progress on the kids' rooms

I've made some serious progress on setting up Hypatia's bedroom. She picked the paint color, and the wall decal is from Etsy. All the boxes are "unpacked" - although you will see the pile of toys in the middle of the floor that were dumped out of a box and not put away yet.

Now (sigh) I still have to do something about Carbon's room. He moved by shoveling stuff into trash bags, and dumping them on the floor of his new room. It was a brilliant technique for transporting a huge mess from one place to another. What to do about messy children?

thinking about the juggling act

(Hypatia working on a research project, in the evening because the day was too busy)

I've been thinking of myself as a juggler a lot recently. It's the way we talk about these things: don't drop the ball, keep it all in the air, etc. I may have too many balls in the air right now, and I am worried about dropping one. As the pace has picked up this fall, I planned to take a week to get the hang of the juggling act, then add in just one more ball at a time. That was probably a good idea, but it still seems like there are too many balls:

Work, homeschool, home, the RE credentialing program, exercise, marriage, and food

I'm dangerously close to dropping the balls, to burning out, to giving up. I don't want to give up either of the balls that folks tell me are the biggies: Full time work and full time homeschooling. Yep, most folks don't try to do both of those at the same time, but I feel that both are my heart and soul work, and giving up either feels like giving up a piece of my heart.

And if I won't put the balls down, I guess I need to just learn to be a better juggler.

tucking it in where you can

I'm working on the Credentialing program for Religious Educators, which is a lot like taking on part time grad work as self-study, and I have a mentor that I work with once a month on the phone. We've just started this process, and she asked me how I plan to fit the study into my life.

Well. About like this, what I've pictured above. I need to take the books with me everywhere I go, snatch any time I can, and tuck study in to my life. So when I take the kids to the Children's Museum so that Carbon can take an art class, Hypatia plays while I study. Even if that means she plays on my legs while I hold the book just above the "playful puppy".

Saturday morning I took my laptop with me to the gym for Hypatia's gymnastics class. As I was sitting in the bleachers, working away on a powerpoint presentation for church, another mom started talking to me about how hard this is, to balance study and kids. She's in a nursing program, and has two young children, and shares many of the same struggles I do.

It's not easy being a mom, a student, a worker, all at the same time.

hanging in there

Oh, what a day I've had! Up early, dragging the kids out of bed, then:

• 7:30 our ritual Sunday morning stop at the grocery store for gluten-free muffins, smoothies, and espresso (a once a week special treat)
• 8:00 arriving at church, to set up classrooms and get things all prepped for church
• 9:15 teaching a small "first service"
• 11:00 then leading a very large "second service" with Children's Chapel and special mixed age rotation method (an experiment, today was the first time we tried it and so that was an extra stress)
• 12:15 Right after we got done with that I just had time to clean up, and wave at my husband as he came to pick up the kids from me
• 12:30 With our minister, I lead a two hour session of a curriculum called "Articulating Your Faith" with our high school group
• 2:40 I had to dash from that to run downtown for a rock climbing party I had organized for all the kids from church. Twenty-seven kids and their parents came out for it - it was really fun and great. My husband brought our kids to it, so I saw them all there
• 5:10 From the party I had to go back to church to cook some soup and salad and host a Young Adult dinner and game night
• 5:30 I made soup and chatted with some families who had been there cooking dinner for the homeless camp we are hosting
• 6:00 The young adults arrived and I spent two hours with them eating and talking and playing games
• 8:15 I washed the dishes up and locked up the church and headed home
• 9:30 I put the kids to bed

A marathon of a Sunday!

putting it together

Ah, IKEA. I love you for your affordable and practical home furnishings. I also like to shop in your store, and appreciate the cafeteria placed in the middle so I can take a break and have some meatballs and gluten-free torte.

But once I get it home, assembling it all can be quite the chore!

A somewhat unconventional field trip day

Yesterday my husband needed to drive up the road to Seattle to get his motorcycle serviced, and so we chose to take a day as well and drive up to keep him company and have a "Field Trip Day" for our homeschool.

As we are doing a Unit Study on Asia, I wanted to take the kids to the cool asian grocery store in the International District, and that's just what we did: browsing the aisles, trying to figure out what the vegetables and fruits were when we couldn't read the labels, buying strange candies and so forth. Carbon was impressed by the variety of origami paper for sale, I admired the bamboo salad bowls but couldn't actually bear to pay $70 for one, Hypatia loved the dolls they were selling, and my husband bought a package of rice crackers with dried fish in it. We still haven't tried the dried fish - I'm a bit nervous about that.

It was a lovely field trip, actually, and as close to a trip to Asia as we were going to get this week. :)

It's not all high-brow museums and such. There are much more unconventional educational opportunities out there, and they are pretty fun too!

Patience

A couple of interactions this past week made me think about patience, and whether I have more or less than the average:

Last week at a Math Salon event for homeschooled kids, I was playing a game of Blokus with Hypatia and another kid, another homeschool mom. Hypatia was the youngest kid trying to play the game, and I was trying to coach her through some strategy, which led the other mother to tell me that I had more patience than she did.

And then we had a birthday party for a friend from Hypatia's preschool, and of course almost all the conversation was about how Kindergarten is going. As I talked about homeschooling, many parents commented that they wouldn't have the patience for that.

So ... does homeschooling require more patience? Am I more patient with my kids than the average? (Not if you ask them!).

I don't feel like an especially patient mother or teacher, but YES, it does require patience at times to work with kids:

Using my "broken record voice" to say "get in the car, get in the car, get in the car", "buckle your belt, buckle your belt, buckle your belt".

Slowing my steps to the pace of a toddler.

Waiting while my son looks for his shoes and socks, lost for the millionth time.

And many, many more times.

What is patience? For me, it feels like putting myself into a mind-set that it's not about me. Just remembering that it's not all about me, about my needs, my pace, my preferences, helps me chill and wait for others. It's also the same when I am listening to someone talk about themselves - it's not about me. Instead of constantly thinking about how that relates to me, I remember that it's not about me, it's their story, their point of view, their time to talk.

What does patience feel like to you?