I chose the first grade package for my daughter Hazel. Unexpectedly, every time we settled on the couch to read about history or study the Bible, her brother Jubal was on the other side of me. He would ask the most pertinent questions and I soon realized that I was homeschooling him too.
The following was my day on Friday, January 23rd with some notations as what a more "normal" day would entail.
6:45 a.m. The baby in my closet (yes, you read that correctly) woke up and was ready eat. In an ideal world I would get up at the same time every morning and have productive time to myself. In my real world with two children who still get up frequently at night, I get up when the baby gets up. I struggle with serious crankiness if I don't get a good block of sleep, so I get up anywhere between 6 a.m. and 8 a.m. depending on how the previous night went and when Granville wakes up.
I nurse the baby, make my bed, wash my face, put on the same clothes I wore the day before and wipe out my bathroom sink and toilet. I do not enjoy cleaning the bathrooms and would previously let them go so long that my husband would finally clean them. Since August, I've been proactively wiping down my sink and "swishing" my toilet when I get up. Now I never have to deal with bathroom horror because it doesn't have time to get that bad. (Thanks for the idea FlyLady.) Jubal hears Granville burbling in my room and gets up to see him sometime while I'm doing all of this. I move to the laundry room where I start one load of laundry. Both my husband and I try to wear our outer clothes as long as possible (unless they get dirty, of course!). It really does lower the laundry requirements and we get away with only doing five loads of laundry each week. I generally do one load per week day. I wipe down our main bathroom and head to the kitchen.
7:30 a.m. Since we started homeschooling, I wanted to have better breakfasts than cereal every day because I don't have to put my daughter on an early bus anymore. I have about ten breakfast meals that I cycle through. Some are easy and some are more involved, so I can choose based on what we have going on each day. Thankfully, we had breakfast for dinner on Thursday night so I still have pancakes in the refrigerator. I clean out the dish drainer, make my tea, get out meat to defrost for our dinner, set out vitamins and our pancakes and bananas. The boys and I eat, but Hazel still isn't up.
