems like every little extra square corner of space has a park tucked into it, and there's a shockingly large amount of extra green space around to put parks into.  I suppose that living in water-poor cities that are only green in the places that people can afford to water makes you appreciate places where the grass and trees grow without anyone having do to a thing.

Our park time every day is after nap and quiet time.  The morning is devoted to school and so in the afternoon we go to the park.  Our apartment complex has a playground, but it's shaded in the afternoon so we only go on warm days, or when I'm feeling lazy.  Half a mile away is another park that we go to when I'm looking for sunshine or feel like giving the children some more exercise.  It's a lovely little thing, nestled along Four Mile Run and liberally littered with abandoned wheeled toys that the children love to fight over.  A mile down the road is another park with an amazing 20-foot tall rope-spiderweb structure that everyone loves to climb.

So each afternoon we head to whatever park suits our fancy.  I've been doing this for a few weeks now and I've noticed that before four o'clock we usually have to park all to ourselves.  The local elementary schools get out around 3:30 and so everything is deserted.  Sometimes I'll see moms with small children and sometimes I'll see nannies with their charges, but mostly it's just us.

This would have been a problem a few years ago when Kathleen and Sophia were too young to play without my help, but now they're old enough to have plenty of fun without any help from me.  And Joseph and Edwin are happy to tag along, fearlessly tackling just about every thing their sisters tackle.  Most of the time they play nicely and make up all sorts of games and 'clubs' and pretty much provide all the fun anyone is looking for.  I don't think I've ever heard any of them ask for someone to play with who was their own age.

It's interesting to me to discover these times unused by the general population that has to march according to someone else's schedule.  I've always enjoyed the time aspect of homeschooling; when I happen to run into the morning or afternoon school bus stop rush I always feel smug about not having to throw everyone into shoes and coats to make sure someone doesn't get left.  If I feel like sleeping a little longer in the afternoon, I don't have to worry about my girls waiting for a mom that couldn't make it to the bus stop on time.  I like having the whole afternoon to soak in the sunshine while the children form a train of wheeled vehicles, knowing that the only thing waiting for me at home is dinner.  No soccer practice, no homework, no unfinished projects.

Maybe one day this will change when the children are older and life finally intrudes upon my little self-made universe.  But for now, I'll find all of the empty parks and the warm spring sunshine and enjoy every bit of it.  With nobody around to bother me.

Living with Children: Laundry

After our housekeeper quit right after we got back from R&R in August I took some domestic tasks back on myself.  As we all know very well by now, none of those tasks included scrubbing toilets because I don't scrub toilets.  But they did include doing my own laundry.  I always had little respect for women who let their housekeepers do their laundry (yes, sometimes I'm a judgmental jerk) until I let mine take the task off my hands.  Then I realized that's it's really nice not having to spend two hours folding and putting away laundry every week and I justified myself by taking the children on a walk instead.

But when Asli abandoned me I got that task dumped back into my lap along with ironing Brandon's shirts - six a week, something that I've never done.

So I did what any mother should do: I enlisted the help of my children.  Now lest you think that they were willingly enlisted and we live in a fairy-land where we all sing songs everyday and blow each other kisses and never speak above a pleasant murmur, we don't.  Maybe we occasionally visit the outskirts of a place that is neighboring that place, but we don't live there.  We live in a place that is a lot more loud, messy, and rude called reality.  Anybody who claims to live anywhere else is selling something.

But one of the wonderfully great things about living in our particular reality is that I can be the loudest and the rudest of the inhabitants, I am bigger than most of them, and they can't get away from me.  When I made castles in the air about homeschooling while Kathleen was getting to the age where I could put foundations under them, child labor was always a major portion of those castles.  Some of the earliest parts.  Since I direct everyone's time I can direct everyone to help me.

Before I start getting nasty comments (well, that would be if anyone other than friends who wouldn't be nasty anyway actually read this), I would like to point out that we all have different views on work and childhood.  I have a good friend with six children and a very busy husband who is one of the nicest people I've ever known.  I don't think I've ever heard her actually speak above a pleasant murmur, and she lives to serve other people.  I look at her and think how many good qualities of hers I don't possess and and am working on.  Since she never wants to put anyone out of their way she ends up taking a large portion of the household responsibilities on herself.  Childhood is precious and only happens once and so children should be allowed to enjoy it.  That is her view.

That's not my view.  I try to let my children enjoy their childhood, but I also give them responsibilities.  I need the help and they need to learn basic household responsibilities.  And I need the help.

So, every Monday I haul everyone's laundry upstairs at 5 am and start the first load.  During my exercise, breakfast, school, and lunch, I change the loads every hour.  By the time I wake up from my nap, everything is dried and sorted into baskets (I do this after each load).  One for me, one for Kathleen, and one for Sophia.  In my basket I have my clothes, Brandon's clothes, Joseph's clothes, sheets, and large towels.  Kathleen has her clothes and Edwin's clothes.  Sophia gets the small towels, washcloths, and her clothes.  Everyone folds the contents of their baskets and puts them away.  Then we repeat the next Monday.

Having the girls fold and put away their own clothes has required me to let go of my OCD tendencies.  I like the clothes to be folded in a very particular way, and the girls don't even come close to it.  I also like drawers to be neat and every time I see long-sleeved shirts co-mingling with short-sleeved shirts and pants in the skirt drawer and unmatched socks hiding in the underwear I have to close my eyes and turn away.  "It's their clothes," I chant to myself, "their drawers.  I have nothing to do with them.  I don't fold them, I don't put them away, I don't wear them, and I never have to look in them."  Then I resist the urge to rearrange everything.

Occasionally I'll give up and rearrange Edwin's because he didn't have anything to do with the haphazard stuffing of pants and shirts into the wrong places (usually Kathleen is running up against dinner and finishes sloppily) and really he needs to be able to find his clothes, right?  Last week when Sophia caught me at it, she rearranged her drawers too and I had a small thrill of moral victory.  Keep things neat and maybe they'll also learn to see that it's a good thing.

But for now, I'll take my victories where I can, and the biggest victory all is forty-five minutes.  Forty-five minutes to fold my basket and put everything away.  Then laundry is done until next week.  And that is a wonderful thing.

Homeschooling: What Do You Do in the Summertime?

At least two mornings a week our doorbell rings and it's one of the girls' friends.  Can Kathleen and Sophia come out to play?  The girls look at me and groan as I shake my head.  "No," they sigh, "We can't.  We have school."

Yes, that's right.  We have school in the summer.  I'm a horrible mother.

When I was in school year-round school started becoming popular.  For some time it looked like our whole school district was in danger of giving in to peer pressure, but in the end we were saved from a fate worse than death.  Some schools became year round, and I remember wondering why any child would ever want to give up the most sacred part of the year, the long endless days of nothing to do but swim read and hang out, to go school.  Surely there must be something wrong with them.

Now I'm on the other side of the equation and I know exactly why those children went to year-round school, and it had nothing to do with their preferences.  Because what a child sees as a paradise - months with nothing to do - is a mother's nightmare.  After having over nine months of scheduled, structured, planned life, everything is thrown to the winds and not only does mom have to get everything done she normally does - cook, shop, clean, and other household business - she has to add referee, in-house entertainment, chauffeur, and playmate to her workload.  Theoretically the children could help out with the household chores so mom has more time to spend on summer activities, but two and a half months is not nearly enough time to set up any kind of new helpfulness habit.

So that's why we have school in the summer.  Because what else would we be doing?  A day off every now and then is fine, but after a couple of days of no schedule, children start eating each other alive.  And if I have to impose some sort of schedule to keep cannibalism at bay, it might as well be school - a schedule that already works for us.

We'll take a month off for our R&R in August - by then I'll need a break - but that's the only big break we'll take this summer.  When we had visitors in the spring we took a month off to spend with them - nobody flies all of the way to Azerbaijan just to watch children be taught about ancient Rome.  Holidays we take off because that's the family rule - no work on holidays.  And we'll be taking another forced break when we leave in six months and have at least a month of home leave.  But otherwise, it's all school all the time.

Of course we occasionally will take days off for fun summertime things.  This past week a friend invited us to go to a beach club with here, so we had a field trip.  Everyone needs a field trip every now and then, right?  The girls have swim lessons on Thursday mornings, so Thursday afternoon we have abbreviated school.  Fridays I always take off - why have school on Friday when you can not have it instead?  

We only have one area - history - with a set number of lessons that have to be completed (it's kind of hard to skip ahead) and that will be finished before we leave, so I consider my duty to first grade just about completed.  Science has a somewhat nebulous number of lessons, and math and language arts are on a rolling schedule - when you finish one book, start the next one, so we don't have to worry about finishing them by a set time.

Sometimes I daydream of long empty summers that are filled with long days at the pool and lots of trips to the beach.  Then I wake up and look around at my four children and remember reality - four children equal work no matter where you are.  So I might as well get some good out of that work and take smaller breaks.  Maybe we'll change it up later but for now, the girls will have to keep telling their friends to come back in the afternoon.

Homeschooling Advantages: Time to Play

When I decided to homeschool Kathleen, I knew that some days I would think about my friends who had time for play groups and park dates while I was stuck inside on a beautiful morning discussing mixed numbers and telling Edwin to stop sticking his fingers in Joseph's nose.  On those days I would wonder why exactly I had thought that this was a good idea.  Downsides are what choices come with.  It's just part of life.

One morning Kathleen got an invitation to take Sophia over to a friend's house.  It was the friend's birthday and her mom was surprising her with a day of friends (this was during spring break).  I sent the girls over and stayed home with the boys.  As I fed only two people lunch that day, I realized that my life could be like this every single day - quiet, cheerful, manageable instead of chaos for four with a side of whining - if I sent both girls to school in the fall.  I was very tempted that morning.  Very.  Tempted.

But this week as I took the children out for walks every single afternoon to enjoy our gorgeous spring weather, I thought that perhaps crazy lunches and busy mornings were a pretty good tradeoff for empty afternoons filled with hunting down turtles in the butter-yellow spring sunshine.

I try to keep our life fairly simple to balance out having four children under the age of seven home all day.  Nobody has any lessons (other than what I teach them), sports, or 'after school' activities.  In the fall I looked into enrolling the girls into a dance class sponsored by the American school here.  The administrators were very happy to accommodate me (yes, we feel it would be good for them to spend time with their peer group [and not home with just their crazy mother to skew their world view and turn them into social outcasts]).  But when I saw that I would be spending Friday afternoons from 1:15 until 4:00 at school trying to keep two boys entertained, I asked them to remove the girls' name from the list. If I had only had the two girls, it would have been no problem.  But I don't, I have four children.  So we stay home a lot.

But this means that every afternoon when every other mom around is going to pick up their child from school, I'm finishing my nap, or reading my scriptures, or sitting with Sophia while she reads.  While the other children are attending Brownies or play practice or swim team, my children are riding their bikes around the neighborhood and creating contraptions that all three can ride on together.  When it's homework time they're helping me with dinner or playing in the bath with their siblings.

I like to pretend that I'm being virtuous when I think about not having the children in more activities.  After all, so many studies say that children are over scheduled and could do with a little more boredom. Childhood isn't the same as it was twenty years ago.  Children are losing their ability to think creatively.    All of those things make me feel better, and maybe a little smug (please don't tell anyone).

But really, I'm just lazy.  After a long morning of school, I'm ready to have an empty afternoon to recover before we enter the crazy zone of dinner- and bedtime.  And I love it.  I love not having any commitments, not having to drive anywhere, not having to help children with homework while trying to make dinner.  I love not having parent-teacher conferences (Ashley, how are you supporting your child's educational endeavors?  Oh in lots of ways, Ashley).  I love never. ever. having a school assembly.  And volunteering.  And fundraisers.  I love having my day belong to me and nobody else.

And those are the upsides.  Also a part of life.  A good part.