Things have gotten a bit different around these parts during the last month.
My son is in second grade, and his teacher, whom he loves and had for first grade as well, has had major health issues and has taken off teaching and has been on disability since roughly mid February.
Homeschool
Since that point, our son has been having a rough time, and we decided around the beginning of April to try out homeschool for at least the rest of the school year. So basically, my life has been consumed since then in redesigning his room to make it homeschool friendly, finding and assembling curriculum, telling the district we’re homeschooling, and, since last week, actually homeschooling each day.
His little sister still attends kindergarten at our neighborhood school, so we drop her off, come home, and start our day. We have a snack and lunch break, but basically we are homeschooling from when she leaves to when we go pick her up after school…. which means the things I had been doing while both children were at school have been pushed around or just not been getting done.
Some of these things include:
• Blog posts (luckily I can write “whenever” and schedule them to come out)
• Conference design, planning, etc. (sometimes I do this at night)
• Cleaning the house (trying to do this with the children after school)
• Grocery Shopping (we did a math activity/costco trip and that was good… otherwise I’m going to have to take the kids with me after school)
• Day dates/lunch dates with Jamund
• Random shopping/house work/etc.
• Appointments: we have to take him with us when we go to the dentist, etc.
• Other writing: Yeah. Just not doing that really.
Is it Worth it?
It is a sacrifice, yes, but I think it’s really helping our relationships and helping me understand him better. It’s been good to have that one on one time. Some days/moments are really rough, and others are awesome. We are learning a lot (I’m learning a lot!). I’m trying to get laundry and random things done during break times, which makes me have to be more efficient.
But it is exhausting! I’m tired! I’ll have to figure out self care as I go along. I know it’s only for about two months and then summer vacation is here…. and that won’t necessarily be much easier! My son and I both do well with routine, so not having a routine during the summer can create chaos.
We’ll see if we continue to homeschool in the fall. I like it. I do like to teach. I used to teach at UVU, so teaching is enjoyable for me (of course, this is much different than college teaching, but it’s similar in theory, haha). It’s just knowing that there are so many little things not getting done that is stressful—or just not having the breathing room that we had previously. The stress of homeschooling is different from having the kids home when they were little (before school)—I now feel that responsibility to make sure that he is getting an education and could go back to school without much trouble—so there’s that as well.
… Sorry to not really talk much about mental illness on this post, but I guess I wanted to explain what’s been going on around here lately so you can understand where my brain is these days! Also, all of the things we do can and often do affect our mental health, so we’ll see how this shakes things up!