Our Homeschool Journey Part – 2

I think my eldest was still about one. No, wait I was 16 and terribly bored in high school.

Yeah, my mother told me about someone she knew who was homeschooling her teenage daughters. I looked it up online. The idea of studying at my own pace fascinated me. Sometimes everything we studied felt so redundant. Once we were done learning about something we had to keep restudying it to ace our exams. I would have loved to move on to more challenging things.

Fast forward to 2010. I wanted our little boy to go to an arabic school, so he could learn the language by full immersion. This adorable little school was a short walk away and our son could go once he was 3. I promised my husband I would teach him everything else myself, I just wanted our children to learn arabic.

We moved away from this area and going to that school wasn’t an option any more. I came across right brain learning and Brill Kids. I loved the idea that  Glenn Doman promoted. My little boy was going to be a little genius and would read when he was 2.

That started the era of power point flash cards. We did power point sessions twice a day while both my babies snuggled in my lap. I made my own power points.I’ll upload those some day! I tried to schedule everything. I looked at blocks of free time I could create around my housekeeping schedule. I still have some of the papers.

I think I developed a scheduling method that worked for me really well. I’d love to share that in the future insha Allah.

Did I follow the schedule to the letter? Not always. I often improvised. I sometimes cried over not being able to follow it. I was listening to GTD by David Allen and I really wanted to be organised. All these time management strategies didn’t seem to apply to moms. Didn’t anyone understand that babies don’t always follow a schedule?

I was also travelling every weekend. My husband and I made it a point to enjoy ourselves whenever we had the chance during the weekdays. So there were days that he’d come home and say, “Wanna go out?”, and I’d just say, “Sure, let’s do it!”.

There were also the days that he came home late after the children had already gone to bed.

It felt like there was so much happening all the time. I would catch the bus whenever I wanted to go out alone, I didn’t have a drivers license. Nothing stopped me, not even the heat. But then I didn’t go out alone that much. I was actually pretty content in the quiet tranquil of my home. Going out with 2 under 3 was not easy. Someone always cried or needed to be nursed. I would occasionally walk to the park. We didn’t go to any playgroups. I felt my kids had enough fun once a week with all their cousins at their grandparents’ house.

So I cooked and cleaned, laundered, made slides and scribbled on paper. Then in the summer of 2011, I decided I wanted to homeschool for real and plan out the year for my 2.5 year old!

I strove so hard to do everything perfectly, I was often internally bitter despite that. Bitter about the spotless home I worked so hard to keep, bitter that I didn’t have access to books, bitter that I didn’t have enough time to read stories and so tired. These were the early years, I had only 2 kids, I was full of zeal and I was a bit younger too. I had the energy to keep going.

With all the internal struggles buried in my mind I set out to plan a real homeschool year!