Earlier this year, I tried several different times to do a “Day in the Life” post because I love reading these kind of posts on other homeschool blogs. I kept putting it off though – partly because every day is so different from the last and partly because I’m afraid that people will judge me because the kids aren’t memorizing the periodic tables or writing their third concerto. I’ve read your blogs, people. Your kids are superheroes. Mine have trouble finding matching socks.

I finally managed to scratch this out shortly after my husband finished his parental leave, when Forest was about six months old and I was getting used to being with the three kids on my own. I’m not sure why the post was never published, but I came across it when I was updating my blog and figured I should share it.

I picked a Monday to feature because Mondays are my favourite day of the week. I find that I’m refreshed from the weekend and I’m excited to start learning with my kids. Tuesdays are good too but then on Wednesdays we visit with friends and family and on Thursdays I lose steam and start to wonder if I’m jeopardizing the girls’ futures and by Friday I’m seriously considering public school. It’s good to have a consistent weekly routine, right?

So here we go…

Goals for a random Spring Monday

✓ Math: Games to Learn Math Facts from RightStart 
✕ Copywork: Lesson 16 from Pictures in Cursive
✓ History: Chapter 3 of A Viking Adventure
✓ Literature: Finish Chapter 16 of A Little Princess
✓ Life Skills: Bake Bread, Clean Bathroom with the girls
✕ Nature Study: Readaloud from a Nature Reader, start seeds

Today, I woke up at 5:30 to make sure my husband got out the door in time for work. It’s his first day shift since he’s gone back from parental leave and I was nervous that he’d sleep through his alarm. I couldn’t fall asleep after that so I laid in bed and daydreamed and browsed Facebook and watched my kids sleep and prayed for people that I know and love.

The baby woke up around 7:00 so we spent the next half hour make faces at each other. Well, I made faces and he just smiled with varying degrees of dimple depth. He’s a one-trick pony.

At 7:30 I decide that there is no chance I’m going to fall back asleep, especially with a six month old that keeps stabbing his pointy nails in my face. After I change his diaper, we wander off to the kitchen so I can make tea. At this point I decide that I should finally do my “day in the life” blog post since it’s going to be an “average day”.

8:00: River walks into the kitchen with a huge grin and announces that she’s been awake for hours. Sure. Then she asks if we can watch the Roar, the music video by Katy Perry. I’m immediately embarrassed that I’ll have to include this detail in my blog post. It’s likely the only music video that my kids have ever seen and the only Katy Perry song I know. We’re normally much cooler than that. Or is Katy Perry cool? I have no idea. Honestly, we usually just listen to classical.

While River watches her video (twice), I start my morning routine, which loosely consists of making tea, loading or unloading the dishwasher, starting a load of laundry, and cleaning up the kitchen floors and counters.

Rivers tells me that she’d like to write a book for her cousin in New York and gets to work. It’s going to be completely written in rhyme, she tells me. This could take a few days.

Harbour kind of wanders in and says hello. She’s confused when I tell her that Daddy isn’t home and she goes downstairs to check that I’m not lying. Once there, she is quickly distracted by our vast collection of LEGO and doesn’t return until breakfast time.

8:30 – I start cooking up some steel cut oats for breakfast and clean up the counters so that we can bake bread. At 9:00, we eat the oatmeal and at 9:30 we start school by kneading some dough.

I love kneading dough. It is exhausting though, so I decide to count this as Phys Ed as well as Life Skills. Today is the third time we’ve made bread and I’m not sure who enjoys it more – River or me. We split the dough into two and knead it together while we quietly look out the kitchen window, commenting a bit on the buds growing on the trees and the house sparrows that live in a little nook of my neighbours’ house, right outside our window.

We leave the dough to rise and then head off to the bedroom. River begs me to finish off a chapter of A Little Princess but I decide that we need to do a History reading first. We read a short chapter of The Viking Adventure and I ask River to narrate it back to me.

(Narration is used extensively in a Charlotte Mason education – it essentially means that I read to my daughter and then ask her to tell me what I just read. I’m always blown away with the amount of detail she can recite, even when I’m positive that she’s not paying attention at all. She often uses voices and gets swept up in the story as she tells it back to me.)

Today River works on a cross stitch project as she listens to the story. She just started cross stitching yesterday and seems to be growing more confident. I hope she doesn’t get bored – so far, she has a low boredom threshold for the Handiwork projects that I love.

After 15 minutes or so, we finish the History reading and start reading A Little Princess (Literature) while Forest nurses in my lap. We’re only a few chapters into the book and the story is exciting. When we finish off the chapter, River begs me to start another chapter but at this point I’m getting tired because I’ve been up since the crack of dawn. Forest has fallen asleep so I pull up the audiobook recording on Libravox and we listen to the next chapter together. River works on her cross stitch and I work on mending a pair of jeans that are full of holes.

Once the chapter is finished, we return to the kitchen to punch down the dough. Then we shape it into loaves and let it rise again. River goes off to play with Harbour.

Forest soon wakes up and starts to fuss. Ugh. A short nap. I decide to take a shower while the two girls are occupied and I cram the playpen into the bathroom and stick the baby inside.

Once I climb in the shower, Forest immediately starts to cry. I sing to him the only song that comes to mind, which is, of course, Roar by Katy Perry. Harbour wanders in, because children are inexplicably drawn to closed bathroom doors. She announces that she needs a bath right away so I promise to be quick. I get out as soon as I can but of course by that point she’s lost interest.

Once I’m dried off and dressed, I offer to play a Math card game with River because I’m concerned that she’s not recalling basic math facts as well as she used to and I want her to practice. We choose Go to the Dump, which is a game by RightStart math. Go to the Dump is just Go Fish, but instead of finding pairs, we find numbers that add up to 10.

It’s 12:30 now and the bread is done. I know we’re supposed to wait for the bread to cool down but we’re hungry and it smells good. I cut in immediately and we eat half a loaf.

After we’ve eaten, it’s 1:00 and I decide that I’m ready for our quiet time. For some reason, this sets River off. She doesn’t want a quiet time all by herself. She’s bored. Everything is boring. Reading is boring. Playing is boring. Colouring is boring. I finally convince her to work on the book for her cousin while she listens to Sparkle Stories on the iPhone.

We just started quiet times on Friday so this is only our second one. I need them. I want to see if I can cope better in the evenings if I have a break at some point during the day. My hope is that Forest will eventually nap at this time too. Today I am lucky, he naps and I am able to keep my eyes closed for 30 minutes. Harbour spends a good portion of that time trying to pry my eyes open with her fingers.

Finally I get up. It is now 2:00 and I ask if anyone wants to go outside. The girls are enthusiastic, so I start to get Forest dressed and tell the girls to get themselves ready. River suddenly turns on me, angrily yelling that I’m a grouch. Which is kind of funny because I haven’t lost my temper at all today. I was a total zen master. I’m kind of at a loss on what to do. Clearly my kids need to get outside but I decide that I need to deal with this attitude first. River gets a time out.

Once the time out is finished, we move outside for Nature Study. It takes forever and a day to get the kids dressed and even though they are excited to go out into the yard, I still have to bribe them with a chocolate to actually get them out the door. Seriously, why is leaving the house so hard???

When we get outside, it is raining a tiny bit but not enough to worry about. We happily walk/skip/run to the end of our street, which is a long way for Harbour’s little legs. On the way, River finds a snail shell and gives it to Harbour. We spend the rest of our trip looking for more snail shells.

When we get home, Harbour buries the shell in a bit of leftover snow and then digs it up and again, and then buries it in the snow and digs it up again. River and I look through the old leaves for signs of spring growth. For some reason River, my nature girl, suddenly goes inside but Harbour, my nature hater, stays out for another 20 minutes until her hands were too cold to dig any more. This gives me such hope for the summer.

We come inside and find River playing with some dolls. Harbour tries to join in but River wants time to herself, alone in her room. “Well, that’s what quiet time is for. So that we each have time to ourselves everyday,” I explain.

“Can we do quiet time again now?” she asks. Right.

I tell her that I have something even better. It’s 4:00 and I want to squeeze in our daily clean, another new thing we’re trying. “We’re going to clean the bathroom” I say dramatically. She rolls her eyes.

I go to the kitchen and fill a bottle with vinegar, water and a few drops of lavender. Then I fill a bowl with baking soda and drag the girls to the bathroom. Because can anyone resist fizzy bubbles, or as I think of it, science? My family certainly can’t. The two girls happily took turns sprinkling baking soda and spraying vinegar while Forest cries bloody murder in his playpen beside us. Fine. I pick him up and we all scrub the counter, sink and bathtub. The girls clean the mirror and then I put Forest down in the Exercauser and I clean the toilet while he screams some more. I tell the girls that it’s time to take a break because I need to calm him down.

While I nurse him and he bites me, the girls tried to play Go to the Dump themselves, which doesn’t really work at all because Harbour is way too young for the game. I decide to do supper a bit early and I suggest toasted waffles. The girls are confused – what are those?! It’s yesterday’s leftover waffles, reheated in the toaster. OK, it’s hard to make that sound good but it’s a novelty and they both agree.

2.7 minutes later, dinner is on the table. Booyah.

After dinner, the girls play until it’s time for River’s kids club. We walk her there and, later, we walk back to pick her up. At this point, it’s past everyone’s bedtime and I unceremoniously put them in bed. Because I. am. done.

These days, half a year later, our days have a bit more structure and and a bit more school work and a bit less Katy Perry. But back in the early days of spring, our days were intentionally light on lessons because I knew that we had to be flexible as we adjusted to my husband back at work and our baby. I figured that as long as we did some reading and some math each day, we would be okay. After all, no one has ever been turned away from university because they didn’t learn the parts of a flower in grade two, right? Meh. I’ll have to remember to delete this post when River fills out her first university application.

If you’ve got a “day in the life” post on your blog, please be sure to link it below in the comments. I love seeing how different families do school! 

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