Resistance

Right now I’m reading The War of Art by Stephen Pressfield. It talks about how in the effort to undertake anything creative or vitally important to your development your biggest enemy is Resistance--with a giant, honking, capital R. This resistance takes many forms, but in all of them it keeps you from doing what’s truly important to you. Whether you’re a writer or an artist or just want to lose weight or learn a language, Resistance doesn’t want you to succeed.

At the same time, I’ve been experiencing great Resistance at home in some of my home schooling efforts. I have not been doing much writing, but my son has, and it has been Hell--with a capital H. There’s been crying, complaining, endless talks about attitude and effort and how it’s important to follow directions. He seems to understand, yet inevitably he ignores the instructions and does entirely the wrong thing. Then he’s upset when I point that out and tell him he needs to try again. What on earth was going on? I’m used to setting expectations weekly work goals for my kids, but I’m not the kind of person who forces them to do work that makes them cry, or at least I didn’t think so.

Then it hit me that perhaps this is a similar phenomenon to my own Resistance, the one that prods me to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer (season 6 now!) instead of finishing my novel, or sitting down with a nice warm cup of tea and a book instead of getting my boots on and hiking off a few pounds. The only difference is that I’m letting myself get away with it, and my son isn’t so lucky.

Finally, after many tearsome talks on the couch, my son was able to explain his own resistance: writing is hard, and he doesn’t like having to do the work (Ouch! That sounds familiar). The rest of his schoolwork has come easy to him. Aha.

I wanted to home school my son partially so that he’d be constantly challenged and learn how to work. He’s really smart, and really lazy. I went to college with too many people like this. They’d cruised through their school careers thinking everything could be easy for them only to find themselves unprepared for the hard work of college and the realization that personal relationships couldn’t be aced like a test.

Of course, this means that I’m the sucker who has to deal with the tears, complaints, and prepubescent drama. I’ve got to be the wall he slams against before he sits back down and does his work. This may not be happy, but it’s healthy. Meanwhile, my empty desk chair beckons. On the plus side, my son seems to have learned something, because he’s finally worked hard and written a few very good stories.

I, on the other hand, have a Buffy DVD to watch.

Emotional Intelligence

I know that the nine-year-old can be difficult and moody, but when mine wrote “2008—another year to live through” in his journal, it got me to thinking: those teenage years are going to be bad, bad, bad. Sure, there’s no way to guarantee your kid isn’t going to be miserable or get into trouble, but there’s got to be some way to help inoculate them against the troubles of life.

And so I found The Optimistic Child: A Proven Program to Safeguard Children Against Depression and Build Lifelong Resilience, by Martine E. P. Seligman, Ph.D. It gives tools for teaching kids how to develop self-awareness and think critically about their emotions. The gist of the book is that while you can’t control what happens to you, you can recognize and control your thoughts and understand how your feelings arise from these thoughts.

For example, if your friends are whispering to each other at your birthday party, you could respond in several ways. First, you might think “They’re making fun of me and I hate them, I should never have had a party!” Feeling bad yet? Or, you could think “Oh, I’ll bet they’re telling each other about what they got me for presents!” Why feel miserable if the feeling is unfounded? I know which one my son would pick.

As wonderful as all the ideas sounded, the rub was that in order to teach them to your kids, you have to practice them yourself first (and catch yourself if you’re thinking “Oh darn, I’m awful at this, I’ll never be able to do it!”). So after attempting to get enough sleep, meditate in the morning, and have several cups of coffee before my kids woke up, I shut the Mommy Monster in the closet and rolled up my sleeves.

Mid-morning, my son was trying to copy over a story he’d written, and kept forgetting to skip lines. “I’m lousy at writing!” he said, almost in tears. “I can’t do anything right.”

“Aha!” I said (probably a little overenthusiastically, and I’ll blame the coffee). “Give yourself a break—is that really true?” I pointed out that he’d written a really good story, and that his handwriting was even fairly decent. It seemed to me, I said, that the only real problem he was having was remembering to skip lines. “What do you think we could do to help you remember?” I asked. We made little dashes down the page to remind him to skip lines, and he got back to work without any further trauma.

It remains to be seen whether either of us is more emotionally intelligent yet, but I’d argue that averting just that one meltdown was worth the price of the book. If I’m lucky, my son will be able to provide me the same service the next time I lose my keys.

Zombies Ain't So Bad

It’s my personal opinion that games are a great way to teach, and if a game has zombies in it, well hey—that’s a bonus in my book. There’s nothing like a little undead to liven things up.

Zombie Fluxx is a riff on the original Fluxx, a card game put out by Looney Labs (www.LooneyLabs.com). The game starts out with only one rule—draw one, play one. There are four different kinds of cards: Keepers, Goals, Actions, and New Rules. Keepers are cards you place in front of you to help you win, such as “bread” and “the toaster.” Goal cards specify what keepers or conditions you need to have to win; for example, if you have the previously mentioned keepers in front of you and you can put down the “Toast (must have bread and toaster)” goal card, you win. Action cards let you do things like steal a keeper, or switch hands.

The real fun of the game comes with the New Rule cards. Each New rule either adds on to or supersedes the previous ones—so at any one time there are likely to be multiple rules (i.e. “Draw Three,” “Play Two,” “Hand Limit One,” “Dual Goals”) that you need to keep track of. The rules, and goals, change all the time. It’s great for encouraging reasoning, logical thought, and rule-processing skills.
Needless to say, this type of game appeals largely to boys and left-brained people. I’ve tried to play this game with a bunch of women on a girls’ cabin weekend, and nearly got chucked out on my head in the snow.

Zombie Fluxx is all this and more. In addition to Keepers, you have “Creepers,” or zombies—individuals, pairs, trios, and the occasional undead quartet. Part of the challenge is figuring out what to do with your zombies (isn’t that always the case?); do you keep them, try to kill them, or better yet, force some to flee to your neighbors? With some of the goals, you can only win if you have no zombies (for example: “Getaway Driver…You win if you have the Car and at least one Friend Keeper on the table in front of you…and no Zombies!”) For some, you must have Zombies (i.e. “Brain Baseball…You win if you have Brains and the Baseball Bat and at least one Zombie on the table” or my personal favorite, “Zombie Baseball Team…You win if you have at least 9 Zombies in front of you along with the Baseball Bat.”)

My nine-year old son and two of his friends (including one girl who, granted, is a rather left-brained fan of Norm from “This Old House”) had a great time with this game. At one point, they successfully juggled ten rules, full hands and multiple Zombies. “I’ve got Zombies and I’ve got Wood!” one of them cried excitedly.
In addition to Fluxx and Zombie Fluxx, one can get Eco Flux, Spanish Fluxx, and Jewish and Christian Booster packs. I’ve even seen a teacher-made version of “Music Fluxx.” If you’re up for a challenge, you can mix your games together. Can you just imagine—“Rosh Hashanah…You win if you have Friends and Challah…and no Zombies!”

My favorite part of Zombie Fluxx, however, is the New Rule “Zombies Ain’t So Bad.” With this card on the table, you can win with Zombies even if the current Goal says you can’t win if you have any Zombies. Sometimes, things just aren’t as bad as they seem—now isn’t that a great message to send our kids?

Cathedral

We’re a few weeks into school now, doing our chores, our writing, our math, marking the days as usual with our regular footprints. The kids are supposed to get their chores done and practice their karate so we can go for a walk in the woods first before we start the morning lessons. Each child does a half an hour of math and a half an hour of writing or recall a day, then we read together.

So far, this seems to be working. But how could I tell? Right about now the wonderful schedule and balance and curriculum plan I’ve devised starts looking to me like a giant house of cards, and we know what happens to those. The universe does not tend to order, and I sure as hell don’t.

Like with most things involving children, home schooling is a messy combination of faith and anal-retentiveness. On the one hand I know that, with just a little guidance, enough freedom, and a lot of love, they’ll grow into themselves without my stack of books and old brain full of ideas. On the other hand I feel like I have to create the world for them and look like I know what I’m doing. God had it easy—no one was watching.

The schedules I make, I am very much aware, may be more for my own sanity than for the kids. Their purpose is to try and coordinate us all into a family rhythm, to make for us a shelter where we can all rest and grow, where we can drink from the same well and feel nourished together, part of the same tribe. But everyone has their own interests, activities, sports, friends—and in our culture, “more” is better; I’m sure wanting to stay home and do less makes me seem like a freak.

We’re busy enough that when we’re home, I feel like I need that rhythm in order to breathe, or have room for my own thoughts. In music, the rests, the silence, the spaces between the notes, along with the arrangement of the proper notes makes something pleasant to the ear. Three kids humming different tunes (literally and figuratively) without a break instantly singes my nerves. I like being creative, I like the wildness of jazz, and improvising, and I want our house to be full of music both real and imagined, but I need that energy to have a center to hold it.

I’ve found if I make myself a schedule and routines, I can still be creative but get way more done with much less stress. I know this is why many people like writing sonnets; the structure is a place where their imagination can play. And once I get my time in the shelter, I can tolerate distractions like a high-volume chicken dance with much more equanimity.

But I’m not one who naturally tends to routines and schedules. How could I think I could even be good at this? I missed an entire class in college (except for the tests) because it met too early in the morning. I’m interested in everything, and am prone to get horribly behind in the laundry because I’m reading about the French and Indian War. Left to myself, I’m nomadic; I’ll wander from tent to tent following my interests, staying for a bit and then moving on. To push the metaphor a little bit, this would appear to be a perfectly fine way to live, until you realize you’ve forgotten your camel some ways back. Along with all your clothes.

Better is the house with clean underwear and a camel full of gas, even if it’s a little stodgy. But this structure I’m building for us all—this is the challenge—how do I make it strong enough to support us, yet light enough to let in the wind and starlight?. How do I explain this to the kids? How do they see walls made of air and time? Or do we all live in a magic house, invisible except for the music?

Yesterday I read Raymond Carver’s famous short story “Cathedral”—in the bathroom, of course. In it, a man tries to make conversation with the blind man come to visit his wife. The television is on, talking about cathedrals, and the blind man wants to know what one looks like. Go get a paper bag and a pencil he says; hold my hand and draw it with me, so I can feel it. The husband doesn’t know what he’s doing, but he tries.

He surprises himself, or more precisely, the cathedral does.

So here we are. You can’t see dirty laundry with your eyes closed, and right now the chicken dance sure sounds like fine music. Our little shelter is built of sweat and spit, and it is open to the stars. We are all holding each others’ hands, trying to draw something larger than we think we can even imagine.

There’s A Chipmunk in the Toilet and My Hair is Turning Gray

If I weren’t already in a constant state of mild panic, the chilly mornings we’ve been having would remind me that yes, it’s the end of summer. Time to get school supplies ready, start putting fall clothes in the drawers, wonder who the children’s teachers will be—oh no, wait a minute—that’s me!

I’m ready, mostly. When you home school, you have to be organized. But, I’ve found that the more organized I get the more paranoid I get, often for good reason. The universe tends toward entropy. Something always happens to throw a wrench, or perhaps a rodent, in the plans.

The other day there was a chipmunk in my toilet.

Usually when you hear the words "and it's trying to swim" coming out of your child (in reference to anything living or previously living in some kind of perilous situation involving liquid), really what it means is "it's dead as a freaking doornail." But no! In this case, the chipmunk was very wet and exhausted, but definitely among our living chipmunky friends. We had company at the time, and everyone joined in a little chipmunk-rescuing conga line toward the back door. He ran, we watched, and that was the highlight of our day.

But that’s not the extent of it. Each morning, I’ve been getting up at 6 to write and do paperwork, in the alleged quiet before my children wake and come down for snuggles. This is apparently when all the things in the walls begin to wake up and actively chew through our joists. I try to write, but their chewing is rhythmic and incessant, like little furry metronomes.

Last night as I went to brush my teeth, there was a flying squirrel on our foosball table. I think he was playing red. He stared at me with little almond-shaped eyes then darted into the wall as I looked for a bag to trap him. I later learned that the southern flying squirrel, Glaucomys volans, apparently prefers to nest communally, so who knows how many of his little buddies are hiding in the walls.

Like the rodents (any comparison to vermin is strictly subconscious), my children have minds of their own too. My plans look real nice in my folders, my calendar, and my PDA. Looking at them, you’d think that I sat down and focused without any distraction and figured everything out. Yet, on our first day of school, I realized I couldn’t find my son’s math textbook. On our second day of school, everyone was in the kitchen doing the chicken dance instead of brushing their teeth.
I am aware that the schedules I make are for my own sanity as much as for the kids’ benefit.

Life is hard, home schooling is hard, and I so want something to be easy. Yet, I’ve realized that part of staying home is having a house full of life and learning to love it even when the distractions are driving me crazy. It’s not about me; I only live here. It’s a dance, and I only get to lead sometimes.

At the moment, two of my kids are making weapons out of KNex (“these are bombs, arrows, bombs, bombs, and more bombs”) and flinging them at each other while the other is inexplicably picking out “The British Grenadiers” on the high notes of the piano. Another chipmunk has jumped out onto me from the home schooling shelves, and instead of writing I’m checking out the web page for the National Flying Squirrel Association. The dog is staring at me, with a huge erection.

Why try to concentrate? I can do the white-girl two step, and I can do the chicken dance. It’s amazing what I can do when I’m not being attacked by rodents. For now, that’s enough.

Until We Reach The Sea

I’ve found people always ask casually what home schooling is like, as if I could give them a short, polite answer other than “It’s great!” I could say that home schooling is an adventure, hard work, pain or joy or all of the above, but the words rarely come at the right time and there’s never a quick way to sum up the journey we’ve been on for years. Oddly, after the “what about the socialization” question, the most common inquiry I get is “how long are you planning to do it?” Right now, as summer beckons, my children have a similar question: “how long are we going to do school?”

Questions of duration are tough ones to answer – we’re having so much fun learning, and it’s as much a part of life as getting dressed or eating, neither of which we plan to stop doing any time soon. My children and I have been slowly making our way through history, and right now we’re in the early 1800’s soaking up the journey of Lewis and Clark. All four of us are watching Ken Burns’ PBS documentary, traveling with the brave group as they row against the current of the wild Missouri river. Those men lived out President Jefferson’s dream, searching for the mythical Northwest Passage through the uncharted mystery of a young nation. They nearly died in the mountains but finally made it, years later, to the great vista of salt water that had danced at the edge of their dreams. I am awed; I hope my children are at least mildly impressed and not just quiet because they’ll eagerly watch anything I let them, even the Paint Drying Channel.

Today we visited the Harvard Museum of Natural History, a wonderful repository of gems, taxidermied animals, insects, glass botanicals. The collections are arranged in large rooms behind glass, and in the afternoons, hardly anyone is there. We went specifically to see the stuffed woodpecker that Lewis and Clark sent back to Thomas Jefferson. We were so excited! What a wonder it would be — to view the very same bird that the great adventurers handled on their amazing trip up the Missouri—we could see it here in Cambridge.

But, maybe not. Turns out, the bird is on loan to Washington DC. We probably even unknowingly walked by it when we visited the Smithsonian a few weeks ago on vacation (the title “Flipped the Bird” occurred to me for this article). One rule I’ve discovered about home school field trips is that nothing ever seems to go right. We get stuck, we’re at Symphony Hall in Boston instead of in Springfield, someone throws up in the car. But we always keep going, and have our own good time. As I tell my son: when life hands you lemons, don’t get any of the juice into your cuts.

So the bird wasn’t there—but there were eggs, given by George Washington as well as Lewis and Clark, and hundreds and hundreds of other birds, including a colorful burst of tanagers mounted on the wall like modern art. We used the bathrooms, we sketched, we used the bathrooms. My four-year old drew a passable picture of a heron complete with what he called a “scotch-colored” beak (don’t look at me, I prefer wine). Everyone shared colored pencils without bickering. I even got to draw a white hawk with the sketch kit I haven’t used in years.

A usual, waiting repeatedly in front of the bathrooms puts me in a meditative mood. I do not need to wipe anyone—therefore I think. What do I want for my children? I want them to be strong enough to row upriver. I want them to know that there are always new things to be learned, that dreams are to be shared. And for me? I hope I’m always welcome along for the ride.

It’s a beautiful afternoon, and we’re happy. It doesn’t matter where our journey takes us, as long as we have each other and our eyes on the horizon. How long will we do this? Until we reach the sea.

Stuck in the Mud

Usually I write this column on Tuesday afternoon, our “day home” where I start the day with Pilates and everything seems wonderful because we have time to work and time to play and time even left over to cook a real dinner. On our relaxed home days I never regret home schooling and rarely ever fantasize about sipping margaritas during a day-long spa appointment while my kids are at the local elementary school.

The actual reality is that many days don’t go nearly as blissfully, and we face the same challenges that everyone else does in dealing with child logistics, struggles and rivalries. We home schoolers do it all day though, every day, and get to claim responsibility for all the successes and failures. The successes are sweet, but progress is not always regular and obvious. Life is messy, especially in a house full of people, and I have to constantly remind myself that the kids are still learning even when things don’t go exactly as I’d planned.

In fact, I’ve found it’s the days that go most cataclysmically wrong that are the ones that end up being our best learning experiences. At first, I want to pull my hair out—why can’t he just finish his math without whining? Why can’t they just get along? Why can’t we get even five minutes of piano practice done?

But then we learn: sometimes you just have a day where everything is hard; sometimes people you love make mistakes or say things they don’t really mean; maybe you shouldn’t leave your practicing until you’re tired. Sometimes (or maybe I’m just trying to convince myself) I’m sure that these “life lessons” are more important than any curriculum we might cover. At the least, these lessons are usually pretty memorable. For example, today:

We snacked on apples with honey and then went on a late morning hike figuring we’d be back by lunch. Plenty of time to do some work, even though we’d gotten a lot done already this week. The hike was wonderful, but then as we attempted to pull the car out of the parking lot, we got stuck in the mud; badly stuck, as stuck as a legless pig set on rooting to China.

My oldest child started to panic, even though I was the one covered in mud from trying to give the front tires something to grip. I called for a tow truck, and explained to him that it really wasn’t a big deal. We had our water bottles, a big bag of walnuts and cranberries, and a whole lot of good trees to pee behind. “I don’t like the trail mix,” he said, whimpering. “What’s going to happen to us?” Fortunately, we haven’t gotten to the Donner Party in our studies.

While my two younger kids chowed down, we waited for the truck and listened to a history CD about Benjamin Franklin. We talked about the Revolutionary War and Betsy Ross, and whether Franklin really did fly that kite. By the time the truck finally dragged us out, it was 2:30, and we were planning on going to karate at 4:15.

Lesson One: Sometimes things just don’t go according to plan.

I told my kids if we could stop at home for a quick change and a tick check, I’d take them out to eat to celebrate our deliverance from the muck. As we drove home, I reminded my son about the IMAX movie about Ernest Shackleton that we’d all just seen. He’d set off to cross Antarctica, but practically everything that could have gone wrong did.

“You think that was scary,” I said, “imagine what Shackleton must have felt when he saw the melting ice pulling apart his ship.”

“Well, at least they had provisions that the crew liked,” he said.

I had to pull over and look back at him. “Wiley,” I said. “THEY HAD TO EAT THEIR DOGS!”

Lesson Two: It can always be worse.

This time, I think he got it.

Baseline

Recently I’ve been reading a lot of nature books—field guides, essays, books on tracking skills and animal behavior—and the birds in particular have piqued my interest. Maybe it’s just that I’m sick of the crows lunching on the suet in the feeder or just wondering where the little robins are. But in my brief stint as an armchair naturalist (I’ll go out when little Jack Frost has been minced by the rototiller) I’ve discovered that there’s some striking similarities between the feathered folk and my own home-grown, two-legged fauna.

If you walk towards the woods on a balmy, spring day, you’ll hear the din of birds chattering in the green enclosure of the trees. Maybe they’re comparing worms, complaining about their mates, or talking to their eggs. Maybe they’re just singing for the sheer joy of being alive. But as you walk into the forest, as they hear you, suddenly their sounds change—some birds hush in fear, some squawk a warning, some stake their territory. If you sit down and wait quietly, the birds forget about you and resume what they were doing. This activity, this sound of normalcy, is called baseline. Even if you can’t recognize any individual bird’s song, you can sense that the birds are happily returning to their ordinary business.

At my house, Monday, Wednesday and Fridays are our busy days, when we’re out to various classes and cooperatives. Tuesdays and Thursdays we stay home, and here’s why: we can get our work done and then get to the even more important work of winding down to baseline. It takes a good few hours of “free” time for us to relax and go about our lives as if…as if we were just living. We have a snack because we’re hungry. We read books together because the books are there and everyone’s eager to snuggle on the couch. The kids get past bickering and play so happily with each other that I can sit down and write an essay (so far so good). What does this sound like? Beautiful background noise – no screaming, unexplained water or appliance activity, nagging, stomping, complaining, nothing.

What strikes me is how infrequently we get to hear this noise in our own homes. Most of the time, in our culture, we’re rushing from place to place, yelling at our kids to hurry up or blaspheming anything that will listen over lost socks and missing homework. We’re tired, we’re hungry, we’re stressed, and we’ve always got some place else to go. If we sat and listened (which we don’t, because the dog needs to go out and someone needs to be wiped), then what we’d hear is the sound of alarm, of unnaturally elevated activity that most animals can only keep up for a short time. It’s almost like there’s a big, honking predator at the door.

We need our big chunks of time at home, and I’m firmly convinced that this is one of the best things I can give to my children. It’s taken me a few years to realize just how much “baseline” time we need in order to not feel stressed out all the time. I also know how easy it is to feel that rushed, utilitarian crankiness is “normal” and how hard it’s been for me to protect this refuge of quiet in our lives. So tonight, I’ll sit here and enjoy the sound of the heater and the bustle of the gnome city being built in the playroom (complete with recycling center). We’ll have a quiet dinner together, read more stories and watch the laundry not fold itself. Tomorrow, we’ll go out.

Sex and the Single Santa

One of the many reasons that people home school is so that they have some control over what their children are exposed to. Theoretically, when they’re close to the hearth during their young years, children can sheltered from the clearinghouse culture of the schoolyard, and thus hang on to their innocence and childhood for longer. But truth is always stranger than fiction.

Around this time of year at my house we’ve had a lot of “Don’t spoil Santa for your friends” conversations. Since my husband’s a hindu, and I’m an atheist, there’s no good reason for them to believe in Santa—but many, if not most, of their friends still do. I don’t want to be the one to ruin it for them.

My oldest and I have also had “the conversation” about sex (in the middle of a quiet and mostly empty Chinese restaurant when he asked “how does the sperm get to the egg” and “FedEx” didn’t seem like the right reply.) So I told him, and started to explain that it was like Santa—not all of his friends know yet, and their parents may want to keep it that way. Then it struck me how utterly wrong it felt to be talking about sex and Santa in the same sentence.

At the time, my five-year-old daughter Mira still thought that the hen married the rooster to make eggs, and that was just fine with me. Six months later, and she’s explaining to me that “if we get chickens, then we’ll eat the eggs that haven’t been spermed, because the others are fertilized and will turn into chicks.” I figure it’s only a matter of time before my three year-old comes out with his own version. So here is another truth about home schooling: all of your younger children will be able to explain anything you tell the oldest in a thoroughly precise and usually loud and ill-timed way.

Suddenly, there’s no such thing as complete innocence anymore. If you’re studying history or science with your older children, or watching nature videos, it’s especially hard to keep “tough” subjects hidden from the younger kids. Do you skip over the part in the video about slavery where it talks about the children that the Master had by his slaves? (cue conversation about how you don’t have to be married to make babies). How do you explain what those praying mantises are doing, and why she’s biting his head off (please, no one ask if he likes it!) What do you say when someone asks why the conquistadors killed the Native American men but left the women alive? (hey, isn’t that a cardinal on the bird feeder?)

All I know is that now I’m off the hook about Santa until next year, and if we do manage to get chickens this spring, everyone’s getting “unspermed” eggs for Christmas.

The Gift of Each Other

Recently my husband questioned whether our kids, who home school, miss out because they don’t get to see their friends every day. We see friends three times a week usually at the various cooperatives we do, but those other two days we (I) desperately want to stay at home. It seems like the only way we can get any of our basic school work, like math, language, and library book reading done without it being a chore is if we can spend the whole day at home. In any case, in the late afternoon when many kids, I suppose, are leaving school and after-school activities and maybe going to have dinner at their friends’ houses, we’re just getting ready to make dinner and ease into a quiet evening.

I’m very fortunate that when we get together with other kids those three days, all the kids are genuinely their friends. The mothers and the fathers are friends, too, and all eager to share conversation (and pastries, if available.) Sometimes it’s hard to get things done for all the socializing going on. But I still worried—are my kids missing out?

Then it occurred to me. They do see their friends every day—each other. Even though they’re each about 2 ½ years apart, and drive each other crazy sometimes, they’re close friends and will happily spend hours playing with each other. My eight-year-old will still hug his sister in public, and my six-year old daughter and her three-year old brother are virtually inseparable (though he still wants to marry me). But yet (and you see this coming), I still worry. Is this normal? Isn’t it supposed to be Hell on Earth to have to stay home and play with your siblings?

Getting together for scheduled play dates is wonderful, but I’ve found that it’s the small joys in the random, unscheduled, unplanned minutes of downtime that really feed us, and you can’t make those happen. You just have to hold hands and wait. Today, the kids rushed outside after doing their schoolwork, eager to be out in the sun. I’m taking a moment to rub my eyes and have a cup of tea. “Hey Mom!” I hear from outside. “We’ve found a midget in a bucket of water!” Though I was pretty sure we didn’t have midgets, I ran outside anyway. It’s November, it’s unseasonably warm, and my kids are all leaning over a bucket and looking in awe at what my son claims he knew are called midges, not midgets. They’re probably some kind of gross larvae, but they’re beautiful, and suddenly I’m not so tired any more.

The other day, I tried to pry my oldest out of the playroom, where they were using the sides of the guinea pig play-pen to grill baby-wipes as pretend fish, in order to do some of his work. I ended up letting him play, with the promise that he’d do his math later. As I stood in the kitchen in a completely, wildly, improbable moment of peace, I realized that more than math, more than social studies, more than any academics or information I could give them, this was the true gift of home schooling: the gift of each other.

Published in the Groton Landmark, December 2006