Honest Input from a Friend: Priceless

Today has just been one of those days. Honestly, it’s one of those days that I just want to give up on homeschooling and enroll Gage in school. We have some really good reasons to be schooling Gage at home, but that’s for a later post, perhaps. Gage requires balance in his life, and if anything gets off kilter, he begins spiraling down. Too much TV, not enough alone time, hunger, sickness, too much play time, too much sugar, blah, blah, blah…….(the list goes on and on), all lead to a spiraling effect if I don’t catch it quickly. He spirals down into an emotional wreck. So, today, as we were trying to do school, things were just not going well. Our friend, Mandy, is here visiting and what I love about Mandy’s visits is that we can go on with life as normal. She is like family and so when she’s here, she sees life as it is in the Lee home. I’d like to think we’re like that with everyone, but I have to admit, we’re probably not. Anyway, Mandy gets to see all of our struggles, and I love hearing her insight. She is so wise. Today, after sending Gage to take a nap because I absolutely couldn’t tolerate one more minute of his drama, I vented to Mandy. After listening to me say all of the things I felt like saying to Gage, but held back (only by God’s grace), this is what she had to say. She affirmed for me that if she had been dealing with all of the struggles I had been dealing with all morning, she would be in tears. She sees that every little thing that I tell Gage to do becomes a struggle and that I have to tell him more than once (usually 4 times) to do it, before it is done. These are all things that I need to hear. I get so caught up in it all, that I don’t realize what’s happening. So, thanks to Mandy’s input, once again, I realize that I let Gage get by with bargaining way too much. He has learned that he doesn’t have to immediately obey. He can have an attitude, give me a rotten look, and beg for a different way to do something way too often. Looks like I’m going to have to try, once again, at changing some things. I can already detect what some of the issues are. One of them is that he is being allowed to have too much free time with our new schedule of doing school from 1-4 in the afternoons. So, I’m going to have to come up with some things that he can do on his own during the times that I am not able to go on an adventure for half of the day. I swear, raising kids is the hardest job in the world. No wonder I’m so exhausted by the time we put them to bed at night!