On Motivations

I've been thinking a lot about motivations, especially as I struggle with finding a means to motivate my own children that are now being homeschooled. I started to notice the pros and cons of homeschooling. 

Pros:

We can honestly do so much more in the amount of time we have together.  We can go over three subjects with one on one attention, finish piano practice, and have a lot of leisurely reading time.  We also explore a lot of other fun subjects like technology where we're doing a coding subscription kit and learning about 3D printing and printing stuff together (or planning on it). 

Cons:

Within 2 days of homeschooling my kindergartener, I called the school and registered her.  Even though I'm unsure how long in person school will last with the pandemic, I needed her to learn the social aspects of a school education where they have to take turns, not throw massive tantrums everytime she wanted something because 1. I'm her mom and 2. I'm her mom. 

The same hardships exist with just my boys.  Whenever they decide to be disruptive or that they don't want to do the assigned work, they throw a tantrum, enormous astronomical sized ones that I know they would never ever dare to throw at school.  I know there are children that would also throw a tantrum at school, but mine haven't.  In fact, Bubba is the most well behaved kid at school, he actually separates himself from his friends if they are causing trouble because being well behaved at school is that important to him.  I am trying to think of what it is that makes him try so hard - the pride, the knowledge that he's the best?  And so my mind dwells on what motivates me.  Why do I work so hard to organize and clean?  Before I started posting my decluttering journey, why did I keep my home clean.  Pre social media, why was I obsessed with it?  It made me feel good.  I like showing my mom that I could keep my room clean, but I also liked how it made me feel.  Good.  

Does completing their work make my kids feel good?  Perhaps until they've learned a sufficient amount, there's nothing to be proud of?  Or will test taking and receiving good results make them want to try harder?  Will the objective of learning itself ever make them feel good?  As I sit and force my child to practice another song on the piano yet again, is there something for him to be pleased with?  

I finally decided my kids do need motivation.  Some type of positive and negative reinforcement, because without it, they are just ticking tantrum bombs.  If it's not the oldest, it's the second.  I quickly put up "very good" and "not good" in Chinese on my board and started telling them that good behavior earned a show.  I hate using screen time as a hook for them, but with our strict screen rules, it really works.  So for now, why not.  Perhaps faking it til we make it will mean they eventually are so honed in on routine, they don't even question why they study hard and work hard, because it just comes naturally,  or perhaps, it backfires and my kids will not do anything once they get a phone and don't need to do anything to get it.  Who knows.  Time will tell.  

Poetic Justice

Part of my kid's homeschooling curriculum includes reading a lot of poetry.  It's so interesting, I almost forgot how much I loved poems growing up.  In high school, I would constantly write poems.  Poems about love, about disappointment, failure, death, or attempted death.  I was very emo to say the least. 

So homeschooling so far (week three done, starting week four) has been going and has had its ups and downs.  Mostly, I'm nervous about whether they're learning anything, definitely more than public school, but enough to make this endeavour worthwhile?  Verdict isn't out yet.  I've definitely noticed which of my children may actually most definitely benefit from this set-up in the long run.  I'm not sure about the others quite yet.  

I Wonder. 

It wasn't easy. 

It wasn't hard. 

It just kind of became. 

But do they see me?  Do they hear me?  Or am I like the blurred blare of a voice they can't make out?

This feels right.  This feels like my time. But not as much when I'm losing my voice yelling. 

Frustrated. Dejected. Tired. 

Happy. Proud. Accomplished. 

I wonder. 

Day Three: Are My Kids Growing Up?

Wednesday was a joy.  We finally got some of our English textbooks, so I felt good about teaching two of my kids and just using the downloaded PDF versions for one child.  Despite being completely exhausted and utterly drained by 2 PM, the morning was so great.  To have a kid sit on my lap while we go through their work, to have the kids play for 15 minutes on the apps they've downloaded, to have a kid calm down and speak gently to me, it was all SO SO weird!  It's as if they respect me as a teacher mom, and are able to enjoy having their mom spend some one on one time with them.  And it was so exciting to see them learn with me!  Cooper was fine by himself until about 11 AM, and then we distracted him by giving him some bells.  Once he tired of that, we grabbed the xylophone bells.  Sometimes Dagny will ask for some ipad learning time while the boys are doing their apps (NightZookeeper for English and Prodigy for Math), for 15 minutes.  I oblige willingly, but then Cooper just wants to play on the ipad for the rest of the day while the others are learning.  That does become a bit of a problem.  But really not paying too much attention to him has been key.  

I also managed to clean 4 of our 5 toilets (it's the Wednesday chore we always do), and the kids helped with dishes and tidying up.  The boys had baseball practice at 6 PM, and the littles and I joined to go play on the playground for a bit.  I rewarded myself with a quick trip by Swig on the way over, and enjoyed sharing the drink with my kids too.  Good hump day, I really hope this homeschooling positivity continues.  Because so far, I'm loving it.  

Day Two: Regret is Painful

 Today was difficult.  It's only the second day Daisy, I know - I know. But let me explain.  Dagny had a music lesson that was in person with a studio that is deemed safe and is doing all the necessary things and taking precautions to keep us distanced and safe.  Not a problem.  I had to bring the other kids with me.  They had Chinese worksheets to practice character strokes and memorization in the car.  I brought an ipad for the youngest, there are shape learning games he can play.  I expected to sit with them.  But it was a parent class and I had to attend with Dagny.  There were only five of us in class with our kids.  Everyone started to talk about back to school since it had just been the day before for most of the people in our nearby neighborhoods.  This, my friends, is when regret hit.  All of a sudden, I had that knee jerk reaction of WHY THE HECK WOULD YOU KEEP ALL YOUR KIDS AT HOME WHEN YOU'RE ONLY A FEW YEARS FROM BEING AWAY FROM THEM ALL?!?!?!  ARE YOU CRAZY?!?! 

I think I have to explain that one of the huge reasons we are attempting homeschool is because I want my kids to learn Chinese but I'm kind of done with the Chinese immersion program we were attending.  I could send my kids to the regular English school but then they would be in school until 3:30 PM and by the time we settled at home and relaxed, I'd have to teach them Chinese before our evening dinner and activities resumed.  Or, we'd have to wake up super early to learn before school.  And where's the incentive for anyone to do that?  Instead, I started to think about how my kids who have started school all missed being with me, spending time with me, exploring with me, and playing with their friends.  For me as a child, school was my only outlet to see friends and learn.  I looked forward to school every summer and dreaded my long boring summers at home with super workbooks and nothing else.  But my kids have a different life at home.  Their mom is available to do stuff, experiment, projects, field trips, all that jazz.  So I had always wondered if homeschooling was an option that would give me the opportunity to take my kids out to explore and learn in a different way than at school.  So along with being able to learn Chinese together, we would also be able to go and do fun things and learn in non traditional ways.  The first time I even got this idea was when we were doing a rotation as a family of five in Washington D.C.  There was a family there who homeschooled (they also had chickens, I'm not sure why this is important but I think it explains my fascination with wanting to raise chickens too - don't worry, Andy has said no repeatedly and I'm not winning this one) and the mother had come from a homeschooling family herself.  Apparently, her family was amazing.  A bunch of kids and they all went to Ivy League schools and now she was homeschooling her crew.  I found her Instagram because we had some mutual friends, she was actually in our Church Ward at the time we were visiting but I didn't meet her or her sister, but heard about them.  I spent hours scrolling through her Instagram account, wondering if I could ever homeschool my kids.  It seemed amazing.  Exploring with your kids.  Learning through reading and being, rather than an institutionalized approach.  Hmm.  It definitely peaked my interest.  But to be honest, I was exhausted just scrolling through her feed.  Plus I was physically exhausted as is, wandering around the City with three kids and no car.  I created a tab and filed it until recently.  And I guess the more I have been wondering about it, the more I have wanted to try it.  I'm sure the feed was a bit glorified, and as my thoughts of regret have peaked on my second day, I'm positive there's going to be a lot of ups AND downs definitely, but it was part of the reason why I wanted to try it.  

So after music we ended up going to Lakeshore Learning to pick up some stuff.  I was looking for math manipulatives, a word I had seen tossed out in the Facebook Homeschool groups I'm a part of now, but it ended up looking like junk I didn't want in my house.  Instead, we got some stopwatches and Dagny and Cooper both got a fun lil activity book - Dagny's was a mosaic mermaid peel and stick thing and Cooper's was a water powered look and find book.  We also got some dry erase markers and a map, because I also want to do some geography with my kids.  And then we headed to Chic Fil A because I wanted a salad and McDonald's just doesn't satisfy.  Plus the lemonade at Chick Fil A is so good.  We had an appointment at the library so we headed back to grab a book, but I ended up grabbing a bunch of display books the library had in their roped off area.  And then, we finally made it home to eat.  I fell asleep that afternoon during our scripture and meditation hour, and half asleep kept commanding my kids to hurry up and read some scriptures and meditate.  When I finally woke up, we had to grab some food to prepare dinner, so we went off to the store again with masks.  We're getting pretty good at masking up together.  I didn't want to leave my kids alone in the car with the AC on, so instead I piled them into the grocery cart with my phone and a show on, and I ran about to grab items while they sat there in the store.  

But then we had some neighbor friends come over while I prepared dinner and just relaxed.  Dinner came too fast, and then the normal nighttime workload.  I work every evening from 8:30 - 10:30, but it gets me out of bedtime and I'm okay with it.  It is kind of weird to work every night again, but it does make me really value my weekends.  Now with homeschooling, I'm feeling quite busy every day.  But I'm trying to give myself some grace until I figure things out more.  And that's why we ate out, and likely will eat out a bit more until things normalize.  

Day One: Here We Go....!

We began homeschooling on Monday and it was.... well, first of all, we don't even have all our supplies yet.  So many people are turning to homeschooling that most of the textbooks and curriculum we ordered still aren't here yet.  So that presented the first challenge.  Second, we had just returned from an amazing Lake Powell trip with Andy getting some kind of stomach virus, so the entire weekend felt like a slap in the face with vacation withdrawals and a sick husband who couldn't do anything.  Not quite how I had planned the days leading up to our first day of homeschooling, but oh well.  Sometimes you just gotta roll with the punches you're given, right?  

I had gotten some advice from experienced homeschoolers to "unschool" my kids a little bit, but given my own upbringing, I couldn't bring myself to completely "unschool" them.  We halted the zoom Chinese meetings I had been running with their peers twice a week all summer, and we did less rigid math worksheets each day.  But I wanted to really wanted to give my kids a fun first day experience and a learning environment that was conducive to my sanity - so organized and put away when we weren't doing it (since the dining room is essentially our schoolroom).  I made some last minute trips to Walmart and Target on the hunt for some storage and cute room decor.  I ended up moving some boards around the house so we had a "white board" to learn on, and repurposed some of our existing storage to create school supplies easily accessible.  I even made a "Phillips Classroom 2020" list of rules for the kids to go over the first day.  But we hadn't finalized when piano lessons would be.  And I hadn't figured out if teaching the kids the same subject across all three kids would work better than having them do different subjects.  And I certainly hadn't figured out what Cooper was going to be doing while the big kids were in school.  So my mind was a little bit of a hot mess, trying to calculate and plan, and figure out everything.  

We started out the first day by taking photos of everyone with their "first day of school" signs.  Cooper is actually the only one going into school twice a week, but he doesn't start until September, but as always, he wanted to be included, and he couldn't wait for his turn.  This quality would become very useful throughout the day.  As we started out, Dagny started demanding to learn addition.  In her mind, she was ready for first grade math.  I had plans for her to work on writing her numbers correctly, but according to her, she already knew how and was ready to do addition!  Not quite what I had expected.  Meanwhile, Jordan and Bubba were loving the online writing game I had subscribed to, and Cooper was busy going over some Mickey flashcards I got on clearance at Target.  He asked me when everyone was going to school, and when I told him this was school, he gave me a scoff, laughed, and said, "this isn't school Mom!" and it cracked me up.  He definitely has an idea of what school is, he was expecting us to take everyone to school, and he was happily disappointed as he got his siblings to play with all day.  I went over some math with Jordan and Bubba, and Dagny and Cooper ended up playing with some of our learning puzzles nearby.  It was all feeling good.  But then we got to Chinese, and I realized holy smokes, there is a lot I have to teach.  In order to fully get our kids immersed in the Chinese language, not only do they have to understand the characters, they have to know how to use it in a sentence, and then write it, but not just write it, but in the correct stroke order.  Chinese is a very difficult language!  I'm starting to appreciate my own Chinese education a lot more than ever before.  

Andy's cousin is also currently homeschooling so the kids got to have a fun playdate with her kids in the afternoon.  We went for our annual ice cream on the first day of school tradition, and the kids all said they had a great day.  

I Can't Sleep!

I can't sleep lately, my mind has been a whirlwind of new information and the adrenaline of processing and analyzing all the new terminology, scheduling, and homeschooling process as we attempt to do it through a public charter school which supports us, provides accountability and guidance, and most importantly... funding... is absolutely insane and wonderful all at once! 

I spent a few days just reading and reading through the MyTechHigh parent link, absorbing all the information, and then really trying to understand how the entire process works.  I joined facebook groups, read through posts and comments, and then did a bunch of research on my own online, talked to friends I have who homeschooled, and friends who were also planning to make the switch.  It's a new community I've suddenly become a part of and it's exciting, and scary, and fun - all at once!

It made me realize, I probably need to go back to work once my kids are done with school.  Or have a side hustle.  Or invest in a bunch of new hobbies.  Even though I have looked forward to the future two years ahead when I'd be able to leisurely dine with girlfriends over slow relaxing lunches, I hadn't really thought about the rest of my day, and what that might look like.  I've dived straight into maintaining our household routines and finances, but that only keeps me occupied for part of the day.  There's something magnetic and thrilling about this new adventure of homeschooling that has kept me awake at night (literally) and it feels like I'm pumped with caffeine (even though I don't drink any caffeine, not even diet soda). 

I have finally begun to use some of my abandoned skills from my working days in coming up with class descriptions for custom-built courses I am doing with my kids.  I have been trying to figure out a better excel workbook to track all the expenditures as well as the reimbursement and receipt process.  I have been joining zoom calls with Q&A, feeling like I'm in the work place again, and realizing I made a much larger sacrifice than I originally thought when I became a SAHM.  I do not have any regrets regarding my decisions, but I miss the high energy, demanding schedule and budget demands of my prior life.  Of course there's as balance, and I also don't miss the political drama or late nights, or when I messed up at work.  And I do love being able to sit in my pajamas until I feel like it, put make-up on whenever, take a nap here and there, clean my kitchen and watch my kids, etc. 

Perhaps I always was a bit curious about homeschooling, but never brave enough to attempt it.  The Covid-19 situation has really provided me with a new opportunity to try it, even if for a year, and I have no idea what will happen.  I may go insane the first day or week of homeschooling.  I may love AND hate it, which is the likely outcome, but I am super excited, as if I'm starting work at a new company, for the first time, so at least there's that. 

A New Normal and Adventure: Homeschooling

Perhaps I stopped blogging a while back because I became more active on Instagram.  When new ways of journaling pop up, the old ways seem to take a back seat.  My husband also invested time and money into videotaping all our adventures, and so our historian duties quickly transferred to him.  And I seriously have too many Chatbooks that making more seems more of a problem finding where to put them than making a significant historical impact.  But now a new journey has taken over our lives, and I want to capture it, and so I've returned.

We've decided to homeschool our children.  Given the current climate with covid and the restrictions placed on our kids with so many unknowns about how long all of this may last, I reluctantly revisited an idea I've always been interested in, but always a bit fearful to approach.  I am 100% a mask wearer and supporter, but even after donning a mask on for a quick grocery store trip, I am nauseous and my head hurts from the mask.  I had to wear one yesterday on an Uber ride home from the car dealership where service was looking at my broken sliding doors (which magically worked 100% throughout the day while being diagnosed, of course) and the car was a cocktail of Lysol that nauseated me for hours after returning home.  I just can't imagine my children being able to effectively learn Chinese (when you can't even see the teacher's mouth moving) or anything else.  The Chinese immersion program we had been a part of was so amazing, but when distance learning hit in March, my kids were trying hard to just maintain what they had learned, and definitely didn't learn anymore.  And yet I can't fault the teachers, they're all struggling as much as the next person with their kids suddenly home and trying to find curriculum to put online and learn new technology for this new normal.

I had always wanted to homeschool, but truth be told I was afraid of the stigmatism surrounding it.  The old "your kids will be so socially awkward" myths, the dilemma of how to "socialize kids normally" when they're home with you all day (I'm pretty cool, if I do say so myself), and the constant responsibility and workload of having kids with me 24/7 -  I mean I am two years away from having my kids all in school and being able to take adult lunches with adults.

But what ultimately me convinced me was the combination of the temporarily unknown as we navigate the new normal, and the ease of doing it based on all the tools now available as more people lean towards homeschooling.  Homeschooling isn't what it was 10 years ago, much less 20 or 30 years ago.  The industry has grown with attempts to help guide children to grow and learn, and if I ever wanted to homeschool, this is the time to do it when they're all relatively young and I can't screw them or their education up that much.  I'll have three kids in school: a kindergartener, second grader, and fourth grader, and one three year old just around for kicks and giggles.

I've found a charter school that keeps me accountable and provides funding as I approach my first efforts.  I've been pouring over the guidance and scouring the learning options, and I plan to attend a live session tomorrow for Q&A.  I've also been talking to friends who have homeschooled before, picking everyone's brains, and managing my own expectations as I predict I will go crazy a few times throughout the year with my kids home so often.

It's not what I expected.  It's not what I planned.  But it seems like the best option given I am already a SAHM.  It is an investment, a huge responsibility, and something I'm not quite ready for, but am prepared to learn and try my hand at.  I'm not sure what will happen, if my kids will love or hate this upcoming year, but either way, it would have been a weird year anyway.