Robots and Mummies

Sorry, I've been offline for a few days as we move stuff into our new weekend place in New Paltz. Another point on the homeschooling side of the ledger: having the flexibility to leave the city as is convenient for us, rather than having to wait for the weekend or the school day is over, is really great.

As far as school goes, the past week has been sort of hit-and-miss. L had to take the New York City Gifted and Talented test on Monday. This was just in case we wanted to send her back to her school for first grade and also to maybe send her to one of the city G&T programs should she qualify (This is just to give us more options for next year). To do it, her school re-enrolled her for the day, which was really really great of them. Tuesday we made up for it by zooming through three times as many pages of math as normal, totally at L's own prompting. We also went to the library and read. Wednesday I went on a tour of the British International School, a new private school on the East River near the UN International School. I was very impressed, but don't think we'll be able to afford it.

After the tour, L and I went to the Met to see the Egyptian wing. Wow. It really was amazing to see how much L got out of the exhibits having spent the past 2 weeks reading about Egypt and mummies. We borrowed an audio guide and wandered around, looking at everything. She pointed things out: "Look, the white crown! The red crown! The double crown of Egypt!" She knew about the Upper and Lower Egypts, the pharoahs, King Narmer (who unified the two Egypts). We tried to decipher heiroglyphics. Seeing real sarcophaguses (sarcophagi?) and mummies made all the stuff we'd been reading about come to life. In fact, we spent so much time looking at the details that we didn't have time to finish and ended going back today and spending another 2 hours.

Today, L had her first basic robotics class. We unfortunately got stuck on a local bus for 1 hour and 20 minutes (!) going uptown and ended up being so late for it that we missed the robotics talk and only had 20 minutes to put the robot kit together. But it was still pretty cool. There were about 8 kids, ranging in age from 8 down to 5. The teacher provided the kits and screwdrivers and all she needed to do piece it together -- put the motor and circuit board into a shell, then connect all the wires the right way. The robot has a light sensor, which we talked about being like its eye, and when a light was shined on it, it beeped and moved. If you covered it or turned off the light, it stopped. So that was cool, but we'll try to make it on time next week. No more buses to 88th Street!

The Philosophies: Unschooling

There are a bunch of different philosophies regarding homeschooling. Obviously. Or as L has taken to saying (to my chagrin), "Duh." (A lovely little gift from a friend's school class.) I would describe what we're doing as eclectic, which really means in our case, "We haven't got the faintest idea." But really, the options are so varied, and in some cases so contradictory, that it's difficult to decide which direction to go in.

So I'm going to try writing about some of these different ideas, more for my own edification, really, over the next weeks. I'll start with one I've been reading a lot about recently.

Unschooling is a lovely idea. One of its major proponents, John Holt, was a school teacher-turned-educational-reformist who eventually decided that the educational system was unreformable. He decided that schooling as we define it was totally unnecessary, and that children could teach themselves and what parents should do is act as guides and facilitators, helping kids get the information they need to answer the questions they naturally have. Of course, it's a lot more complicated that and someone who is into unschooling would probably be horrified at my thumbnail, so check out the link above if you want more information on this. I totally am infatuated with this idea. I wish I could do it. But I just can't. I guess I don't have the faith that if, totally left to her own inititative, L is going to want to learn to read rather than have me read to her. Or that she's going to be interested in Algebra. Or want to learn to write in a way that's legible to other people. But maybe I just don't get it.

I've been reading this book, "And The Skylark Sings With Me", about a real life unschooling family where the daughters get obsessed with things like astronomy (and learn trigonometry) and wild life studies (and learn about genetics and probability theories), and opera, etc. etc. The kids sound amazing, yes they do, but so far away from my L & T, and me. Do I want to spend 2 hours in the supermarket giving a seminar on pesticides on produce and the different forms of credit available for payment and the meaning of the nutritional information on the packages? Because that's what this dad's been doing for his daughters, at the ages of something like 7 or 8. No wonder they're prodigies! I'm way too lazy to do that. And frankly, I think if I followed L's interests at the moment, we'd be spending a lot of time learning about what Dora does. Because this is what I don't get. What if your kid isn't interested in much? Not every kid is excited by classical music and the genetics of cross breeding corn snakes and telescopes, although I wish mine were.

Maybe I should do an experiment and just not do ANY schooling for the next month and just ask L every morning what she wants to do. I wonder what we'd end up doing? Maybe I'm underestimating my child. It's sort of like Communism, though. I suspect that the philosophy is much more appealing than the practice.

Bad Mothers

I think almost every single parent has experienced having someone judge their parenting and finding them lacking. It starts with the raised eyebrows and askance looks when you're in your third trimester and sipping the weekly glass of wine that your doctor prescribed. Or the little old ladies who scold you for walking too fast while holding your baby because you might "bounce her head off." The worst is, of course, when you actually aren't being that great a parent and someone catches you at it.

I had one of those experiences and I'm still boiling about it. I'm mad because the lady was in the right to say something, but at the same time so damn wrong. I was having a rough time with the kids, it was 5 pm, I didn't have the stroller for T, we were in Chinatown, I was carrying two bags, trying to drag two nudgy kids through one of those tight little revolving door turnstiles. Basically a horror scene. I finally burst through the entrance, the bags were falling everywhere, and for a second I got distracted trying to gather my wits along with all my crap. Suddenly, a woman behind me yelled--not sounding particularly concerned but in this nasty exasperated tone: "Lady, watch your kid." I turned around, and of course T was running for the platform. I managed to hook his collar while he was still a good 6 or 8 feet from the edge, but it was still scary and embarrassing. While I was wrangling him (and trying to keep an eye on L), the woman said something like,"You better do a better job watching those kids." I was so shaken and upset by then I just couldn't let this pass. I told her she didn't have to talk to me like that.

"I wouldn't need to say anything if you were a better mother," she snapped back.

I lost it. I told her to mind her own effing business (and yes, I think I actually used the term "effing" because I was trying so hard not to swear in front of the kids, not that I didn't slip in the next 5 sentences), and basically it went downhill from there. I couldn't believe it! I was literally having a screaming match with a strange woman in the Canal Street subway station in front of my two kids and dozens of strangers. It ended with me telling her, as I walked away, to raise her own fucking kids and her shouting at my back that she'd do a better job than I was doing.

The thing is, I wanted to be grateful to her for pointing out that T was in danger. I would have been grateful if she hadn't posed the whole thing as evidence of my bad mothering. I'm not a perfect mother. Hell, I'm not always even a good one. But I'm trying my best, which is all any of us can hope for. I was going to go on with some trite observation about making judgements, "walk a mile in someone else's shoes", blah blah, but you all know about that. We all know it, but there are times when it gets rubbed in your face. So stop pointing fingers at Britney, y'all. You never know when it's going to be you hiding in that bathroom waiting for the stormtroopers to break down the door.

Happy MLK Jr. Day!

We took the day off with all the other schoolers for Martin Luther King Jr. Day. We've been reading some books about his life, and did a simple project this morning, cutting out hand shapes and writing in the names of all the people we love and connecting them into a wreath. A sort of loving and helping motif thing. But honestly, I don't think I've done much of a job getting L to understand the civil rights movement or racism. When I asked her what she remembered about MLK from our reading, she said that long ago, white people didn't like Asians. Close, I guess.

I've just read an interesting essay by a professor who is homeschooling his kids, in which he details why he's doing it, which I can really relate to.

Our Average Day

A lot of people have been asking me what our average day is like now. We haven't been doing this long, but this is what's going on right now:

Mondays, I work at the Sol Goldman Y in the morning and L goes to cooking class. (D takes T to nursery on Mondays and Wednesdays). I pick her up around lunchtime, and we go and eat somewhere together. Starting this week, a friend of L's will then be joining us at 12 to do the Story of the World reading and project for the week. At 3, I drop L off at afterschool and then go to the Writers Room to work till 5:30, when I pick L and T up from their various programs. We try to fit in at least a couple of pages of math or penmanship sometime during the day as well. At bedtime, L reads me an easy reader book, or a page from something harder. We do that every night.

Tuesdays, we focus more on work. We drop T off at nursery, and then go to a cafe for breakfast and school. We aim to do 4 pages of math, and 2 letters from her penmanship workbook. We also go to the library and read, and then L can borrow a DVD and any books she wants, while I look for books that are linked to whatever we're studying in Story of the World (right now, Egypt and mummies). At 3, I drop L off and go work.

Wednesdays is another fun day. L & I sleep in while D takes T to school. Then we go to
Homeschool Soccer class at Pier 40. For the next couple of months, we'll also go to the Central Park Zoo one Wednesday a month for zoo class. We pick T up at nursery at 3, then I do a crafts project at home with L, T and her best friend A. I try to fit in some math during the day and we do reading at night.

We drop T off at school in the morning on Thursdays. Starting next week, L will be doing a six-week robotics class in the morning uptown with a bunch of other homeschool kids. They'll be using Lego Simple Machines to make a basic robots each week. The rest of the day will be spent on doing the usual -- math, penmanship, reading. From 3 to 5:30, L is at afterschool and I get to spend time with T, who really is getting the short end of the stick when it comes to attention.

Friday is my day off. Our babysitter comes and takes L & T while I shop for groceries, go to appointments and try to fit in some work. She does a couple of pages of math with L.

Weekends, D does a chapter out of the Real-Science-4-Kids chemistry book with L. This is a really great science curriculum for little kids, written very simply but without it being patronizing or dull. There are fun experiments that walk kindergarteners through the process of scientific inquiry: observation, developing a theory, then testing. Yes, it is from a Christian publishing house but there is no prosletyzing and definitely no mention of creation or intelligent design at this level. Just atoms and molecules.

On Sunday night, I try to do a basic goal for the week, how many pages of math, reading, etc., I would like to get done and that's the bone structure of the week's work. Obviously, this is all sort of idealized. There are days when we just can't get it together to do the program, and then we let it go. Those times are balanced by days when L can't get enough of whatever we're working on and we zoom ahead. And we have the luxury of doing some work on the weekends or holidays if I feel we're way too far behind. I'm aiming to have all the work (in terms of the textbooks we've bought) done by the end of June.

Sounds simple, huh?

Mummies and Egypt

As I've mentioned before, one of the things I'm doing with L is a history of the world, starting with the Fertile Crescent and ancient Egyptians, using the textbook Story of the World. The chapter we're on is about Lower Egypt and Upper Egypt and how they were unified by the White Crown king Narmer. L wanted to make the Red Crown, so we made a very lame version out of red construction paper. We wanted to make the coil but didn't have a pipe cleaner or anything else that would hold its shape, so ended up skipping that. Maybe later I'll try again.

We also read about heiroglyphics and cuneiform. The project that I want to do next week is to get some clay and make a Sumerian clay tablet. I also went to the library and got about 8 books about Egypt and mummies. L is really into mummies and pored over the pictures. I wonder if this is too intense for her, because it led to a conversation about how bodies rot and whether she would rot when she died. I answered, "Yes, but rotting is a way for your body to become dirt and give your energy and nutrients to the earth and then become a part of trees and flowers and grass." I'm rather proud of that off the cuff response, because it seemed to satisfy her. L did stipulate that when she was dead she didn't want to be squished into a cemetery with lots of other dead bodies. She wanted to be buried in the woods where it was quiet and peaceful. It's fascinating the directions these conversations take.

We had a fairly intense school day today as we had pretty much skipped everything yesterday. So after the math and penmanship and reading and history, L and I just hung out for a bit to unwind and then I took her to afterschool where she got to play with her friends. Then I had T for the rest of the afternoon and I really tried to spend some focussed time on him, because I know he's getting so much less attention from me now that L is with me all day. I feel pretty guilty about that, but I don't know how to balance that other than keep him home too, and that's just not an option at the moment. Not till I really feel like I know what I'm doing.

Red crown of Egypt

Zoo School

This not too great photo is of L's first of three classes at the Central Park Zoo. It was kids only, so I don't know exactly what they did, but when she came out of it, L told me that she had petted a Madagascar Hissing Cockroach. "It was kind of cute," was the comment. Also that there was a snake who didn't like to be petted backwards, because "that's like having his hair brushed backwards. Snakes don't like that."

After the class, the kids were given a set of photos and ushered into the Rainforest exhibit for a scavenger hunt. We found Victoria Crown pigeons, Cotton Top tamarins, poison frogs, fruit bats, and many other cool birds and animals. Oh yeah, the mouse deer was really cute. Even though I thought he was more like a rat deer.

She must have learned something, because when I showed her a map of the different layers in a rainforest, she rolled her eyes and said, in her most bored, teenaged voice, "I already know all that, mom." Then she rolled off: "The emergent layer, the canopy, the understory and the forest floor." Brightening up, she added, "That's where the cockroaches live."

Flowers and more questions

One of the great things about homeschooling (and yes, it's still pretty great) is the way questions spring up in the course of an normal day, questions that lead to investigation and new knowledge (that often leads to more questions). I'm starting to realize that you don't have to try really hard to teach. You just need to be willing to indulge their curiousity.

For example, here's a question that L had that could open up a very interesting avenue of learning: "Mommy, why is Tompkins Square Park named Tompkins?" My (lame) answer: "It was named after Mr. Tomkins." Her sensible response: "So what did he do to get a park named after him?" Me: embarrassed silence. Then the usual "Let's look it up when we get home."

So while L's in afterschool, here's what I've discovered. According to Wikipedia, the park was named after Daniel D. Tompkins, vice president under President James Monroe and the Governor of New York from 1807 until 1817. As governor, he provided money for the War of 1812 out of his own pocket after the State Legislature refused to fund it. He became an alcoholic and occasionally presided over the U.S. Senate while drunk. Tompkins is buried in St. Mark's Churchyard.

The way we could go forward with this, if she's still interested, is to look into the history of the park, go visit Tompkin's grave (since we live next door), look for an old map of the park and see how it's changed since it was made an official park in the late 1870's. If she's interested. Since it's totally possible that she'll have forgotten that she even asked the question by the end of the day.

Her other question, which I'm not sure I'll have as easy a time answering, was the meaning of the flower garlands we saw wrapped around the big tree in the middle of the park. There were chains of roses, daisies and lilies, all wilted and falling to pieces, and flower petals strewn around the roots. Tracks of the local Hari Krishnas? A pagan winter ritual? Some bored teenagers? Any theory would be most welcome.

In terms of real schooling, it was a good day. I had to go to an Earth School tour (we still intend to enroll her into 1st grade somewhere) and so we didn't start working till late. We went to Veselka, had a leisurely lunch and then walked across the street to Ottendorfer Library at noon, when the doors open. L had a webkinz doll with her, which I found to be a really useful teaching tool -- I'd ask L to tell Neigh-neigh how to do something or would ask her to model some behavior I wanted (like whispering in a library). Normally she'd do the opposite of whatever it is I wanted, but being Neigh-neigh's role model gave her a sense of responsibility. Another thing we did was she & the doll (voiced by L) would take turns answering & doing work. It just made everything more fun while still being focused on work.

We pretty much did everything I wanted to do today:

• did 4 pages of our new math workbook (I really like this math curriculum);
• practised penmanship (E's, F's & D's; we're using Handwriting Without Tears, which L really enjoys);
• did some free writing -- L wrote a few sentences about what we did the past weekend and illustrated it.
  
• we recited our poem of the week. She's memorizing one poem a week, nothing too elaborate. Things in the Mother Goose vein. Last week it was Birdy With the Yellow Bill (Birdy with the yellow bill/hopped upon my window sill/cocked his shining eye and said,/"Aren't you 'shamed, you sleepy head?") This week it's One, Two, Buckle My Shoe. She really likes doing this and will recite the poems at every opportunity.

We need to do some reading tonight before bed, and that's it! We worked till about 1:30, so an hour and a half, with a break in the middle. Then we did errands, came home and watched a DVD and I dropped her off at afterschool to play with friends. Another good day.

Next mission: Make Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement understandable to a 5-year-old.

Goodbye Party

L went back to school today to say goodbye to her classmates. I was so touched and grateful that her teacher gave up valuable class time for this. We brought some snacks and L distributed goody bags (I had vowed never to succumb to the tyrrany of children's goody bags, but I've been proven a hyprocrite once again) which we had spent the morning decorating. Her classmates were so excited to see her and bombarded her with questions about whether she'd be back for 1st grade and where she would be travelling to.

When we left, L seemed a little sad and asked whether she could do both homeschool and regular school. I wish we could.

Other classes

I forgot to mention that I'm being helped on this journey by friends who are pitching in to take care of and teach L.

The first week of homeschooling, my dear friend and gourmand R. agreed to teach L. to cook while I worked for a couple of hours. Of course, I was thinking of french toast, marshmallow krispies, things of that "Cooking With Kids" calibre. Was I wrong. The first lesson was the concept of mise en place, and she made a mirepoix, which they then cooked into a red sauce. When I picked L up after work, she had illustrated and written two pages, one detailing how to make a mirepoix and the other one on how to properly chop an onion:

This is a stov with a pot with mwrpwo! Mwrripois is silrre, onuin, and karit.

1. I kt in haf the onyon
2. I slist it hrosontl
3. I did sliset it vrdikle!

Soccer @ Pier 40

L took part in a homeschool soccer class today at Pier 40 on the West Side Highway. About 30 kids, all homeschoolers, and their (mostly) moms hung out from about 11:30 to 2, when we left. It was great. No one was freaky, though I don't exactly know what I was expecting. The kids were normal, the parents were normal. At least the ones I spoke with were. Mostly white, though a couple of black families and at least one Asian mom, which I was really surprised by.

The Orange Line...

L and I have been fascinated for a long time by a streak of orange paint on the sidewalks of the East Village. She loves to walk along it like a tight rope. Today, after dropping T off at the nursery school, we decided to follow it and see where it took us.

We started at the corner of St. Mark's Place and 1st Avenue....

4th and D

...then followed it as it headed east on 4th Street. We met a friend of ours, Marnie, on Avenue B, but as her daughter Maya had what they used to call Scarlet Fever (the poor Velveteen Rabbit!), we kept walking. At Avenue D, we took a break in front of a community garden...

...30 Ave D...

...The orange line went through a housing project, going around a playground where a bunch of kids were hanging out instead of being in school (they didn't look like homeschoolers). We didn't stop to play, but kept going between the buildings...

...Barely there...

...where we almost lost it a couple of times because of leaves, garbage, new pavement, or just wear and tear. Every once in a while, we'd have to walk in circles till we picked up the trail again...

...past some garbage...

...to the FDR Drive...

The line just kept on going. We crossed the FDR Drive at around 8th Street (I think)...

... Crossing the highway...

... To the track fields ...

...till we ended up at the track fields in the East River Park. The line doubled up there and headed south, but we were so tired by then that we crossed the highway at Houston Street and jumped on the M14D back up to St. Mark's....

...And finally school time

...where we went to Mogador's Cafe, had some steamed milk and and early lunch. Then L worked on some penmanship--A's & B's, and 1's & 2's (she's practising writing as she's come up with her own idiosyncratic ways of putting most letters together which makes them almost incomprehensible. Plus it's kind of hard to write when you're 5.) We also did some math sheets going over number orders (what numbers come before and after 67?), and worked again on coins. We bar-graphed the numbers of cents in a penny, nickel, dime and a quarter, and estimated how many nickles & dimes would make a quarter by measuring the heights of the bars.

By then it was noon, and Mogador was filling up with real paying customers, so we moved to the Ottendorfer Library on 2nd Avenue. There we snuggled up on a bean bag in the children's section and read to each other from a Frog and Toad book (we alternated sentences). Then we did Chapter 1 of The Story of The World, which was about hunter-gatherers in the area that is now the Middle East and how they discovered farming in the Fertile Crescent. It's written for elementary school kids, but still, L and I talked about nomads and farmers, the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers, and what wheat is. Can you imagine referencing the Euphrates River in kindergarten?

And that was it. We had lunch, ran some errands, then I took L to an afterschool program she's going to do 3 days a week so that I can work. I am completely wiped out, but it was a good, good day.

2 Days In...

Two days have been survived in this experiment. I shouldn't say survived, actually. To be honest, it's been great. Being generally cynical about most things, I'll chalk it up to the novelty factor of the whole experience but really, what's not to like about having the flexibility to let the kids sleep in to get over their jet-lag and have a long leisurely breakfast--pancakes with maple syrup as opposed to a cold bowl of cereal with a side order of me screaming at them to hurry up or we'll be late?

The first day, I decided to keep the schooling light, especially since I have no idea what I am doing. We kept T home with us because he was so jet-lagged from the trip to L.A., and I wasn't sure how much we'd be able to do with him around. So, we had breakfast, hung out for a few minutes, made our beds, cleared the breakfast things. Then L got to pick where she was going to "do school", and she chose the living room, on a low fold-out table we got in Korea that lets you sit on the floor. We started with identifying coins (I was surprised to find out that L didn't know her pennies from her quarters over the holidays). I had her make rubbings of all the different coins, and we talked about how many cents each one was worth. We also looked at the pictures on them and I told her about Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson & Teddy Roosevelt. (A confession: I was actually unsure at first whether that was really Roosevelt or Truman. Had to look it up.) Then she labelled the rubbings, wrote the names of the coins and their values. And that was it for Math that day.

For Language Arts, she picked a beginning reading book and read it to me ("Rags Has A Bath" from the Reading Rod series that someone gave her). Then we took a page of handwriting exercises from Donna Young's web site and practised penmanship. Before bed, she read a Bob Book, from volume 2.

In between, we took breaks, had snacks, and played with T (who was busy drawing and sitting in my lap and doing "homework"). We were all done in about an hour. When she spoke with D on the phone that afternoon, L said homeschool was "Fantastic!"

Yesterday, Day #2, was also good. The kids stayed up all night playing--D had to go in and pretend to be the bad guy at around 1 am-- so we decided we needed to to short-circuit the jetlag by being more hardcore about getting them up early. So at 7:30, T was woken up and dragged off to school at the regular time (poor thing fell asleep at the lunch table at noon, I was told). L and I cleared up, made our beds and started school. We went back to coin learning, and to help her remember the relative values we played a game I made up called "Money War", which is basically the same as the card game "War", but with coins. We took the loose change jar, covered it with a towel, and then both stuck our hands in and grabbed a coin. On the count of three, we put the coins on the table and compared. L had to name the coins, tell me their values and which coin was worth more. Whoever had the higher-value coin kept them both. She loved the game & by the end of match could tell me not only their names and values, but also the guys on the heads. She also made out like a bandit. The next time we do school, I think I'm going to have her graph the values, and maybe how many of each coin she has in her piggy bank.

We also did 2 pages of a math workbook I got at Barnes & Noble. Nothing great, just something to keep her in practice until we get the math book we've ordered: Progress in Mathematics. We also just did any number game I could come up with as we went through our day: on the elevator, I'd ask her what floor we would be on if we were 2 floors above the 5th, 3 floors below the 9th, etc. In the laundry room, I'd ask her how many quarters make a dollar, how many I'd need to put in the machine if I'd already put in X number of quarters, etc. She loves that kind of stuff and is always begging to play.

For LA, she read another beginning reader book, we did another page of penmanship, and she wrote some sentences about pictures she printed from the web site Starfall. On a picture of a girl labelled All About Me, she wrote: I rily lov me bcos I am vry prity. (I asked her about being smart and kind, and she rolled her eyes and said, "You said to write one sentence, momma.") On a picture of a bunk bed, she wrote: My bonk is vry prity. I lov my moma, my dady and my bonk.

Oh, and we also did the introduction to The Story Of The World, History for the Classical Child. It introduced the concepts of History and Archeology. We talked about what history was, what a historian is and how they are different from archeologists. It led to a conversation about G-Gma (her great-grandmother who passed away when L was 2), and G-Gma's g-gma. Next chapter is about the Fertile Crescent. I think Lily's going to really enjoy this class.

Of course, none of this was done all in one go. We did laundry in between, had lunch, snuggled. It was waaaaayyyy too cold to go out, so both days we just stayed in and worked and played. No pressure.

The interesting phenomena for me was my own reaction to this. Before I started (and still to some extent), I worried a lot about how I was going to deal with spending so much time with L, and not have time for myself. But during the actual doing of it, I felt none of that internal pressure I usually feel -- that I'm not doing enough, that I should be doing something else, why the hell am I home when there's so much to do outside, and why the hell am I out when there's so much to do at home. While we were doing school, even during the breaks when we were doing laundry or washing dishes or just hanging out, I really felt like I was doing exactly what I should be doing. It was really comfortable. And I think L has never had so much of my attention before. Usually, when we're together, I'm knitting, or on the computer, or trying to knit or get on the computer. Even when I'm physically with her, my mind is usually elsewhere. But for the past 2 days, I was really there with her, focused on her. And she's reacted with so much affection. All day long, she's been hugging me, telling me how much she loves me, how I'm the best mommy in the world. If I wasn't so happy about it, I'd wonder what the aliens did with my kid.

The downsides are that I'm not getting the time to work at all during the day, and I feel that pressure in the back of my head. I really need to figure that out. Also, by 3 p.m. when T came home, I was sort of done, and there he was looking for some Mommy-love. Then L needed to adjust from having me all to herself to sharing and so the time from 3 to when D came home, which was early, thank god, was a little rough. We will also have to work on that. The secret, I suspect, is to figure out a schedule and just get everyone on it, so they know what to expect.

Anyway, today's my day off. A is babysitting the two of them (I gave her some worksheets to do with L), and I'm here, trying to work. Of course, spending all this time blogging about homeschool isn't exactly working, but I've got this off my mind now, so time to focus. Hi ho, hi ho, it's off to work we go.