March 11, 2024 - Monday

The kids and I had a long talk about homeschooling today. Since the new year, it feels like we've all been doing the bare minimum and we're ALL feeling frustrated about it in our own ways. Jonas, although he acts like he's desperate to be done early every day, says he's really missing the structure and investment I gave at the beginning of the year. It hurts his feelings when I haven't even checked over his work, let alone give him verbal feedback. Clemi is upset that we've stopped doing art and French, two of her favorite things. She said it makes her miss school more when she doesn't get to do electives, which does make sense. Ruby and Ollie didn't have anything to add, but I did tell them to expect to sit at their desks for most of the morning and not get to just run away and play loudly in the other room. I told them we were going to go back to doing things like we did at the beginning, where we have a quiet school room that we're all in for the majority of the morning. They both accepted that, but we'll see how they're feeling about it when the rubber meets the road! For my part, I expressed to the big kids how hard it is for me to be excited about school when everyone seems to want to cut every single day short. And because I get the sense that nobody wants to be there, it makes it much harder for me to offer electives and do science experiments and turn on French lessons. We've all decided to do better starting on Wednesday. I'm excited about it!