I am really happy to be in Week 22 of the school year. The schedule I follow is 32 weeks long, so we’re more than 2/3 through. I can’t wait for school to be done.

I often have people ask me about homeschooling. It’s hard not to notice that I do, when I have all of my kids with me during the day. Most days, we stay home doing schoolwork, but occasionally we venture out, usually for milk. Thankfully, around here, lots of families homeschool, so I don’t feel too odd.

But when asked about homeschooling, generally from someone who is considering homeschooling or someone who perhaps feels guilty that they aren’t homeschooling or someone who thinks that I think they should homeschool, I assure them that it is a lot of work and things like cooking dinner or cleaning the house can not take priority. It’s really not for everybody, and I don’t think anybody should feel guilty if they send their kids off to the public indoctrination center, er, public school. {No, SERIOUSLY, I’m just trying to be funny.}

It is so hard, in fact, that I love any excuse to cancel school for the day. Don’t tell the kids this, since they are convinced that I really enjoy sitting with them for hours on end as they whine about having to copy 5 measly sentences with neat handwriting and proper punctuation. I am such a slave driver. So, I love it when we take the day to go to a museum or take the week because of a holiday. The only bad thing about this is that I have voluntarily chained myself to this 32 week curriculum and I MUST get it done. ALL of it. So when we take one day off, I try really hard to cram all that missed work into the rest of the week. That way, the weeks won’t run into the next one and we’ll finish the school year in a reasonable amount of time.

So the poor kids are regularly working like dogs to play catch up if we take a break. Making it necessary to take another break because we’ve been working so hard, making it necessary to work even harder, and so on and so on…

I am getting a little bit better and starting to omit some things on the to-do list. The redundancy of some tasks is only useful if done on different days (in other words, 15 minutes of piano practice per day is better than 90 minutes once a week and 90 minutes of “Ode to Joy” will make you despise Beethoven).

And maybe next year, I will take the 32 week curriculum and immediately number the DAYS and think in terms of DAY 63, DAY 64 instead of WEEK 19, WEEK 20.