school – Mama Needs Coffee

Kids at school, kids at home

March 28, 2019

I have had the distinct pleasure – spoken without too much irony – of having my big kids home for spring break this week. When I glanced at the school calendar late last week and realized that I’d misappropriated spring break to the first week of April, horror dawned in slow rolling waves over my psyche as I flipped through my Google calendar and beheld the 302334 doctor, dentist, professional, and personal appointments I’d unintentionally scheduled.

Now a few days into a rigorous schedule of dragging all five children on most of these errands, I’ve had time to appreciate how much they’ve matured in the past year or so. Or perhaps how much I’ve matured? It mostly boils down to, I think, having a couple kids who can buckle themselves in and out of the car. Game changer.

Still, I don’t mind that school starts up again on Monday. Not one little bit. And I have perhaps been busying myself clicking through listings of free and low cost summer activities, registering for swimming lessons, and generally spilling some ink onto the 12 weeks of summer stretching out ahead of us in the not too distant future. This week has been a brisk wake up call in a few categories:

How much they eat. It is truly shocking. I don’t fear college fees (because I think higher education is poised for a meltdown/restructuring that all of my kids will benefit from, and also hope to have a priest, a plumber, an electrician, a stylist, etc etc in the family) but I DO fear the line-item totalling I do each month as I scan through our checking account and note how much we spent at Trader Joe’s. IT IS SHOCKING. VV shocking. I’ll start out the week with $200 worth of groceries in the fridge feeling confident that meals are planned and lunches are ready to be packed with aplomb, but come Thursday the fridge looks like we’re all practicing intermittent fasting and we have plowed through 4 loaves of gluten free bread, and that cardboard IS NOT CHEAP. (GF bread, Kerrygold butter and Lavazza espresso beans are our big splurge items in this house.)

Horrified, I begin the cycle of checking fridge, freezer, pantry, repeat, wondering how we went through 5 containers of deli ham (Luke) 4 loaves of bread (also Luke) and 3 pints of cherry tomatoes (ONCE AGAIN LUKE). The pantry is roughly bare, save for 3 boxes of bean-based breakfast cereals which my snobbish offspring will not eat, even though breakfast puffs made of brown rice and lentils are both gluten free AND penitential.

How much energy they have, (and how many hours there are in a day without naps.)

Having little kids home with you 24/7 is exhausting. Full stop. I’ll never be as tired as I was when my oldest three were little. However, there is something precious about the sacred stretch of 1-3 pm when you have all little kids (or big kids in school) and the world is your freaking oyster. Got laundry to do? Not anymore, you don’t. A book chapter or six to read? Treat yo self. Want to each lunch in silent, introverted bliss? Nobody will stop you.

I miss those nap times, I truly do. Next year Luke will be in school with the big kids on Mondays and Tuesdays, leaving Zelie and I home by ourselves twice a week, and I’m already salivating over those 4-5 uninterrupted hours of bliss.

In the meantime, I’m making meals, sweeping floors, driving people to appointments and applying bandaids and stern lectures (okay, screaming) all around, giving helpful reminders about not putting your fingers in certain places and also public urination.

I look forward to 9 pm every night when all are asleep, feigning or otherwise, so that I can, um, also go to sleep. I was chronically exhausted when the kids were little, but also dying for some alone time so I tended to burn the midnight oil. Now I’m dog tired from physical and emotional labor and old enough (smart enough?) to know that most nights another hour of sleep will refresh me far more than an hour with my Kindle.

Screentime is best used as a carrot and not a stick. My kids are less likely to respond to my vague threats of “no more episodes” if they’ve already binged half a season of Rescue Bots in a morning. Since giving up shows for Lent, we’ve seen a 400% increase in good attitudes, destructive but endearing creativity, and time spent outside. No comment on sibling relations having either improved or deteriorated.

When screentime is a non-option, my kids tend to be more compliant and creative. When I shock them by offering an episode of something on Formed or throw a Hail Mary and put on an entire Disney movie while trying to do something on a professional level, they respond with eager joy instead of jaded eye rolls.

I also find it serves as a powerful motivator to finishing chores, behaving like a human being, etc, and therefore I’m wise to reserve it for end of day purposes.

They all have really strong feelings about each other, good and bad. Our neighbors probably think we are lunatics based on the screaming + pictures of Jesus all over the walls.

It’s a confusing playlist, I’ll admit. One moment everyone is bouncing idyllically on the trampoline, the next minute the hose is on and there is mayhem and not infrequently, blood.

Having everyone home and playing outside (read: not at school or staring at a screen) is a level of volume that I was not prepared for. Was Luke mute last summer? Was I still in a postpartum stupor? I do not know. But I cringe constantly throughout the day as someone screams in a truly blood curdling scream that someone did something to someone, wondering if today is the day the fire department is going to come.

Our neighborhood is mostly retired folks whose hearing is, I pray, sub optimal. The few kids on our block either live at my house during daylight hours or sit inside like vampires, shying away in fright when they are greeted by a fellow human. In other words, all the noise is coming from us, and it is a lot of noise. A lot.

As much as I enjoy this time together, in other words, I will not mind one bit when that school bell rings again on Monday morning. Until then I’ll be chugging all the LaCroix (another budget busting indulgence to get me through spring break) and thanking God for not giving me the grace to home school.

benedict option, Evangelization, Family Life, motherhood, Parenting, school

Getting schooled at home (whether or not you’re homeschooling)

August 8, 2017

Like other neurotic and vaguely millennial (by the skin of my teeth, I tell you. 1982.) mothers of modern times, I stress somewhat obsessively over the choices we’ve made slash continue to make for our children. Gluten? Screen time? Appropriate catechetical formation? Vaccines?

The list of things to research on the internet and form opinions about (well informed or not) is basically endless, #thanksgoogle. And so I know that I’m not the only Catholic mother who has engaged in a little internal hand wringing about how I should maybe be thinking about homeschooling my children, sorely ill-equipped for such a venture though I may be.

A painfully necessary aside: I love homeschooling. I think it’s amazing and brilliant and that the majority of the kids who come out of it are overwhelmingly impressive, not to mention some of my favorite human beings on earth (most of my mother’s helpers have been wonderful homeschooled gals). And yet, I hope to God that our wonderful Catholic school never a. gets shut down by the government or b. becomes astronomically unaffordable…because I am in no way, shape, or form equipped to engage in it at this present moment in my motherhood. Also, I myself am a product of Colorado public schools, and right now, I can’t imagine sending my kids there in their present form. Your public school might be awesome. Many of our public schools here in Denver are … less than awesome. But yours might be! And it might be the best option for your family. This is not an essay written at you to shame your academic choices, so please click elsewhere if that’s what you were expecting to find.

So if you are publicly schooling your children, or homeschooling them, or letting them wander around your homestead keeping bees and marking up their nature journals and conducting astronomy experiments at night, or serving Mass at 8 am at the start of your local parish school day?

Then you are probably doing an awesome job.

As long as you’re engaged.

For the past couple years I’ve watched some of my homeschooling friends sit down to outline their yearly curriculum at the end of summer with something like a vague pang of envy, because while I have zero desire to engage in the behavior of homeschooling, I sure wouldn’t mind some of the outcome: brilliant kids with a love for learning and a companionable relationship to their mother/teacher. (A caricature, I know. But still.)

This year, however, it has occurred to me that I actually can have the best of both worlds. Our school encourages parental involvement and is earnestly forthcoming about curriculum and classroom goings-on, but I don’t just mean tracking what they’re learning and quizzing them on vocab words in the car, I mean engaging meaningfully over the ideas and content they’ll be soaking up and making the most of the time we have together, helping to connect the dots in their little brains between what happens in the classroom and what happens around the dinner table.

Public-schooled though my siblings and I were, the most valuable curricula on our schedules was transmitted not within the four walls of the school building, but around the family dinner table, when our parents would engage all of us in robust (sometimes alarmingly so, ask any of our childhood playmates) political and religious discourse, covering everything from current events to world history to politics to moral theology. It didn’t matter than the youngest in our sibling set was separated by 17 years from the eldest: we all got schooled in the fine art of loud family dinner table debate.

And thus it was there, in the domestic school of rhetoric and reason, that the most enduring lessons were driven home to my siblings and I: that logic is essential to comprehending reality, that reason and faith must be wedded to one another to make any sense out of life, and that if you didn’t have an opinion about something before one of our roundtable spaghetti-sessions, well, you might afterwards. Or else you’d have some good book recommendations assigned to you.

My parents engaged us in the art of daily living, and though we have our flaws and our domestic dysfunctions same as the next family, there is an enduring sense of unity and fraternity that knits the nine of us together, which I have no doubt is rooted in those hundreds of hours spent debating, discussing, and dissecting the universe.

So just because my little people will be out the door for 8 hours a day starting later this month does not absolve me from being up in their business and intimately engaged in the formation of their minds. Far from it! In fact, precisely because they’ll be out of my care for 40 hours a week, no matter the impeccable caliber of our teaching staff, it behooves me to be inversely more engaged during their time that we do have together.

For us, that might mean limited sports and social activities on school days. I figure if that becomes ingrained in our family culture from the earliest days, it will be that much easier to resist the surging tide of social pressure to sign up for All The Things.

I don’t mean that nobody will ever play soccer, just that family time and chill, unstructured sibling interaction will always take precedence. That dinners at home and breakfasts together, so much as is possible, will always trump completing homework assignments or attending tae kwon do classes.

We choose to send our kids outside the home to educate them, entrusting them to the care of competent strangers for 40 hours a week. But we do not cede our parental responsibility – or authority – during those 40 hours, or the other 128 in a week.

And because we send them out, it is even more essential that we do maximize those hours when they are home, and that we actively and intentionally engage with the content and curriculum they’re being exposed to in school.

As a public school graduate, I can attest to the hours and hours my parents – but mainly my mom – spent interacting with the local school board, meeting with teachers, questioning content and curriculum choices, and more than once choosing to exempt us from certain unit studies or entire courses altogether. (I’m looking at you, 5th grade sex-ed and 7th grade health class.) They weren’t being prudish, but prudent. I got a sex education at home, and in an age appropriate and mostly satisfactory manner, and my parents exercised their God-given authority over my education and moral formation.

Was it embarrassing to be pulled out of classes? I honestly remember being the envy of my 5th grade class because while they were blushing furiously, learning to insert tampons into plastic scale models, I enjoyed 45 minutes a day of free time in the science lab during those 2 weeks, fiddling with equipment and reading for pleasure. If I felt any embarrassment at being singled out or “othered” while my classmates were rolling condoms onto bananas, it was more than compensated for by the strong identity my parents formed in each of us that we were, in fact, different from many of our peers, intentionally so, and that it was acceptable and even preferable to be so.

So where I’m going in this rambling, kind of all over the place essay on parental authority is that you are the parent, and your authority is vested not by any municipality or school board, but by Almighty God Himself. And whatever He is asking of you this year where your children’s education is concerned, know this: the role of primary educator is intractable.

So whether you’re unschooling, homeschooling, inner-city public schooling or attending St. Gregory’s Classical Rhetorical Academy of Wisdom and Theology, you are ultimately responsible for exposing that kid to as much truth, goodness, and beauty as you can cram into 18 years, however your family deems best to achieve it.

And that won’t be on the standardized test.

Happy back to school season, fellow parents. May God inform and inspire all our choices where our children’s minds (and hearts, and souls, and bodies) are concerned, and may we be endowed with the mental fortitude to implement them.

About Me, motherhood, school

A letter to my firstborn on the first day of kindergarten

August 23, 2016

Dear son,

You made me a mama. You were, in fact, my first real introduction into the real world, the first person who demanded more of me than I asked of myself. You created in me an almost insatiable need for coffee, opening up chasm of love so fierce and exhaustion so deep that I still find it shocking and incomprehensible at times. Especially on those late nights when I stand in your room after bedtime, stroking sweaty blonde hairs away from your little head, marveling that sleep can can contain you – does contain you, night after night.

When you are awake, I am “on.” There is no off button for your joie de vivre.

Not that I want one, exactly, but I do marvel that you and I, the consummate extrovert and the perpetually solitude-seeking introvert, were cut from the same genetic cloth.

You have challenged me and refined me in a way that I find painful, at times breathtakingly so, and yet I am filled with gratitude for you. You are a gift, and life with you is an adventure.

Yesterday when I thought I was leaving you at school for your first full day in a big boy classroom, I was a fragile mess of tears ready to fall. Joke was on me though, because we got all dressed up and schlepped in for a 40 minute orientation and then early dismissal.

This morning, dress rehearsal firmly in the rearview mirror, you proceeded to lose my car keys and so, peeled out of the driveway in daddy’s car, 10 minutes late and nary a maternal tear shed.

Which is so typical for you.

You are, after all, the child who decided to make an impressive public display only 37 weeks into pregnancy. All the months of Bradley classes and books and calming scented candles fell by the wayside as you came screaming into the world after 19 hours of hard labor. Stunned, we looked at each other later in the recovery room and I realized you were not a child who could be scripted, that you would march to your own beat.

I love that about you.

And it’s also one of the hardest things about being your mom. Your passion and your energy drains me, and in that emptiness I have the opportunity day in and day out to beg God to fill in the empty spaces. He knew how much we would need each another.

You really wanted to bring leftovers in your lunchbox today, not a sandwich, so you could have a hot lunch “like daddy.” I think you would have carried a briefcase with a smartphone and a laptop in it, had I let you. Yesterday when you surveyed your classroom, stuffed to the brim with eager 5 and 6 year old faces, and you were nervous. But when you saw that your little chair had a seat-back pocket upholstered in a dinosaur-print fabric while most of the other diminutive chairs were decked in floral print, you were satisfied.

I stood in the back of the classroom and watched your teacher’s orientation slideshow with one eye, watching you with the other. You were unsure of your surroundings but you obediently dug into your pencil case for a crayon and started coloring the sheet she’d passed out. Periodically you twisted around in your tiny seat to scan the room, locking eyes with me in the back only for a second, no smile betraying that you’d seen your touchstone. But I know you did see me, and I could tell by the resolute straightening of your little shoulders as you swiveled back around that you were satisfied.

I hope that today is easy for you. I hope you don’t turn around to see if I’m still standing in the back of the room, but that if you do, you remember that your favorite cousin is in the room down the hall, that your best friend is waiting for you at home to share afternoon snack, that the little rows of desks filling your classroom are filled with friends you’ve known for years.

I promise, it will get easier for you to be there. What I suspect will not get easier, however, is the part where I leave you, urging you to step into a future that feels like it’s accelerating, smiling and waving encouragement as my heart breaks a little bit with the effort.

At the most fundamental level, I guess this is what motherhood is all about: pouring love in and then releasing, little by little, and standing back as shaky little legs grow stronger and more confident, moving further away with every step.

I didn’t want to ugly cry while writing this. So I’m sitting in a public coffee shop and propriety is mostly preventing that. But on the inside oh, my sweet boy, my heart is a little bit broken. Because today began the first chapter in a new life apart from our shared life together. Never again will we have our little domestic bubble of alltogetherallthetime. And there is relief in that to be sure, but there is a deep grieving too, and a profound gratitude that for a little while, God chose me to be your everything, and that He chooses me still to step back and help you launch.

I pray that the foundation we laid will have fashioned a worthy platform. And I know kindergarten is not Harvard, but I also know from the tearful stories at the grocery store this week and the knowing looks from the older moms in carpool line, that it’s not all that far off.

I am so proud of you my sweet boy. It is a privilege to be your mom.

And hey, nice work on losing those car keys this morning and diffusing mama’s waterworks so you could make a clean escape. You know me well.

About Me, Family Life, motherhood, Parenting, school

State of the preschool: an update on a family with commitment issues

January 21, 2016

My kids are hopefully young enough to not remember having attended 3 separate schools and one failed and decidedly halfhearted attempt at home education in the past 3 years. And for like, 3 month stints at a time. I was one part ashamed, one part defiant and one part sort of impressed by my own itchy trigger finger when I found myself telling my inlaws that yes, Joey had started school again and yes, it was at an entirely new place and oh, did I forget to mention that he dropped out last fall after Luke was born and we’ve just kind of been on a Netflix/library sabbatical since October?

No?

I don’t know what to say except that when it comes to making schooling decisions, I never thought it would be such a … fluid process. But last night when Dave was graciously setting up some kind of online password for something on my behalf, he asked me to give an answer for a potential security question: what was the name of my elementary school? At that point I realized that although we’d only moved once during those years of my childhood, I’d attended 3. Or was it 4?

So maybe it’s a firstborn phenomenon of motherly not-having-your-s-together.

At any rate, having tried our own parish school and, finding it to be a less than ideal fit in terms of distance and class size and personality (but mostly distance – the driving was killing me because of the time of day and the school zones that separate us from the church campus), we then threw our hat into the public school ring for 5 whole weeks last fall. And it was mostly fine. Except that it was a little bit more expensive than private preschool (an irony which my tax dollars are still seething over) and that I had to walk two little boys in and out of their two separate classrooms, two times a day, and while pushing a double stroller and very newly postpartum. The rest of the parents/nannies/grandparents on pickup duty mostly just blinked at me in awestruck…wonder (that’s what I decided it must have been), flattening themselves against the wall as I navigated the land barge to the ladybug room and then the ant room in turn.

Needless to say, that arrangement was ill fated. So, true to impulsive form, and after our not-ready-for-school-it-turns-out 3 year old had yet another night of tantrums and nightmares, I calmly dialed up the very, very kind director of the school and quit, cold turkey, on a Tuesday.

So for the rest of fall and well into Christmas, we settled into a not terrible rotation of trips to the library, one day per week of crafts and reading lessons with my mother’s helper (I have her 4 hours on Mondays this semester, which is probably not quite enough, but it’s better than nothing!), and an increasingly disturbing amount of Netflix in the afternoons.

After the dust and glitter around the holidays settled, we looked around and reevaluated how our non-system was serving us. It was sufficient for the survival season that is months 1-4 postpartum, but now that I’m back on my feet and Luke is mostly predictable, we decided we were up for adding a little more structure. So, over the past 3 weeks we’ve made a few key changes.

The biggest one was that our oldest started attending pre-K at a Catholic Montessori school from 8 am – 3 pm, 2 days per week, which is definitely the longest he’s been away from home.

It’s been a little up and down for him emotionally, but overall the change has been incredibly lifegiving, for all of us. It’s a good ramp up for him as he faces down the specter of full-day kindergarten next fall, and he seems to be blossoming in the Montessori environment.

It’s a beautiful thing to see his mind awakening, and it gives me so much peace in my mother’s heart to see that I don’t have to be everything to him, that I don’t have to shoulder the burden of every last detail of his development and formation. But without ceding my primary responsibility. It’s such a relief.

The other change we’ve made has been pretty radical, but the payout has been pretty incredible. About 2 weeks ago we prayerfully and, honestly, regretfully, made the decision to go screen free at home during the week, dangling the big fat promise of family movie night every Friday as the digital carrot that would placate our little media junkies.

And guess what? The first 4 days were about as terrible as you might imagine, and tracked oddly parallel with the narrative in that perennial childhood classic: The Berenstain Bear’s “No TV Week” (<— I’ve been spelling that wrong my whole life long).

There was wailing. Gnashing of teeth. Withdrawal tremors. Tears and plaintive negotiations and deep sighs. But, about 5 days into our little experiment, something shifted. The kids started turning away from me and toward each other, negotiating for wrestling matches, lego design sessions, and fort building. They started “reading” to each other and to themselves in the little corner of the living room that Joey had begged me to turn into a “home atrium,” and even though nobody can actually read yet (and I don’t care, because science!) they would all of a sudden be capable of 30 minutes of sustained, self-directed silence.

And as for me? Well, I’ve had some of my own digital delirium tremors over the past fortnight as I’ve been forced to engage flabby, atrophied motherhood muscles and build blanket forts, read chapters of books aloud, and generally engage more during the daylight hours than I thought myself capable of.

But surprisingly? It’s been really, really good. And the endless spare time I thought I’d lose by not having a show to throw at them has been recouped by me ditching Instagram and my personal FB account. Because mama can’t enforce what mama’s not willing to practice herself.

I’m not advocating for a screen blackout across the board. We still spin our CCC movies in the minivan during longer drives, and we’re still watching Broncos games on Sunday and a family movie on Fridays, (which mostly I ignore and read during, but physically attend with my body on the couch. It turns out there really are only so many times you can watch Star Wars.) and they still get whatever cartoons are playing in the kid’s club at the gym a couple times a week, but I’d estimate their total consumption has been reduced by 80%.

And the results have been pretty astonishing.

(ESSENTIAL ALL CAPS CAVEAT: if you are in survival mode, for whatever reason, don’t let this convince you that you are ruining your children and their childhood. You aren’t. We live in a tremendously individualistic and isolated society for the most part, and when there is illness, a new baby, or other high stress times in the life of a family, sometimes Netflix is the only available babysitter. I get that. I’ve been there.)

Less fighting, less whining (relatively speaking, given our demographic), less sibling violence, less parental snapping, and just a general increase in peace in the home. And honest to goodness gratitude when they do get to watch a precious few minutes of something as an unexpected treat.

I don’t think technology is evil, but I don’t think we should passively let it flow over us at the rate it has developed. I had plenty of cartoons and shows in my childhood, but I couldn’t summon them on demand, and I didn’t melt down and shriek at my parents if something less-than-amazing was offered to me, crying out that a more acceptable option be produced.

Not that, you know, any of my kids have, uh, (cough, cough) ever done anything like that.

So there you have it, the state of our union, at least for now, with a crew of inmates numbered 5 months, 2 years, 3.5 years, and 5.25 years. I might be back here to eat my words in a month or 7, but for now, it’s working.

Family Life, motherhood, Parenting, school

Oops, we quit it again (preschool, that is)

October 31, 2015

I mean, I think we all saw this coming.

I’m pretty sure the director of our sweet little neighborhood preschool did, anyway, when I switched the boys from full day to half day to 2 half days per week to…nada. Poor kids. Poor little Caterpiller and Ladybug classrooms, both now down a blonde boy apiece.

Here’s the rub though; the kids cared not one single bit. And actually, the nail in the pre-k coffin was John Paul (3.25 years old) and his nightly freakout sessions (which I was attempting to negotiate with threats of “if you don’t get back in bed and stop screaming you’ll be too tired to go to school in the morning”) which promptly and mercifully extinguished the moment he heard “you won’t be able to go to school.”

“I don’t have to go to school, mommy?!”

Oh crap. He didn’t want to go?

“Is that why you’ve been, um, so … intense lately, honey?”

“Yeah.”

Crickets.

Wellllllll okay then. I called the preschool director later that afternoon and pulled the trigger. Announced time of death. Called the game. Whatever. Actually, first I checked with Joey, the freshly-minted 5 year old, to see if he was potentially devastated by such a turn of events. He wasn’t.

His exact reaction was something along the lines of “oh, can I stay home all day in my cozy pants with you?!”

So college should be absolutely thrilling for him.

(Also, I’m getting dressed a lot more frequently now. I’d say 95% of the time. Nothing like seeing your own shiny reflection in the impression you’re making on your filterless five year old for a little reality check.)

So how’s it going, having 4 kids 5 and under home all day while trying to work full-time ish from said home?

Pretty good, truth be told. Better than it was with 2 of them in school 3x’s per week, or even 2x’s per week.

Because no drop offs. No pick ups. No trudging into the school 5 minutes before dismissal with the double stroller and waiting outside two separate classrooms to sign two separate sign out sheets and then schlep all 4 back to the car to begin the lunchtime negotiations.

We have more peace and more chill in the mornings, for sure, and as long as I have a steady stack of library books available, I think they’re getting approximately the same socialization/academic instruction that one might desire for a pre-literate human needling.

I thought – no, I was utterly convinced – that I needed preschool in order to survive this season of life with a newborn and three other pretty young children, but it turned out to be less of a blessing and more of a hassle.

So what are we doing instead?

Well, aside from the aforementioned library books, there are three essential components that make life bearable slash occasionally enjoyable M-F.

1. Self care, beginning with the spiritual. I scored an October issue of Magnificat at the World Meeting of Families last month and I’ve been sitting down with it and a coffee first thing every morning. It has been nothing short of life-changing. I love (and use, when I’m on the go) Blessed is She for the same purpose, but there’s something about having a physical book in my hands that helps me slow down and focus on what I’m reading. I’ve made a rule that I can’t touch my phone or laptop until prayer time happens, which has finally helped morning prayer “stick” for me, since it’s tied not to a predictable recurrent wake time but to the order of events of the day.

I’ve also been more faithful to one night out per week with either my sisters or girlfriends, and involving either adoration or prayer or conversation or alcohol or all 4. I’ve also been hitting the gym 4 times per week whenever someone is available to watch Luke for 40 minutes or so, and the kid’s club is open.

2. Domestic help. I have a homeschooler who comes for 4-5 hours every Monday. She is delightful and her only flaw is that she can’t drive herself, but her parents drop her off and I drive her home, so it’s not the worst. She does dishes and mops the floors and takes the big kids to the park and has recently been designing her own preschool curriculum to tutor them in the afternoons when Evie and Luke are asleep, and no you can never have her number. Or even her name. Cackle. (God help me when she leaves for college.)

3. Taking little opportunities to do school-y things in our day-to-day lives. I’m about 90% convinced that I’m never going to homeschool, but that doesn’t mean I’m not still the primary educator. So we learn together. We stop at a construction site and watch the diggers and talk about how asphalt is made. We go on nature walks and bring the leaves home and arrange them in ROYGBIV order and talk about seasons and why leaves turn colors and photo-freaking-synthesis. We stop by church to say hi to Jesus and talk about the Real Presence and the red candle and the Eucharist. In sum? We just do life and it happens to include teachy stuff and it’s such a relief to read studies like this one that make me feel ril, ril good about my illiterate little preschoolers.

I’m realizing with each passing week that this season of all 4 kids home all day long is actually fleeting, so on the afternoons (read: most) when the fan is totally covered I’m still trying to kind of soak it up. Or at the very least, be glad that I can crack open a little happy hour at 4 pm and not be worried about pickup time. (And p.s., with the $$$$$$/month we’re saving in tuition, I can afford to drink the good stuff. Public school was not free, as it turns out.)