Crap!

I have a confession to make. Mess makes me grumpy. Really grumpy. For me mess is a little like PMS. I start to feel a little tense, a little snappish, a little off. I don’t really know why. Everything on the outside is okay so why am I so uncomfortable, like my skin is crawling? OH, now I know, PMS.

Mess works the same way for me. Life gets busy; we end up driving down to Houston a few times in a week. We are all a bit preoccupied with SDB, etc. Then Sir D gets a head cold. Then I get a head cold. Then I start to get better, but I’m grumpy. Something’s not right. My skin is crawling a little. What’s the deal?

Then I look around. There are three baskets of clean laundry in the living room waiting to be folded and put away. The living room floor needs to be vacuumed. The girls room is messy, the boys room is messy, the back room is messy. The hall has baskets of dirty laundry in it because the place where the baskets go in the laundry room on the shelf has other stuff on that shelf that is not supposed to be there and needs to be put away in its proper place. My room is messy and my desk is cluttered, and now my skin is crawling. Then I grab the ringing phone and my finger sticks to a smear of honey. THAT’S IT! I CAN’T STAND IT ANYMORE THIS PLACE IS A PIGSTY!

So what to do? We had a pretty unproductive week last week since I was sick. The kids still did some school, but I was not on it, and as my good friend who has been homeschooling forever says…You don’t get what you expect, you get what you inspect. I did not inspect much last week.

Really I should just cancel school for a few days and clean this place up. We’d all be happier for it, but how? We didn’t get much done last week. Next week all the public schools are off and the kids have youth group and church activities planned, not to mention I’ll be busy baking. I really don’t feel like we can afford to take any more time off.

That’s always the rub. I know that homeschooling is more than the academics, they need to know how to cook and clean and live with other people. But they need to know how to read, write, add and subtract too. If I were reading this on anyone else’s blog I’d tell them to relax. Clean the house. The academics will always be there, there will always be more to learn. Get things back on track at home and everything will run smother.

Great in theory, but now that one of mine is taking college classes in highschool and the other is about to enter highschool and there are two more trailing ever so closely behind them, I realize I don’t have all the time in the world anymore. 8 more years. That is all I have to teach them. And that is Ann. The others will be done sooner. 8 more years. I don’t know how this happened. I used to make myself not even think about how many years I’d be homeschooling when Ann was a baby, the number was just too overwhelming. But now? Now it just freaks me out.

I have 8 years or less to teach these kids what they need to know before they fly away from my nest! And my house is a wreck.

Crap!

(Told you I was grumpy.)