Getting Back Into It is PAINFUL

 I have decided that there is no casual, friendly, painless way to get your children and yourself into a routine after several months of a free-for-all.  Everyone is happier when on a schedule but that initial adaptation to the new environment is challenging.  Oskar is now three months old, absolutely adorable, and on a pretty good schedule.  It was time for school to start again.

 I planned, I prayed, I thought, and I hoped that the transition wouldn't be as grim as usual.  It was.  It still is.

 The messy house is just going to happen.  While you're reading with one child the others are going to be getting into things--especially the two year old.  Take a deep breath, let it out, repeat as necessary.  (All advice in this post is for myself.  I'm sure you all have magical powers that make this easier at your own homes.)

 Patsy, the Flying Poodle, learned how to climb our 6 foot fence and race away to freedom.  She contributed to the general chaos and I was less than impressed. She's currently living, in disgrace, with her godmother (my hubby's sister who trains search and rescue dogs).

I think the hardest thing for me is to really commit to getting up early.  I make my schedules and write down all the good things I want to do with my children and then I sleep in, we get behind from the get-go, we only accomplish the most critical tasks like reading, grammar, math, etc., and I get frustrated because the kids could do all those things at school.  I want to get up and going early enough that we get to all the fun extras.  I consider history a "fun necessity" and look forward to all our Ancient Rome projects.  We've worked on Rome two days.  We've had it in the schedule for six.  Grr.

The other hard thing is the infernal whining.  I'm sure your children never whine, but mine suffer from whinitis whenever we pull ourselves back into a good school routine.  "I don't want to read!" "I hate math!"  "I did Spanish for 15 minutes.  It was 15 minutes, it was!"  "When is it my turn?"  "I'm not rewriting this paragraph ever, Mom."  And on and on it goes.

Once we've had a schedule in place for about three weeks my children accept it and are generally happier with the increased structure.  They value play time because they know it is limited.  They start to feel a sense of accomplishment as they move from one section to the next in their math books.  Grandmas get called to hear new piano pieces and Dad can have ever more complex conversations in Spanish with the oldest.  It is human nature to be happier when progress is being made and the kids reflect that universal truth.  The getting there, though, is hard.

 I'll be writing more about our Ancient Rome unit.  I tried to keep things fairly simple as we are still working around an infant, plus the other demands on my planning time.  I found a lot of fun ideas on pinterest (yes, I finally learned how to pin things) including a whole folder thing on it.  (Okay, my brain is fried--what are those things called when you open up a fancy folder and there are lots of little flaps and envelopes and things??  The unit I looked at is one of those.)

 I'm not using the entire unit, but there were several cute ideas and we've never done a folder-thingy, so I thought I'd give it a try.

 So far we've filled out a little flap thing on the Romulus/Remus legend.  The kids were thrilled that they got to use a stapler and loved decorating their folders.

Harriet's in a slightly easier stage now as she is willing to join us for some things.  While we did our legend and our maps she made her own.

Do any of you have any brilliant tricks to getting your family back in a good routine??  I think we're past the worst of it, but we've had some distractions the last few days so I'm a little worried that all our hard work on the routine will have to be done again.  Maybe.  Maybe not.  For those of you done with school for the summer--have fun!!  For those of you who homeschool year-round or need to make up a baby break, I'll be posting this summer.  We'll forge on together.