It’s the bane of my existence. “It” being housework. Not just the bathroom-cleaning, dusting, sink-scrubbing kind. I don’t like that, either, but it’s the “loading the dishwasher three times a day, folding four loads of clothes a day, picking up ten pairs of shoes a day” kind that really bites. And what is worst of all…trying to get kids to consistently help you do it. I came home Saturday to an empty house. The kids had left with dad – two to go to a basketball game, and three to their grandparents’ house for the afternoon. I was looking forward to a few hours to rest, get some things done, and then maybe pick up the girls for some clearance-sale shopping. And then I walked into their room. Oh. My. Goodness. This was the room that had been “cleaned” before they left. I won’t traumatize you with a detailed description of what I found – it would be too harrowing a scene to recount. Suffice it to say that when I piled everything into the center of the room from on the beds, under the beds, on the walls, and over the curtain rods (yes, you heard right) the resulting teetering mountain was waist-high. And that was just the girls’ room.

Now, you need to know that in my former life I was a clean freak. I drove my roommates and my husband crazy. And when I had just one child, I was still able to feed this OCD tendency (at least until he could walk). I even kept all the books on his bookshelf arranged by height. Every day, he would pull himself up beside his bookshelf and, as fast as he could, throw all the books out. And every day, before his nap and before bedtime, I would arrange them, all one hundred of them, back in height order. Now, I realize that this is a teeny bit compulsive. Fast forward to when the girls were small, and there were five. As I sat amid a roomful of toys, swings, bouncy seats, burp cloths, and sippy cups and talked with my son’s (childless) speech therapist, I laughed and mentioned that I used to be a clean freak. She had the gall to look me in the eye and say, “You have got to be kidding me.” Okay, she really didn’t have to say it like that.

My husband and kids would still say that I am a clean freak. I am on them all the time about cleaning, and I am quite sure that they would consider a messy house to be one of the seven deadly sins according to me. In fact, my girls have even been known to include cleaning in their nightly prayers. Okay, that’s sad. But where is the line? How do you maintain a pleasant home that family and guests alike can enjoy, while not harping on your kids all the time and making life miserable for everyone? Do you use a chore list? Do you use punishments? Rewards? And what priority do you place on a clean home? I would really like to hear a sane, reasonable view of things. And in the meantime, I need to go arrange some books :)

I have always laughed at the idea that what we do at our house is called “homeschooling.” Sure, this year we have actually managed to set aside a corner of our playroom with a table designated for “homeschooling”, freeing us from having to empty the kitchen table before and after every meal. And we did really great with this table for about the first month. But I don’t like that the room has too little natural lighting, so we moved back downstairs to do most of our work. Even with the better lighting. though, I get a little stir crazy at home and want to get out, so we take this show on the road a lot (especially when it gets warm outside). You have no idea how quickly kids get their Easy Grammar done if they are sitting in the parking lot at McDonald’s waiting to go in and eat lunch. Or at the library where they each get to play computer games at their own computer as soon as they get done with their handwriting. Or at the park at a picnic table, where the playground and the woods beckon them to hurry up and finish their math. It’s a little unconventional, to be sure, but I find it a great occasional motivator to park them (literally) in front of their reward and let the longing for it spur them on. I have tried many (many, many) forms of punishments and grounding for work left undone, but nothing works as well as that visible reward. Even the promise of getting to do something later that day doesn’t quite do the trick. I don’t know whether it’s because my kids are visual, or because they maybe just don’t believe that I will follow through with something that is not imminent, or maybe it’s because they have me as a captive audience to answer their questions…I really don’t know. All I know is, the kids who went with me to the bank, the car wash, Walmart, and McDonald’s today - they got their work done. The one who stayed home with Dad? Not so much.
So, how about your home? Do you homeschool, or is it sometimes “car-schooling”? :) Can you grade algebra at a red light? Is your shoulder out of socket from reaching around into the seat behind you to grab that book and read for yourself what in the heck that science question is asking? Have I run into you at McDonald’s?

I am so mad at myself. Every time I do this, I swear I will never let it happen again, and then before I turn around, I have done it …again. No, nothing illegal or immoral, just…well, irresponsible, I guess. I have fallen behind on grading my kids’ schoolwork. Not a couple of days behind…weeks. Like, two weeks with my girls in math and Easy Grammar and (dare I confess it?)…nine weeks with my son in math. There, I said it. My girls had done their work, but when I finally got around to checking it, they had gotten on the wrong track and so had not only missed several things that I should have caught and corrected early on, but this wrong way of doing things was now ingrained in their brains and will take a while to back out. Not to mention the fact that they were then faced with correcting two weeks’ worth of homework, a circumstance which does not make for happy times around our house. All of that is bad enough, and like I said, occurs far too often, but the worst thing was with my son. He is a seventh grader, and a pretty responsible and honest kid. So, in my busy-ness of the past few months, I had just relied on those character traits, and when I would ask him every day if he was done with his schoolwork and he said yes, I took it at face value. I knew that his Science, History, and Language Arts were up-to-date - he does those at co-op and I teach one of those classes, so I knew we were good with those. But I knew there would come a day when I would have to pay the piper and grade weeks’ worth of math homework, and I kept putting it off. So finally this week, the day arrived. I asked for his math homework to grade, and he immediately started hedging “Ummm, I’m a little behind…let me catch up and I’ll bring it to you.” “That’s okay,” I said, “let me grade what you have and you can finish the rest.” “But Mom…”…”Bring. Me. The. Book.” I opened the book to week 18, where he was supposed to be, and started flipping backwards to find where he had stopped. Week 9. ARE YOU SERIOUS????? “Mom, I started getting behind and I needed help, but the further I got behind the madder I knew you would be when you found out so…I just didn’t tell you.” And then I felt ashamed. Angry, yes, because he lied to me. But ashamed because I knew that I had fallen down on the job in a major way. So after a heart-to-heart about honesty and integrity, and an apology from me for my neglect, we sat down with his agenda and came up with a plan to catch him up in two months and keep him current. It will require a lot of extra work on both our parts, but it was a wake-up call to me to not lull myself into neglecting staying on top of my kids’ education, and a clearing of the air between my son and me that I hadn’t even known we needed. So chime in…please tell me that I’m not the only deadbeat mom out there :)How do you keep up with your kids’ schoolwork? How do you transfer that responsibility to them as they get older? How do you strike a balance?

….a long winter’s nap. Ahhhhhh, just the sound of those words is warm and comforting, especially in my part of the country which is currently in a deep freeze with temperatures dropping into the single digits. Somehow, cold lends itself to sleep, hibernating, low energy, staying at home, even getting up late. Who wants to face the agony of getting out from under warm covers and having your feet hit the cold floor (even if it’s carpeted, it’s cold right now). It’s ironic that the coldest weather of the year also hits right about the time of my New Year’s resolution to exercise more. If I am not going to go for a walk when it’s 70 degrees outside, I am for sure not going for a walk when it is 10. The one thing that goes better around our house when it is cold is our homeschooling. Whether it is the complete lack of temptation to go outside, or the fact that we stay warmer all bundled up in the same room with the fireplace, we get on a steady pattern of working that usually hangs around until the first of March. I count on getting some good solid work in during January and February to shore us up for April and May, when neither Mom nor kids want to be inside hitting the books. We even have fewer errands to run (or should I say, we run fewer errands). The errand list is probably the same, but it seems like I can do without groceries a whole lot longer if it means an icy trip to the store to get them :) In addition, only one of our kids has winter sports practice, so we don’t have to shiver our way to (and through) the number of practices we do in the spring. All in all, although it feels like we have only 6 hours of daylight each day, and we will probably have an electricity bill to rival the national debt, I suppose winter is not so bad....
What about you? What does winter do to your routine (and energy)? Anyone want to join me in a long winter’s nap? :)