Shipments, schedules, and school shopping….oh my!, by Kami - MetroFamily Magazine
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Shipments, schedules, and school shopping….oh my!, by Kami

by Kami McManus

Reading Time: 2 minutes 

So the enrollment process was finally over! Now all we could do is wait! By the time the month of August arrived, we were getting very antsy to get our hands on our curriculum and see what we were in for! Once we received the emails confirming the shipments of everything, it was time to get a basic schedule in mind! Of course we couldn’t make it to “permanent” until we knew exactly how many assignments we needed to do every day, but we knew how many hours were expected each day/week, and I knew the basic schedules of the new daycare children I was expecting to start.

So I pulled out my brand new date book and sat down with our son and we talked about what we wanted accomplish each day, what time of day we wanted to be done, and any extra-curricular activities that were coming up. He didn’t want to be up at 6:30am with me (not that I blame him, I love to sleep in too!) but did not want to be working when his Dad got him at 430pm either! So we settled for 8am as his time to get up and start his day. That way he was dressed, had breakfast and so on by 9am and could get to work. Assuming we could get stuff done in 6 hours, he would be done around 3pm with an 1.5 hour buffer for lunch, breaks, etc before his Dad came home from work!

Next came school shopping! It was a pretty amazing thing to realize that I only had to buy stuff for my son. I was not buying items to help supplement an entire classroom. Not that I didn’t mind helping out, but have you noticed how that list seems to get longer and longer and more expensive every year? So we stuck to the basics – pencils, pens, crayons, notebook paper, 3-ring binders, ruler, scissors, glue, and so on. First thing we did was check our supply/craft closet and amazingly we discovered that we had almost everything we needed. We actually didn’t buy hardly anything on our original, self-made list! There were some things we had to fit into our budget that most public school kids don’t—a good printer, printer paper and ink for the printer.  Sure all kids will need those things once in a while for a book report, science fair project or something like that, but soon learned there was something we had to print out almost every day.

Our first day of schooling at home was fast approaching. We were excited and nervous all at once! Would we like this as much as we thought we would? How hard would it be to be home with each other every single day with no breaks? We then learned that it wasn’t just our son who had a 5 years of public school habits! It never occurred to me until then how different my days really were when he was leaving to go to school every day. I think the only reason, it didn’t occur to me was that I am home with kids all day long, so it just didn’t seem like it would change my day that much.

I would soon learn how wrong I was about that!

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