My biggest challenge is time. Just having enough TIME to fit it all in. There are six days a week, I try to hit at least some homeschooling five or six of those days. I have to work two of them, two of them I babysit all day, which means I’ve got three solid days with nothing OTHER than homeschooling to do. But there are weekends and playdates and family stuff going on too.
I remind myself that the beauty of homeschooling is that it’s flexible. That I can cram in a half hour of history here, two or three chapters of math there, and still get it all done. When I total it all up, and look at what we do on a weekly basis, or a monthly basis, it’s always more than I think we did – but then I agonize over it, what did we miss? Am I doing enough? Is he ahead of where he should be? Right on track? Or the worst – IS HE BEHIND?
There’s all this weight – am I messing this whole thing up? I look at what the girls do in public school and feel better about it – I know that he’s learning better one on one than they are. I know that he accomplishes more, in many ways, than they do. But I worry that I’m missing some huge piece – like writing. I’m not doing enough with writing. I mean, he’s reading and exploring different forms of writing – like poetry and essays and novels and non-fiction. He’s reading (on audio books) high school level books. He’s not doing a lot of book reports, or writing essays on his own yet. We’re working on learning to type, which will help. It’s so painfully difficult for him to write still – how much of that is because of the vision issues, and how much of it is that he’s just rusty – I don’t make him write because it’s so hard for him, which means that he’s not writing a lot… vicious circle, I know.
The reality is that I’m making this all up as I go along. Much like everything else I do… and just hoping against hope that it’ll all work out in the end.
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