From the Commonplace

You can read the full text of Mr. Arnold's tribute to his father here

What you are doing today matters, my friends. May the Lord strengthen us and bless us.

Part II - On Your Mark; Get Set...

Welcome back to our planning series. In the first part of this series, I talked about my experiences at the Living Education Retreat. So... there I was, feeling all inspired and ready to change my whole life. Maybe you've been here before? You see or try something and it seems like The Answer to All Your Problems. You adopt the system wholesale, but after a while it fails miserably. Yup, me too. I’ve failed so many times at getting organized that I was feeling a little cynical that I ever could do better. This time, I knew I needed to start well so that I would be encouraged to keep going. That made my first order of business to figure out what I wanted from a schedule.

A schedule isn't a moral good in itself. It is a tool for accomplishing a purpose. Like any other tool, I needed to know what I wanted to build before I could decide what tool would help me do it. When it got down to the essentials, what I wanted from my schedule was (1) to have the decision-making done beforehand. Decision fatigue was sucking me dry. I needed to know exactly what was next, so I could put my energy towards actually doing it; and (2) to still have the flexibility to deal with unexpected situations. It’s important to me that I can drop everything to help a friend, or that I can see that my kids are wiped out and what we really need to do today is go swimming with friends. Perfect order and perfect flexibility. No, we're looking for doable, not perfect. That means I wanted my time to be reasonably ordered for a normal kind of day without accounting for every second, but still flexible enough to handle a not-so-normal day.


Where are you now?

The next step for me was to do a Time Evaluation. Sounds fancy, huh? Actually, I just tried to consciously observe how I normally spent my time. Did I do a good job deciding what needed to be done? How much was used for the task I had planned on doing? Where did I use my time well? What caused me to waste it? How much time did it take for me to transition from one task to another? How about my kids? What did we actually DO all day? I might bristle if my husband asked that last question, but it was one that I needed to ask myself. If you like to write stuff down, you might keep a time journal. (That wasn’t going to happen for me. Ahem.) A few days of paying attention made my problem areas surprisingly clear to me.

1. Transitions - I wasted a lot of time looking at a To Do list (when I had one), and trying to decide what to do next.
2. Distraction - Even when I knew what to do next, I often got distracted by something that needed put away or cleaned, a project that looked more appealing, or whatever thought happened to pop into my head at the moment. Things that needed to be done by a particular time were being dropped because I got distracted by something that could have waited.
3. I have kids. They aren’t so good with transitions either, especially starting chores and school time. If I’m not ready to help them get started, they get distracted by something more interesting and I have to start the rounding up process all over again.
4. The internet. ‘Nuff said, right?

If you are struggling, I encourage you to do your own Time Evaluation. Get as fancy or simple as you need to. Write things down... or don’t. The key is to be honest with yourself. Remember to include things you can’t change, so that you know that you need to figure out a way to work around them. If you have babies and toddlers, you must have a certain amount of flexibility to meet their unpredictable needs. The whole point here is to get an honest picture of your life right now. Being aware and realistic—about the good and the bad—is the first step to changing things.

Once you have an honest evaluation done, it's time to get to the good part... daydreaming about what you do want!

So how about you? Have you ever tracked your time? What did you learn from it?

And Then There Were Three...

I'm tempted to begin with an apology for how long it has been since I posted. Well over a year is a little ridiculous, I know. All I can say to excuse myself I that I haven't had a lot to say. I have been in a phase of my life where I'm soaking knowledge up as... well, not exactly as fast as I can. Perhaps I should say I'm soaking in as much as I can handle. I am working my way through The Living Page again, this time with a group of local CM homeschool mamas. This book has changed my heart about what we're doing, and expanded my ideas about why we're doing it. Maybe I'll write more about that later. For now, I can only recommend that you go get yourself a copy, if you don't already have one. If you are the sort to buy a new book and tuck it on the shelf for "someday," I encourage you to pull it out and crack it open.

When we started back to school this January, Tiger began her Kindergarten year. Well, kind of. According to the letter I send to the state, she doesn't technically start kinder until the fall. However, she's ready and raring to go, so go we will. I realize that Mason herself did not advocate formal education before age 6. That's perfectly fine, because calling what we're doing right now "formal" would be a stretch, if you know what I mean. Mason does recommend reading and early math lessons as the child requests them. That is pretty much what happens at our house, except it's more like whenever Mama can slip them in around everything else. Tiger is so excited to have her OWN math book and to learn to read that she is the one begging and pushing. At our house, Kinder is a warm-up year. Both Tempest and Tiger have enjoyed the one-on-one attention, the big-kid feeling of "doing school," and the excellent stories recommended on the Year 0 page at Ambleside Online. We aren't terribly consistent, but it gets them into the routine of coming to the table (or couch) and paying attention to a lesson.

So… homeschooling three. Can I admit it? I'm feeling very overwhelmed. I don't transition easily, and this case is no exception. At the end of the day, I'm tired and mentally sore in the way that I hear exercise people get sore after a workout. I wouldn't know about that, but I'll take their word for it. This is why Kindergarten is a warm-up year. It isn't just for my kids' benefit, but for my own. It's comforting to know that we'll get to what we get to, and everything will be fine.

We definitely haven't reached equilibrium… yet. I have faith, though, that we will. As I encourage myself, let me encourage you, too. If you feel like you can't *insert your struggle here*, just remember to add "YET."

I don't get up on time… yet.
I don't keep the house as clean as I would like to… yet.
I don't do my meal planning consistently… yet.

Keep pressing in, and we'll get there yet! How is your back-to-school going so far? Are you raring to go, or feeling a little blue from winter clouds? Have you hit your stride, or are you still struggling to find your rhythm?