A Day in the Life (TMI)

Yesterday was very... Educational. It made for a perfect real life account of what homeschool looks like in real time, so I would be remiss if I didn't at least attempt to catch the highlights in writing.
We took a three day fall break last week because this momma needed to put her drive in check. I had the number thirty on the wall (for days of school, that birthday passed some years ago!) and I wanted to keep going. But that still small voice told me it was time to rest after six successful weeks of keeping up with it all day after day.
The rest was good for all of us, but we have been very slow in settling back into the school days. By slow I mean that Monday and Tuesday we schooled from eight to eleven without a break, barely got done with our work, still had catch up at naptime, and several things were left unfinished.
So yesterday I woke with an agenda. "Today," I said, "we are going to finish school quickly and run errands!" See, with a potty training two year old, very new to the process, we have stayed put at our house for over a week, and I think we were all a bit stir crazy - enough to make a trip to hobby lobby sound like a Disney experience! I was determined to make that trip. Plus, I really did need to purchase supplies for my CC class.
We finish breakfast and I set out Claire's binder for her. I head to the white board to start erasing yesterday's date and information, just in time to see my half naked two year old streak to the bathroom hollering "poopoo potty!" I declare Claire to be "big" enough to look at yesterday's date and figure out what needs to be changed to make it today, then I run after Buddy.
Now, he has to sit pretty far back on the Elmo potty to keep the teetee from shooting across the front and all over the floor, but this means bad things for number two sometimes. When I arrive, he is just standing up and asking, "please wipe?" There is poop all over the potty. Not just the seat. It has this pretend tank that "flushes" on the back of it and the whole thing has poop on it, which has now run down into the cracks and is dripping on the floor.
I wipe the boy first, with a hearty, "good job big boy!" because I really am so excited to be done with diapers in this house. And I carefully pick up the potty and attempt to hold it over the real toilet so I can get the poop off. Of course I can't do this without getting poop all over my pants, but oh well. The poop covered potty goes into the tub, and my pants are rinsed and set on the laundry pile. Mother's instinct now tells me to check his room to make sure he didn't have a little sneak preview of this incident outside of the bathroom, and yep, some poop by the door and now poop on my foot.
I clean the floor first, but not until I yell at the three year old at least three times to "stay in her room!!" She is now wallowing on the floor sobbing about how much I don't understand her and I am having flash forwards to her adolescence, but no matter, we can worry about her in future years of counseling, right?
Now it is time to check on Claire. In the, I don't know, maybe half an hour of this episode, she has written "Wednesday", "September", and traced a leaf for fall, and is now staring at the board waiting on instructions or something. I erase the board and fill in all the date information telling her something like, "seriously, you know what numbers come after twenty three and thirty two, and don't I have enough to do without...". She hears something like "mom is frustrated again," as she copies my work in this first rate education she is getting.
Then it is time to jet back to the bathroom to clean the potty because now Buddy is needing to go and has nowhere to do it. I get it all wiped down just in time to get it back under him for round two of the poop, only this time he also pees all over the front of the seat all over the floor, and I'm actually grateful I haven't yet had time to put pants on because I'm kneeling in the stuff.
He and I and the potty go into the shower. I get us all clean and me and Buddy dressed (now I can finally wear some pants again) and head back to the table. Claire has finished copying her work, but written her 3's backwards and put the date and not the number of days of school in the boxes, so we fix all that. I pull out her phonics workbook and turn to the right lesson in time to hear Evie shout "Mommy! Poopoo! Wipe please!" Seriously?!?
I FINALLY finish with all the potty time, and the younger two come to join me and Claire at the table where I pull out the Bible story. Jephthah's Vow. I start to read and then I begin to remember this story - you know the one where the guy vows that if God gives him victory in battle he will sacrifice whatever he meets when he comes home, then has to kill his daughter. Yep. So I slam the Bible shut a few sentences in and decide we will just save that story for some other day. Not sure what it is doing in the Golden Children's Bible that didn't even mention Abraham's almost sacrifice of Isaac...
I set Claire on task with her Phonics, correcting pencil grip and letter formation as needed, reminding her to date her work (so that Mommy doesn't have to go back and do extra work for record keeping), and I busy myself with keeping Evie and Buddy busy with cutting, pasting, drawing, or whatever may keep them quiet and occupied while Claire works. Claire moves onto Math and I pass her some counting bears so she can do her addition without me, then I go chase Buddy back and forth to the potty a little more while Evie wallows and entertains herself by telling stories to her dolls in her room.
And somehow, by some miracle, we wrap up all this craziness by 9:30, get dressed and pulled together and head out for some relatively fun errands, where the children behave like angels and Buddy goes potty at the store with no problem and comes home with a dry pullup! We saved our reading to do while Buddy napped, but after that morning, I just shooed the girls outside to play and spent naptime quietly cutting out some stuff for my CC group while they played. So now we have extra reading to do today, and we seriously need to review CC today since we didn't get to that yesterday either, but I still consider that a successful day in the life at Corius Christian Academy. Learning in the trenches.
Addendum: When Geoff went to run Buddy's bath last night, Buddy decided to poop there, too, so I wasn't the only one who had to deal with that seriously messy day. No, Evie, we do NOT need another boy in our family. I think we are done here, people.

On a Superior Education

I have been having a tremendously hard time coming up with something to say here. This is not because nothing is occurring around here, but because I don't just want to add more words to the world. If I open my mouth I want to speak truth, beauty, life, meaning, not drivel.

So I have been silent.
Somewhere in proverbs, a verse says, for you it is wisdom to be silent. Lately I have been making this choice more and more often.
But I am thinking a lot and learning so much, especially when it comes to how to raise and school my family so that we honor God. And I've had a fairly insightful breakthrough and change that is worth sharing or chronicling so that I don't forget it over the years ahead.
I'm going to confess something now. When I first felt drawn to homeschool, I think a large part of my motivation was that I wanted my children to be smarter than everyone else's. I didn't have the money for private education, but no matter, I was so smart I would think, who better to give them an Ivy League education than me, right? I know, don't laugh...
Seriously, though, besides the pride at the heart of this assumption, what I found when I started to dig deeper is that I had an underlying belief that education was about knowing stuff, and not even possibly important stuff, but just more stuff than everyone else. Because of my strong belief that education, knowing things, was one if the most important things in life, I would give my children the absolute best I could. This meant a classical education of course. Latin is essential to life, not because it provides a great foundation for understanding so much of the English language, but because I like the way it feels when people hear my child talking about declensions. After all, she is only in kindergarten!
Who doesn't love to impress people? What mother doesn't want to hear others praise her kids, seeing as how they are a direct reflection of her hard work, amazing intelligence, and gracious parental wisdom. Okay, now you can laugh! I just did.
I recently found that the heart of my homeschooling had become, me. Oh, God was in there, certainly. I mean, what God believing mom doesn't worry about what her children might be exposed to in the public school system? What christian homeschool would be complete without a child who can recite whole books of the bible, not to mention obey all Ten Commandments and outshine every other child in her amazing character? After all, the best compliment a mother can receive is to hear one of those other moms saying "why can't you act more like those Peel children?" Right?
We could all get a good laugh if I continue to point out my serious character flaws, but let me tell you what I've realized recently. If I give my children all of the best education this world has to offer, but they choose not to follow God, I haven't done my job as a parent. The bible is not some subject to be mastered like Latin, but it should be the guide to which they will turn for the rest of their lives. Prayers from memory are only a stepping stone toward an intimacy with God that they will need to develop in order to walk in truth, love, beauty and wisdom in this fallen world. And the scary part of recognizing these truths is that some of this, I can't "teach" them.
When I started looking for more "challenging" curriculum and I thought I could search for classical, christian, or classical christian, those search terms played again and again in my head. And God spoke to me and said, "which search term would you sacrifice for the sake of the other?" Would I be willing to teach a secular curriculum because deep down I believed it was higher quality or more important than the christian version? And that's when I repented.
I do not want to give my children the whole world only to find that they haven't found God and therefore are left with nothing of value in their lives. I don't want them to see God as an a la carte course to tag on to their superior education. And I am not saying that giving them a schooling that is not explicitly christian would keep them from knowing Him. Truly, they see their mom seeking with my heart to follow and serve God and that is the best way I know that they will find God.
But in obedience to God, I am changing my beliefs about what constitutes a superior education. I am so grateful to Him for showing me now, before I am in over my head, where my values were and where they should be. I am free now to teach my children what is important to God, not what makes mom (or them) look good, and I believe that teaching them to value things the way that God does is the best education I could possibly give them.