Why is it...?

All summer long my oldest daughter and I worked hard at dejunking and reordering the house. We painted the bedrooms, which we’ve needed to do ever since we bought the house, and we rearranged two rooms so that one could be made into a more functional schoolroom/library - it always takes me two or three years to get really “moved in” to a new house. Everything was going along swimmingly, until…

We started back to school five weeks ago.

The house is a mess now. I always feel this way about my housekeeping and homeschooling. I can only do one thing at a time and do it reasonably well - and by “at a time” I don’t mean in any given moment a la multitasking; I mean in any given day or week.

And it’s not because I have I such a brutal homeschooling schedule or standard of housekeeping that it’s unattainable - it’s simply because I’m so slow, and once I get going I have lots of what Samantha calls inertia: I don’t turn easily from one task to the next and I have trouble stopping what I’m doing before it’s finished.

This year I’m using Ambleside’s Year One book list for my youngest four children, and we’re really enjoying it. Besides being part of my children’s education, I’m hoping that this method will help me learn the skill of pacing - of working steadily at several tasks, a little bit each day, over a long period of time.