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September 12, 2006
So I Drive, And I Drive, And I Drive ...*
How do you active moms manage to handle having your children in 500 different activities?
This year, we have co-op-ish classes on Tuesdays, and Karate/Chess Club on Thursdays. Both activities are in the middle of the day. And when we get home, everyone is beat and wants to go hide.
Today was our first day of classes. We got up and hit math and Latin (and Connor worked on some Classical Writing analysis). Then we got in the car, and drove. The drive was a fairly typical experience of driving in Michigan. It was foggy. It drizzled. The drive was long. After an hour of driving, a large orange sign informed me that the bridge was out ahead and I could go no further on my road. A frantic call to Jeff (thank the Gods for Google maps) brought me to an alternate route. On a dirt road. In the rain.
(To someone from Texas, dirt roads are weird. In Texas, a dirt road means you're really out in the sticks. In Michigan, it just means you've turned off the main road. I think the winters are so hard on the roads here that they just don't want to bother with paving the other half.)
I dropped the big kids off. Went to lunch. Picked big kids up. Drove home, an hour, in heavy rain.
Bleah.
The classes are good (and they'd better be!!). The boys are taking a Clay Animation class, and a LEGO engineering class. The engineering class is teaching actual basic engineering. Today the class involved a little math. (This is where the homeschooling Mom holds her breath.)
Me: "Soooo, how was the math?"
Them: "Oh, it was easy math. But some other kids had trouble with it."
Me (outer voice): "Oh. Well I'm glad you did well." (Inner voice: "YES! Score!")
They eat lunch there too, so they get the experience of being herded off to the gym and eating lunch out of sacks. Now their school experience is complete.
* The title of this post comes from a song. Jeff and Peggy are probably the only ones who have any hope of knowing it.
Posted by lynx at September 12, 2006 7:22 PM
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Comments
Whadda ya want, a Medallion?
Posted by: Jeff Medcalf ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.caerdroia.org/116/nav-commenters.gif)
at September 12, 2006 10:34 PM
I guess I don't qualify as an active mom, because I start to actively figure out how we can avoid activities. Though I might make an exception for nifty Lego engineering lol (it's those darn exceptions that get me in trouble)...
Last year we had an hour of music lessons on Tuesdays right after lunch, which pretty much wrecked our whole afternoon, by the time we got back from town. This year, the hour starts at 4 pm, which gives us more time at home but means I have to have dinner ready to go by the time we're done running errands after music. And I'm delighted that my eldest is no longer in Girl Scouts (once a week) but 4H (once a month and other things that my husband, designated 4H parent, will look after). I'm trying figure out whether that's the extent of our activities for fall and winter, because by the time it starts getting dark really early, I really don't like driving around when I could be in my cozy house. I'm such a wimp...
Posted by: Becky at September 13, 2006 9:30 AM
"I can't get no (dum dum dum) sat-is-fac-tion!"
It's easy, but you have to, at some point, start arbitrarily limiting the activities. You're not limiting their development, per se, but you are putting necessarily limits.
It's like the people who have their children in 2 different sports. No, sorry, one sport at a time. And one instrument at a time. And one book club at a time. Oh, and here's the key -- you can't do ALL of them.
Some wise parents tell their children that they can do two (or three, or whatever) extra-curricular activities, and do them well. [Of course, when you're home-schooling, the line between curricular and extra-curricular is blurred, so you have to stay vigilant and keep the line defined.] However many extra-curricular activities they are, you have to be certain that you're not blowing up family time.
Dumb people are like a certain person I know, whose kids do scouts and church and soccer and basketball and horseback riding and are each in (separate) children's book clubs, not to mention their private school education and those demands. Said person can't function without a nanny and family members to take up all the slack for her. If two parents can't do the transportation themselves, then it's too much...
:)
Posted by: queuno at September 13, 2006 5:57 PM
you and I have talked this before so I wouldn't go into how we pick what we pick again, but I WILL say that we chose to live in the city because everything is close by. I can't fathom driving an hour. Tim was pushing for them to take a class in downtown St Paul and I shot that down, even though it is close by the traffic and paying to park meant there was no way I'd consider it.
And the dirt roads? that is just weird...I don't get out of the city much but I think you have to go REALLY into the sticks to hit dirt roads in MN.
Posted by: sozzled at September 14, 2006 7:46 AM