Transformations

I've been on my leave of absence for... I guess about 3 weeks, now. Originally the plan was for Sarah to stay home with me Mondays and Tuesdays, and to go in to school W-F (alone on W and F, with me on R). Instead she's chosen to stay home with me, so far. Which is fine with me. But for the last few weeks, while I've been letting myself coast completely, it's meant hot and cold running TV for her, 24/7. I'm happy to suspend our TV guidelines on true *sick* days, but this is not that sort of thing -- and we can only live like this so long before it becomes enervating and depressing, instead of a fun treat.

When we were homeschooling together full time, we drew a lot of our inspiration from Waldorf -- in terms of the rhythms of our day/week/year, in terms of a focus on story, song, and nature, and in terms of my (generally unspoken) focus on emotional/spiritual age-appropriateness (steering away from overly analytical explanations of things during that first, dreamy, stage of childhood, for example -- because I know I have a tendency towards the wordy, analytical answer every time). When we started at the school, most of that went by the wayside -- some intentionally, some not.

When I started thinking, 'okay, we're going to be home together most days for the next 4-5 months -- what do we want our lives to look like?' I found myself going back to Waldorf (and specifically the Enki and Oak Meadow materials I'd collected during our first years of homeschooling). I spent the early part of this week reading mostly my old Enki books (I'd passed along most of the Oak Meadow stuff to friends), talking with Sarah, and considering what a restorative, balanced rhythm would look like, for us.

Enki suggests looking at the way you're already doing things, and identifying just the one or two places in your day where you'll *most* benefit from transitioning to a more rhythmic approach. But, frankly, I'm just not up for leaving things mostly as-is while we make just 2 changes to our days (I think they're assuming a much more highly-functioning household as a starting point than what we've got right now). So Sarah and I talked about it, and we're going to try to gently transform our whole day at once -- with lots of compassion for ourselves, and lots of "hey, great, we stayed on track all morning -- let's take a break to mindlessly veg in front of the TV for an hour!"

We're unschoolish (I don't tend to call us "unschoolers" -- I find that once you adopt a label, it's too easy for people to say "that's not unschooling -- to be an unschooler (or vegan, quaker, pagan, attachment parent, etc.), you have to do such-and-so". I've got no patience for that and I'm unwilling to subject myself to it), so within the larger rhythm exactly what we do shifts from day to day or week to week. This week we've been going back to the comforting rhythms of our early homeschool days -- cuddling, then spending a little time on our own stuff, then coming back together to have breakfast and play school and plan out our afternoons. It feels really good to be back in that space...