Casualties of homeschooling

I knew when I we began homeschooling that some things would change around here. I knew I would sacrifice my free time. The time I used to read in the afternoon. The opportunity to take an uninterrupted shower. My desire to have any more children, ever. (lol) My sanity.I also knew I would have to lower my housekeeping standards. That was the hardest part for me, because I am really uptight about my house. I cannot relax until everything is cleaned up and organized. That's not to say it always is- just that I am on edge until it gets that way. It's something I need to work on anyway, as I drive everyone nuts barking out orders to clean things up. So I knew I was going to have to chill out a little. But it hasn't been easy, especially now that we are in our new house.We want to keep it nice, and we'll spend a little extra for better quality trim or paint. Toys stay in the bedrooms. No food in the living room. And don't bang the cabinets.

When we moved in the first thing we redid was the dining room. The previous owner used it as an office and it was carpeted with old, smelly, stained carpet. The white paint was dingy and dark wood trim in each corner concealed the fact that they never completed the drywall. We ripped up the horrible carpet and replaced it with laminate hardwood. We patched up the drywall and painted a cheery, mustard yellow from the Benjamin Moore colonial collection.We finished it up with soft white trim. I added cranberry curtains and accents. It is by far my favorite room. At our old house we ate in our living room, and this is like a dream come true.

It was also the ideal place to do schoolwork, so when we got started I moved everything in there and organized it in wooden cabinet I've had since we first got married. I keep the books, manipulatives, crayons, pencils, glue, markers, everything there. I wanted it to be accessible so the kids could get things out whenever they were feeling creative and make little masterpieces. I imagined Gracie as a famous illustrator one day, telling an interviewer, "My mother really nurtured my creativity...growing up, no art supplies were off limits, I was always free to express myself!" the problem is, in my fantasy, they put the supplies BACK WHERE THEY FOUND THEM. This has not been the case.

I started noticing that stacks of paper were slowly taking over my house. A little pile on the kitchen counter. A little pile on the desk. A few more sheets on the coffee table. Some papers with shapes cut out on the kitchen floor. Then I started finding chewed up crayons in the dog's bed. Before I knew it, there were papers and pencils and crayons scattered all through the house. Even in the bathroom! "Clean up your art stuff guys!" I must have said it six times a day, yet every time I turned around, there was MORE. It's just the way things are when you homeschool, I thought. I started cleaning it up myself too, but it never seemed to help.

I sat the kids down and told them they had to start asking before they got out supplies, and when they were finished, clean them up. "Ok!"...and they forgot.

Then yesterday was a particularly hectic day. Caleb was extra bad all day. I woke up with a migraine and found  him standing in the open fridge, chucking lemons and apples across the kitchen like baseballs and the dog chewing on one. While I was helping Gracie with math he got a Sharpie and colored his hands. All day was like that. We topped it all off with a last-minute trip to a masonry supply store to buy stone for our woodstove. They were trying to close and we were trying to shop and Caleb was trying to climb the samples in the showroom. We were tired and stressed and had dinner late.

I finally got the dishes done about eight and started to wash the table in my beautiful dining room. I glanced up and when I saw it I actually felt sick to my stomach. Scribble marks from one end of the wall to the other, all over my gorgeous yellow paint, up and down and curled around, darker in some places where he had pressed extra hard. He left his weapon at the scene. A lone pencil, now dull from his merciless rubbing.
"CALEB!!!"

Needless to say, his butt was mine, as are all the art supplies now. Gracie is not allowed to use them either, because she was irresponsible and left them out where Caleb could get them. They are all in a box up in a cabinet. They are not allowed to ask for them. When I decide they can color, that's when they can color. It's a pain having to retrieve them when Gracie does schoolwork or to write something down ourselves, but for now it's the only way. The piles of paper were put in recycling, except for a few exceptional ones that I saved for posterity. It's a shame it had to come to this, but I feel like I got some order back in my house. And, for the rest of the week, Luke is my favorite child.