Homeschooling Woes, I Need More Coffee

I slammed my knee into an exhausted, impenetrable homeschooling hurdle today.  The race always starts off with my spandex wedged into the appropriate places and glittering stars of academic bliss awaiting me at the finish line. I start running and clear the first few hurdles with relative ease. I clip my heals on a few; I straight up avoid some by running around them rather than jumping over them. But all in all, the race has gone as planned.

photo credit

And then we round the corner to summer.

As I'm running, I look up and this stretch of track seems to bleed into the horizon, never ending. It's the War and Peace section of the homeschooling year. You know you have to push through and finish, but man this is going to get painful.

I find myself muttering:

  "If you want to do the craft yourself it's on page 336. I'm tired."

 "If you aren't going to learn, I'm not going to teach." 

And, 

"If I hear you cry one more time, I'm gonna stick Jell-O in my eye." 

You see, we homeschool year round. With different people coming to visit, visa runs, and various things we have to leave town for, year round schooling just works better. But, it's about this time in the summer that I haven't just run out of steam, I've surrenedered to hitchhiking my way to the finish line. I don't even care if it's a drunk Pink Floyd groupie, I just need a ride to the end. The funny thing is that we don't have an end. I'm not organized enough to keep us on a good formal schedule, so we simply finish 2nd grade math on Monday and start 3rd grade on Tuesday. No bells, whistles, or graduations. I give them 5 kuai and tell them to get an ice cream-by themselves. It's all very grand and I'm sure they feel so deeply nurtured by this.

There is it.

All those lessons I've learned about training up my children in godliness and the benefits of tailoring my children's educations seem to be lost under the screaming dark angel saying, "Put them all in school and you'll get to actually finish a cup of coffee and a sentence involving a comma."

--I should spend more time praying over this. I try. Really I do. But I quickly find myself praying that I'd get mono so that I can take a nap.

--I should take a day off. If I do, it's fabulous and I feel so refreshed...until I wake up the next day. You see, resting has an eventual end which makes rest feel like a bad guaze-wrapped solution and when I have to get back to our routine, there are bits of bleeding flesh that have been ripped off after said rest.

--I try to remind myself of why I'm homeschooling and for that brief moment, I'm swept away in a Bette Midler song of homeschool nirvana. After those three melodious minutes are up, I shake the sentiment from my hair and remind myself that those platitudes have to be executed by me and me alone.

This is where I'm at today. I can sense the Lord tapping me on the shoulder. He's telling me to stop yelling my complaints so loudly, I'm disturbing all the other lovely families smiling their way through homeschool. There's redemption in this, I know it. I'm processing all of this with Jesus. He's teaching me things. But for today, this is all I've got.

Am I alone in this sentiment?