Today we are blessed to have our 17th post in the Real Life Homeschooling series!! Ya’ll have blessed my socks off!! Our guest post today is from Lauren at Serving From Home.
How appropriate that I sit here writing about homeschooling with a baby as this little monkey sits nicely on the couch squirms all over my lap. 8 months ago, at the beginning of December, we welcomed Miss E to our family. We entered a whole new season of homeschooling my 3 eldest were each about 2 years apart, so we’ve never really homeschooled with a baby before. It is a lifechanging experience.Fortunately I had some incredible advice from other families to immediately lower my expectations and to take those first few months easy. We certainly did, taking the whole month of December off from “formal” school to enjoy our new little bundle.Being such an easy going baby, I felt quite ready to get back into things by the time January rolled around. And for a couple of months, things went fairly smoothly eat, sleep, change diapers, school. She slept a lot so we just worked out schooling around her schedule. Easy, right?
So I thought! See this picture? All these things are subjects we try to fit into our homeschool week. Not all every day, but at some point we try to touch on each one. Well, what we ACTUALLY accomplished is more like 1/5th of this.
When we hit month 4, changes began to occur. Miss E changed her daily schedule to more structured nap times 2 to be precise. Suddenly I went from having a nearly alldaynapping baby, to needing to bounce her around on my lap, keeping her happy, holding off a feeding so I could finish the math lesson.
Right, the feedings. I’ve heard of moms who can nurse and school and cook and clean all at the same time! (OK, maybe I’m exaggerating somewhat :D) I was not one of those moms. When it came time for feeding I had to focus on just that. No multitasking momma here! So that meant totally dropping a lesson even if we had just started or were part of the way through. Talk about frustrating!
This went on for about a month constantly shuffling the schedule around her schedule, trying to cram in as much as we could before her naps ended, racing from one subject to the next I’m really not sure how we learned much of anything during this time?! There were many tears from my side as I felt we would NEVER finish ANYTHING and life was going to be like this FOREVER!!!!
And then, as babies are wont to do, we hit another stage and more changes. This time for the much better! As I mentioned, she is such a chill baby, that even her cranky times weren’t all that bad. But cranky or happy, juggling a baby with a 3rd and 1st grader and preschooler at home doing lessons is always going to be exactly that a juggling act.
But I finally learned to chill out and go with the flow. If she was sleeping, we’d do the subjects we needed a bit more quiet and concentration for (even if it wasn’t on the “schedule” for that particular time of day). While she was awake and if she was unhappy or loud, I’d assign the boys their independent work and do oneonone with my preschooler while the baby played with us.
If she was happy I’d let her play on her blanket while I worked with the others or assign one of the kids to play with / near her (these are great teaching opportunities here also for helping your older ones learn to serve and take care of a baby!). I just had to learn to relax, be flexible, not stress over getting EVERYTHING done (‘cuz who really does that anyway?!).
So having finally gone through the season of a new baby and trying to homeschool, here is my advice to you, if you are trying to figure out how to make it all work:
1) Take some time off to adjust to the new routine WITHOUT having to worry about school, and enjoy that precious babe! We took a whole month off, and we felt so refreshed and ready to jump back in because of it.
2) Drop some subjects. Take it down to the basics math, grammar, reading. Don’t kill yourself trying to keep up with the same pace as before. Life’s a whole lot different now!
3) Be prepared to shuffle, juggle, and change your daily routine. A lot. Almost hourly. Be flexible and don’t let it stress you out. The beauty of homeschooling is that YOU set the pace!
4) Get some help in teaching or around the house. I gave up the grocery shopping to my husband so I could save some sanity and wouldn’t have to take precious time out of our school day, dragging the kids to the grocery store. (PS Exersaucers, bouncy seats, swings or an extra pair of arms are all life savers.)
5) Talk with your husband about your day, pray about it together as far as what you should be doing and how things are going. Often we can feel like things are going terribly, we’re getting so far behind, nothing is working out, WHEN WE’RE IN THE THICK OF IT ALL but taking a step back and viewing it from someone else’s perspective, getting a reality check, we can see that things are still under control though out of our control, by God’s eternal perspective, He’s got this :0)
This homeschool mom {and so many others like me} don’t have our acts together. We aren’t as patient with our kids as we need to be, we don’t have the organizational skills of Martha Stewart. In fact, most days my husband comes home and I tell him that I just can’t do this another day.
And most of all, we are in desperate need of His new mercies…every day, every morning…every single moment.
Guest Posters wanted: the response to this post has been so great. ya’ll are great. 🙂 SO, I’m going to open up this series for GUEST POSTERS!! If you are a homeschooler and want to contribute your own “real like homeschooling” post, please email me with your post! I would like to have a picture to go with it. And if you have a blog, I will link back to you! 🙂 If you want to “grab” the picture in the top of this post, I will let you know when your post will go live and you can use this graphic as a teaser and point people here to read! I really think these will be encouraging to all of us as homeschooling mamas! I hope to share one post per week on this series!!
“chill and go with the flow” YEs! Love you sweet friend!
Thanks, I needed to read this to let go of the mommy, first time homeschooling guilt.