Recalculating...Recalculating

When I'm driving by GPS and I made a turn Gladys, my GPS, doesn't agree with she gives me a lecture. She will get huffy with my choice (or circumstance) to take a different direction. Gladys then advises me that she is "recalculating my destination". Actually she hollars at me "recalculating...recalculating" as if I've turned her world upside down. Maybe I have.


It's a little like that with our new homeschool schedule.


Last week we took off from lessons to decompress and deschool. I think we are sufficiently decompressed, but deschooled is feeling like it will take a bit longer. For 8 years I've lived my life BPU/APU, Before Pick Up and After Pick Up. My whole body is on pointe waiting for half past 2 p.m. I've had an alarm on my phone to mark the time left before I needed to be on campus. Now there is no where we have to be at any given time. That doesn't mean we've gone all where-ever-the-wind-takes-us with regards to the structure of the day, but we are learning to be flexible. It's a long unused muscle.


The schedule was a bit part of why we choose to homeschool. There are so many cool things that happen during school hours. Museums are open, workshops are happening, government is running and art is all around us. It seems a bit disconnected to read about these events in a textbook rather than experience them firsthand. We're even planning a trip during what would have been The Test Week if we were in public school. Now we're going to take advantage of low-rate season and lovely weather to explore educationally relevant places. And isn't it all educationally revelant?


Tomorrow we start our Back To School. We have changed up the schedule to include waking up at 8:00 a.m. rather than the butt-crack of dawn to be at a building at 7:30 a.m. There are chores to be done first. The boys have a heavier workload than they did in their public school, but they're able to take breaks when they want and there aren't the usual distractions of rowdie classmates or changing classrooms. It's amazing how much can be accomplished when they are just working on the tasks at hand.


After all these years I wonder how long it will take before I stop watching the clock for 2:30? It's weird to live your life at the ready. For years I've felt I couldn't get momentum on a project because I had to stop what I was doing to deal with pick up. I can't go to the grocery store because it's almost 2:30. I can't run a quick errand because it's almost time for carpool. It's this odd little mantra based, not on what worked for us as a family, but on some arbitrary schedule set up by the school district. It's that same free-fall feeling I got when I graduated from university. That feeling that I should be doing something, shouldn't I? I have to learn to not fill every minute of the day to be "productive".


Recalculating...recalculating....