Welcome to what is likely to be the “new normal” for a while. I know–it’s a nightmare. Everything is suddenly different and as it is, maybe you dread school vacations and breaks. Now you’re stuck. How do you deal? I gotcha covered… Continue reading New work-life balance fundamentals for coronavirus
Every day is a new beginning. I am always motivated in the spring. Maybe it’s the lengthening hours of sunshine and the starting of my gardens. Life is bursting forward and I am running face into the wind with all of it. It’s a good time to check in with yourself and see if you are where you want to be…
Continue reading Check in with yourself and see where you want to be
“Honoring your children” is a phrase you will hear a LOT in the homeschool community–but especially the unschooling community. I’ve come to see how this phrase is very subjective–with an incredibly broad spectrum of meanings.
Let me tell you what it does (and does not) mean for my family… Continue reading How do you honor your children?
Yesterday, I appeared to be having “a day”. And my blog is here to help me process, so I turned to my blog. Because it was just after noon and it was a bad morning. Here it is… raw and real and freshly outpoured yesterday. ❤ Continue reading Small confessions: all out of courage
This is not a proud day for Mama, and that’s okay with me. We all have those days. Those days where our parenting behavior is just not stellar or admirable or what we aspire to in any way.
That being said, having one of those days every once in a while (usually) doesn’t end up harming anyone; and sometimes–it even provokes some change in the people around you. Time will tell if that is the result of today’s experiences, but a mama can hope… Continue reading This is what a bad day looks like
My blog post on allowances was posted to Facebook and someone asked me “what happens when they don’t do their chores?”
Fair question… because that happens. So here is how I handle it at my house… Continue reading How I get my kids to do their chores
BigGuy woke up very late and I heard him sneeze twice. They were deep, chesty sneezes that may have hurt him in his chest. We’ve been skirting illness for a few weeks now; and honestly–I could not be more thankful that we haven’t been sick. The last two years (almost to the week) have been EXTREMELY hard on my family and a lot of the things we had in place that kept my kids (and the parents) healthy went largely out the window as we worked on other things that took the front seat.
One of them is how we eat. The other is stress management. Continue reading My day… Monday, Sept. 29th so far…
Yeah… I think this is going to work out–not being part of the Young Philosopher’s group that was meeting on Fridays from 11:30am-1pm. I mean, that’s lunchtime. Seriously? And it’s kind of far. And it falls on the day that BigGuy and I are supposed to hold our big Socratic white-elephant-in-my-head discussions… which might be too much heavy conversation for a day.
But Fridays are really, really open now and I think that’s going to work well for us. For one, it’s the day we prepare for the weekend. We do our “weekly home blessing” (thank you, stronghold of The Fly Lady) which is a set of two chores per family member that help get the house cleaned up before the weekend. This started long ago when we hosted “Wine Night” at our house every Friday night for nearly a year before relocating. Taking care of cleaning up the house before the weekend set in meant that we enjoyed a clean house all weekend and company dropping by wasn’t an issue. We could just relax.
Well, we are returning to that. And I think having the review of the week’s work and the Socratic discussions on Friday are going to dovetail nicely into preparing for the weekend. Because we can also have these discussions WHILE we work on stuff.
So each day the kids have all kinds of responsibilities…
At the end of the week, it goes like this (or rather, IT. IS. PLANNED. to go like this):
Honestly, the kids are the only ones being held to this right now and BigGuy bears the brunt of it. So add this to the list of “things mom should really get better at”. To be fair, Girly is WAY more helpful in general than BigGuy so I kind of don’t feel all that horrible about it. At 5, she tap dances rings around him in the helpful category. I love my son and he has his amazing qualities. I’m just saying that being helpful isn’t one of them.
And then there’s the general keeping things in their place crap. Shoes go in the closet, not out and about. Pencils have a place. Library books have a place. Board games have a place. My core sense of self is only at rest when “everything has a place and everything in it’s place”. With this house presumably the final place (until retirement), sh*t’s gotta get put in it’s place and that needs to become a habit.
Friday is also farm share day. So if we can get the rest of the house clean, by the time we get our farm food later in the day, we really don’t have anything standing in our way to deal with the vegetables. We get two shares from a farm in town; but then another farm uses our house as a drop-off point (it’s complicated–they started using us mid-season when we were already midway through a full season share with the other farm. Although to be fair, last year we did 4 shares total–two from each of these farms; and we’re likely to go back to that next year since we will not yet have our own gardens to the point of supporting us. Wait-wait-wait… I digress..
I’m looking forward to Fridays. Especially if they’re sunny. And clean.
Things I did well this week:
Things I did not do well this week:
Other things that happened this week:
Overall, I think it was a decent week. I would love to be downtown drinking with a bunch of happy women celebrating a 40th birthday right now, but I will take a hot bath and soft bed after this day of being on my feet ALL. DAY. and up since early (for a work-related meeting before covering at the sale).
Upshot is that BigGuy is happier and feels like the dynamics of the household have changed for the better with this recent change in who is getting up when and doing what.
I can’t lie that there is a very, very tiny part of me that is sad that Papa gets to connect with the boy instead of me. I mean, I know he loves me and all. I just wish I had the resources right now to connect with him more meaningfully. Or that I was at least gaining something else in the absence of that connection. Like maybe connecting with Girly. They grow up so fast. I just need to focus on the gratitude for having a husband that gives them that rather than my kids lacking it completely.
I’m sitting here listening to the sounds of Girly crying in her room and BigGuy finishing an hour’s worth of trying to clean the bathroom vanity in my room.
I’m not exactly getting this “teaching practical life skills” thing down very well.
Ideally, these are things that would have grown with us as a family–learned and added as time wore on. But that’s not what happened. Instead of gently ushering my kids into independence and the keeping of their environment, my untreated PTSD led to a rather volatile “mom can’t take any more of the mess and freaks out” method of trying to keep house. Only further derailed or enhanced, of course, by 7 moves in 4 years (Girly aged 8mo-4 and BigGuy aged 6-10… formative years).
Now my kids have grown into a lifestyle of simply not taking care of their things and not really wanting to keep the household clean. Mama’s upset about the state of all of it doesn’t really move anyone because Mama’s been kind of a b*tch for the last several years as the symptoms of her condition got worse.
So… first, Mama canceled this afternoon’s events “because obviously we need more time to get things done”. That resulted in lots of playing. Cool that they’re having a good time, but Mama can’t do it all by herself. Then I tried some consistent redirection. #fail
The biggest mistake Mama made was telling them that I sold tonights tickets to “the circus” (it’s really Cirque Shanghai). Oh my. They get upset, but they don’t exactly get motivated to do anything. In fact, sometimes BigGuy will cry and plead that “he’ll do AAAANNNYYYYthing” to get whatever he lost back and sometimes, I fall for it. I tell him to do some subset of what he was responsible for and he still won’t do it.
The whole thing is really just a parenting mess that needs to be made right. And the way I’m handling it is nothing positive… which is making everyone miserable and not exactly suring up the shaky foundation we’re working with.
Mama’s decided that I need to be WITH my kids as they do this–talking them through it and helping them find joy in the process until it becomes a habit. I need to be engaged instead of just barking out orders.
Stay tuned…
Educated Adventures 