Doubts and Reassurances

April 14, 2008

Spring arrives suddenly the same way each year. The weather warms and everybody wants to be outside. The garden and yard are wanting attention NOW, the camping trips need to be planned, the garage cleaned out in time for yearly curbside pick up, laundry is being hung and indoor cleaning projects can be put off no longer.

I come to this point and I wonder... where exactly do I fit school into this picture? By school I mean our morning routine of scripture memory, lots of reading aloud, handwriting, spelling and math (the latter two for Celine only).

And I can come to only one conclusion - morning school doesn't fit into our spring life. Rather than stress myself out about it I'm choosing to go with the season and embrace spring, hopefully pick up a couple rain days of indoor learning in the next month and then put the whole she-bang to rest for the summer.

I can't function any other way - spring is too fleeting and too downright busy in our gardening/outdoor loving family to attempt to accomplish much more than the household basics.

But I still wonder sometimes if I'm slacking off somehow or putting my kids at a "schooling" disadvantage.

And then my fears are relieved when Laurent wakes up and while he's still rubbing sleep from his eyes he asks "If the sun is hot why is it colder the farther we get from earth and the closer we get to the sun, like going up in space?" Then later in the day Celine really wants to read, are you ready, Macbeth! Which we happen to own a child friendly version of.

So, I take a deep breath and am reassured that as long as my kids are asking intelligent questions and want to keep reading we're doing ok. Better than ok because they're also learning to grow their own food, discovering all the creepy crawlies that emerge this time of year and learning to ride bikes. Spring, glorious spring.