Last time I had a blog I put so much pressure on my self to make sure that each post was well written and had some amazing point, or that someone learned something from it. This time around I want to be completely real. While I do feel I am a wealth of knowledge, excuse the horn tooting, I am also super flawed and don't spend my days as Little Miss Sunshine working around the house.
These last few weeks have had more bad days than good. Days where I was crying by 9 am, spent the rest of the day yelling, called my husband and vented which caused him to come home and yell. I really started to second guess this decision to homeschool, is it really worth the stress? We had a few months of either no school or light school as we had to make an emergency trip back home for a funeral and then when we came back it was two weeks before Christmas. Needless to say life was crazy around here for a good two months. But come January 1st, I wanted to jump back into the New Year. Have a fresh start and really get caught up and on track. Isn't that what the New Year is for? Well someone forgot to tell my children because I think I left them back in the bad habits and laziness of 2015. I had come up with a whole new schedule and approach to school, one that I was excited about. All they knew was that now they had to do school and they didn't want to. So the first two school days of 2016 were spent yelling at everyone! I yelled at the kids, and the dog and the husband and the chickens and prolly my friends They accomplished two out of five subjects each day and we knew from experience that if we didn't nip this in the butt it was going to be bad for us. So we did what every parent dreads, we took away everything. I am talking I pulled all of the toys out of their room and gave them books and coloring books and that was it. The oldest had two options: be in your room or do school. Gosh while I write this I realize how harsh this sounds but you know what? after two days of this he turned around, caught himself back up and had a much better attitude. The following week he had one bad day and after imposing the room consequence he was fine the rest of the week. Our youngest is a whole different ball of wax. He has similar consequences but more age appropriate. He has to stay in his room after dinner until bed if he doesn't finish on time. He is very social and spending even five minutes alone is torment for him. Separating him works well.
You know we had similar problems all first semester and we had them all our first year of homeschooling as well, so I knew if I let this continue it would be April and everyone would be ready to pull our hair out. Reading this it may seem like we jumped to the extreme really quick but I promise you we tried everything. We tried allowing them to take the reigns and lead their own education, we tried having a time limit and what we got done that day we got done. You name it we tried. It was time for the big guns. I know that some say school should be organic, that it comes from living life and being engaged but all my kids want to do is pretend they are killing each other. No learning is occurring there. We also believe that they need to learn time management and how to do things they don't necessarily want to. Of course all of this is balanced by lots of play time and love.
So when they don't listen I yell and I get angry and I punish them. Then I walk away, calm down and come back with love and a pep talk and you know what it makes us a pretty normal family.
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