My So-Called Homeschool

I’m sitting here at 8:45 am blogging instead of later in the day because I’m now working afternoons again. I started this part-time job at an inner-city daycare working 3pm until the count went down to where they didn’t need me (around 5:30 or so). It wasn’t many hours, and yes I was driving to Detroit for just a couple of hours a day, but the pay still helped out around the house even with the price of gas. I can’t get another job where I can bring my kids along, and Squid’s schedule is so constantly changing that I can’t schedule anything around him. I was working in one of the preschool rooms, the Green Room, with 3 and 4 year olds. They were making me crazy! I am not really temperamentally suited for working with large groups of young belligerent kids. I don’t know how to describe most of these kids. It’s beyond the normal defiance of stamping a foot and yelling NO!. Most of them just look through you like “Was someone talking to me?” when you try to correct them. Well, those are the ones who aren’t deliberately challenging you — again, beyond the normal boundary pushing of this age. Anyway, between feeling like I just wasn’t any good at what I was doing and getting home after dark (I started in February) with dinner being pushed later and later, I was really not liking my job. (Massive understatement) So when my boss, who incidentally is my minister’s wife, came to me to see if I’d like to move to the toddler room at 7am, I jumped at the chance! I can handle temper tantrums when they’re actually age-appropriate. Monkey Boy is in that class, which has worked out pretty well. And I figured we would be done by 11am and have the rest of the day to do schooling or whatever. But . . . things never work out quite the way you think they will. What actually ended up happening was we’d go in at 7am (me, up at 5:30, kids up at 6, out the door at 6:20), then I’d work til 11. I have some heartbreaking stories to tell about these kids, but I’m not sure if I’m going to do that here. Like I said, my boss’s husband is my minister and I know he reads this blog. I’m just not sure what would be appropriate. Anyway, we’d get home by 12 or so — I never left right on time — and then we’d have lunch and nap about 1. Monkey would of course fall asleep on the way home and think he’d had his nap for the day! He was sequestered to his crib anyway for an hour or two. I would drag my sorry butt out of bed around 3 or 4. The day is shot! Time to think about dinner. Then I wouldn’t be very sleepy to go to bed early so I’d be beat the next morning again. And so the cycle went. Just before I switched to the early morning shift, I had a miscarriage, then a day after I switched, my co-worker miscarried a couple of weeks later so I ended up actually working nearly full-time, we’re trying to potty train Monkey Boy and put him in a toddler bed (Whose idea was that to do those at the same time? They should be shot!), and other and sundry life happenings. I think moving back to an afternoon shift might actually work at least for summer. Even though we won’t get home til dinner time, we can eat a little late and the girls can still go out and play with their friends after dinner.

I don’t know how long I can do this job. It just sucks the life out of me. Besides issues with the kids that are draining, there is a lot of drama among the workers (again, won’t go into it for now anyway). PLUS, you know that homeschooling thing I do so my kids won’t be picking up a lot of bad attitudes from school? Yeah, that doesn’t work so well when you take them to daycare with you in the inner city. They are getting some very bad habits — from 3, 4, and 5 year olds no less! We talk about it and try to make a life lesson of it, but I think there’s just too much reinforcement there. But whenever I bring it up to Squid, he just looks at me with this I-really-hate-to-say-this look and says “You know, it is really helping out, though.” Until his possible full-time position solidifies, I’m stuck here. We’ve been praying about it, but it seems the answer is “Wait” for now. I’m holding on by my fingernails in the meantime . . .

(Yes, I know that it says 4:19 pm is when this posted, but I drafted this a couple of mornings ago and had to finish it later.)