Fantasy World

    So I am on day two of hiding out in the house from the heat. Next week is supposed to be cooler and we have a lot of outings planned so I'm not too worried about our lost two days. I'm not sure if other homeschooling parents find themselves getting sucked into the "I haven't showered in two days and the house looks like a tornado went through it" vortex. I am fully ensconced. I felt pretty good that I changed my shirt last night. When I first decided to homeschool, I had a lovely vision of us showered, dressed, sitting in a perfect house, working on activities that stayed perfectly contained, and experiencing non-stop learning. Umm, the reality is that it would only look like that if Good Morning America was here filming....and no learning would have existed during the entire time it would take me to actually get it to that point. Instead, my house is a disaster about 60% of the time (some weeks the percentage is much higher!) and I often can't remember the last time I gave her a bath.
    As far as the learning, today we worked on her Highlights magazine which is always fun. We then moved on to a workbook and she did quite a bit of writing, matching, and sequencing. Molly has days, luckily not too often, where she pretends to not know something. Today it was what letter comes after E. She knows the answer and had the alphabet spelled out in front of her. It takes an inordinate amount of time to get her to answer which then takes us away from all of the other things we would rather be doing. I know she is testing boundaries and that if I let her get away with it she would lose all respect for me and herself. We got through it, but it takes so much of the wind out of my sails. It makes me question if I am doing the right thing. Am I pushing too hard, am I not pushing hard enough? She always seems so happy afterwards and seems to make a huge leap following one of these episodes that it makes me think that it's just a test to see what I will accept. We ended up doing a fun CD-ROM game on the computer that allowed us to incorporate adding and subtracting into our day. There was a lot of art today and a bit of chocolate ice cream which is a very rare treat....so rare, in fact, that I spent quite a bit of time scraping off the freezer burn on top. She is signed up for swimming lessons that start next week (her first ever!) and she and I are joining our fancy, park district health club. Slowly but surely we are finding our way through this new territory. Will my initial fantasy ever come true? I hope not:)