7:00 AM: Prepare for your day.
Have a cup of coffee or tea. Consult the calendar to see if today requires everyone wear pants or not. Check Facebook, email and other social media to see if there is further information about pants wearing requirements for this week, other social obligations and general passage of time information.
8:00 AM: Family Breakfast.
Attempt to feed children breakfast. Regret your life choices.
8:30 AM: Tidy the kitchen.
Do dishes. Ask children to help do dishes. The mountain of dishes seems bottomless.
9:00 AM to Noon: Educate the children.
Rotate through teaching children reading, writing, spelling, math, art, science, history and all the random stuff you can cram in. During this time various children will alternate taking breaks to move, go to the bathroom and just wander off for no reason at all. Parent will get no break, as rotating through the kids, changing out the laundry and yelling “Where are you going? You aren’t wearing pants!” takes the entire morning.
Noon: Serve lunch.
If the kids are small or have food allergies, this may require full-on cooking a meal; no throwing peanut butter and jelly sandwiches at them and moving on. No, you gotta make something and do more dishes. While you do dishes, yell at the kids to put on some pants, we have to be somewhere.
1:00 PM to 1:25 PM: Time for an outing!
This time is spent finding coats and shoes. Smaller children need more help while older children need more yelling at. Frustration with this ends when mom goes and looks for herself exactly where she told the child to look and the shoes are right there!
1:30 PM to 3:30 PM: Afternoon adventures.
After getting everyone dressed and in the minivan, race to the playdate, co-op class, or other reason to leave the house, worrying about being late, again. Drag your children out to this event. On the way there, contemplate how great it is you get to do these things. On the way home, wonder why you do these things.
4:00 PM: Afternoon respite.
Sit down and try to ignore the children for an hour so you don’t lose your mind. The youngest child comes in every 10 or 15 minutes to ask for something: juice, applesauce, a sword, etc. Lock yourself in the bathroom for a few minutes of silence.
5:00 PM: End of the day tidying Up.
Yell at the kids to do the chores they should have done earlier in hopes the house won’t be a disaster when the working parent gets home.
5:30 PM: Prepare a healthy meal your family loves!
Give up on yelling. Start dinner while again doing dishes. Listen to at least one child tell you about something they think is fascinating. A. Minecraft B Dinosaurs C. How their little brother is picking his nose and eating it. Realize you’re out of a key ingredient for what you planned to serve. Reinvent dinner on the fly based on what you actually have. Question your life choices again.
6:30 PM: Dinner with your loved ones.
Convince your children to eat what you made for dinner even though it’s not what they wanted and includes vegetables. Encourage the kids to tell the working parent all about the great things they learned today. Instead, children will focus on whatever TV show they watched while you were locked in the bathroom.
7:30 PM: A tidy home is a happy home.
Wait, there are more dishes? Ask the other parent to help with the dishes and stuff while you hide in your room with a glass of wine and wonder if you just skip teaching math for the next several months if it will be okay. Multiplication isn’t that important, right?
8:30 PM: Keep to a soothing bedtime routine.
Come back on duty and convince children to brush their teeth, put on pajamas, and get ready for bed.
9:00 PM: Storytime.
Read them a story. Usually, one that you will be counting as part of their curriculum.
10:00 PM: Quiet time
Find time to actually read a blog like this. Laugh because your kids are not actually in bed asleep, but your day was at least this crazy.
About the Author
Laura Sowdon, OTR/L is an occupational therapist, writer, speaker, educator and creator of the Five Senses Literature Lessons homeschool curriculum. She has worked as an occupational therapist with children in public and private schools, as well as private practice. Laura has taught and managed homeschool co-ops as well as homeschooling her own three children. Laura is dedicated to the idea of educating children at a pace that aligns with brain and physical development milestones and respects neurodiversity in all its forms.