It’s 1:00 p.m., Time to Start School

When someone asks me what a normal homeschool day is like for us, I answer, “I wish I knew.” Today, for instance, I wake up early before anyone else in the house is stirring.  I make my way into the kitchen and put the tea kettle on the stove. Waiting for the tea water to heat up, I revel in the quiet that surrounds me while the dog, curled in bed, is giving me a look that says, “You have to be kidding, I’m not moving.”

I have great hopes for this day, a day with no appointments, no long lists of things-to-do, a normal day. I sit down at the kitchen table not realizing that it would be the last time I would be sitting down for quite some time, pick up my copy of My Daily Catholic Bible, read today’s reading, check e-mail, and log into Facebook as the eight-year old pads into the kitchen and demands breakfast.  Not liking what I have to offer him for breakfast, wanting something else to eat, the eight-year old is crying, stomping, and thrashing about.  I send him back to his room, as the dog deciding to take part in the action, gets up from bed and starts to bark, demanding attention.  I coax the dog outside, the eight-year old to his room, and the whole while the teenager is still in bed blissfully unaware that morning has come.  A minute hasn’t passed before the dog is scratching at the patio door.  I let the dog back into the house just so he can follow me to the teenager’s room to help me do the impossible; wake up a teenage boy.  “Wake up, Bubba. It’s morning,” I calmly say.  

“Yes, I’m up,” he says while still in bed, under the covers, with his eyes closed.  The dog, knowing that this will not work, jumps up on the side of the bed, short, front legs up on the edge of the bed, long body stretched, hind legs still on the floor as if on tiptoe, his face reaching to lick the boy’s face.  The boy laughs and gets out of bed to pet the dog.  With his mission accomplished, the dog, tired and hungry, herds the teenager to the kitchen.  I feed the dog.  The teenager feeds himself.  The eight-year old, deciding that he’s hungry enough to eat the sugar-coated bits of sugar-bits that we actually have and not the peanut-butter-flavored bits of sugar-bits that we don’t have, sneaks back into the kitchen and politely asks for breakfast.  I help him with his breakfast.

The phone rings.  It’s the college-age son whining that he’s starving, has nothing to eat, can’t finish his homework, and has a class later in the day, in other words, I have to drive him to the grocery store.  I quickly shower, throw some clothes on, clean out the back of the minivan to make room for the groceries, and drive to his apartment. “Hi, Junior, ready to go?” I ask.

“Huh? Uh?” he answers as he follows me out to the minivan.  Groggy, slow-moving, shuffling his feet while dragging a shopping cart behind him, he slowly makes his way through the store.  Trying to be patient, I calmly follow him through the store offering useful tid-bits like, “No, you don’t have to buy 10 of those items to get the 10 for $10 price,” and “yes, half of $5.00 is $2.50.”  

Having been in the store for over one hour, my patience wearing thin, I proclaim, “Son, are we done yet?”  Did I actually just say that?  And I wonder where the kids get these witty remarks.  He gives me this look that says You talkin’ to me?  and slowly continues to pull his cart through the aisles.  Finally, after what seems like two hours, he stops with a lost look on his face and proclaims (ta da!) that he’s done.

Not having gone on a run this morning and full of energy, I make a beeline to checkout lane 21 where there is no waiting, unless you count waiting for Junior to slowly drag his grocery cart over to the lane.  He gets to the lane and watches me, uninterested, as I start to unload his groceries.  The cashier is bagging the groceries, the cart is empty, and he just stands there.  “Push the cart over here to the front so we can load the bags into the cart,” I say.

“Huh?” is his reply.  I grab the cart, pull it over to the front, and load his bagged groceries back into the cart.  I pay.  We leave the store with the newly purchased groceries and go back to his apartment, where we grab the grocery bags (thanks goodness for bags with handles), open the door to the apartment building with our feet since our hands are loaded with bags of groceries, and in one trip up the stairs we get all those groceries in the apartment.  Mission accomplished.

Back at home I realize that it’s lunch time.  We eat lunch. We pray our morning rosary and afterwards I announce, "Kids, it's 1:00 p.m., time to start school today!"

It's now 4:15 p.m. and we're diligently working on our homeschool. The phone rings.  It's Junior.  "Now what?" I think hoping for the best, but expecting the worst. Apparently, he's finally awake.  He just wanted to thank me for having taken him to the store today.