How do you juggle everything?
On imperfect home education during times of parental exhaustion (that is to say, all of the time!)
For the past two years, I’ve hit homeschooling burnout around about mid May - so unsurprisingly the recent weeks have dragged. Usually by now I’m feeling frazzled, overwhelmed and ready to drop anything formal and adult led until after the summer - this year is no different! The only difference is, I suppose, that this year I knew it was coming.
Life with three small children at home is just, well hard. Perhaps people with different circumstances, and different children, find it somewhat easier - but I find it challenging every single day. There are certainly high moments (dancing to classical music, reading poetry, painting together) and there are low moments aplenty (sister squabbles, meltdowns and the house being trashed on the daily). My point is this: if any of this sounds familiar, you’re certainly not alone.
It’s taken me several attempts to get this post started as my thoughts have been all over the place lately, and my to-do list is never ending (and it often feels like I’m failing at everything). Some days I had intended to write after the girls fell asleep, only to fall asleep beside them. Some days I feel like I’m the last person who should be talking about home education - surely there are people who are doing a better job than I am? Shouldn’t they be the ones sharing and offering advice? However, that’s exactly the reason it’s important that I do share our experience: to give home educating mothers with multiple young children a voice. To show that, actually, many of us are home educating imperfectly - and that imperfect is more than good enough.
In fact, some days imperfect is simply wonderful. Our spring days right now are filled with barefoot garden play and creepy crawly friends. You might even remember me mentioning that we’d taken a caterpillar as a pet - goodness me, the caterpillars! We ended up with about thirty in the end, in a tank indoors, and a big investigation into finding their food source. We had some of our home educating friends round for a play date during the holidays and - to make a long story short - another mum and I ended up climbing the garden fence to chop down a branch from next door’s tree! All in the name of education, of course!
Eventually we returned all of the caterpillars to the garden, as we ran out of tree (and box tree caterpillars are very fussy eaters) but the girls still come in from the garden now with handfuls of them. We’ve also nursed a poorly butterfly (who sat upon A’s hand for a good hour), observed a dragonfly, dug up worms, and Q made a nest for a tired bumblebee. It’s amazing what you can find in your own untidy, rather neglected garden! So I suppose lots of learning has been happening, really, even though we’ve been quite inconsistent with the three Rs. I don’t suppose any amount of book work could compare to hands on experience - I definitely feel like the girls have made some memories recently that will stay with them as they grow up. And isn’t that what it’s all about?
I often wonder how I’m supposed to juggle it all - running the house, caring for the girls, education, socialisation, making memories, clubs, trips, family time. I even hear home educating parents of older children asking how do you fit it all in? and I suppose the answer is simply that you don’t. If those with older children haven’t found the perfect routine that allows time for everything (including rest!) then I doubt that I, or any other parent of littles, will discover it.
While I still can’t help but strive for more balance in our weeks, I rather like the idea tilting instead. For us it looks like this:
Some weeks we see lots of our friends, at the detriment of table work. Other weeks we lean into education and the house falls apart. Very occasionally, the house is immaculate but the girls miss their friends and we’ve done nothing noteworthy at all. (This third sort of week doesn’t happen too often!)
I’ve found that we have to prioritise one thing and let the rest go - then prioritise something different the week after. Overall, I hope that the girls are getting everything they need and - most importantly - that they’re happy.
If you’d like to hear more about how we spend our days as a home educating family with young children you can subscribe below. I’ve been away for a month, but hopefully I’ll be back this weekend with my usual weekly post about what we’ve been up to. I hope you’ve been keeping well x