Recently I have been feeling the pressure of the education of my younger kids. OK, I know they are only little, 3 ½ and 1 ½, but Matthew has had 100% of me through both of those ages. He is excelling in his schooling and I wonder how much my enrichment helped. I read endlessly to him, talked to him about all things, showed him flash cards, focused his attention on things when we were out and so much more than I do the girls.
I try to make myself feel better by noticing that Matthew had no one else to interact with, I had to do something with him to entertain him and education was more compelling than anything to both of us. Lily and even more Laura have their siblings to learn from and interact with. I also try to remember that I am 8 months pregnant! I have assigned work to go over with Matthew and I run out of steam to do stuff with the girls… but as Mark says ‘this is a season of our life’.
But I still feel pressure as I see time marching on and I still spend more time on Matthew’s education. We are addressing this: Mark is making a focused attempt to read our very best children’s storybooks to Lily this month and I have been trying to tell Laura the alphabet…. ‘that is a monkey… monkey begins with the letter m’.
With homeschooling there is no one to fall back on. No one to take over when you are tired and let you off the hook. But that very pressure is the motivation to try harder. These are my kids and I will pour in what I have. At least I don’t have a class of 30 strangers whom I can’t ‘really’ care about to fill up. I only have those precious babes that I birthed.
All in all I am pretty sure that high on my New Year’s resolutions, after deliver a healthy baby, will be read to Laura more!
