Walking the line between clean and schooled

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Being homeschoolers, we occasionally have people suggested our house should be ‘just so’ since we are home so much.

Well, the house is ‘just so’ if you consider we live in it and messes are a by product of living in the house. 

That leads me to this week’s question…

How do you divide household duties and needs with your homeschool schedule?

Well, the short response (which is what I have time to type right now) is that we divide up important tasks to get done when we are home.

Laundry will often be running throughout the day with schoolwork done in between ‘rebooting’ of the laundry process.

Meals are prepped while less intensive tasks are being done (e.g. listening to history, going over review questions, etc.)

But, the area where we suffer greatly is in picking up all the messes that get created. 

For some reason, boys do not have the ability to see the problems, even if they are knee deep in a mess!

I do try to put in some quick ‘clean up’ runs at regular intervals to keep things at bay.  And, now that only Little J is too young to understand cleaning up as soon as you are done, this mama is becoming more of an enforcer of that rule.

The time factor does get the better of me at times.  Supervising boys cleaning up wasn’t happening the other day as I had work samples to gather for submission to our charter school.  So…the clean up didn’t happen like it should have.

My personal philosophy has been that a neat and tidy house is not worth the time lost in educating the boys.  I can focus my time on having a good learning experience, a clean house, or maybe even a nice, home-cooked meal ready for when Mr. O gets home.  It’s just a very rare day that all three things happen.

But, I will admit to reaching a point where I can’t stand the clutter and the forecast shows some time without much school work so mom can escort a bunch of things from the house.  Unfortunately, for me, that won’t happen until Mr. O is done with the bathroom remodel downstairs.  I’ll be praying that it IS done by May 20th so I can boot the boys outdoors and get to work.

So, for now, I will be walking that fine line between a neat and tidy house and spending my time working with the boys on schoolwork.

You can read what the other TOS Crewmates have to say on this topic by visiting the TOS Homeschool Crew blog.