forcing chaos into rhythm

I have had to rearrange this fall's daily and weekly rhythms so very many times now.  Despair has definitely become involved.

We had a good plan, a plan inspired by the curricular successes of previous years and meant to be a refuge from the busyness of warm, effusive summer.  Then all the fall classes were advertised, some too good to pass up. So we revised the plan to include what we planned to do. Alas, some of those classes fell through when they teachers quit or not enough students enrolled. Now I am writing up a new schedule, late on a Sunday night. All this past week I've been telling the children that the brightly colored schedule on the wall is inaccurate, but this afternoon I saw them studying it anyway, again. I have to get a new one up or they'll be confused and worse, annoyed, all week long. Making my various schedules and agendas available for the children's perusal osaves me so much hassle and grumpiness, especially from the Oldest, who likes to get very absorbed in one thing and do it for weeks without interruption.

We keep four schedules. There's a master calendar online using the free program at 30boxes.com. This takes everything we might want to do for months in advance. It's shared with loves and friends online so we can coordinate our plans. There's a chart in rainbow pastels on the wall, showing what we're supposed to be doing with our days. That's our weekly school rhythm. There's a meal plan on the refrigerator reminding me what I stocked the fridge with for the next week or two. Also on the fridge is our monthly agenda. To make that, I drew five rows of seven boxes on the side of the white refrigerator in Sharpie. I enter the date in dry erase marker, as well as anything we are definitely doing on that date. Since the children aren't allowed access to the internet whenever they want, only for a couple of hours a day, having an agenda offline is essential. Also, they look at that spot on the fridge several times a day when they go for milk or snacks, so no one can claim they didn't know we were going out to that street fair on Saturday. It also empowers them to schedule playdates on their own. 

It's the school plan I'm making up anew today, the colorful weekly rhythm on the living room wall. It's frustrated by the cancellation of both Youngest's and Oldest's science classes. I have no plan for them for science. Much as I'd love to buy a couple of lab kits, I can't afford that on the spur of the moment. The classes were to be paid for weekly. Nature study is free, but after five years of it, I feel like I can't possibly handle another one. This month is covered because we happen to be doing geologic time and origins (of the universe and the species) in history. Come October I must have some other plan. That's only a week away! What kinds of hands-on science can we do on a tiny budget without a plan? I don't know, but I've got to get this schedule up for these little boys to look at. They are trying very hard to rely on the schedule I keep saying is faulty. I decided I'm just going to have to put a block in that says "science" and think about what it might be later. "Halfway faking it, halfway making it," goes one of my favorite songs. Turns out to be excellent homeschooling advice.

With that mental block beat, I turned to Pinterest for inspiration. I entered "Waldorf schedule" into the search tab, mostly because I wanted to paint the chart this time and I couldn't remember which day of the week was which color according to Rudolf Steiner. As well as that, I found a gem about organizing your day so that head-orientated activities are in the morning, heart-centered activities occur around lunch, and handwork is done in the afternoon. "If you center your days with heart warming activities, you can help them relax and refresh to start the second half of the day with a sense of calm and security," the author reminded me. For a few moments I was inspired. Then it occurred to me that I'm not sure I can warm my twelve-year-old's heart. He is so closed off lately. I could have a friendly drawing session with my nine-year-old, snuggle up with and read to my six-year-old, but the twelve-year-old does not want to spend time with me. Thinking that I had no way to warm my beloved firstborn's heart sent me into another funk and I set the project aside for hours to focus on what is in front of me. "Chop wood, carry water" - another excellent bit of advice for homeschool moms. I chopped asparagus instead of wood and carried a pot of water to boil it in over to the stove.

But at dinner, as we sat around and played Ha Ha Ha (in which the object is to say "ha" with a straight face) and laughed, I realized I did actually know how to connect with my oldest. Laughter always draws him out of his pubescent cave. At the end of dinner we sit around a table and play a game and laugh, and he's refreshed again. With this in mind, and with children now in bed, I looked at the lessons I wanted to do and tried to figure out which could be done as a game. I thought of Spanish. We play a version of Round Robin with Spanish flashcards in which the person who uses the word in his contribution to the story gets to keep the card. But for my six-year-old, that is definitely head work. It's hard for him, and he has to be reminded to think of it as an opportunity to learn Spanish, not a game that is supposed to be light and fun.  Each kid approaches the subjects differently! Music is definitely a heartwarmer for the six-year-old as we sing folk songs to each other, but the Oldest approaches it academically, from the head, as he struggles to master more complicated songs. The middler experiences it as handwork, because he's still in that stage of getting his hands to do what his instrument demands.

Perhaps my only hope is to leave the older children to do headwork independently all morning while I go through the whole head-heart-hands cycle with the youngest. Then I can move on to heartwork with the big boys while the youngest plays by himself, and we can do hands-on stuff in the afternoons while the youngest explores the backyard. A day within a day sounds like it will set me off-kilter, but of course I can learn to deal with it.

So, now I am working up a routine for the baby and one for the big kids, and painting and writing a new thing for the boys to stare at on the living room wall. I hope when they wake up in the morning it doesn't make them groan. They never will know how planning their days haunts and enlivens my soul.

when the sun came out

Some kind of magic happened when I organized the bookcases and lost the wifi.

For the first time probably since five years ago when Youngest was a toddler, I feel like good work is being done in my home. Our schedule has had last minute changes, so we aren't getting the lists of bookwork done. But the boys have been hard at work on projects of their own devising.

Middle is actively working through problems of inking and coloration, realism vs grossness in his sketching. His drawings are suddenly eerily powerful, and he spends hours bent over the same one, going over the finest details with techniques he is inventing and refining.

Oldest has divided the bricks, technics (moving pieces) and specialty stuff out of the Lego and is very designing mechanical problems, then solving them. With the obsession that I have learned is quintessential him-ness, he goes to the Lego the moment he awakes, has to be forced to stop and eat and tricked into going to bed.

Even Youngest seems to have new memory abilities churning up in him. I have begun at the Big Bang with him and we journey across leaps of time on the big armchair each day. Each morning when we set forth again he works his little mind hard, retelling where we have been. His brain, previously, was made like a sieve.

I'm not teaching them, exactly, but I am so actively working to create and maintain the space that is ideal for their learning. I know that all the past five years I have been mindful of that, all this time I have been making them go through workbook pages and buying them educational tools. But now I see and feel myself creating a space that is really warming and sound with every other breath. Before I was teaching the boys at the kitchen table despite life working against it. Now I am demanding that life work for education, and in the good space that makes for us, the learning is happening without any teaching. It feels good and right again in a way I haven't felt in so very long.

It almost feels like I could blog it again, like I can observe this, I can look at it, dwell on it long enough to find things to say that are helpful, happy things.

the four of us

I have a hard time when a blogger doesn't share any photos of herself or her subjects. I need to be able to visualize the people I'm hearing about, even if all I have is relative height and hair color. Anticipating that my readers may be like me, but knowing I couldn't post photos and yet maintain a satisfying amount of privacy, I set out to find an avatar maker that wouldn't be too goofy. I found one that was goofy, but while I was playing around with it, I was able to perfectly duplicate my boys. I think I did okay with myself, too.

On the top line, myself, with black hair, and my oldest boy, who is eleven years old and blonde.

Then the middle boy, whose hair is undergoing a natural transformation from blonde to brunette (something both his father and grandfather experienced when they were about his age, nine years old). Finally, the baby, who will always be the baby, even though now he is six, and who is sloppy and brown all over. 

This is us. Really. It's remarkable how well that goofy anime avatar-maker captured us. Well, my eyes are smaller and my mouth is bigger. Yet still, I expect that when I show the boys in the morning they will all say, "WHOA!"