Fourth in a series of prose snapshots of a day in my homeschooling life. This is a reflection of an ideal Thursday. An actual Thursday will likely end a lot less clean than this one does. In fact, an actual Thursday frequently ends with the house looking even messier than it did when we started. And starting next week, we have an American Sign Language class on Thursday mornings for six weeks, so our Thursdays are going to look much different than I’ve described here.
Thursday is the day that usually kicks my butt. Not only is it a regular homeschool day, it’s housework day, too.
I get up and exercise as usual, but on my way upstairs I bring the laundry baskets, and after my shower I gather my towels and sweaty clothes and all of the rest of the laundry I can find around the house and sort it, with the help of my children, into the baskets. This involves my son sitting in one of the baskets and laughing as I toss dirty clothes on his head. Then I pretend the laundry basket is a car and motor him down the hallway, stopping and having him de-basket at the top of the stairs. He’d like me to motor him down the stairs, but that’s just not going to happen.
I start a load of laundry, and then we eat breakfast and get started on lessons.
On Thursdays, we do math, flute, Latin, grammar, writing, chemistry, and handwriting, punctuated by my taking clean wet clothes out of the washer and hanging them on drying racks near the boiler and answering for the 78th time all of my son’s questions about how the boiler/hot water heater system works. My daughter and I do our lessons while my son attempts to build his own boiler system out of bath toys in the bathroom sink.
Finally, we eat lunch, do our walk, and read books. Then it’s time to rush around trying to get things picked up and then vacuum before the floor is covered with toys and papers and crayons again. I try to get all of the vacuuming and dusting and straightening done within an hour, but it usually takes me more like two hours to get everything done. By then, it’s just about time to start dinner.
The rest of the evening proceeds as usual, except that Thursday is usually a meeting night for either my spouse or me, leaving the other to do dishes and manage the bedtime routine. We go to bed irrationally excited that the following day is Friday, as though there’s likely to be a respite over the weekend.
Imperfect Happiness 