The diagnosis is "Back to School Panic"

A few days ago I started wondering if I was about to have a nervous breakdown. Given my family background, it's not such a funny thought. Then I remembered...this always happens to me just before school starts. I desperately need a break and start falling to pieces. This year, my exhaustion is mixed with a huge dose of excitement. Three of the four dear children are schooling at home. It's my dream job, but I wonder if I've gotten in totally over my head, teaching preschool, 5th grade and 8th grade simultaneously.

My homeschool room looks like a tornado hit it. I know where my lesson plans are (and they ARE ready), but everything else is a whirlwind of books, papers and craft supplies stirred together. It's like the soup that kids #2 and #4 were making together yesterday in the yard. They had just filled up the wading pool with fresh water. The next thing I know, kid #4 is stirring the pool with a big stick, as if it were a witches cauldron. Kid #2 is dropping in bits of grass, weeds, flowers, leaves, rocks.

I opened the window and the first words out of my mouth were, "What do you think you're doing!"

The answer was so obvious.

"Were making soup!" he said, his eyes bright with excitement.

He's so happy! I remember a time, less than a year ago, when he was too afraid to play outside. Now he's in the front yard with his sister making a nature stew.

Here I am, worrying about the mess when a miracle has occurred on my front lawn. Now I do feel like a fool, but the panic is gone. This is the life I dreamed for him. Yes, it's a few years later than I had hoped, but I don't want to miss it. Maybe it's an Indian summer, but it's our summer. And it's sweeter because it came late. If it had come earlier, I wouldn't have appreciated it quite so much.

...and we do have guests coming next week.....and the house is a wreck....and school is less than 3 weeks away. There is always something.

Right now, I'm going to try to let go and embrace our Indian summer.

Yesterday's wise words of the day...

I don't consider myself to be a Charlotte Mason follower, but I love this quote.

"If mothers could learn to do for themselves what they do for their children when these are overdone, we should have happier households. Let the mother go out to play! If she would only have courage to let everything go when life becomes too tense, and just take a day, or half a day, out in the fields, or with a favourite book, or in a picture gallery looking long and well at just two or three pictures, or in bed, without the children, life would go on far more happily for both children and parents. The mother would be able to hold herself in ‘wise passiveness,’ and would not fret her children by continual interference, even of hand or eye––she would let them be."

Charlotte Mason