Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday morning I wake up at 7:00, eat breakfast with my family (if it happens in time!), hear about the plans and projects for the day, and then drive away in the blue Eagle Vision that Mom and Dad drove away from their wedding in 1996.
It feels strange to be away from the home life. It still feels strange to hold a job out of the house. It hardly feels like a job.
I drive for 56 minutes and 30 seconds, listening to the radio and drinking in the morning sunshine over the beautiful Manitoba Prairie. It is a pleasant drive.
At 9:00 I pull into a familiar driveway in a homey small town. There is always some small child or other to greet me when I come in the door and put down my satchel of schoolbooks. There are always nine children with some new story or joke to tell me when I come in and put on my apron and begin to load the dishwasher. There are always dishes.
At 9:30 I call to the kids: "9:30 jobs guys!", and they know what to do - we have been on the same job schedule all summer. I should really switch it up soon.
It usually takes some (or a lot) of coaxing before the dining room is cleared and wiped and swept, the bathrooms are cleaned, and the dishwasher and laundry machines are running.
How do the mothers do it every single day?
Now that it is school season again I think we will try to do our copywork at the table before lunch prep time. They love doing their copywork - and they're fast at it, too.
11:00 means it's time to get lunch ready. I have so many eager voices clamoring to be "Master Chef" that I finally wrote down a rotation so we always knew whose turn it was. Makes it simpler.
Agreeing on a menu is sometimes a to-do. Picky eaters love to cook. What they like, that is.
I always have so many helpers. I've discovered that one of my favourite questions to be asked is, "Where do I put this?".
After I have cleaned up lunch (and run that trusty dishwasher again!), it is school time - usually around 1:00. The kids actually still have mixed feelings about school.
I love to do it outside in the backyard. The kids don't really care for bugs. Or cold. Or heat.
I have had to make many rules - like the 'no interruption policy', and 'you can sit on your brother but only if neither of you makes any noise doing it'.
We always read a poem first, and race to calculate the poet's lifetime. Then we read a little science (we studied every single element in the periodic table last school year!), and a little math, and a chapter of Genesis. The dessert at the end is always a chapter book - right now we are on Watership Down by Richard Adams. There have been some enraptured silences over it, which is all I'll ever need for encouragement.
After school is done we have found lots of projects to do. The quinzee was fun in the wintertime.
I think I was the one who had the most enthusiasm about the garden. We had a pretty good crop of peas, and way too many cherry tomatoes. Picky eaters.
We dug up the potatoes and ate them for lunch one day when one of the kids wanted scalloped potatoes for their birthday lunch. They were delicious.
Before I go I always try to put a little supper in the oven, and do a little reading lesson where it's wanted.
And they have come to visit me a few times.
Good times.
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