First Day of School

I spent a lot of time over the summer finalizing plans for our first year of homeschooling.  We picked a curriculum and I had delved into it well before time for school to begin.  I prepared the room we are using for school with the things we needed and realized at the last minute that we had desks and a book shelf, but no chairs.  So in the midst of packing for our family vacation, I hunted chairs for us on Craigslist and found some just in the nick of time.  I thought I had a pretty good plan and we'd be ready after returning from vacation to jump right in.

I did have a plan, but there wasn't much about our first day that went as planned!  Beginning a school routine was a big change for all of us.  We were used to having structure to our days, but the school schedule completely changed our structure.  The kids were used to eating and getting dressed at a leisurely pace for the most part, but I set a start time for school and that was an adjustment.  On top of that, we started on a Tuesday and Tuesdays are different because Brenna has dance and Amelia has piano on Tuesday mornings.  All-in-all we were pretty successful at getting ready and out the door.  With dance and piano lessons complete, we got ready to go to our school room just in time for Grant's morning nap.  At 10 months old, he still preferred to be rocked to sleep so that delayed the start of our day by another 20 -30 minutes.  With the baby asleep, we jumped right in to school work just in time for the girls to say, "Mom, when's lunch?"  

You get the picture.  Every time I thought we were going to have a nice chunk of time to get to work, something happened.  I anticipated that schooling with 3 children with varying needs would be a challenge, but I could not have anticipated how big of a challenge it would be.  The first week was trying for a lot of reasons. (Grant having an ear infection being one big one.)  At one point during the week I even told Dustin that this may be our first and only year of home school!  Thankfully, after much prayer and trial and error, I can say that we have a new routine.  The children have adjusted well and I can honestly say, so have I.  I don't think they even remember that they used to have a weekday schedule that didn't include school time.

I have learned so much in the weeks since we began school and it is a continuous process of learning and refining.  I think that this continuous process is one of the beauties of home school.  I constantly learn and adjust as needed to meet the needs of our family.  I've learned how to work our weekly schedule, taught Grant to put himself to sleep for nap time, and found out that school time can be a real joy for all of us!

Amelia on her first day of school.

 Brenna ready for her first dance class.