The Incompetent Housewife: I'm cramming an otter into a Pringles can.

Monday, February 25, 2008

I'm cramming an otter into a Pringles can.

These two statements will get me through some busy days:

"Someone once told me that homeschooling and being a full time homemaker, wife and mother is like 'cramming an otter into a Pringles can.' It's just darned near impossible. That's the way life is for me, but it's working."

"Sometimes I forget I'm in the business of raising children and not of getting things done. I have to keep checking on the children and their progress and not worry about how the house looks."

—homeschooling mother Amber Galbraith, as quoted by Connie Goff in the Maryville Daily Forum, Maryville, Mo., Feb. 20, 2008

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You know you're a homeschooler when:

yet another person asks how you do it all, and you think about the mountain of laundry and unintentionally green things in the fridge.
you figure the kindergarten teacher will teach your shoelace-troubled child how to finally tie shoes, then realize, "Wait! I AM the kindergarten teacher."
the internet repair worker walks into your living room and announces, "Oh, you run a daycare." You don't.
when your child is teased that there are poisonous snakes in the hole she fell into, her calm response is, "That can't be. There are no poisonous snakes in our state."
your 6-year-old hears you discussing something involving numbers and wants to know, "How would that look in a pie chart?"
you hear loud crying, so you rush to the front yard to find your 3-year-old has fallen off the porch bottom-first into the bushes. Turns out she is not concerned about the pain. She cries, "I knocked the honey out and how the bees can't come!" (She thinks she has knocked all the pollen off the bushes.)
your 5-year-old says she heated up her silly putty and you fear she put it in the microwave. When you ask how she heated it, she replies, "Well, just with my carbon dioxide." She means she breathed on it.
your daughter sees a piece of art you painted before she was born. Her first question is, "And how did you FEEL while you were painting it?"
your husband is curious why the Unifix cube are all over the floor—again—and you tell him you were playing a math game. Your daughter says no, it was just a game, not math, and insists, "We didn't ‘do school’ today.” Yes, honey, that’s exactly the point.
where others see an empty oatmeal box, you see a project waiting to happen.
you can't cut into a piece of fruit in your house without the kids examining the seeds and begging, "Can we plant them?!? Can we?"
there are tadpoles swimming on your kitchen counter, right there between the cutting board and the coffeemaker.
said tadpoles are in a glass bowl from your china cabinet.
over by the china cabinet are butterfly chrysalises you don't want to throw out because they're just so cool.
your child expresses interest in going to the public school. Your muscles tense as you carefully ask what interests her about traditional school (Are you ruining her life by keeping her home?), then relax as she tells you, "I just want to know what it's like to ride a school bus."
you shout, "Ewww!" because you find a half-eaten bird in the garage. Your daughter scolds you by saying, "Not ewww ... Cool!"
your daughter is supposed to be changing into her pajamas, but instead she stands in front of the mirror with her t-shirt hanging off her head because, "I look like one of the kings of Egypt."
your daughter is looking for a way to light the back of the closet and says, "Mom, do you know where a flashlight is, or should we make one?"
your daughter drapes a towel over her head after her shower and asks, "Hey, do I look like an Israelite?"