A New Adventure

This week in homeschooling land went pretty good. 

A few weeks ago we changed up our schedule because the girls and I were feeling overwhelmed and we needed a change.
We started in August following a schedule that almost exactly mirrored the public school schedule and slowly but surely we got to where we were not excited and happy to start the school day and instead we were dreading getting started each day. We then took a two week break after the first full six weeks and re-evaluated our situation.
The hubby and I talked about how to make homeschooling work and fit us better. We didn't want to quit homeschooling but we knew something was going to have to change if we were going to keep going. We started talking about how back in high school we had block scheduling where I sometimes only went to school two days out of the week and other weeks it was three days. I so much enjoyed that schedule my senior year. It made it easier on me to finish all of my school work, work a full-time job, learn to take care of our first house, and deal with the morning sickness that I was blessed with three months before I graduated.
Now thankfully I am not dealing with such a heavy load but keeping up with a house and raising three beautiful daughters as well as teach the older two their p's and q's is still a stressful situation at times.
So we worked out a schedule where we have 3 day weekends and a four day work week. The girls are off Mondays to take care of any appointments, big cleaning projects, and just generally relax another day. We also cut down the amount of work that I thought they HAD to have each day to "keep" up with the public school kids, not taking into account that we are NOT public school kids and we do NOT have to keep their schedule but instead take each day as a blessing to be together and learn. So now each girl has a slightly different schedule from each other but each still gets the full education they need. The amount of time we spend studying and learning has drastically gone down using this schedule the last two weeks. They both would normally be working for hours past the expected time and both them and I were feeling like we might never finish each day. By the end of each day we were so exhausted we weren't even wanting to spend time doing anything fun. We just wanted to go straight to bed. Now we are getting done quickly and no one is stressed and wanting to pull our hair out.....

Sometimes it is best to take a step away and re-evaluate the situation and change things to make them work for you instead of against you!