The Coronacation Diaries, Episode 1

Building the Schedule

Let’s be honest: for a teacher and for her kids, an unexpected 3-week vacation is like manna from heaven at the end of a dull, grey winter: a gift of precious days of sleep and recovery direct from the gods of teenage hormones and eye-rolling wars. This is a chance to get the house clean, get the rooms finally sorted and organized after the great remodel of 2018, get a fitness routine going after the great ankle-breakage of 2019, get that writing done, get started on reading that pile of books, get the kids prepared to test out of 6th grade math and 9th grade English, and generally get a grip on all of the things in our lives. BUT, I know what weekends are like in my household, with the constant arguing about the need for more cleaning of the bedrooms and less watching of the Youtube. Plus, with Michael working his DTMB job at home in the basement, there was no way we could survive as a family with the door slamming and the stomping up the stairs and the living on cheez-its and the earbuds in...I knew we had to build a schedule, or else we would be at each other’s throats all day every day, and we’d emerge at the end of the social distancing experiment as pale, flabby, angry lumps of (well-rested) dull stupidity. 

I’d seen the schedules floating around. The ideal schedule, clearly built by a control freak, and shared a thousand times on social media:

And the mock schedules, clearly built by others who are flies on the wall in my own home:

            

My kids were resistant (oh, so resistant) and mad (oh, so mad) that I wouldn’t just let them build their own schedules and do whatever they wanted whenever they wanted. (If you attempted to enter their bedrooms, you would understand why this would be an oh, so terrible idea.) But, I pulled the parent card (either you build a schedule or I'll build one for you) and handed out pencils and pads of paper. We all built our ideal schedules and then lined them up to compare. Surprisingly, they were all pretty similar and all fairly sensible. 

I am somewhat apprehensive about attempting to adhere to 3 different schedules in the house, but I am also thinking that this compromise might be a way to get them to take some ownership of their day-to-day, and see if they can keep to their word and police themselves. In the classroom, choice and voice lead to ownership and engagement, so here's hoping that the same is true in the home.

And I’m going to hold myself to my own schedule, as well. Because I’ve got things to clean and pieces to write and books to read and pounds to lose and rooms to sort and the only way I’m going to avoid succumbing to day-drinking and watching marathons of Hallmark movies is with some serious ownership of the day-to-day.

I've got things to accomplish and a three-week gift of time.

Starting tomorrow.

Cheers!