This post was written as part of the annual opportunity that families have to share A Day in the Life at Simple Homeschool.
Sometimes I find it hard to believe that I only have one child left, my daughter, who is technically school age. Five years ago there were four kids (three boys and a girl) whose day to day life I was actively involved with and now there is one. That being said, I’ve been pleasantly surprised that living and learning together has not actually stopped at all. We are still sharing ideas and supporting one another even in the midst of jobs, college and living away from home. Texts and FaceTimes and fun visits continued even as the oldest two moved on and so have natural parental concerns. My mind still swims with excitement and curiosity for them as well as anxieties and worries that I need to consciously move through on a regular basis. I guess it’s “par for the course” as my father would say.
This is actually where my mind is at 5am on this particular mid-February day. A variety of thoughts swirl around my mind as I think about the different things my young adults are doing and aiming toward in what seems to be a very uncertain time in history. I say a prayer for personal peace and rest for my mind. I won’t solve anything at this time of the morning and thankfully I give in to sleep and wake up over two hours later feeling much better.
The first thing I do once I’m up and about is open the kitchen blinds. I catch a glimpse of the vibrant red of a male cardinal at the little feeder in the lilac bush and things are off to a good start. I stand and just watch for a while. He’s joined by two chickadees and an uncountable number of little round juncos. I’ve been spending a couple of minutes doing this each morning. It’s part of what I discovered I wanted to do when trying something called a joy list again recently. I can’t help but get off to a jovial start after watching these little creatures for a bit.
My husband left early this morning and my daughter will likely sleep longer still. I hear my youngest son’s alarm. He has an interview this morning and another this afternoon. He’s also getting back to his woodworking mentorship next week after a few weeks away. He’s worked with this carpenter and custom woodworking mentor (the most wonderful mentor in the world, I think!) for 6 years, and in the past year, has begun to take on his own commissioned orders. Recently he has gotten an opportunity to do some repair work on an elderly woman’s generational family pieces.
I head down to my workspace in the basement to do some work. I’m able to a do a decent portion of my work at home right now. I’m quiet because our oldest son is here for a few months and is also currently working from home so whereas a few months ago I might have had music and the laundry going as long as I wasn’t making calls, now I try to keep noise to a minimum as he has his own calls and meetings downstairs. We’re all re-learning to share the space right now.
I’m thinking about my youngest son’s job interview this morning and have a stabbing thought that maybe I should have helped him prepare. He and I updated his resume together a couple of weeks ago but most of the conversations he’s had about applications and interviews have been with his siblings and friends. He has seemed easy going about it so I haven’t added any weight, but now I wonder. This age of late teen/early adult is a bit tricky for me to figure out at times.
I work steadily until 12:00 and come up for lunch. My youngest son is making himself lunch and eager to chat about the first interview which he feels really good about. He rolls through the questions and an overview of his answers and seems to feel it was a genuinely good experience whether or not he gets the job – but yes, he does want the job. 🙂
My daughter (16) is sitting in the living room, art materials out. She’s been working on a series of gouache paintings over a period of time. She’s also getting ready for the first session of a mixed media workshop series from an art gallery to begin this afternoon. It’s virtual and she realizes her iPad isn’t charged so we do some shifting around of tables, outlets and cords so that she can have a good set up while also charging her iPad. Over the last few years, she’s had a “maker space” room with a long table and lots of set up space available in the basement, but it can only be accessed through the room my oldest is currently using as an office and it’s not ideal to interrupt him during a work day. The outlets aren’t spaced in the way she needs at the kitchen table so she ends up fine to settle with a makeshift set up in the living room and creatively figures it out. Did I mention we’re all getting re-adjusted to sharing space?
She’s apprehensive because the art gallery hasn’t sent out the participant materials and there was a message yesterday that they would spend the first session talking about the series and getting to know one another – something she hadn’t been anticipating when she registered. As a strong introvert, she wasn’t really looking for a lot of group small talk. She had wanted to get straight to work. We talk about it (again), she sighs, smiles and concedes that it will likely be fine. Once she’s all set up, a message comes through that because they haven’t been able to get the materials out to participants and the materials really are integral to the process, they are going to postpone and begin next week. Another sigh and some quiet mixed feelings, she shrugs, chuckles and puts her materials away. Instead we get out a Math DVD and book and settle in for The Great Courses High School Math course.
Now, if you have read my Day in the Life posts in the past, you may remember that we have a whole life learning/unschooling way of living. So what place does a math DVD and book have in our afternoons? Well, Math is part of life and while we don’t structure our day into “subjects,” my daughter has been very interested in math, and is enjoying having a course as a way to work away at it. She looks forward to the instructor and enjoys working out the answers – kind of like a puzzle – and is often interested for me to work them out alongside and then find out what steps I naturally take/the way I figure it it versus what she naturally does. For the record this is quite different from my guys. My oldest has taken a real interest in finance and spends a lot of time developing his skills and knowledge around that. The two younger guys were happy enough to work toward any math credits they needed as prerequisites for applications and they’ve always enjoyed math that came up in the context of their own life (building, outdoor interests, gaming, culinary, sports, banking) but working away through a course? Not so much. This is my first encounter with a real fascination and sense of beauty in mathematics outside of a practical purpose or interest.
The other thing is that my daughter enjoys courses. It isn’t curricula she’s necessarily interested in, but courses and workshop series that are geared to adults or at least not age-specific. She has another (she’s already done some) self-paced photography course she’s planning to begin once she decides on a camera, and she also has a writing and illustrating course she’s just ordered.
It is a gorgeous sunny day after a light snowfall, so we decide to that since the afternoon is now freer without the art class, we’ll head out to one of our favourite conservation areas. We have been walking there in the late afternoon/early evening quite a lot lately and have found that if we go at a particular time (adjusting for later sunsets as the winter goes on), we will often see many deer. We decide to hold off a little longer and have time to watch two segments of a North American Birding course.
I’ve been becoming increasingly interested in birds the last few years and my mother-in-law has been loading me up (in a good way) with bird-related things. It’s been so fun for my daughter to take an interest this year. The last few years it’s been my own thing, which is fine too, but this fall and winter she’s taken a strong interest and has been helping think of new bird feeder ideas (we find it works better to hang small feeders that we make and then fill each day), watching the course DVDs and pouring through books along with me. We’ve also been going on some walks to see various birds. We watch our video segments and head out to the trails.
We are not disappointed. When we arrive, it is truly like walking into a winter wonderland. We are greeted by the standard crowd of mallard ducks and Canada geese and then turn the corner, look at each other in wonder and catch our breath. It’s stunning. The way the snow is hanging onto to the branches, the blue sky and low afternoon light coming through the trees … it’s hard to do justice with a smartphone photo. She reminds me that she’d like to make a decision about a new camera.
Then we turn a corner and oh my … the deer. At first we see two walking toward us on the path. Then another two quietly appear behind them and by time it’s becoming dark, we have easily seen 12 – 15. As all parents know, a walk in the woods is never just a walk in the woods. This afternoon it’s also an opportunity to chat with the conservation worker about deer populations, patterns and behaviour, conversations between my daughter and I about protected wild spaces, hunting, whether the trails should be public space or the deer’s/animals’ space after a certain time of evening, mapping out a new trail down to the water for next time when we meet friends and a host of other things. The sun is nearly out of sight as we leave and she spots a red-tailed hawk perched near to where we’re parked. Our full conversations continue on the way home in between a couple of songs on the radio.
By the time we get home, my oldest son is finished work and emerging for supper, and my husband is arriving home after stopping to pick up dinner that my mother-in-law has prepared for us this evening … fantastic. I’m so grateful to arrive in from the cold to a ready-made meal. It’s not unusual. My husband drives to her place once a week to visit and help with errands and things around the yard and house and she enjoys the opportunity to send a meal back. In the past few months, my youngest son has been going along to help and then also cooking and baking along with her, making many of the recipes at home as well. This has been such a rich experience and especially fun because it was at his request, so now it’s a shared interest between him and his granny. One of the things I’ve really noticed as the kids have gotten older is how much they treasure time with their grandparents and the reciprocity of those relationships.
After dinner, I head back down to my workspace to get some emails returned for tomorrow while others do their thing – connect with friends over gaming, watch the news, etc. I’ll be working away from home for the morning tomorrow so want to get things wrapped up from any messages that have come in from today and get things in order. Back upstairs, I spend some time chatting with my husband over dishes and then sitting, relaxing at the table. There’s lots going on in the world right now and people are in and out of the kitchen with their own thoughts and opinions which is interesting and yet at some point becomes a lot. We agree to bring in some lighter conversation for a while and most of us settle in for an evening of watching the Olympics.
My daughter, especially, is on top of what’s happening, partly because she watches a show highlighting the athletes’ training throughout the year and partly because she has a head for event rules, scores, new events and the personal stories of the athletes. Most questions we have are sent in her direction. Around 10:30, people drift in different directions, my husband to read, my youngest son likely to a podcast and my oldest to get back to gaming with some friends.
My daughter and I settle in on the couch to read, write or listen to something. We will be up at least a couple of hours yet as we both love to read and discuss late in the evening. It’s always been my most creative and thoughtful time of day and as she’s gotten into her teen years, she is finding the same thing. She’s been very interested in language and literature these past couple of years. For a long time, she had been enjoying Latin, Italian and Japanese on Duolingo and last year I joined her to do both Latin and French. The past few months she’s taken a strong interest in poetry and children’s literature and has been reserving large numbers of picture books and children’s novels from libraries each month, pouring through illustrations and writing styles as she writes and illustrates parts of her own.
We are jointly reading Steeped in Stories by Mitali Perkins (a beautiful book from the Introverted Moms community that I was already reading and then realized fit her interests as well) and on Kindle, we’ve been reading Almosta Farm, the sequel in a new Canadian Children’s series by mother/daughter writing team Heather N. Quinn which we plan to write a (very good) review of. Tonight she also reads the transcript of the most recent Read Aloud Revival podcast. She often tunes in for booklist ideas and illustration inspiration.
Finally, I’ve been enjoying pulling quotes out of various books that relate to things I’m thinking or hearing about and she’s been watching and noticing too. It’s especially fun when they are older books that express a thought that’s relevant to life now. For example, a couple of years ago, I wouldn’t have imagined we’d be deep diving into children’s literature in the way that’s happening right now and that I’d be enjoying it so much too. I found a related Mark Twain quote at the beginning of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer that has had me smiling since.
So that was what one day this February was like! It’s a far cry from the days of fastening multiple children into booster seats and car seats and preparing meals while navigating a dozen other things! Somehow it does not feel less, though, and the connections are more wonderful than I could have imagined.
If you’re interested in reading about A Day in the Life from the past two years:
Day in the life from 2021 is here.
Day in the life from 2020 is here.
