Balancing Homeschooling and Work

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While I am not working outside of the home right now, I have in the not too distant past.

For the first half of 2009, I spent somewhere between 10 and 20 hours most weeks doing my best to keep our parish’s music ministry program running while they searched for a new full time director. So far as the schedule went, I was quite blessed to have mostly evening and weekend hours. That helped keep our school hours more regular. However, it still impacted our lives significantly.  Free time for me went out the window.

At the moment, I am doing a few tasks that amount to work inside the home.  Being a member of the TOS Homeschool Crew is a lot more involved than some may realize.  We have deadlines to meet along with a set of expectations for the work we do.  I have also joined a few other programs for doing product (or book) reviews.  Some allow you to choose your own schedule while others have set dates for publication.  I’ve also been one of the moms working together on the Curiosity Files unit studies from The Old Schoolhouse.

My approach so far is to fit the work in around our other activities and schooling needs.  A fair bit of it is done after everyone heads to bed.  Thanks to technology, I can write up a blog post and tell Blogger to publish it on a given date at a given time.  Usually it works fine (although I had a hiccup in the recent past.)

However, there are days when I might not want to stay up late ‘working’.  So, I have been praying over the best approach to meet all my obligations without sacrificing time after the boys go to bed.

One thing that is starting to happen in the house is making the boys more accountable for getting work done independently.  I’ll be the first to admit that progress in this area is slow going.  It’s hard to get them to be more independent when they are used to having Mom close at hand.  For school work, we are trying a few things that are student led (e.g. Teaching Textbooks for math and Time 4 Learning for R and D to get more language arts apart from me.)  So far, it is going okay.  And, I will confess to thinking we might be moving towards more

Another thing I am trying to get ‘in place’ is a better schedule for our days.  My personality enjoys the free flowing, take it as it comes at me, approach for some things.  Unfortunately, that doesn’t work so well with my boys.  I’m thinking a bit more structure will help us all.  The upside to being on a schedule is that I should be able to set aside time during the day for my own work. (Convincing Little J to follow a schedule might be a bit challenging, though.)

This is really my dream as eventually I would like to start doing more ‘work’ on a regular basis (whether free lancing or per diem jobs in the area.)  For that to happen, things need to work more smoothly than they sometimes have in the past year.

Finally, part of the schedules for the boys will include times for them to help engage Little J in play so I can work with a sibling.  We do this some already, but not in a scheduled manner.

Guess it’s time to re-read my copy of Managers of Their Homes and get some schedules together for the family.

I’m looking forward to reading what other TOS Crewmates have to say on this topic.  A few of the ladies have jobs that take them out of the home for several hours a week.  I sure hope they are sharing as I know I can learn a lot from their experiences.  (The list of links go live tomorrow morning on the TOS Homeschool Crew blog. Click the button in this post to get there.)