Sometimes Parenting is Hard

I started out this morning thinking that homeschooling is wonderful. Small breezed through his reading today and allowed me to read three books to him without getting all squirmy. He was cute and cuddly, and now has an eagerness to become a fluent reader that he didn't have before. We've been waiting for that spark, holding off on instruction until he was ready to be instructed. Sparks are good things. Struggles are not.

Then I changed my thinking and realized that sometimes homeschooling is hard. Large and Medium were not getting along. Not getting along in a loud, angry, insulting kind of way. They could not agree on who would read the history chapter first. Why this led to an all out struggle is unclear, but it wasn't pretty.

We were going to Park Day, meeting a bunch of homeschooling families for a nice afternoon of play and parents chatting. Last week's Park Day ended with Large whining that we had not yet done history. In response to that, this brilliant parent decided we should do history first. We are on a survey course of history, the kids want to finish it to move on to more in depth study of periods that particularly interest them. I suppose we could just skip the step of finishing out the 19th and 20th centuries together, but they don't want to.

So, I decided that sometimes homeschooling is just hard. I waited for the storm to pass, they worked it out, ending in a few giggles. We read the history, discussed it and moved on with the day. Later, a friend helped me to see that this really was just a parenting issue, not a homeschooling issue. It could have been anything that set them off, they are siblings after all. And close siblings, just a bit over a year apart. They do nearly everything together and probably get sick of each other several times a day.

Sometimes families are hard. But as homeschoolers I think we tend to hold ourselves to higher standards. We aren't allowed to have bad days. We could, after all, just send the kids to school and get some time to ourselves in the middle of the day. I sometimes fantasize about the wonderful projects I could get done during the day if they weren't with me, if I wasn't driving all over the 5 county metro area to get them where they needed to be. But I would be just as unproductive if they were in school as I am with them out. And I'd miss the fights and the reconciliations. Those are some pretty important life skills.