Is it homeschooling if you skip as many days as you attempt?

I feel like I’ve run out of excuses. Trip to Missouri (the week before Thanksgiving)…. a couple weeks to adjust to being home…. frustrated with the “curriculum” and lack of measurable progress; scale back to singing days of the week and going over letters, but this sporadically because it feels so insignificant…. Sicknesses. Christmas. New Years.

I’m new to staying home. I don’t have a lot of problem with basic routine; we have set wake, sleep, and mealtimes. I guess I should be thankful for that. I don’t know how people who don’t have any routine cope.

But I’m not used to being the kids all-day, day in day out Teacher, Nurturer, and Play Facilitator. My mom is sometimes able to watch the youngest while I play with the older two, and my mother in law takes all the kids once a week. I feel like such a garbage can for even saying I’m their 24/7 caregiver, because I know a lot of moms don’t have this. I get breaks.

The thing is, I don’t know what to do with the breaks I get. I have a little accounting job that I’m constantly getting behind on because I rely on my mother in law taking the kids to do that work, and it seems like we don’t go more than a couple weeks without an interruption to that. She has friends and family she likes to visit, and she won’t take them when they’re sick (for good reason). For the last month we’ve been sick more than healthy.

I guess I’m just having a hard time since we’ve had so much sickness and the holidays. I’m discouraged. I don’t feel like I’m good for the kids. I cry too much. I lose steam. I let them watch tv simply because I don’t know what else to do. I don’t make plans because I don’t trust myself to carry them out. When I do try to do things, I mess it up somehow. I have cookie dough in the fridge from two different attempts to make cookies. No icing for the sugar cookies. I tried to let the kids play in flour (unrelated to the cookies) and it got all over the garage, and there’s still a mound of gross flour just outside the garage that I’m not sure how to clean up. Our yard looks like a graveyard for toys…I can’t look anywhere without seeing evidence of my many failures.

I don’t have any local friends or hobbies. I don’t even read books anymore. Whine whine whine. Poor me spoiled housewife.

If you’ve read this far, I’m sorry I wasted your time. The update essentially is that I have no idea what I’m doing but I’ll just keep focusing on reading to Joseph (Beatrix Potter these days) and doing letter activities and flash cards. I’m not in any rush for him to learn to read, but given his background he will need support there and is unlikely to just pick it up.

When I started this post I was depressed. I’m not anymore. I’m grateful for a family that loves me. I’m grateful for such amazing, fun children. But mostly I am so grateful that God doesn’t look at me wallowing and say “buck up”. He gets down in the mud with me and out walks with me, all the while telling me about the great laugh we will have over this some day when I see it all pieced together.

But when the kindness of God our Savior and His love for mankind appeared, He saved us, not on the basis of deeds which we have done in righteousness, but according to His mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewing by the Holy Spirit, whom He poured out upon us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that being justified by His grace we would be made heirs according to the hope of eternal life.

Titus 3:4-7

Homeschooling is challenging for me, but I will press on.