Dancing With Pixie Addicted Snails

Most of the time home edu­ca­tion and par­ent­ing runs some­what smoothly, it is a dance not with­out bumps or mis­steps, but we all move together on the path of learn­ing, cre­at­ing and grow­ing. And I have even had the occa­sional day were I sit back and think man this is just like I pic­tured the per­fect day. I secretly hope that is the day some­one will pop by and see how won­der­ful every­one is. No mis­steps and every­one is flaw­less. Those days I know the kids are geniuses.

And then.…

There are the other days.

The days when home­school­ing or par­ent­ing the kids is noth­ing like a dance, unless it is Elaine’s hot mess dance from Sein­feld. In gen­eral on these days it is all harder than herd­ing sugar laden kit­tens. No let me take that back. Kit­tens actu­ally move maybe it is harder than herd­ing a sea of snails with ADHD hopped up on pixie sticks who need their next pixie stick fix. Unable to focus, all over the place, leav­ing a trail of slimy ooze behind them as they vac­il­late from being slower than slow to being dis­tracted by a shiny object and dart­ing off only to become dis­tracted again.

All the while I look a hot mess. Run­ning around in a pair of yoga pants that I think were once black but now look an odd hue of grey with bleach stains down the one side, in a shirt that has spit up and hair that is piled high on top my head. Oh did I men­tion the fact that it is after­noon? Not the morn­ing. And I have not show­ered and there are 3 pen­cils stuck in my hair vis­i­ble to every­one but me. While I search fran­ti­cally for a pen­cil, because I can­not find one & have for­got­ten that my hair is a vir­tual play­ground for pen­cils, I yell “WHERE DID MY PENCIL GO?!?”

Yeah, on these days I tell myself that heroes and saints are made. The days I per­se­vere, every­one sur­vives in tact and math facts were tack­led even when it would have been eas­ier to think “Who cares if they ever learn math, what is math any­way? Who needs math?” But I don’t given in. Instead a cold sweat break out across my brow pic­tur­ing them liv­ing in the base­ment at 26 unable to hold a job because it turns out math IS impor­tant!! Math makes the world go round & you need math!! To, oh, I don’t know, bal­ance a check book, pay bills, and prac­tice qua­dratic equa­tions for fun. Ok, maybe not the last part but the first two things for sure.

Then I breathe. Deep breaths. In and out. Gath­er­ing my thoughts and real­ize, I sim­ply need to go with the flow and relax. We will get through and learn all we need to even if the cat­tle get more rest­less and need more pit stops on the way. And hey Elaine’s dance may have been a hot mess but dang was it fun. And some­times you have to dance like you don’t care who is watching.

Tagged as: children, family, home education, homeschooling, kids, life, life learning, me, Momma, motherhood, parenting