2002-05-22-10:44 p.m.

I've developed a new skill: I can help a kid with his math and take a nap at the same time.

I get SO SLEEPY after lunch, and if we are not finished with schoolwork by then, it's a bad thing. But one day I got Becky to bring her math and sit on the bed beside me while I "closed my eyes" and I found that there's this little zone I can go to where I'm really pretty much sleeping, but I can still do non-creative thinking and teaching. I sleep, answer a question, then go back to that zone until my brain is needed again. When you homeschool you figure out things like that. It's a matter of survival.

Another thing you do a lot when you homeschool is heap a lot of guilt upon yourself because you just know your children can't possibly be learning enough. Can they? And then something like this happens:

I've been getting sick of doing workbooks and I know the kids are sick of them. I want to just take them all to a museum and let them roam around and learn by touching and looking and roaming from exhibit to exhibit, but I just can't do that right now. Sometimes when I feel like that I can just do something a little different and it helps. So the past few mornings I've been asking Daniel what he wants to listen to on the stereo.

The first day he wanted Moonlight Sonata and Fur Elise. How cool is that? I asked him who wrote them and he gave me this LOOK, like, how dumb do you think I am? Today he wanted The Magic Flute. He knew that one, too, and when that was over Beethoven started again. He said, hey, why'd you play Beethoven again? I told him The Magic Flute was the last song on the CD. Oh, he says, and I'm just beaming because he KNEW when it changed from Mozart to Beethoven! Later he said, I guess Beethoven really liked Elise, huh?

I'll bet not everybody gets to have conversations like that with her son very often. I'm very lucky. Very happy. Not quite so guilt-ridden today. I think I'll celebrate with a nap. *S*

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