The Balancing Act: Homeschooling and Having Your Own Life Too

I've always known that I loved homeschooling - after all, I was homeschooled all the way through and I loved my own education and the lifestyle we had in my family.  But there is a twist when you know you love homeschooling, because most often that means that the mother would need to stay home and not have an outside career.

My mother balanced her need for income and her desire to homeschool us by running a home daycare. When we were little she could only take in a few kids, but by the time I was legally old enough to count as an assistant we were able to have 10 extra kids in our home all day long.  She spent 11 hour days supervising our schooling and all those babies, toddlers, and preschoolers, she did all the housework, and she took on lots of volunteer tasks for the community theater company that our entire family got heavily involved with.  She also continued to play the cello, which had been her pre-children passion.  She played for a community orchestra and in a string quartet.

Now, my mother has no regrets, other than this: she says she wishes she had taken more time for pursuing her own lifetime learning goals.  She wishes she had set herself more learning challenges and had homeschooled herself at the same time.

I am balancing my role as a homeschooling parent with a full-time job running the religious education program for a church, as well as with the housework, garden, animals, and all my crafty/homesteading experiments and hobbies.  And I am taking a cue from my mother's regret, and taking time to continue learning and reading for myself and not just for the kids.  It's a lot to balance, or I'm well-supported by the pillars of my life, depending on how you flip the organizational chart.  How do you balance your life?