4/10/12
Growing up, I was always the kid in the family who loved schedules. I loved a plan. I loved to know what the plan was. I loved TO plan.

Fast forward to now and I still love to plan. I still love to have a plan. BUT, I hate schedules. Even schedules that are made by ME. Apparently as a kid, I had meltdowns when schedules and plans were not followed. In contrast, today I think my middle name could be flexibility! As a mom I have to be flexible. As the wife of a graduate student with a grad-school schedule, I have to be flexible. So flexibility is a good thing.

I'd like to blame my detest for schedules on being too flexible. The truth is probably more along the lines of -- I allow myself to be distracted by worthless things. That means that when I'm distracted, the schedule goes out the window and when I sit down to look at the schedule, I'm faced with all these things that did not happen. So in reality I hate schedules because when I sit down to account for my day, I always come up short. And I continue to hate schedules on the days where everything gets marked off because I look around and see that there is still more to be done. Sure, for once I was realistic in my goals for the day (another important element of good scheduling that I don't always practice...) and did not allow distraction to get in the way - but there are always those other things I'm wishing got done. I tell ya, as a mom (homeschooling or not), there's nothing quite as distressing as playing catch-up all the time. I'm always trying to get things in order so they can be at a point where I'm just maintaining things, mostly housework, but I never get there. It's great when you do the work that maintains things around the house and you can sit down at the end of the day and feel like things are in order. But what am I supposed to do when I sit down after a long day of work, only to look around and discover things don't look any different?! I know this feeds my issue with schedules too...

The dilemma is that I'm pretty sure I do need to have schedules. Especially as a homeschooling mom. Especially as I contemplate continuing to homeschool with a new baby in the house.

4/11/12
After today, I think we won't be able to homeschool as a family next year unless we have a bigger support group and are more committed to schedules. Eric's OCD flares up worse as the years pass and yet we keep adding kids to the mix and continuing to homeschool which certainly adds to the chaos.

It's interesting that just today I was reading a homeschooling blog where the mom said that she and another mom do a "kid swap" twice a month. They have eight kids between the two of them (five and three) and every other week, one of the moms is the host mom and watches all eight kids for four hours so the other mom can do things without the kids.

Tonight as I washed dishes and contemplated the state of things, I came to the conclusion that we are done homeschooling for now. Unless we have a better system. Many people manage to homeschool and work through the struggles of the mess that comes with it, but I don't think our family can do it anymore. I realize housekeeping is not my greatest strength, but I have a desire to change that continues to grow as the years pass. I feel like my greatest stumbling block has been the homeschooling for the last four years. I love doing school with the girls and would sorely miss them and the school-time and certainly dread the inability to put off cleaning...but at this point I think it's best.

I have hopes that we'll move somewhere with a strong homeschooling community that will embrace our family. A place where I will meet mom friends with big families and similar struggles. Maybe then I can find someone to start our own "kid swap", but I'd say every week so that twice a month I had cleaning time. I'd be able to use that time to clean the areas of the house that I just can't seem to do with kids underfoot. In our house right now, that's the deep cleaning as well as organizing. There's so little storage space that things are routinely relegated to the garage but often have stopping points in piles/bags in my room for further sorting before they make it to the garage. I shift things around to get from one place to another. It's certainly no "hoarder status" but it drives me batty and must be exponentially worse for Eric. When the girls and I clean their room, I always come out with at least one bag or box of things that shouldn't have belonged there. And I'm not sure I've once had time to put those things away right then. Those too, go in the master bedroom. How I would love to have time, every other week through a kid swap like I'm envisioning, to tackle these projects!

In the meantime, what do I do now? Still homeschooling, in my third trimester, in Eric's last month of his doctorate, and suddenly today I feel like things are at a peak and so disorganized that I cast my mind forward to when I can start anew and do things better. But what do I do now?