As a family, we have now tried homeschooling, public school, and private school. That puts me in a perfect position to compare all three options.

In prior posts I gave 10 reasons to use public school and 20 reasons to homeschool. In that analysis, homeschooling won not because there were more reasons, but because those 20 reasons mean more to me than the 10 reasons in support of public school (which largely apply to private school, too).

Why I didn’t homeschool last fall

Disclaimer: It wasn’t really by choice. In all of my analyses, homeschooling subjectively wins.

Our kids went to private school for nearly half of the 2024-2025 school year because we did not find a suitable nanny. Since I started working full time from home in late 2023, we needed a nanny to homeschool. I wouldn’t quite say my job is essential, but it greatly reduces our financial stress.

The transition to private school was very hard for me, which I kind of expected after our brief experience with public school last fall. I knew that sending our kids to school took lot of extra work outside of school hours to facilitate my kids’ attendance, so I anticipated being tired for the first few weeks. The problem is that it didn’t abate. I still struggled to get enough sleep alongside all of my other obligations nearly three months in.

That led me to objectively assess (as much as I can) the time and money each schooling option takes. How much time and money could we save (or not) by homeschooling?

The results surprised me.

Homeschooling saves time

Time is perhaps my most valuable personal resource. Once I use it, I can’t get it back. Homeschooling and mass schooling present very different cases for my daily schedule. (Your mileage may vary.)

Time needed for homeschooling

Homeschooling does not have to be nearly as time consuming as many people think. How much time do the teacher and students spend transitioning between subjects or classes, managing behavior and attention in a class of 20-ish kids, or catering to kids working at a different speed than your child? I’m going to make a wild supposition that 30% of the teacher’s time with students is spend in these ways.

Then there are whole chunks of time you can remove from the schedule. You can take out lunch and recess since those are not instructional time. Granted, I would not neglect to feed your child or ban time to play and exercise, but that can be done outside of the homeschool time and with much more freedom of choice and timing than at school. Joining the a local soccer team or taking gymnastics classes could count as gym class, supplanting the need for yet another class. Library time can just be a family outing every month or so. Those chunks added up to about 6.5 hours each week at my kids’ school, or about 1.3 hours on average each day. (Note: This is not to criticize my kids’ school. These are just artifacts of mass schooling.)

Starting with a 7-hour school day, taking out those chunks leaves about 5.7 hours. Then multiply that by 70% to account for classroom management and it’s down to about 4 hours per day for direct instructional time, independent work and reading, and the myriad assessments that make student monitoring easier in mass schooling. I’m not sure how to account for the parts of this that are not teacher intensive, so I’ll leave it at that. Only about 55%-60% of the week is spend on academic schoolwork, and some of that is independent work.

Time for public or private school

I’m going to treat the school day at a public or private school as a black box. The kids are at school, no matter what they’re doing there. Sticking with the numbers from my kids’ most recent private school, a school day is 7 hours long. For this school, we as the parents spent about an hour and a quarter on transportation at both ends of the school day–two and a half hours of transportation daily. Winter weather would lengthen the drive even more since we live in Wisconsin.

We spent about an hour prepping the kids for school in the morning, and even that is a rush. Then we spent another approximately 90 minutes clearing out lunch boxes, supervising homework, and prepping kids’ shoes, socks, and clothing in the evening. Each week, I probably spent another hour or two washing and organizing uniforms and organizing backpacks and outdoor gear.

The total approximate time consumption outside of school hours: more than 4 hours per school day. Mind you, the kid’s school day is only 7 hours. Some of those prep hours overlap with the 7 hours in a school day, so I didn’t actually get 7 hours of work time either. It ended up being more like 4 hours of work time if I squeezed in a short workout, which is critical to preventing migraines and long-term joint problems for me. It also ignores house and farm maintenance, organization, cleaning, or other life activities.

Homeschool vs. public or private school

For more visual people (myself included), let’s look at the actual schedules for our three school options. This assumes four hours of nanny time while homeschooling, bus service for public school, and a private school that is 25-30 minutes away.

When I compare these schedules side by side, I understand why I’m so tired and feel like I never have free time. I’m over scheduled and I don’t have free time. (Duh!)

More seriously, I was truly taken aback by the numbers. I didn’t realize how much of a difference homeschooling made in our daily schedule.

I’d like to highlight a few things in these schedules.

Unscheduled (mostly free) time

Look at the columns labeled with M (for munchkins) under each option. Do you see that beautiful block of three hours in the morning after a generous breakfast period? That is mostly free time. If they don’t dawdle too much, they can have a bit of a recess after lunch, too. Then there’s another big block of free time in the afternoon after a few hours of school and computer learning time. That amounts to six hours of free time for them to explore their interests, learn to run their lives (change sheets, do laundry, etc.), exercise, or get extra rest if they need it. Compare that to the measly two hours for any of the mass schooling options.

Sleep time

Homeschooling allows for up to 11.5 hours of time in their rooms for sleep or settling in to sleep. Kids in elementary school are supposed to sleep 9-12 hours each day. Private school allows for about 9.5-10.5 hours in their rooms, which includes time to fall asleep. Public school allows about 10.5-11 hours–a bit better than private school, largely because it’s closer to home. I also assume no homework from public school. When the kids attended the local public school last year, they didn’t have homework, at least up to second grade. Assuming the kids take 30-60 minutes to fall asleep, neither of these allows enough time for the kids to rest their bodies if they are very active or fighting off illness. If they need extra sleep, it has to come of out of their paltry 2 hours of free time.

Homeschooling allows up to 11.5 hours of time in their rooms, which is flexible based on what they need. Miss M, for example, would get to bed 1-1.5 hours later than the bold bedtime line on this particular evening. She’d still have 10-10.5 hours of time in her room if we wake her up at 8am–or we could just let her sleep in a little the next day to make up for it. She could also get up at 8am and take a nap later in the day if she’s still tired.

Homeschooling allows so much more time and flexibility! I knew it was more flexible by a long shot. I didn’t realize how much time it saves until I mapped out the schedules side by side.

Once it starts snowing, the kids would lose either sleep or free time to the increased transportation and prep time (outdoor gear). I don’t know how much time that would take, but I would say at least half an hour.

Time to eat

Breakfast is usually in the van on the way to school right now. (Our van is messier than ever, by the way.) They’ve been eating A LOT of bagels lately simply because they’re portable and don’t crumble. Lunch time at school is about 20 minutes, which includes some overhead for organization like finding a table. When homeschooling, the kids have up to an hour to eat at both breakfast and lunch. I don’t think they’ll take this long, so the remainder is free time in addition to the 6 hours I already added up. They also won’t run out of time to eat a full meal at home.

What’s harder to quantify is that they have much more variety in what they eat when we homeschool. Meals usually don’t have to be portable. School lunches are hard to make for six kids! We were stuck with lunch meat and cheese sandwiches or some variation on PBJs for the main part of lunch. Then I threw in some prepackaged snacks and an applesauce pouch. I tried sending other things like trail mix, fresh fruit, summer sausage with crackers, but they all ate into my meager free time to prep them, wouldn’t survive the trip, or came back home because half the kids didn’t like it. If I sent something experimental to try to increase the variety in their diet, they might just not get lunch that day. There were no backup options like there are at home.

Work time for parents

In these scenarios, Jeff always gets at least as much dedicated work time as I do because I scheduled a workout for myself in the morning in addition to picking up the kids in the afternoon or taking lunch duty. Private school only allows 4 hours of dedicated work time for me, assuming I do nothing in those four hours besides work; Jeff gets about 5.5 hours because he can keep working while I drive around picking up kids. Public school allows 6.5 hours for both of us. There’s not much difference between our schedules because the school is only five minutes down the road.

When we homeschool, I have 6 hours of mostly dedicated work time. For part of that, I might get interrupted a bit to explain their independent work, but that 1pm-3pm block is still mostly work time. Jeff has 7 hours of dedicated work time–basically a full work day.

The homeschool work times are very similar to the public school work times, so there is no clear winner. There is, however, a clear loser: private school, mostly because of transportation time. If the school were closer to our house, it would be less of a problem. As a point of interest, all private schools are farther from our house than the public school by at least a factor of three.

Does homeschooling save money, too?

I also compared the costs involved in our three school options, both with daycare costs and without depending on Mr. B’s age. Gotta watch the budget!

Homeschool vs. Private School Costs

There is no age-based difference with homeschooling. We either have a nanny or don’t. Many of the factors listed here don’t have dollar amounts assigned because I cannot quantify them or they don’t have a direct monetary cost. For example, we don’t pay money if we get less sleep, but it certainly compromises everyone’s health and behavior.

The main expenses I quantified are tuition, daycare, gas, clothes, and supplies. Looking only at those items, homeschooling saves us nearly $1200 per month over private school with Mr. B in daycare. Daycare for one child costs nearly as much as tuition for six kids at a Catholic school! That is the only case in which homeschooling is obviously cheaper.

Next school year, Benny could attend the private school full time, so our daycare cost would go away. His 3K tuition would be free, per school policy for more than four kids per family. We’d save over $200 even at the private school. Is that $200 worth foregoing all of the time, nutrition, and other advantages of homeschooling? I suspect that buying convenience foods so I can survive preparing seven portable, durable lunches every day would eat up at least half of that.

Homeschool vs. Public School Costs

All of the public school scenarios save us money over homeschooling. Right now, we’d save more than $500 each month if the kids went to public school. That’s not easy to ignore. Are all of the time, nutrition, and other advantages of homeschooling worth giving up to save $500 per month?

I’m not sure if the public school with Mr. B in school would even be relevant. By the time that happens, Jeff will be retiring, our oldest twins will be 12 years old, and our youngest child will be nearly 6 years old. I don’t think we’d need a nanny to homeschool anymore. Realistically, I think this comparison only applies to this year and two more school years. That’s only about 24 months of school year time. After that, I suspect homeschooling and public school would be nearly evenly matched.

My conclusion is that homeschooling costs more than public school, even if I don’t give up my job (thereby losing income) to teach my kids. Private school is always equivalent or more expensive.

Which option wins?

I can say with certainty that homeschool wins when it comes to time and flexiblity. Financially, public school is the winner. However, homeschooling might be worth the extra cost compared to public school to reduce everyone’s stress, improve nutrition, and generally allow more flexibility. That is up to you as the parent.

For me, homeschooling wins.

The post Is homeschooling better than private or public school? Let’s look at time and cost. appeared first on Bustling Home.

Now, let’s look at my reasons to homeschool.

1. Kids can be involved in the farm

When they’re gone from sun up to nearly sun down and tired by the time they get home, there’s no time or energy left for the valuable work of helping on the farm. Part of the reason we built our homestead is to give our kids a solid grounding in duty, responsibility, and connection to their food—things that school doesn’t necessarily provide. They need to participate to reap those benefits. Realistically, it’s also harder to keep up with farm chores without the kids’ minimal help. Even 20 minutes from each of them can save me an hour or more a day.

2. Kids have more time to read

In order to get my kids to school on time, they have to get up no later than 6:30am. Working backwards, that means they need to be asleep by 8:30pm to get the recommended 10 hours or more of sleep for early elementary school kids. Back that up up even further and their bedtime routine needs to start around 7-7:30pm. Then dinner needs to start by 6pm. The kids just got off the bus a bit after 4pm. So they have less than two hours each night to do anything else, including personal care like showering and prepping for the next day. Who has time for hobbies or the 20 minutes of reading that the teacher requires? This time restriction, as you’ll see, is one of the reasons to homeschool that keeps coming back.

3. I can let my kids sleep

My kids are not early risers. Consequently, 6:30 am usually doesn’t exist for them. If 7:00 am exists, they are groggy and not at all suited to the morning rush out the door.

4. We waste less food eating at home

I have to pack them a lunch and two snacks. They get maybe 5-10 minutes for their snack and 15-20 minute for lunch. Whatever I pack had better be quick to eat or they’re not eating it. Often they’d run out of time, not hunger. I was throwing away a bunch of food every day. The alternative would be hot lunch, but that would run us $90 per week just for lunches. And I’d still have to pack snacks.

5. I can teach my kids at their levels

Despite their best efforts, a classroom teacher with 15-20 students (conservatively) cannot provide the customization that I can for my kids. I know them better and I can give them each individually what they need. I will also notice more quickly if they’re not understanding something and I can sit with them one-on-one to remedy the problem. Classroom teachers simply can’t do that the way a homeschool parent can.

6. My kids, and I, waste less time

Line up! Line up some more! Wait for everyone to catch up. Walk to this, that, or the other class. Spend 60-90 minutes on the bus trying to avoid the bully from the next grade up.

Mass schooling wastes a lot of time just managing the crowd and moving kid around. It’s not their fault. That’s just how it works with large groups, especially large groups of young kids. I also wasted a lot of time getting the kids and all of their luggage ready and out the door, and then corralling it again at the end of the day.

7. My kids have more freedom to move and be active

See point 2: more time to read. It’s the same with time to be active and find a healthy balance of nutrition and activity. School requires a lot of sedentary work. Homeschooling doesn’t have to.

8. My kids have more freedom to follow interests

Again, see point 2. Kids with more free time can follow their interest once their required studies are done. The enterprising homeschool parent (with more time and fewer kids than I have) can even tailor their child’s school to fit their interests. The kid likes horses? Lets look at the anatomy of horses, history of horses, statistics of horse shows or horse races, stories about horses—unit studies really provide an opportunity to capture a child’s interest and expand it into a full spread of traditional academic subjects. Beautiful Feet Books even has a history study on horses that’s almost open-and-go (pro tip: get the guide and look for the books at the library or used). Companies and other homeschool parents have created tons of resources!

9. I can teach higher quality academics (in my opinion)

I have strong opinions on the way certain subjects should be taught. The school does not use these methods. This might not be a problem for all parents, but it is for me. I don’t want to suck the life out of history or make writing formulaic, for example. This is one of my husband’s biggest reasons to homeschool our kids.

10. My kids have more variety in their diets

Only so many foods are portable and durable enough for a school lunch box. Cooking at home, or even just having a variety of fresh fruits at home that would be destroyed in a lunch box, provides the kids much better and more varied nutrition than a box lunch can.

Hot lunch, you say? Not happening at $90 per week for six kids. If we used it every day, it would amount to $3240 for the school year.

11. Our family is not bound to someone else’s schedule and plans

I’m not great at sticking to an outside schedule. I’m not even good at it. I want to make my own schedule that fits my family. Waking up at 6:30am does not fit it. Trying to shove our entire evening into two hours doesn’t work for me. I don’t care to fill out those infernal reading records. My kids read plenty, especially when they’re not stuck in a classroom most of the day.

12. My kids are less tired for evening activities and less rushed

See point 2, yet again. They have two hours max to do anything besides school and getting ready for the next day. If dance takes over an hour of that, all of us are rushed and snippy at each other. My kids need free time to unwind. It makes giving up all activities outside of school extremely appealing, which I’m sure is not in my kids’ best interests.

13. It’s easier to fit in music lessons

We have a music teacher who comes to our house during the day and teaches each of my kids their instruments one at a time. She’s here for three hours (six 30-minute lessons). When the kid were in school, they had to give up lessons completely because we couldn’t fit the drive and lesson time into our schedule for six kids. That was a great loss that I found rather upsetting. For some reason, I hadn’t considered that I’d have to cancel music lessons when I registered my kids for school.

14. We know what our kids are learning

I had some idea of what the kid are learning in school based on the piles of worksheets that came home (most of which did not impress me), but I have no idea what they did for most of the day or what else they learned at school that wasn’t contained in a worksheet. What morals are they learning? What habits are they practicing? I won’t get into specifics, but I wasn’t a fan of some of the self-esteem building that implied that competence was less important than feeling good about yourself. To be clear, I’m not willing to sacrifice either competence or self esteem.

15. We don’t get all of the illnesses going around schools

My kids were sick the entire time they were in school. Consequently, the entire family was sick. When kid take turns being sick, all of my paid time off goes away very quickly. That’s what happened last time I was a working mom when I had two or four kids.

16. Our family, or at least my kids have more freedom to travel/visit family

School leaves very little time to visit family. The kid are gone all day, and once again, see point 2. Homestead work and church fill much of our weekends, too. Gramma June visited during the day a couple of times a month while the kids were homeschooled. Obviously public school is incompatible with weekday, daytime visits.

17. My kids avoid bullies (except each other :-P)

At least some of my kids encountered bullying, even in their short time at school. My daughter sustained a minor hip injury from a bully on the bus. Not cool at all, and I can’t do much to stop it before it happens because I have no control over the environment. On the bus, in particular, there is very little supervision.

18. Jeff and I know the kids’ social group

I like knowing the families of my kids’ friends, preferably before my kids develop an attachment to the other child. Unfortunately, we did have to cut off a friendship with a sweet little girl whose mother acted deceptively with me and my husband. I’d rather my kids see a healthy family with good relationship so they know what they should expect in their personal relationships. My kids are young, so they have plenty of time to learn how to identify and handle dishonest people. Now is not the time.

19. I can make history interesting (unlike my experience in public school)

This deserves its own point, separate from point 9. I like stories, but I hated history in school. If I like stories, I should not hate history. History is the story of the past, but it’s rarely handled that way in schools. My husband, on the other hand, loves history and has read extensively about various events and periods. I haven’t because I thought I hated history.

20. I can teach my kids to write well

This also deserve its own point. Writing a paragraph with a topic sentence, three supporting details, and a concluding sentence is formulaic and easy to teach. So is blindly adding adjectives to make a story more “descriptive and interesting.” Is well-regarded writing constructed that way? No. I will introduce these ideas as tools to use under certain circumstances, but I will not belabor them. We will instead look at truly well-written texts and work from there.

Obviously I thought homeschooling won since I pulled my kids after barely a month in the local public school (through no fault of the school itself—the staff were very friendly and supportive). Sure, I have 20 reasons to homeschool versus 10 reasons to use public school, but this isn’t just a numbers decision. I think the reasons in the homeschool list are so much more valuable than those in the public school list!

If you’re considering starting homeschooling for the first time, managing your child’s education will seem much more daunting than it does to me. With three years of homeschooling under my belt, managing my kids’ education is my normal. If you are at the beginning of your homeschool journey, check out my 10 tips for bootstrapping your homeschool and 5 tips for a successful homeschool day.

The post 20 reasons to homeschool (even for a working mom) appeared first on Bustling Home.

In my typical analytical fashion, I made lists of the benefits of homeschooling and the benefits of public school. My mom suggested I further quantify it by assigning values to each of the points, but I demurred. This decision can’t be completely quantified since it is partly a heart issue. My brain should inform my heart, not completely overpower it in guiding my children’s education. After all, we are raising whole people, not just brains.

Without further ado, here are the benefits of public school. I’ll outline the benefits of homeschooling in a subsequent post.

1. I don’t have to choose and manage their education

In public school, the teachers and administration handle all of that. They even send home extra work for your kids to do over break if you want to supplement school and assign 20 minutes of reading each night so you’re not left wondering what to do for your child’s intellectual development. That’s not a guarantee that it will be the best fit for your child in particular, but a good teacher will do their best to balance the needs of all the children in their classroom.

If you homeschool, you are taking on the responsibility for your child’s entire education. It feels like you are responsible for setting them on a path toward success in life. As an experience homeschool mom, it’s not intimidating, but I’m fully aware how much work it can be. Not only do I need to consider the time I spend with my children directly, but I also need to account for research and planning time for curriculum. And I need to keep myself from falling down the rabbit hole of curriculum options that look really interesting and fun, but don’t fit my needs, and stop researching after I’ve chosen my curriculum for the year.

2. My kids like riding the bus

Well, yes, but that can’t be a huge deciding factor. Maybe we’ll take a field trip to the city and ride a bus there. Riding the bus also wastes an hour and a half to two hours per day. This, in my opinion, doesn’t even go on a list of reasons to use public school. I added it because my kids think it’s important. Sorry, kids.

3. Public school might be a bit cheaper overall

This is hard to calculate. I have to pay for daycare for my toddler year round, which runs about $200 per week. My 4K kids also need half-time daycare during the school year at $10 per hour for the two of them. On non-school days and during the summer, I’d have to pay separately for childcare for my school-aged kids. That means a nanny plus $200 per week. In my estimates, I assume the nanny’s salary would be $20-$25 per hour.

Public school has some hidden costs too. My kids need separate shoes for gym. They might also need two sets of snow pants for the winter and extra mittens because they lose or constantly soak them at school. They’d need field trip money and I can’t buy a membership to save money and take them all to the same place. We’d also probably buy more convenience foods, extra clothing, and hot lunches just to survive the strenuous schedule imposed by public school.

If we homeschool, I pay a nanny year-round and that’s it for childcare. We know the cost and it’s always the same, though the childcare cost is a bit higher than that for public school.

I’d say registration fees and curriculum costs for homeschooling are comparable. A lot of the print curriculum I’ll be able to reuse in the future and save on future homeschooling costs.

It’s hard to quantify the cost difference. One factor that can’t be quantified: What is the value of a custom education and extra free time that homeschooling provides? What is the value of the benefits that public school provides? These are personal decisions for each family, and I place a higher premium on the experience of homeschooling. For some families, finances might be the most compelling of the reasons to use public school.

4. Public school provides childcare for a large portion of the day

I don’t have to find a nanny and I don’t have to worry about the nanny quitting. The public school is always there, unless the kids get sick. And they will get sick. Probably a lot. When we had four kids under three, I used all of my paid time off caring for sick kids. I didn’t get to take off of work when I was sick. (At least I could work from home then.)

5. Kids get to see their friends daily at public school

This one of my big reasons to use public school. At school, kids (usually) form friendships with their classmates. It’s easy, at least on the surface. They see each other at an expected location during their regular routine. That doesn’t guarantee that they’ll be able to socialize outside of school since that depends on family dynamics, but at least the group of potential friends is readily available.

I have to admit this is our weakest part of homeschooling and unfortunately plays into the stereotype of the isolated homeschool kids who never develop social skills. I don’t think that ends up being the case, though. My kids interact with all sorts of people and they do have good friends. Our church and homeschool/homestead friends just happen to live 40 minutes away, so we don’t get to see them as often as we’d like. While homeschooling, it takes work to form a local network of friends.

6. Kids learn the basics of more sports and games in gym class

I have yet to find a suitable homeschool gym class. So far any options are too far away or don’t fit our ages or schedule. I’m not sure this is important at their age anyhow. At some point in their childhood, they’ll be exposed to basketball, baseball, volleyball, football, tennis, and a bunch of other traditional gym class games. It is something I keep in the back of my mind, though.

7. Kids get out of the house and the house is quiet

It is easier to work with no interruptions and in quiet. No way around this for me. I need quiet. If I don’t get at least a bit of a break from visual and auditory input, I get crabby. If the house is silent with seven kids in it, I should be concerned.

8. If our nanny quits, it might be hard to find a new one

This is a real concern. If our nanny quits with little to no notice, it might prove extremely difficult to find a replacement. Who watches the kids if she quits? I have no good solution. I hope this doesn’t happen.

9. Kids have less time to make messes around the house

I hate living in a messy house. It is stressful and occasionally hazardous to have kids clothes, toys, crafts, and everything else cluttering the floor and every other surface. If the kid aren’t here, they can’t make messes. I must accept a messier house if I want to homeschool my kids.

10. A public school is a local community

If I had to choose the biggest of my reasons to use public school, this is it. The school is a local community unto itself. It hosts social events. Kids invite classmates to their birthday parties. The school even has a directory of all of the families in the school to make it easier for families to find each other and a Parent-Teacher Club. The school is all about being a community.

For homeschooling, there are monthly meetups at the local library… that I can’t attend because I’ll be working. There are also a couple of social co-op options… that I usually can’t attend because I’ll be working. I’m hoping to find more community in the continuing activities my kids are doing, like gymnastics and dance. I’d like to find a local homesteading, homeschooling community, but that’s a bit harder since homesteading homeschoolers tend to be insanely busy.

Some of these reasons to use public school are quite compelling. I think my bias is obvious, though, both in this list and in the fact that we did return to homeschooling after a little more than a month of public school. I’ll explain 20 reasons to homeschool in my next post.

The post 10 reasons to use public school (for a working mom) appeared first on Bustling Home.

I had my list of reasons we homeschool. However, it didn’t account for me spending an entire summer burning the candle at both ends and up the middle trying to do the work of two overworked parents who are running a homestead while my husband was disabled by hip arthritis. It also didn’t consider having me work full time.

This is my personal experience trying public school.

I never thought I would try public school

Here’s the situation: I have seven kids, ages one to eight. Thus far we’ve been homeschooling them. Money is tight on only my husband’s income. I actually am highly trained as a scientist, so employment prospects for me are pretty good—just not where we live. I can only work remotely.

After applying for jobs for what seemed like forever, I received an offer for remote work in my professional field. (This never would have happened pre-2020, if you know what I mean.) In addition to farm chores, childcare, homeschooling, and housework, I’m adding eight hours of work, five days a week. I think I can make it work.

Am I nuts? No, but I do have a poor sense of scale.

The local public school is quite good, at least as far as mass schooling goes. This is not a criticism of the teachers or the admin, but of the requirements inherent in having classrooms of 20-ish kids. I figure I’ll try public school, at least for a bit, to give myself time to focus on starting my job. Sometimes one must compromise on the ideal situation to make it work for the family as a whole.

School runs 8am to 3:15pm. Add in the bus ride after school, about 45 minutes to an hour, and they’ll be occupied for a full eight hours. Great! That’s exactly how many hours I need to work. All I have to do is get them out the door in the morning and…

Reality hits

Oh dear. They need clothes to wear. Where are all the clean clothes, times seven? *Digging through baskets of unsorted laundry*

Whew! Everyone has clothes and some of them are even wearing them. Wait, what??? How did that take 25 minutes? And they still need to eat breakfast! What am I going to feed them?

Where are their shoes? Are they clean and dry? Are their backpacks packed? Did I check if they need anything signed? Ugh, they need two snacks and lunch for school, too! Don’t these kids ever stop eating???

Argh, we’re late! All of you, get your socks and shoes on! You can finish your bagel/muffin/cereal/whatever in the van. You’re eating pancakes? Well, shove as much in your cheeks as you can, just like a squirrel preparing for winter. WE. NEED. TO. GO!

(Can you see where this is heading?)

I rush the kids to school and park in visitor parking since we now need to check in at the office. Six kids pour out of our big white van as I retrieve the littlest from his seat. Once we reach the office, I smash six names onto one line for late check-in and admonish them to stay quiet in the hallways as I take them to their lockers. That’s another 10 minutes getting everyone settled.

Daycare drop off takes 25 minutes or so between the short drive and getting my littlest guy settled in. At this point, I’ve been working on getting the kids ready and where they need to go for about two hours. I, foolishly perhaps, budgeted an hour of my day to all of that. Remember, I have a poor sense of scale… and also some time blindness. They don’t help each other.

Quiet is good for a working mom, but…

Now I’m mentally tired from keeping track of seven kids and all of their various belongings and needs that I can’t focus on anything that requires thought. I need a brain break. Unfortunately, brain breaks are for kids. Employers don’t really do that, especially after taking off two hours in the middle of my morning work time to get the kids to school.

How am I ever going to do this once my job starts? If my job had started, I’d have to go straight to my desk and try to be sharp and engaged while my brain moves as fast as a sloth.

I take a breather because I still have the freedom to do so as I wait for government-related paperwork to allow me to start my job. (I’m sure you can imagine how quickly that is progressing.) It’s about 9am if I’m lucky. I have until 3:20pm when I have to pick up my littlest from daycare in order to ensure that I’m home when the bus arrives.

That is nothing like the eight hours of time I imagined when I decided to try public school—more like six and a half hours, assuming I don’t have to do anything else besides work. Perhaps most importantly, I have no time for the workouts I really need to hold my hyperflexible joints together.

Working mom to chaos manager

When the afternoon bus arrives, my six kids come running up the driveway and drop their stuff all over the first floor of our house. Some plop in the middle of the floor to finish their lunch leftovers since they didn’t have enough time to eat it at school (not that we have a dining table or anything). One drops his belongings piece by piece as he heads to the piano to decompress after a day of attentiveness and self-control overload. Yet others drop their things at the door so I have to tiptoe between backpacks, jackets, and shoes to get to the front door.

Out the door to dance class

On Tuesday night, my oldest and youngest twins have dance class. I rush the kids out the door (either a subset or all of them, depending on my husband’s availability) a few minutes too late to make it to dance class on time. They might not quite be wearing the white t-shirt and black shorts specified in the dress code, but at least they’re wearing shorts and t-shirts and don’t stink.

At dance class they wiggle and poke at each other. Even my well-behaved teacher pleaser gets into a tiff with her brother. Neither of them earns their star for good behavior that class. The youngest twins roll around on the floor whenever they’re not actively engaged in dancing. They probably still earn a star if the teacher can call them back to attention since the teacher expects more inattentive, impulsive behavior from four year olds than eight year olds.

And back home again for dinner

Dinner after dance class is wild. Kids are all over the place, talking loudly, laughing, arguing, pantomiming, and occasionally taking a bite. I have no idea how to feed myself, so I assemble a random assortment of leftovers or rely on my husband to invent our dinner. My food starts out hot and is cold by the time I’m finishing my meal because I keep getting up to refill bowls or corral kids. I must say “sit in your chair” and “keep your everything to yourself” a couple dozen times every meal.

Just get through bedtime, I tell myself. Then I’ll get a break.

Bedtime: how to turn an hour into forever

By the end of dinner, the clock says 8:00—bedtime. That is, it’s bedtime after they take their dishes out, wash their hands, brush their teeth, and change into jammies. Actual bedtime moves to 8:30 or 9:00.

When we bought our house, I thought the loop around the first floor would be nice for the kids to make laps with their little ride-on cars. At the time, we had four toddlers and their little train was adorable. Now I’ve got six kids in various states of (un)dress running circles and screaming that their sibling spit on them while brushing teeth or that they can’t find jammies or “I don’t like brushing my teeth!” Dinner clean up will wait until after they’re in bed. Right now I still need to play chaos manager.

Okay, after they’re in bed and dinner is cleaned up, I can rest.

Nope, that’s not likely either. One kid can’t sleep. Then their roommate has to come downstairs to tell me that the first kid is keeping them awake. Yes, if you don’t stop moving, you probably won’t fall asleep. Go to bed and stop moving for a bit. Close your eyes and pretend you’re asleep.

Some night we have several rounds of this. I resort to a very low dose of melatonin to get one child back on a reasonable sleep schedule. He’s going to sleep well after 11pm when I have to get him up again around 6:30 to try to catch the bus (iffy, at best). The rest of the kids fall asleep around 9:30 or 10pm usually. No one is getting enough sleep.

The day barely ends before the next one begins

Holy cow, am I tired! I still have to take care of livestock, pets, and basic house chores. (Remember, Jeff was in Europe at this point, so all of the work was on me. I ignored the non-essential he usually did.) Where are the kids’ backpacks and lunchboxes? I need to empty and wash all of the lunchboxes so I can fill them again in the morning. Paying $90 each week for school lunches is untenable, especially since I still have to pack two snacks for each of them and they won’t eat some of the food the school serves.

I can’t do this.

Once my job starts, I will not be functional enough or have enough time to keep up with the requirements five different teachers or childminders give me. I can’t work on their schedule or using their requirements.

When we homeschooled, I set the requirements and everyone had the same basic routine. All I had to do was check off the same tasks with each child: chores, handwriting, math, music, reading, grammar/writing, and the extra subject for the day (art, history, science, etc.).

I feel like if I continue with the kids in public school, or any mass schooling, everything will collapse around me. Maybe not right away, but within a few weeks or months something major with give way. Will it be my health? My job? Something important for the kids’ school or the kids themselves?

I can’t do this.

The post Homeschool mom to working mom: try public school? appeared first on Bustling Home.

Extreme decluttering: simplifying my digestive system

My start date for my new job was supposed to be mid-October (which turned into mid-November in reality). I saw the surgeon for my gallbladder on September 27. He recommended surgery and, because of my extensive family history of gallbladder problems and the real possibility of having it turn into an emergency, I accepted.

The next surgery date was October 4, seven days later. I’d have a week and a half to recover before my job started. Perfect! Cue the rush to get everything done that I couldn’t do after surgery, on top of looking for a nanny to get the kids out of school asap. (I found the school schedule intolerable.) Jeff was only a few weeks out from hip surgery, so I couldn’t leave a lot for him to do while I recovered.

A tip from the experienced: if you butcher anything right before surgery, do not leave it in a cooler full of ice. Put it in the freezer right away. You likely won’t remember or feel up to dealing with it post surgery.

Surgery went smoothly. I’ve had no side effects from my lack of gallbladder, and I’ve had fewer problems with bloating and no abdominal or upper back pain (both symptoms of gallbladder dysfunction). I did, however, have problems with the steri-strips. They gave me horrible, itchy rashes all around my incision site. Jeff said some irritation is normal, but mine was much worse. Have you had a bad reaction to steri-strips? Let me know in the comments.

Childcare for a working homeschool mom

Finding a nanny for seven children, all of them eight years old and younger, is no small feat. Most nannies aren’t prepared to take on that many kids and most of those who will don’t live near our rural homestead or are too expensive for our budget. Remember, I’m getting a job to shore up our finances. Paying a large portion of my paycheck for a nanny defeats the purpose of working.

By some miracle, I found two good candidates–a younger woman right out of high school and an older woman with years of childcare experience. Would youthful energy or the wisdom of experience keep my kids corralled and on top of their minimal morning schoolwork? As a working homeschool mom, I need someone who can keep the kids out of my office (or my husband’s office since he works from home too) and helps them stay on top of their task list for the day so I can manage the rest in the afternoon.

It was very difficult to decide between them, so we let Benny decide. We chose the younger woman, the nanny that he ran up to without prompting. She started her week of training on October 9, the Monday after my surgery. I notified the school that my kids’ last day would be October 6, though I left my youngest twins in half-time 4K to give them time away from their siblings.

The transition back to homeschooling was not exactly smooth–we’re still working out some kinks–but it was a heck of a lot smoother than the transition to public school.

Where we stand now, in December of 2023

I’m fully a working homeschool mom. My job has started, I spend way too much time sitting at a desk, and I finish schoolwork with my kids after work. I’m also working on reintroducing self care and simplifying to a more manageable workload. It’s the only way to make this situation work long term–and I need it to work.

What about the homestead and livestock?

Thankfully, we’re heading into winter–aka the no-garden season. The perennials are largely dormant and the annual garden is dead. I have nothing to do but plan and dream until I start onion seeds in February.

Livestock are a different matter. They require care year round. With an extra eight hours of work on my schedule every weekday, I need to cut back.

What goes

I don’t like goats, I’ve found. I sold the last little… um… annoying critter… shortly after my surgery. The cows, while well behaved and friendly, are big, eat a lot, drink a lot, and poo a lot. I will not be able to keep up with them alongside a full-time job and homeschooling, especially through a Wisconsin winter. Our drylot has no electricity to run a heater to keep gallons and gallons of water from freezing.

I posted Cali for sale, admitting reluctantly to myself that now is not the right time for a milk cow. She’s such a sweet girl that I really hoped she’d go to a good home. A friend of a friend bought her. They have a whole small herd of cattle, so they know what they’re doing (more than I do, certainly). I trust my friend’s judgment that Cali will be well cared for in her new home.

The jury is still out on Beefy. Since he’s younger, he eats, drinks, and poos less. He’s also not slated to be a long-term occupant of our pastures. I don’t know yet if we’ll grow him out or sell him.

What stays

The sheep are staying. My mom and I drove to Minnesota in the spring specifically to get three Finnsheep ewes and an unrelated Finnsheep ram from lines that are bred to produce meat. (Most Finns seem to be bred for fiber.) Finns are not one of the usual meat breeds, but they won me over with their temperament. They’re standoffish without being skittish (unlike those pesky, pushy goats). When it comes time to trim or treat them, I plop one on its butt and I can do it all singlehandedly (unlike those pesky, pushy goats).

We’re keeping chickens for mass amounts of eggs (if they ever start laying this fall) and ducks for eggs that make great baked goods. As far as geese go, they’re not for us. They ate our duck’s eggs. Also, do you remember when I said don’t butcher anything the day before surgery? Yeah, that was the geese. Homestead fail and no Christmas goose.

Reigning in the chaos

As I settle into my new job, we are working on simplifying everything—cut the fat, keep the meat, as it were. We’re streamlining the homestead and smoothing out homeschooling with a nanny. I’m still trying to wrap my head around how to organize my schedule around work requirements, homeschooling, kids’ activities, and the homestead. I’m going to try a planner for that. The 6am start time is also a struggle. I’m not naturally a morning person, at all.

I freely admit it’s a lot. I don’t think it’s too much, though, as long as I can cut out things that don’t serve us in this season. That’s easier said than done, I know. It certainly means getting rid of all the extra junk in our house and funneling the kids into a few activities. We’re offering Irish dance, gymnastics, music lessons, and swim lessons. Any kids who want to participate in any of those may do so, but we’re not offering anything else right now. We can’t. I’m also testing out organization methods and incentives with the kids for their schoolwork and chores. This working homeschool mom isn’t averse to a little light bribery.

If I had to set a goal for 2024 right now, it would be to find a maintainable routine. We need a quiet year with no major changes. We also need to refocus on fulfilling our needs and then—only after our needs are addressed—work on wants.

Is that possible? Probably not entirely, but I think these last few years of complete, overwhelming chaos have at least helped us refine our priorities.

The post Becoming a working homeschool mom: a few last hurdles appeared first on Bustling Home.

Surprises lurked within ourselves

At the beginning of 2023, Jeff had trouble with his right foot. He could barely walk. Physical therapy kind of helped, but the problem kept returning. Then in late spring, his left hip started giving him trouble. He again went to physical therapy. The therapist found so much inflammation that he couldn’t even test the hip for damage. For weeks, Jeff took anti-inflammatories and did therapeutic exercises to reduce inflammation so he could get the muscles working properly.

At the same time, I was researching milk cows. I thought it would be a good idea to get used to keeping a heifer alive before we have to care for a bred heifer, watch over calving, or manage a cow-calf pair. I looked for a future milk cow nearby that someone else could deliver to our property. We have no livestock trailer, so delivery was essential.

Cali, an 8-month-old lineback/high park cross, joined us in mid-June. I figured she’d be a hardy girl for our Wisconsin winters. Around the same time, we brought home a 5-day-old bull calf, who we named Beefy, from a local dairy so she’d have another bovine and we’d grow him out for beef.

In late June, right after Cali and Beefy joined us, Jeff’s physical therapist sent him to see an orthopedist for imaging. The anti-inflammatories and exercises weren’t helping. An x-ray showed that the cartilage was gone in his left hip and osteophytes, aka bone spurs, were trying to immobilize the joint. The treatment? A new hip.

That went downhill quickly.

Nicki’s axiom for summer 2023: Holy crap, I’m tired.

Jeff already had his right hip resurfaced in the UK a couple of decades ago. He found a Dr. Derek McMinn at The McMinn Centre, who did hip resurfacing for people like Olympic Judo players so they could return to competition. Jeff is not one to accept limitations easily, so he found the best of the best to fix his congenital hip dysplasia and arthritis. Fast forward to now—Dr. McMinn is no longer operating, but Dr. Koen DeSmet in Belgium uses the next generation of McMinn’s hip resurfacing. Jeff booked a flight to Europe and a ship ride back from Europe to accommodate a late August surgery date. All we had to do was survive until then and Jeff should arrive home in much less pain.

Since Jeff was obviously out of the picture for farm work, I needed to manage almost all of the farm chores. Our homestead is not a one-person undertaking. I let my seedlings wilt under the grow lights. It seemed like a waste, but I knew I’d never keep up with them outside. My time planting would give us little to no benefit.

No garden + no workouts + no self care = no good

If there is any year to skip a garden, this was the year. We were under moderate to severe drought conditions most of the summer. Even the weeds barely survived. My garden would have died without a lot of care, and I had no care left to give.

I skipped workouts to tow hay and feed to the animals. Since we still had goats, who occasionally tried to headbutt me because they didn’t like me preventing them from stealing my tools, I had to do all of the livestock care alone. No one else was big enough and moved well enough to help.

By the end of every day, I was BEAT. And not just tired, but beat up. The goats never managed to get to me, but holding a bale of hay or a lamb while trying to kick the goat away on uneven ground (for example) is not good biomechanics. Neither is pitching a 45-pound bale of straw over the 4-foot electric fence while trying not to get zapped or smush a lamb, or pulling a garden wagon with well over 100 pounds of feed on it over lumpy, hilly ground. It was all great exercise, but not the kind that preserves my hypermobile joints or gives me more energy the next day. I had no time for self care, despite knowing how important it is, and got progressively more tired.

By late summer, I snapped at the kids too much and increased my caffeine consumption just to get through the day. I had too many chores to get enough sleep and too little sleep to recover from the chores. I also developed acid reflux that had left me alone for several years and upper right abdominal discomfort. Just as Jeff was getting ready to leave for Europe for about three weeks, it morphed into moderate, intermittent stabbing pain.

Ugh, I don’t have time for this!

I went to urgent care so we knew what we were dealing with before Jeff left. An ultrasound confirmed gallstones, which is what I suspected based on the spike in symptoms after indulging at Mader’s, an old German restaurant in Milwaukee (I recommend going there, if you have a chance). They also found kidney stones and nearly critically dangerous potassium and sodium levels. The doctor suggested I drink a bunch of water and have the electrolytes retested to confirm the likely diagnosis of dehydration. Thankfully, that diagnosis proved accurate and the electrolytes were easy to remedy.

Not so with the gallstones. Once gallstones are symptomatic, they likely will cause problems again with no warning and no pattern. It could be mild, or it could become severe suddenly and require emergency surgery. My family also has a prevalent history of gallbladder problems, so it’s likely I’d have to have it removed at some point. But not yet. Jeff was leaving in a few days. As the only parent and farm caretaker staying in this country for the next few weeks, surgery was impossible short of an emergency.

I lined up a few people for childcare in case I had to go to the emergency room while Jeff was gone. It gave me a little trouble, but not enough to slowed me down. I also made sure to avoid greasy food, just in case.

Working homeschool mom? Or just working mom?

As all of these medical problems were going down, I received a job offer. I had been applying for jobs for well over a year to try to improve our financial situation. We weren’t quite scraping by on a single income after all of the unexpected expenses for our house and homestead. We needed something to supplement Jeff’s full-time job.

My requirements were very specific. I had to work from home, the hours had to be somewhat flexible, and I needed to earn enough to pay down debt at a reasonable rate while paying a nanny. That’s a lot to ask. By some miracle, however, I landed a suitable job in the same field as my earned doctorate.

I signed the job offer on the day that Jeff left for Europe. My estimated start date was in a month and a half—plenty of time to completely rearrange our lives to accommodate eight hours a day, five days a week of work for me.

Public school, at least while I settle into my job, sounded like a promising option. The fall semester started three days after I accepted the job offer. My task list was huge. I had three days to register and prepare six kids for their first day of public school. I also had to find a daycare for the toddler. Long story short: I did it. In the space of three days, I arranged everything (besides daycare). I didn’t sleep much.

Foregoing homeschooling is not “simplifying”

Then I encountered the reality of public school. We live in a good district, so the school itself wasn’t a problem. The mass schooling model was.

Holy cow, did it not work the way I thought it would. I got less sleep than when they were home, the kids were crabbier for the short time they were home, and it really only bought me about five hours of work time each day because of logistics. To be clear, a full-time job requires eight hours a day.

The details of that trial are a story unto itself (read: future blog post). Suffice to say, we made it about a month in public school before we started advertising for a nanny to watch the kids for part of my workday. Since my company is on the east coast and I’m in the central time zone, I could fit in a few hours before the kids get up and finish my day while they have rest time. Becoming a working homeschool mom looked a lot simpler than becoming a working public school mom!

But first… rearrange most of my life.

To be continued.

The post Simplifying and becoming a working homeschool mom appeared first on Bustling Home.

To recap, this year we installed a 3700 square food garden. We also expanded the perennial garden and the orchard. Our harvest, paltry as it was compared to the amount we planted, proved that we can keep at least some things alive and get food from them.

Since we avoided abject failure this year, we plan to expand into livestock next year. In this post, I’ll go over what we’re adding. I’ll cover how we’re changing our veggie garden in a later post. Suffice it to say right now that the garden is probably moving from its current site.

Baa, cluck, thump

We need protein sources on our homestead if we want to grow most of our own food. The best protein sources are animals. Whether it’s for milk (and cheese!), eggs, or meat, we need to add livestock to our homestead to provide ourselves a balanced diet.

Sheep

Sheep are a great multipurpose animal. They can provide milk, meat, and fiber. Since we already have two Australian Shepherds, they’d also provide entertainment. Maybe our dogs would stop trying to herd our giant white van every time we drive up to the house.

We would focus on milk and meat.

Sheep milk isn’t goaty like goat milk can be, though it might have its own distinctive flavor. You can find a good comparison with goat and cow milk on Farmdrop. It also has double the butterfat and protein of cow or goat milk. It’s great for milk products like cheese or yogurt, and we use a lot of both. Have you ever hand Manchego cheese? It’s so good! Though it’s naturally homogenized and won’t make butter, we can fix that by freezing it first to dehomogenize it. Then we get double the butter per gallon of milk!

The downside of using sheep for milk is that they don’t produce as much per animal as goats or cows. However, if we’re going to have a small dual-purpose herd anyhow, how much does it matter?

As far as meat, mutton looks like a good option for winter stews. Fattier cuts might complement rabbit meat well since rabbit meat has essentially no fat.

So far we’re looking at Icelandic sheep. They seem to be common enough in our area. They’re a sturdy breed, which sounds good for first-time sheep owners.

Chickens

Chickens are another great dual-purpose animal. We’d keep a flock for eggs and a rotating flock for meat. If any of the stable flock gets uppity or nasty, they become part of the rotating flock and off to the butcher block they go! At first, we’d stick to a single breed, like Orpingtons or Barred Rocks, that are pretty good as both laying and meat birds but not the best at either. That way we’d only have one variety to manage just like with the sheep. Both are also hardy breeds–great for first-time chicken owners.

Do you see a trend? We’re picking easy varieties and sticking to one at a time to give ourselves training wheels. Once we learn how to care for that variety well enough, maybe we’d expand.

Rabbits

Jeff’s not as convinced, but I think rabbits might be a good addition to our homestead. From what I’ve read, they have a high feed-to-meat conversion ratio, reproduce prolifically, and are fairly easy to care for. They also don’t take up much space.

But before we jump in…

Before we commit to rabbits and sheep, I’d like to taste rabbit meat, mutton, and lamb. That’s a project for this winter. All of these animal will require a substantial investment in infrastructure. We don’t want to spend a bunch of money unless we’re sure we’ll like the products.

Infrastructure projects

In order to store all the small farm equipment, we really need something besides our garage. And the animals need housing, too. It’s kind of overwhelming to think of all the projects ahead.

First, the shed. Between Jeff’s tractor and all the attachments, it’s hard to navigate a large part of our garage. Once we finally decommission the garden for the year, we’ll also have net fencing and giant tomato cages to store. Pretty soon we won’t be able to get to the other side of the garage without going around outside.

We’re thinking a quonset hut kit on top of a concrete slab might be the best balance between price and durability. It might not be as pretty as a custom design, but it’d work. I think we’ll put it where the garden is now. That way we’d have easy access to it from the driveway for plowing in the winter and we’d create a buffer between a patch of woods on the south side of our property and our garden. We hope a small buffer would help keep the deer away. It’d also be safer to pour a concrete slab there since the truck wouldn’t have squeeze between the solar array and mound system. We certainly don’t want either of those damaged!

As we add livestock, we must also construct a chicken coop and run, rabbit cages, and a shelter for the sheep. The chicken coop and rabbit cages might have to be custom built. I’m not convinced Jeff or I have the construction skills or time to build our own. If that is the case, it gets more expensive. I need to research design a little more. Maybe it’d be worth hiring some childcare and having Jeff take off time to build it ourselves… if we don’t screw it up. The sheep shelter seems pretty straightforward–three sides and a roof, more or less.

I cringe at what all this might cost. We’ve only been able to estimate the cost of the quonset hut and concrete slab. The rest is up in the air.

What’s in store next year?

The short answer is, I don’t know. We’ll try to do as much of this as possible. I think our top priorities will be the shed, chicken coop, and chickens. Chickens seem like a good gateway animal. Sheep would be nice for milk if we can manage it next year.

A lot of this depends on how the rest of 2020 and the early part of 2021 go. If I’m pregnant, plans change because I might not be as useful around the homestead with a giant belly or a newborn (or two). If food prices go up, plans accelerate. Or if Jeff has to retire because Illinois does something stupid with the state employees’ retirement, plans change because I don’t know what our financial situation would be at that point.

If you have any feedback or experience, please share! We’re heading into uncharted territory.

The post Plans for expanding the homestead appeared first on Bustling Home.

Sometimes homeschooling is about surviving the day, putting one foot in front of the other. With six kids under six, I have a lot of those days.

These are my top tips to make tomorrow smoother than today.

Plan, but not too rigidly

Plans are a starting point, not a road map. You might need to diverge from your plan to make the day (or week or year) work. That’s okay. But you need to start somewhere and have an idea of where you’d like to go or you might go nowhere.

Especially younger kids need breaks throughout the day. Some of them I plan, some I don’t. With so many moving parts, routines work much better than a schedule for me.

Some days you might need to bail on most or all formal schooling. Have a few backup plans for days like that. Maybe it’s educational cartoons or videos. Maybe you go to the park or a nature preserve. The grocery store can even become a classroom. You can find learning opportunities in day-to-day experiences. I don’t see these as a complete education (opinions might differ), but they are a great way to connect learning to the world at large.

Prep ahead of time (food and school)

Some of my worst days are when I wake up with no idea of what we’re doing and don’t have time to think about it before the kids get up (see “plan” above). If I don’t plan, I can’t prepare for the day. If I’m not prepared, I always feel behind.

With six kids five and under, I need to have a quick and easy idea for lunch. If I want to do any formal schooling, I need to know which subjects we’re doing, have the materials ready, and invent some way to keep the littles from destroying everything.

Make two lists: must and nice-to-do

If you’re day goes down the tubes, what do you need to get done? (I mean this from a homeschool perspective, not bare survival.)

Usually the highest school priorities in early grades are reading, math, and maybe handwriting. In later grades you might expand reading to encompass all of language arts and add some other subjects depending on priorities and interests.

If your kids are young and you’re facing morning sickness, crabby kids, illness, or some other sling or arrow of outrageous fortune, it’s okay to let some of it slide for a bit. Magic School Bus or National Geographic can become science. Liberty Kids can be American history. Instead of doing a read aloud, find audio books online or from the library. For older students, choose curriculum that is more self directed. Maybe pre-recorded video lessons are in order. Let someone else be the teacher.

It might not be your ideal homeschool, but it’s better than running yourself ragged. This is a marathon, not a sprint.

Speaking of which…

Take care of yourself

If you don’t take care of yourself, you’ll be short tempered, tired, foggy, and generally not useful to anyone else. You can check out my post about self care for some self-care ideas.

Feed yourself a balanced meal–in fact, multiple balanced meals–each day. I often resort to shakes made with Greek yogurt or my husband’s super yummy homemade shake mix so that I don’t have to stop and sit down to eat. Get caffeine if you need it in whatever form you need it. I use a travel mug for my tea so I don’t have to reheat it 437 times per day.

Do a little self care so you have enough physical and mental energy to devote to homeschooling. This might mean getting up before the kids for a bit of quiet time, prioritizing workouts, or scheduling a bubble bath after the kids are in bed so you know you have something to look forward to.

If you’re always dragging and dread the day to come, your kids will pick up on it. Like the old saying, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Manage your expectations

I find that I get frustrated when reality does not turn out the way I thought it would. Often it’s my own fault for expecting something that was unlikely to work. Let me give you an example.

Homeschooling five year old twins is vastly different than homeschooling a high schooler and a fourth grader. Although the latter couple of kids might have more work overall, they are much more independent and able to work for long periods. Their school day might be a four or five hour chunk all at once so that the rest of the day is free. You can expect more of them and be a little more hands off, so you can double time it with household chores or your own work.

The five year olds? There is no hands off. In fact, if you’re not engaged their hands will be on everything. They need you involved pretty much all the time or directly overseeing them. Most things will take at least twice as long as they should. You might do school in 5-15 minute spurts throughout the day instead of scheduling a 60-90 minute block all at once.

If you find that your days aren’t meeting your expectations, maybe you need to change methods. Or maybe you need to reevaluate what you’re expecting and change that to fit your and your kids capabilities in your current circumstances.

The post Five Tips for a Successful Homeschool Day appeared first on Bustling Home.

Why, yes, that is all true. We’re kind of heading in the prepper direction, but not out of paranoia. Jeff and I are staunchly utilitarian.

A utilitarian homestead

What besides paranoia would inspire us to work our tails off every day?

We can grow higher quality food than we can afford to buy

Right now we buy food at the grocery store. We buy as much in bulk as we can. Still, we have eight people in our family so far. Even though all the kids are small, we know we’ll have (at least) six teenagers in no time, four of them boys. Teenage boys eat A LOT! Inevitably, food prices will also increase. Jeff plans to retire within a couple of years, so his income will be fixed at that point.

To handle that situation, we can increase income or decrease expenses. We’re going to try both. Obviously homesteading works towards the latter. Probably our biggest expense after our mortgage is food, so that’s a prime target.

We’d also like to use better quality ingredients than we do right now. Sam’s Club chicken is okay, but it’s not nearly as good as free-range, hand-raised chicken. Same with eggs, milk, and other meats.

The difference is even more obvious with produce. Zucchini fresh from the garden is so much better than the old, beat up stuff that we can buy for 99 cents per pound. Pumpkins are even more robust. I figured that even though we only got a small fraction of our potential harvest this year, we probably grew at least $50 in sugar pumpkins alone.

Compared to our investment of time and equipment this year, we lost money. But we don’t have to pay for the equipment again and we’re raising a small labor force to make it more manageable (kind of joking, but the kids will help eventually). After a few years we expect that the amount we would have spent at the grocery store for all of the food we produced will eclipse the cost of equipment.

We will not take modern conveniences for granted

Water, electricity, and food don’t magically appear, though it can seem like that to kids because we just pay utility providers and pay the grocery store. In other words, money means we get stuff. It’s not wholly wrong, but that doesn’t convey that someone had to do a bunch of work to make the supply lines function. We pay for things and services because someone else is providing us something of value.

We eat a more varied diet

Some of what we grow, like Swiss chard or turnip greens, is nearly impossible to find in stores regardless of quality. Sure, we could buy spinach, but those are about the only somewhat affordable and widely available cooking greens.

From our first year–our experimental year from which we expected a mediocre harvest at best–we have in our freezer rutabaga greens, beet greens turnip greens, and swiss chard. Our spinach plants bolted early in the year. I’m not too sad about it.

Everything is fresh

Even the freshest food at the grocery store is days old. Apples can even be stored for many months before they go to market. With homesteading, we can pick tomatoes from our garden for salad the same day or harvest apples to make sauce, cider, syrup, and all manner of baked goods. (Have you seen how much dried fruit costs in the store? It’s insane!)

For milk, we can milk sheep in the morning and drink it at breakfast or lunch. Any leftovers we can turn into cheese.

Food can be preserved and we can still eat it, but nothing compares to using it or cooking it into exactly what we want shortly after we harvest it.

It instills a sense of responsibility and reward for hard work

The disconnect between work and result was one of the hardest things for me to tolerate when I had a job outside the house. I devoted hours of my time to… what? Furthering a company’s image? Adding some minuscule bit of knowledge to scientific understanding that realistically won’t help anyone? (I was a scientific researcher and then worked in public relations.)

Ugh, why bother?

Now, I can get behind piling the pumpkins, acorn squash, and buttercup squash on the front porch so we can pick away at it throughout the fall. I worked to feed my family directly, not just to earn money to spend at grocery store on semi-prepared foods because I’m away from home too much to cook them from fresh.

Hopefully as early as next year, the eggs we collect from the chickens we feed and water will become breakfast. That’s much less abstract (and useful, dare I say) than writing an article about astrophysics or earning an A on a book report.

We all will learn more about the natural world

I’m not big on nature walks in our homeschool. Checking for pests or infections in the garden or learning how to prepare a pumpkin, on the other hand, I can totally do with the kids. Likewise with feeding the animals so we can get eggs, milk, and meat. These things are useful. I like useful.

Along the way, we will learn about animal anatomy, botany, and things in nature that help or harm our animals and garden. Just spending time outside doing farm chores we’ll encounter nature. We won’t need separate walks to observe local birds or identify plants. It will be part of our daily existence.

Self sufficient? Organic? Free of processed foods?

The short answer is, if it’s useful to us, we might try it. If it’s not, nope.

We do not aim to go off grid, though we won’t rule it out at some point if it is convenient or useful. Wheat is not on our list of crops, even though it’s important for making bread. We can acquire that in bulk pretty cheaply and grains are generally a pain to process. In other words, self sufficiency is not our goal.

We certainly aren’t going to try to grow everything organically. That costs a lot more and defeats some of our money-saving goal. Jeff and I are also not convinced that there is substantial benefit to growing most things organically. It certainly doesn’t make the food any more nutritious or moral. We know what we’re putting in the soil and putting on the plants, so we can more accurately assess the safety of our non-organic home-grown food than even the organic stuff at the store.

I doubt we’ll ever completely remove processed foods from our diet. Sometimes we just need an easy dinner of chicken nuggets and tater tots for the kids, crackers for a quick snack, or a night of s’mores over a bonfire. I’m okay with that and it won’t substantially impact any of us as long as that’s not all we eat.

The post Why we homestead & how hardcore we are(n’t) appeared first on Bustling Home.

To that I say, it probably won’t be a smooth start and that’s okay. Some days you’ll be ready to march straight to the school to register them for regular classes. Other days you might be spooked by how well it went. You’ll probably have a lot of the former in the beginning just because you’re not sure what you’re trying to do. Rest assured, you can adjust along the way and find your groove.

To speed up the adjustment process, I’ll share a few ideas on how to bootstrap yourself and your family into homeschooling. These aren’t one-size-fits-all or complete solutions. However, I think it’s worth trying a few of them before you give up on homeschooling. (Note that I live in Wisconsin. Other places might have different laws regarding homeschooling. Always know the homeschooling laws where you live.)

Let me know in the comments what you find most difficult or dauting about homeschooling.

Hire out for some subjects

You don’t have to go it alone.

I am not my kids’ first homeschool teacher. While I was pregnant with my third set of twins and still working 20-30 hours per week, we hired an off-duty kindergarten teacher to watch the first and second sets of twins one day per week. She also did preschool type activities with them.

Although I wasn’t teaching them directly, I had much more say in what they learned than I would in a public or private school. I talked to their teacher weekly and we chose together how to approach their education.

You can also hire a private tutor if you want help with a specific subject or use online courses that teach by live or recorded video a la Outschool or Khan Academy. Look for local co-ops or Classical Conversations groups to see if any fit your needs.

Check your local laws about what you can count as educational hours. For example, in Wisconsin co-ops don’t count because multiple families get together. Online courses do count. The parent doesn’t have to be the teacher, but the class can only include students from one family. That’s not to say co-ops are useless or illegal in Wisconsin. They certainly provide social and academic value. I just can’t count co-op time towards the required 875 hours per year.

Choose open-and-go curriculum with a good teacher guide

I have taught atmospheric physics and jujutsu to college students, so I have some teaching experience. That doesn’t mean I have any idea how to teach reading to a four year old. I needed a script to follow and activities with supply lists and printables ready for me to copy (remember, I have twins so everything comes in duplicate at least).

Since reading was my first priority in formal education, I looked for a reading program that was extremely simple to follow and thorough: All About Reading. Each lesson in the teacher guide includes an introductory section that explains how to prepare for the lesson and lists any supplies you need. Then the guide explains step by step what the teacher should do with the kid(s) and even includes exact wording of some questions and statements. Now, you don’t need to say these verbatim, but it provides an excellent starting point for a parent who feels wholly unprepared to teach his/her child.

Start gradually

You don’t have to plan a full schedule on your first day of homeschooling. Start with one subject for a few days, then add a second. A couple days later add a third. A few weeks later you’ll have your full schedule in swing. This works for new homeschoolers and veterans transitioning from a break period back into daily schooling.

Imagine it’s like starting a new job, except your coworkers (who are also new to the job) run off to play hide and seek if you have to stop to figure out something. Frustrating, right? It’d be much easier to start with a single goal or task on day one that is small enough for you to keep most of the details in your head at once.

Similarly with homeschooling, it’s much easier to start with one new lesson or curriculum at a time. Not only is it less daunting, but it limits how much you can crash and burn from the beginning. It’s easier to recover from small failure than an entire day of nothing working despite hours of careful planning.

Don’t be afraid to quit for a day

Some days just are not meant for school. Kids might be sick and need a movie or free reading day. Or maybe they’re tired or antsy and the park is better than home. Just because you give up on one day doesn’t mean you’re failing. Tomorrow is a new day. Adjust whatever wasn’t working and try again.

Write out your reasons for homeschooling

Why am I doing this? It’d be so much easier to drop them off at school for the day and be free until pickup.

Sound familiar? When you think homeschooling is a terrible idea and question your sanity for even attempting it, having a written list of reasons for homeschooling nearby helps. Review it weekly and whenever you need a confidence boost. You chose this sometimes difficult path for a reason–or many reasons. It’s not easy, but it is rewarding.

If you need help starting your list, take a look at mine: 8 Reasons We Homeschool Preschool and Kindergarten

Find a homeschool group online or in person

A homeschool “group” might be meeting with one other homeschool parent a couple of times each month. It doesn’t even have to be for school stuff. Even though I don’t need anyone’s approval for my kids’ education, having someone to talk to about homeschooling helps me feel more confident that I’m not completely off target. I also can ask about all the homeschool things if I’m thinking of making changes in our homeschool.

Start with weekly goals, not daily

One week, tried scheduling our curriculum in a daily planner. That close to the worst week of homeschooling I’ve had. Even if it might not have been much different from other weeks, I felt like I was failing and falling behind. When I get frustrated or stressed, I get impatient. Then the kids misbehave and the problems snowball.

I had already figured out that routines are less stressful than schedules. I don’t know why I thought homeschooling needed to be more exactly structured. Maybe it’s a hold over from my own public school experience? In any case, writing a list of goals for the week and having a loose idea of how I can meet mini-goals throughout the week has worked much better. If I were better at keeping records, I might write down in the daily planner what we did. This is called “planning from behind.”

Meet your kid at their level

My oldest are five, but missed the kindergarten cutoff date by 15 days. Right now, they are working on (approximately) first grade math, first grade reading, kindergarten writing, and other subjects that can span multiple grade levels. They’d be bored and their education stagnant if they had to go back and do basic phonics.

On the flip side, I’ve read a lot of comments from parents who recently pulled their kids from public school and realized that their child was way behind grade level in certain subjects. Math and reading come up a lot. There’s no use in staring your child on fifth grade math when s/he hasn’t mastered third grade math yet. S/he won’t learn and everyone will be frustrated to tears.

Instead of using the grade level on the curriculum, find your child’s skill level through placement tests or trying examples from the curriculum. Start there or a little earlier even to build confidence and get used to a new type of schooling. Progress is more important than some arbitrary standard set by the Department of Education.

Use curriculum as a guide, not as gospel

After saying that I loved how scripted All About Reading is, you might think that I follow it exactly to make sure I “get it right.”

Nope. I only used that to bootstrap myself. Now I look over the lesson to discern the key points. I might use the examples in the book or I might switch them out for something more relevant to my kids’ interests. Sometimes I skip the activities if we’re short on time or my kids don’t want to do them. As long as I can tell that they know the material they need to, I don’t really care how much of the prescribed work they do.

Do I think that All About Reading is a waste of money since I don’t use parts of it? Not at all. The extra activities and scripts are there if I need them when I’m sick or my kids might get stuck on a concept and need more practice.

Could I have found a cheaper way to teach my kids to read? Probably, but I see no problem investing in resources that save me time and hassle. I paid for someone else’s time to organize the curriculum so I can focus on other subjects that I feel more qualified and compelled to plan myself, my homestead, and my personal goals.

Separate subjects if your child needs it

As I mentioned earlier, my kids’ skills are not at the same grade level according to public school standards. The bigs can do first grade math, but they have trouble writing the answers because writing numbers and letters is still a work in progress. I cannot hand them a worksheet and expect them to do it.

To allow them to progress in math, I sit down with them and their worksheet. They read the instructions and each problem since their reading skill is good enough. Then they tell me the answer and I write it. In this way, their handwriting doesn’t hold them back in math.

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