When an all day time out is just necessary

When my sweet rooster just wants to start off in a daydream, dragging his feet at any idea to put paper to pencil, what is there to do?

I am going to bore it out of him. I love what Art Robinson said about letting a reluctant child sit in their seat for as long as it takes each day. It renews me, when my son just refuses. If it gets too bad, I send him to bed. I hope he goes to sleep, but mostly he forces himself to stay awake.

Reasoning? I tried telling him that his attitude is his only obstacle.

Punish it out of him.

Motivate him?

There will be a week here and there, that nothing is going right with him.  He just looses it.  Most of the time it is just exhaustion.  We might spend a few days of him going back and forth to bed and then we are done for a few weeks.  And then we start again.

It mostly goes he is stubbornly defiant and reluctant.  I send him to bed.

About 20 minutes goes by, he will ask to come out.  I let him out and he is told to do his work.  he will stare blankly at it.  I wait about 15 minutes and send him back.

about an hour will go by and he will ask again.  We will go through the same drama and he will be sent back.

Now this is when we begin the cycle of coming and going.  Usually after the third time, I make him stay until dad gets home.  sometimes I tell him 2 hours, I am always just in the hope that he will fall a sleep.

Once he gets about an hour of some afternoon ZZZZZZZZzzzzzzs.  He will usually come in sit down and do some work. Usually.

He is easy to pick out when he is tired.  The entire house will be screaming. He has those kind of magic powers.

This is what I can sometimes find him doing during his I will sit in bed days.

On days that it will be no use to sleep, I will typically bring his work to the room and I will work with him 20 minutes at a time through out the day.  Doing this, works out very well.

Having a Place that Feels like Home

Today, I was really hit with a sense of thankfulness.  As, a child in the early eighties and late seventies, I was the only kid in class that had parents that were not married.  Now, by late elementary it was sadly soon becoming the norm.  As a child, I never understood why the kids were so upset and crushed as their parents divorced. I always chalked it up, that because my parents were always separated I did not know anything else. So I was the blessed broken home kid.

Well, 35 years and a fried egg sandwich later, God presents the epiphany of the gift I has given to protect me, I had a home.  More like I had a sense of home.  My sense of home was with my grandparents.

Grandpa and I

My situation was the fact that my mom and I lived with her parents and my dad had remarried and was progressing with his family.  For reasons I do not comprehend, but lean heavily towards the fact that I was seen more as an commodity of my mothers, I was not allowed to live under my father's headship in his home.  In my entire life as a child, it was my father's house that resembled a home, never my mother's house.

In the life of uncertainty, especially from a baby to a tween, I had a safe, dependable place and that was with my grandparents.  In a life with a single mom, it was my grandpa that got me ready for school and it was him who I came home to.  He made sure I did my homework.  It was also him, who threw me in the pool first thing in the morning when I had a crabby attitude.  Note to self, should get a pool.  It was my grandma and grandpa that I ate dinner with and learned to have manners at the table.  It was the two of them, that I crawled between when I couldn't sleep at night.  It is with them, that I keep all of my normal everyday life memories with.

Sadly, even though it was my mother who I had custody with, she is not in any part of my before tween years memories of life.  In fact, the very few memories I have with her, are most times hurtful and isolated pain. Well, anyway.

What I realized today was that my grandparents did an amazing job protecting me from the ugliness of broken homes.  The ugliness of parents try to upper hand each other.  I was protected.  I never once had a thought that I didn't have a home, especially while I was sorting out the emotions that I did not have a sense of home at either parent's house, I always had a refuge to run to, my grandma and grandpa.

Today, as a parent, I am thankful for the parenting model I received from them.  They gave me a great foundation to be a parent and to make a home.  They were not always perfect, but they were perfect for my needs at the time. I am so glad that they let the Lord lead them to be what I needed them to be.

Changing mom's attitude: Preference versus problem

With coming to terms with my hulk issues, I have been spending the last month in prayer and my eyes open to change. Do I want my kids to look back in disgust with the way I handled things or do I want them to look back at their childhood and cherish our time together. I try to consider this when I get overwhelmed.

Now I have actively gone 9 days without yelling. Not that raising your voice is wrong, but it becomes useless when that is how you speak, squawk, all the time. I had a friend, a great friend indeed, point out that I was operating at a level 3 all the time. Embarrassingly enough, I didn't even recognize it. It had so slowly crept into my nature that I didn't even know it was there. And the embarrassing part was that I can't stand people who act this way. No wonder why I was so frustrated.

So 9 days is huge when you realize this is all I did, all day long. On this journey, I have been paying attention to the triggers that would set me off to yell. I like calling the triggers, because, we'll I don't know, I could explode? The biggest culprit I found were these little things that would irritate me to no end. As I began identifying them, I realized that I wasn't always yelling toward my blessed children because they were doing WRONG, it was more that it was something I preferred not done.

Hmm, a good example. Of course I tell myself all the time, "preference or problem?" To keep me in check. Let see the way the stuff gets put away in the utensil drawer for cooking. Is it in there? Yes. Is it useable? Yes. Does the drawer closed? Yes. Did I have to bend over the dishwasher to empty it and put it ALL away? Well, no. Is this really a problem or is it a preference? Hmm, guess just a preference.

After giving this a lot of thought, I realized I was after my kids about itty bitty not important nick picky stuff and I was ashamed. Well not at first, I was still deep breathing and talking to myself that I need to get over myself and my selfish demands that could ruin a lovely day because I want to let everyone know I didn't like this and never, ever do it again. Oh my, what a beast I could be. Worst was how bad it made me feel, my agitation making my blood pump harder, agitation moved to irritability, and then to anger and bitterness.

Yike!

So my husband and have kept each other in check and prayed to Jesus to lead us by the hand like children. We have made bigger progress than I would have expected. I have had some real tender moments with my children individually this last week that haven't been available before.

Our journey into alpha omega lifepac curriculum

So I ended Easter Sunday with a bang of a meltdown. Not meaning to, the Hulk came out and began a screaming nightmare on the entire family. See it all of sudden hit me that none of our curriculums have been working and what really brought this to an inferno boiling point is the fact that my deranged "rest of the world does it better" thinking is, that we must be done with this years education at the end of May. Mix this with the fact that somewhere in December final nesting kicked in with the pregnancy and I magically threw out two months of schooling. Then the fact that I never submitted an homeschool portfolio for the year and my former engineer brain is envisioning the binders of engineers reports that would be submitted for a permit. All this equalled an unfair tyrant explosion onto my entire family.

I allowed fear to make me a hulk and expected everyone to take responsibility in it, yikes, how selfish of me. The real source of my problem is that the curriculum we intended to use at the beginning just did not work. Then the worst was that it really stopped working for us in mid October (we start in September for the "new" year), but we floundered with it until the first of the year. At the first of the year I found the Robinson curriculum and fell in love with the entire concept. The kids could teach themselves, once they learned to read. Well, love the Robinson (RC) curriculum, especially for the price, but it is not something that I can employment yet. For the price of $100, I did obtain the hundreds of electronic books for my home library.

As for RC, I consider it an awesome tool. The biggest thing I learned from it, is my teaching style and ability. With the things that need to be done with the five kids ranging from 8 years old to 3 months, I do not have the luxury of time and energy to teach every one everything, one spoon at a time.

So as the public school masses are finishing up their school year, we are not yet half way done. Well, after my bossy fit to my children I started an all out assault on a better curriculum. I have tried several things and found some great tools, but they did not fit our needs. Our list:

> rod and staff curriculum - math, reading, and English 1 st and 2 nd. Now this is what we originally started with. The math was good but became overwhelming to my second grader. I liked the simplicity of, but I think it drowned my children with the mastery work of the math. Reading was good , but here again, when you have slow workers the task becomes gigantic and they shut down on me

> plaid phonics by modern curriculum press- 1st and 2nd. I liked it and of all our things this lasted the longest. I only had the workbooks and did not have teacher manuals. In the end it began to feel like busy work.

> spelling workout. I liked it a lot, but it was too easy again to go through the motions without the reverent ion of proper spelling rules.

> writing with ease level 1 & 2- hm try to deliver this 2 separate times was doomed to fail with my routine. I also had the grammar one at 2 levels, yep we couldn't always fit it in and it too fell away.

> story of the world - love it, we might actually pick this one back up when we get things in a better balance. My children learned a lot. Not sure if I will do any of the worksheets, since I use them as a crutch and stop engaging the learning experience. My children from the first chapter were so encompassed in the story and their need for food that the family would eat lizards, well, my children and their rock stomachs had to give it a try, yuk! Well if a book could get my children to eat lizards raw, it says something about the books, they were wanting to live it out.

> mammoth math- must say I do like it. I used it just for a month. If I didn't go for the entire grade set on lifepac, I would have stayed with it. The Worm (2 nd grade) actually began to see math in the mental form to perform addition and subtraction with ease. The worm's change in attitude is amazing.

>life of Fred - love the book, but I have a hard time using it as a core lesson. I would consider it enjoyable math reading that you would use the pencil and paper. We grasped bigger concepts thanks to it and it also helped me to better talk math to my children. We might still use it as an enjoyable enrichment activity.

> logic of English - cant say enough about it. Loved it, still using it somewhat as a reference. I would enjoy going through the lessons myself, to fill in any errors. With the easy to learn spelling rules, we finally got my husband to stop saying cayenne pepper with a soft c. Yeah for my ears. I took out her reference sheet for phonograms and spelling rules and we use it with our lifePAC spelling list.

>logic of English cursive -completely awesome. Best way to teach cursive, it even had my 5 year old attempting handwriting, my 7 yr old began gaining confidence. We use this as our foundation for learning the appropriate formation of letters.

> science was an awesome Evan Moore plant thing with way to many printable sheets. Nice but again, I worksheet my kids to death that it failed.

That is a ton of materials to go through in a single year for just 2nd and 1st grade, and yet I had no idea where they were and keeping them progressing, honestly, I felt like we spent the last 3 months in a holding pattern. Well, a few things came to light in my homeschool heart.

1. My kids have a preference to learning in a specific style, but if it is not conducive to moms other million responsibilities or moms natural thinking and amount of sleep available, it is going to fail.

2. I am a cover to cover kind of mom. I know sounds way to lame, but I don,t have the mental energy to think on my own, I need to follow a path provided that my children and I can walk hand and hand together. Not me pulling them like a stubborn donkey, and in some case a curriculum that would allow them to drag me through it.

3. I need a chapter at a time glance, not the entire year. I like programs that spilt the books up to little books versus my kids and I looking at a huge text thinking will I ever get done with this.

4. Feeling like we are by the seat of our mental pants and space limited and energy deprived, I need something thAt doesn't require me to chase down a ton of books, and to have huge teacher manuals, supplements. I just do not have the space.

5. I wanted something we could jump into mid year. And would give me the ability to grade and give assessments.

With these factors and a few others I began doing my research. I read probably several hundred reviews, and I began pointing towards lifepac, even though they have a lot of mixed reviews about their effectiveness and also being a subject behind and taking no time to complete. With all those factors I came to my own conclusion, that I think the lifepac starts of slow and easy until 3rd grade. Makes since building up confidence and keep points before asking them to work very independent. In reviewing the reviews I gathered that there are a ton of projects and if you just focus on the work text and do not review and include the teacher manual, then yes you could fly through it and miss the depth,

There is not clear perfect curriculum, but I needed to find something that would keep me from leaving my children behind academically and would not ouch of the edge to Hulkhood. The part I liked was that you can assess the kids and fit them in to not just a grade but a book to. So I reviewed their skills and realized worm, should start of in book 5 of second grade, which is really right were we are in instruction. Sadly I seen were I have fail the Rooster, I needed to place him in just book 2. I think I could have pushed him above, but we are in need of confidence building and self discipline for sitting and working on Our work. I did not want to take on that task while teaching completely new concepts.

I bought the entire core curriculum for second and first. This is the first time I bought an entire grade of a complete curriculum for my kids since I flunked out of Abeka k4 program with Worm. I did get excited about all the pretty boxes, for some reason they make me happy.

I plan to come back and report my findings as I start this travel. Mostly because I have not found a lot about any families that are actually using then.

I will NOT be the HULK!

I am tired.  I am sleep deprived.  I have 5 kids.  I home school.  I live in a tiny house with 7 people. I have a newborn baby.  I have a house I don't like.  I have a yard without a fence.  I have a monkey of a 2 year old that is my ever constant demise.  I can go blah, blah, blah of excuses.  But what it comes down to, I am not acting like a mom should.

I am tired.  When I have a stress trigger pulled, I yell and have a temper tantrum like the worst of an ill behaved 3 year old. I am ashamed and yet, I haven't stopped it. I do apologize is my only redeeming quality.

I feel like I am missing some key important parenting tools in my tool box.  Unfortunately, I have some really bad ones that I haven't been able to stop from using.  The HULK tool.  I was handed the Hulk tool for my tool box from my own mom.  The Hulk tool resembles flying off the handle over every little thing.  Shaming.  Looking to always find a guilty party to blame with the constant who did this yell. Threats, threats, threats of doing some over the top things for not pleasing me.  Distracted while interacting.  My triggers go off and I turn into a monster.  I really think in my childish fits, I could flip a car!

I know that if I was not so exhausted, I wouldn't come close to using or considering the Hulk tool.  In fact, up until a year or two ago, I did not even know I owned it.  Well, 5 children in 8 years with a husband over working himself to feed and roof the clan, well I just got tired.  And when I mean tired, I mean not a sense left in me.  In the past few years, I have had passing by glimpses of my once vibrant self, but shortly later I would find myself in the trials of morning sickness.  I wouldn't take a day back, if it meant not having a single one of my blessed children.

But I am tired and I act like a monster.  Head down in shame, I am even known for throwing things.  Hmmm, great thing I want to teach my children.

First step is acknowledging it!  So my mantra is, "Lord, please do not let me be the Hulk" when I begin getting aggravated   At this time I might not be able to get my energy back and I might not get the stress triggers to go either, but I can pray that I can react in a more nurturing way than an aggressive child like manner.  Will you pray for me too?

~trish, a recovering HULK parent tool user!