When homeschooling is attending the school of LIFE
We had a new roof installed on Monday and Tuesday. Turns out that some of the materials they used on Monday had a very strong chemical odor, and with my extremely sensitive sense of smell, I couldn't stand being in the house more than an hour, and I worried it may not be safe. We had been in and out all evening, so we didn't have this realization until late at night. Kids were already showered/bathed and in their jammies as I started throwing a couple days worth of clothes into a suitcase, and we checked in to a local hotel at 10:30 pm.
To add to the fun, we had a car repair scheduled for Tuesday morning, so my hubby had to leave extra early to drop off the car, and we were down to one car for the rest of the day. That would normally not be a big deal, but under our circumstances, I was forced to drive from the hotel, to our house to check on the smell (really awful), the store (needed flip flops for the pool and my eldest had outgrown last year's pair), back to the hotel to swim and add a second night to our stay, to my hubby's work, back to the house to open all the windows for circulation (which made the house very cold very quickly), to the library so we could eat lunch without freezing, back home to check in with my hubby who had stayed, back to the hotel, to dance class, back home to pick up my hubby because the car was done early (woo-hoo!), to the car garage, then me to church to practice piano while my hubby took my youngest and picked up the oldest, to a restaurant for dinner, back to the house to get a few odds and ends and check on the smell (much improved after the open window time!), back to the hotel. Phew. I know everyone's had days like that and you can empathize!
At one point, I realized that it might be easier if my kids were attending the local school. I would have dropped them off for the day, and I could have run around like a chicken with my head cut off without having to drag them along. But then I realized that even though the day was crazy, they learned about LIFE. They got to see the stuff adults normally block kids from seeing. They got to see #adulting, and I think that's probably more valuable than any formal lesson we could have covered.
How about you? What kinds of circumstances have your kids experienced because they followed you on your day-to-day living? Grocery shopping? Post office? Banking? (Our kids attended the session when we refinanced the house because it was during social distancing and we couldn't get a sitter.) Don't rule out any education you are giving your kids in the School of Life.
Wishing you a happy week of homeschooling - hopefully less chaotic than mine was :)
