Coffee: You can sleep when you're dead.

Sleep... or blog.  Sleep... or blog. 

Lately my blog posts have been sparse because I'm racking up some good sleep hours.  You'd think after ten years of parenting, we'd have bed time down to a science.  Unfortunately, science has never been one of my strong points.  Bed time is more like a theatrical production at our house, complete with trapeze and flying monkeys.

I think my children were trained by Pavlov to start salivating when they hear the words "bed time!"  They are suddenly starving, even if they just wolfed down an entire bucket full of home made kettle corn during the family movie that got started thirty minutes later then intended.  Somehow we are always out of bananas... and string cheese... or anything healthy that can be consumed in under five minutes.

Is a doughnut a good bed time snack?  What if they have it with milk?

If showers happen, add another thirty minutes to the process.  What can possibly take a child that long to wash?  I have to wonder what they do in there (for twenty or thirty minutes) when they get out and they still have a pudding-cup goatee and the hair around the ears is still dry.

We are lucky if teeth are brushed and the children are sufficiently rinsed off by 9:30pm.  At that point, we usually gather in our meditation room with books or knitting.  I know I could ship them off to bed at this point, but it is seriously my favorite part of the day.  The room is cozy.  Dad, kids, Mom... all cuddled under blankets with good books.  Ahhh.  I know, how selfish of me.

I absolutely know that we could push the whole process back (I do actually have a rational side of my brain), starting them with their fourth-meals at 7:30pm, so they could be sawing sustainably-harvested-timber before midnight!  It just doesn't seem to work out that way. 

This is one reason I must choose between writing and sleep. 

Another reason is that I can't seem to wake up early, even when I go to bed before eleven.  I have every good intention, but end up turning my alarm off and drifting back into dreamland until Cady wakes me up!  Wait... that's not absolutely true... if I sleep in the meditation room (there's a comfy foldout couch) the sun wakes me naturally.  It's really wonderful.  But then Jay thinks I'm mad at him!

The last reason is that I can't seem to carve out enough quiet time during the day.  I am still married to the idea that I have to be doing things WITH the children all the time.  My loving hub has desperately tried to get me to insist on an hour of independent, quiet time for us all during the day.  That hasn't worked because as soon as my children are unsupervised (even if I just go to the bathroom) there is a cataclysmic event, World War III right there in my living room... or sometimes it's more like a scene from "Scream," depending on who started it. 

How will we ever accomplish anything this way?  I am looking forward to the structured classes coming up in the new year... Guitar lessons for Asher, Co-op on Fridays, breakdancing, theatre.  Of course there will still be dance for Cady, but that's on Saturday mornings, during which time Asher will be taking his Video Game Design class through the local college's community ed program.

I don't think this first few months of Home Schooling has been a fair trial.  I wanted to take it easy, so I didn't sign up for all of these extras, not anticipating their necessity in breaking up the time my children are exposed to one another.  I think next semester will be a better gauge.  I'll let ya know.

In the meantime, if you see my writing become more prolific, it means one of three things... we have bedtime down, my kids are getting along well enough to be unsupervised for an hour a day, or I am consuming ungodly amounts of coffee.