As the year went along did your standards go along with it? ….You may be a homeschooling mama if….. you are an idealist who cannot maintain her ideals because there are so many of them!
The year begins, you have your curriculum set, your daily master plan laid out, and your energy reserves on high. This is going to be the best year ever! I mean EVER! THIS is the year for perfect penmanship. Day one is a wake up call to tune of ‘nobody wants to do school’. To be honest, neither do you. Perhaps this is day two or three at your home, but at some point the rosy bloom fades as we (children, mom, dad) realize a root word of home school indicates entry into trenches of hard work.
How can this be with such incredible lesson plans, wonderful academic groups, stellar social outings? Standards begin to slip with a lesson here and there under the daily duress caused by a little one waking with The Grumpies and derailing the day. (*on my best days I remember to send this child back to their room immediately as this attitude illness is highly contagious) We convinced ourselves that a once a week lesson in insert nemesis subject here is adequate and/or will be caught up on during insert holiday/weekend here. (*on my best days I remember to eat the slimy toad first) Somehow said slimy toad does not make it back to the A List.
Fast forward a few months and the What-Did-I-Forget-This-Year joins the What-Did-I-Forget-This-Day going to sleep review. …Never caught up in that subject ….forgot to add in this subject… did we cover enough in those subjects? Realizing we dropped some subjects altogether we ask how and when this could have happened? Looking back you find that your last check date was JANUARY THIRD???!!!! Were we even doing school that near to Christmas? Well, it is my handwriting, so we must have been unless another alien abduction occurred.
Is recovery possible? Happily, the answer is yes–if you want to, if you summer-school, if you realize the subject was a much-needed-basic as opposed to a fun-sounding-filler. What’s up with all these hyphens?! If your subject of concern falls within the first catagory, the good news is that you can focus deeply on this area over the summer. This includes high schoolers. If you fall into the latter category, realize that some of what you placed on your child’s lesson plan was temporal busy work that you saw as ‘fun’ (worksheet worship) rather than eternal expansion that is often seen as ‘play’ (explore/discover/create). In either case, you can lay down your guilt, and know that you will be wiser in planning and executing next year. You have given your best and realized that, as always, you fell short of perfection.
You may be a homeschooling mama if…..you want Heaven so badly you are willing to submit to daily sanctification applied through your children.