I didn’t think I’d ever understand why one homeschool day went almost perfectly, while the next day was as far from perfect as possible. For years I tried recalling each step of the two days and couldn’t determine what I had done differently most of the time. I couldn’t pin point what was causing the difficulty on our frustrating homeschool days.
Then one day it hit me. Everyone has off days. That includes both myself and my children. We don’t always have it together. It is impossible for every homeschool day to go “perfectly” because we all have days when we’re just off.
For myself I know that there are some days that I wake up a little later which throws off our schedule and other nights I stay up too late which can make me a bit on the grouchy side the next morning. My children (and I!) don’t like to be rushed in the morning, so if we get up late and try to rush through the morning it can make for an unpleasant start to our days. Sometimes my kids just wake up on the wrong side of the bed, whether they had a bad dream or not enough sleep, who knows it just happens.
The truth is that anyone (or everyone!) can just have an off day and that’s all it is. There doesn’t have to be some specific rhyme or reason behind it, we don’t have to spend hours dissecting our every moment to try and determine just where we went wrong.
Frustrating homeschool days will happen and the further along you get on your homeschool journey the easier it will be to accept them, move through them and keep going. It’s important to remember that just because difficult moments show up on your homeschool journey that doesn’t mean that you’re on the wrong path.
When we take too much time looking for the what we’re doing “wrong” in our homeschool, we miss all the things we’re doing right! We take so much time looking at what we’re not teaching, what our kids aren’t learning, how behind we are and what difficult lessons lie ahead. Instead, we should be living life today. We need to be looking at what we’ve taught today, what concept our child began to grasp a little bit more today, what accomplishments we’ve succeed in today and what difficult lessons that we’ve covered together today. Tomorrow will come too soon. We have to live today, even on the frustrating homeschool days. Otherwise one day we’ll be looking back and realize that we wished for tomorrow to come quickly one too many times.
I hope that the next time that you encounter a frustrating homeschool day that you will not spend hours trying to figure out the why behind the difficulties like I have in the past. I hope that you remember that you are not alone and that every homeschool mom has frustrating homeschool days. There are no perfect homeschool days, some are just better than others. Just like anyone else’s life has good days and bad days, so do homeschool families.
I’d love to have you share your truth about frustrating homeschool days with me in the comments…
