I’ve felt a little AWOL lately, but with good reason: we bought a house. And we didn’t just buy a house, we bought a house that needed a few (what seemed like a few when I listed them in my mind before actually doing them) upgrades before we moved in. Our possession date was February 12; our move in date was March 24; and between those two dates Brad and I spent every. Single. Day (except Sunday, which I now really get as an important day of rest. Six days of physical labour, and suddenly a day of down time is amazing) renovating. And after the first couple weeks, packing also. And did I mention I have a baby.
I’m exhausted. We moved nine days ago and I just finished flooring the basement today. Took me ten actual hours in a row.
This has been my month.
Needless to say, my interactions with the children have been less than “quality”. I have worked hard to keep our social and educational engagements going (although we did skip library day twice), but in between those things the past 1.5 months have almost entirely consisted of “do whatever you want as long as you’re out of my hair and occupied and not making messes”. Near the end the kids did get a little more real life experience helping me clean out the rental and unpacking their heaps of clothes and suchly. But let’s not sugar coat this: there has been a lot of TV watching and video gaming going on.
This isn’t the first time our lives have looked like this. Every time I’ve been pregnant, life goals kind of go down the toilet for a while. It’s like, imagine your kids are on break from school and you get the flu–we did that, for long stretches at a time.
But here’s a mind blowing thing: my kids still aren’t stupider than your kids. Seriously. Like I’m not being facetious here–my own mind has been blown by this reality. I literally cannot stop my kids from learning stuff, no matter HOW MUCH I suck! I have long felt any degree of “programming” executed in a family is more for the parent’s emotional comfort than anything else, and my long stretches of lameness seems to be evidence of that.
In fact, one of the weeks during this exhausting renovation race the kids got really into Ted Ed videos (which they discovered because I liked Ted Ed on Facebook and enjoy watching the videos myself here and there), and they still are randomly coming out with tidbits of information they learned from some Ted Ed video or other three weeks ago.
Not to make it sound like utter sucking is my new life plan or anything. For my own emotional comfort I will hopefully return shortly to a more active parenting style–maybe take the kids on walks occasionally. This never ending winter definitely has been bad for their physical prowess. But I just thought maybe I should point out that sometimes, unschooling looks like this.
And still the children flourish.
The Unschool Sisters 