A Little Rebellion Every Now & Then

After approximately a year of trying to use the “open” upstairs room as a combined schoolroom/office for me, we’ve thrown in the towel.

While the plan was a good one, it failed to consider one very important factor. Namely, Jacob. He’s not good at playing alone, and putting him in the playroom adjacent only result in tears and screams. I would attempt to teach or read over the noise.

The end result of that was not doing school at all.

Then I merely brought the books down and went back to doing much of our work at the kitchen table. The problems with that, however, were exactly the same as they had been before we moved the schoolbooks up the stairs. I had school papers and books on the table at mealtimes, I had them taking up room on the counter and barstools, and I even had them on Sam’s chair, still, at dinnertime. Worse, the chaos of it all meant that both of us were in a hurry to get school done quickly, ignoring all subjects I could possibly consider non-essential.

Now we’re finally doing what I initially wanted to do when we moved into the house. For whatever reason, I couldn’t see how doing school in the sunroom could possibly work. Now I feel like it’s the only thing that possibly can.

I made a list last week of all that had to be done, from the very obvious (move desk to sunroom) to the not as obvious. The list is not complete, but it’s complete enough that with some work tonight and tomorrow, we should be able to do school in the sunroom beginning on Monday.

Why the sunroom? The sunroom has Jacob’s water table, which will keep him entertained. The sunroom is just off the dining room and kitchen, which will let me give Gillian an assignment and then go to wash breakfast dishes, prepare lunch, or finish other kitchen chores. The sunroom also has the easel, which has a chalkboard on the reverse side, which will also keep Jacob entertained. Will it be easy to keep Jacob entertained, even with those factors? No. We’re going to work on his ability to play by himself, as well. (The goal is thirty minutes by September, plus Fridays I’ll be taking him to the Y for Parents’ Day Out from 9am to 1pm, at least some of the time.)

The peculiar form of masochism, however, is that this involves moving books. The homeschooling books had completely taken over a small, three-shelf bookcase in the office, as well as two shelves of tall, five-shelf bookcase. The tall, six-shelf bookcase in the sunroom held yearbooks (mine as well as Sam’s), one double-shelved row of children’s books, three plus rows of pregnancy, birth, and parenting books, as well as art supplies, API materials, LLL materials, and ALACE materials.

No, I’m still not sure where everything is going to be once we’re done moving books.

The good news is that I should have more than adequate shelf space for the homeschooling books, especially since I commandeered the drop-leaf dining table that acts as a sofa table in the sunroom. I made it into a shelf with bookends.

I still think this is all a form of masochism.