Self-Discovery

So, as most folks who read my blog know, my family has decided that we are going the homeschool route. Trent will be kindergarten age at the end of this month. Pretty scary for me. It shouldn't be too hard though. We've been doing home preschool all along and to be honest there really isn't that much difference between kindergarten and preschool. We'll just have a more formal curriculum this year, is all. 

One of the biggest reasons that we decided to homeschool is because I wanted to be able to travel with the kids. However, after the past couple of years of the preschool "trial run" (I've been thinking of preschool as practice for once we actually start grade school) I'm starting to think that traveling won't be such a great idea. The kids and I have been travelling quite a bit, as most of my friends in the NoVA area know. I've discovered just how hard it is for me to get back into the routine of things after we have taken one of our trips. It's not the kids that have the problem with travelling. Heck, I don't have a problem with travelling. I have a problem with how long it takes me to "get my act together" after we have been on a long trip. 

We can be gone anywhere from two weeks, to a month and a half. It seems the longer the trip, the longer and harder it is for me to get back into my routine. We got back from an unplanned three-week trip to New York on the last day of June. I STILL am not unpacked. My house is a wreck. I find motivating myself to do much of anything a major challenge. Looking at the clutter and mess makes me want to crawl into my bed and pretend it doesn't exist. That doesn't work of course, it just makes matters worse. 

When I started staying home, I realized I would really have to force myself to keep house. I'm sort of an all or nothing person. When I clean, I am on a furious cleaning frenzy and won't stop until I fall from exhaustion (only a slight exaggeration). When I am in a lazy mood... Well, let's just say it's hard to get me out of the funk I find myself in if I let that go on too long. Once I stopped working, I kept finding myself in this cycle of working too hard and then crashing for three or four days. 

So, I then tried making sure that I did a certain amount everyday.This of course backfires on me, too. When I try to force myself to do things, there's a part of me that just shuts down. All I want to do is lay around in bed, or watch tv, or play a video game, or spend hours on the internet. I sort of turn it into a game with myself. The rules are as follows:

- Tell myself to do one household chore. Let's say the laundry in this instance.

- Make half-hearted attempts at doing said chore. In this case, moving laundry from the dryer to a basket and think about folding it.

- Continue to think about folding it all day. 

- Repeat the following day.

- Possibly repeat for a third day in a row to an entire week later.

- Find something else to occupy time. Internet, watching a movie with the kids, doing an activity with the kids, etc.

- At this point, I have done the half-hearted attempts with many loads of laundry and there is now a small mountain of clothes that needs to be folded.

Now repeat this for all of my household chores and... SIGH!

I find myself caught trying to find the proper balance of doing enough to make sure it doesn't get worse and knowing when to let myself have some down time. It's hard trying to figure that out. What I have realized I can do is trick myself. I don't like to do whatever it is I "should" be doing. So, I "should" be doing the dishes. Instead of doing the dishes, normally I would find something else to occupy my time, like spending hours on Reddit or Pinterest. If I'm feeling motivated enough I will avoid doing that and spend my time doing a chore that doesn't feel as necessary to me. This could be anything from scrubbing crayon marks off the walls to turning the compost in the backyard. Here's how a typical in my mind conversation goes:

OCD House Must Be Clean Me: Self, you really need to make sure those dishes are clean! Look there are only a few plates in the sink right now. If you wash them now, they won't be adding to the pile later when you make dinner!

 

Avoiding All Responsibilities Me: But I hate washing dishes. Besides there's not that much there, and look! There's laundry that needs to be folded!

 

OCD House Must Be Clean Me: Oh, alright! We really do need to take care of those dishes at some point today, though!

 

Avoiding All Responsibilities Me: Alright! Got out of doing the dishes!

Of course the downside to this is that I then end up with a huge pile of dishes, but at least I'm doing something! The idea is that if I can convince procrastinating side to do this enough times, the house will start looking good. When the house looks good, I get more motivated to keep it clean because I feel good about it! Once I feel good about it, it's easier to keep up with my normal chores and schedules!

The big problem is that once that habit is broken by, say, a month long trip, it takes me a long time to get back to that point again. So, I guess what I'm really trying to explain here is that if I realistically want to homeschool my children I cannot be doing all of the travelling I had originally envisioned us doing. I need a certain amount of routine and order to make it happen and travelling throws too much of monkey wrench in the works. 

Of course, we can always do school during the Summer to accomodate when we travel during the rest of the year, too. This will probably end up happening next year because I have several trips planned during the coming school year that I am simply NOT missing out on.