In The Beginning: Our First Week.

My son, James, and I have just completed our first week of homeschooling together. The whole process has really served to hold a mirror up to my parenting skills. And I find myself seriously lacking. Lacking patience, lacking compassion, lacking flexibility, lacking joy. I had made all sorts of plans, about how our week would look, and how each day would flow. I was dreaming about the fun we would have together.  But so far it hasn't quite worked out as I had hoped. It's mostly been tough. Tough with a huge dollop of difficult. Or perhaps that's just my perspective.

 We have had some fun, on some days. Like when James, Dan and I went to the woods, and did a nature collection, fed the ducks and swans and had lunch together. The next day James and I made a huge nature picture featuring photographs of our time in the woods, and some of our nature collection. We both enjoyed that.

But most days have been full of struggles. James has been quite out of sorts. He's been angry, confrontational, defiant. He's been cheeky, silly, and distracted. He's been really unenthusiastic about many of our plans (things we both had talked about and agreed on), and unresponsive to my attempts to direct him or challenge his behaviour. To some extent I think this is due to the disruption of the change from school to home. Perhaps he is just pushing the boundaries because I'm his mum and I am trying to carve out a new role as his teacher. Maybe he's reacting to the newness of the circumstances, and things will settle down. I hope they do.

I am trying to be flexible, to think about the options for different ways of learning and interacting. At the same time I am worried about what other people are thinking - how do I convince my husband and other family members that this is going to work out, that we can be adaptable and unconventional and still give our son a well rounded and effective educational experience? How do I convince myself?

I haven't behaved particularly well either. I've been cross and shouty, and too, too serious. I've been anxious to get things done in a certain way, to achieve my goals according to my timescales. I've been talking too much and listening too little. And the furrowed line in the centre of my forehead is getting deeper! I thought I was well prepared for last week. Now I think I've been flying blind.

Preparedness for me has always been about the external - the paperwork, the to-do lists, the right things in the right places, the materials and the books, the trips and the experiences. But I have not prepared myself. And I have not prepared James. Our relationship has taken a bit of a beating over these last few months, as he and I have struggled to navigate the ups and downs of school and home life, and to communicate in our different languages (that's what it feels like some days).

I thought that being prepared meant having the right plans for each day and each week's work, planned responses for this and that behaviour. Now I realise that being prepared is much more than that. It's about me being a mum, the right kind of mum for James. It's about my heart and his. It's about our relationship, our connection, our trust. I am not here to control him, but to nurture, not to boss, but to train, not to do for, but to show. My role is to care, to love, to bless. I am to raise him towards adulthood with care and affection. And our homeschooling journey is now a major part of that. I want to worry less about what he is achieving academically, and concentrate more on how he is developing as a person.

"Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is older he will not turn from it". (Proverbs 22:6)

I am going to spend some time thinking about what kind of character I would like James to become, and how I can help him to grow into that character. I'll be on my knees praying a lot - I need all the help I can get!

Operation Funsies.

So, there are two weeks until school starts. I have mixed feelings.

I am still knee-deep in 'research' about home education. I am fascinated by people's stories of their own HE experiences, and the more I read, the more I think it's a great idea. I think (as usual) I am stuck in a well of diminished self-confidence when it comes to esteeming my own abilities to home educate my children. I don't know if I've got the guts. It makes sense on paper and in my head. And I think it is the best option for J who is 6, and shows a keen-ness for learning outside of the school environment that has surprised me lately.

What concerns me most at this time is the behaviour of the boys when they are together. Individually, they are wonderful, talkative, interested, compliant where necessary, fun and responsive. Put them together and they fight and bicker, scream and shout, ignore me and defy any attempts to restore peace and quiet amid the storms. In short, they go mental on a regular basis. The focus of my research in the next couple of weeks is going to be how do people deal with manic children and difficult behaviour in the home education environment - I haven't seen much mention of it in the blogs I've read so far, so I'm going to have to dig a bit deeper.

That being said I've got a couple of books coming from Amazon, one about home education (Learning Without School, by Ross Mountney), one about loving my children (How To Really Love Your Child, by Ross Campbell) which I'm hoping will throw out some pearls of wisdom that I can put into practice to bring some calm to this home of ours. I'm trying to fight the feelings I have of looking forward to the children going back to school and pre-school.

How can I home educate if I don't enjoy spending time with my own kids?

So, my other focus for the next two weeks is to get out there and enjoy my time with the children, get down to their level and have some fun, give them some attention and ignore the housework while they are awake. It's operation funsies!