Five more days
January 3, 2008 by Sherry Osborne
Filed under Parenting
I hate to admit it, but here it is: I am counting down the days until Christmas break is over and the school opens up again. I’ve been chanting a quiet countdown this week and today I am thinking, “five more days…”
It’s not because I don’t love having my daughter at home – I do, and we’ve had some great fun between playing games, doing crafts, baking, and playing in the snow. But it’s also exhausting. I think that school is so structured that she’s used to having something to do every moment of the day and I can’t keep up. It’s also totally blowing my routine. Lately I find myself frantically stretching to reach deadlines by working late – the other night it was after 1 am when I finally shut my laptop down, having just finished my work. We’re all sleeping in too late, going to sleep too late (it’s 9:45 pm and I can hear my big girl flipping pages of a book, so she’s still awake, augh), my little girl has been missing naps, and I feel completely thrown for a loop. I need the structured routine as much as she does, I guess. Otherwise I apparently get nothing done – and that includes the mountain of clean laundry I’ve been meaning to fold and put away all week.
Five more days. Five more days, and things will be back to normal. Whatever THAT is.
I’m sorry but this made me giggle, because it’s exactly the opposite way I felt about school. Now that we unschool, we don’t have to follow the school’s schedule and can be much more relaxed, which works better for us.
I work for about four hours in the daytime in two hour blocks and then do something with the kids for about four hours. I still end up getting four hours in the daytime and two hours at night for work. We all do an hour of housework in the morning after breakfast and a couple hours on the weekend. If the house isn’t perfect, who cares? Family life is more important to us.
If I were doing school-at-home or heavy academics, this wouldn’t work, but unschooling works for us.
Lill