Enjoy and Bless

Podcast Transcript:

So today is another unscripted episode. I said in the previous one that I would share about our random Wednesday, sharing what we did that day. It’s been really helpful to me throughout our homeschooling education, to hear how other families spend their weeks, how they decide what to do day to day, if they are very structured, very unstructured. So maybe this is helpful to you just to get get a glimpse into a random day in our life.

So Wednesdays: Wednesdays usually the only thing specifically scheduled on our calendar is that the girls are taking horse riding lessons at a horse farm that is a five minute walk from our house. They are typically there from around four o’clock till six or seven at night. They have their lesson, and they also help out around the farm with just various tasks that need to be done, watering the horses, feeding. They help out with showing new riders around or helping tack up tack, what’s it called when you tack out, take the tack off, all kinds of things that they help out with there. And while they are at the farm, I am at home, usually getting things cleaned up around the house, starting dinner. If my husband is working from home, he often will go pick up my son from school and we’ll have some quieter time at home with just the three of us. My husband and my son might play together while I finish up dinner. So that’s a typical Wednesday evening.

This particular Wednesday, we had a vet appointment for our most recent animal rescue. We have quite a few animals in our home that we take care of that have all been adopted or rescued one way or another. And our most recent addition is a little white dog. He’s about six pounds, came to us with some health issues, and so we had a veterinary appointment to get lab work done and see how he’s doing and one of the ways that unschooling children learn a lot is just being with their parents through a normal day and experiencing just normal, everyday life tasks, like going to the vet with the dog. And obviously children that attend school can do those things as well, but there’s not as much time or opportunity, I imagine. So the girls went with me, got to see how the doctor, the veterinarian assessed his health and drew blood, and they got some of the plaque off his teeth that they could and got to hear the discussions that we had about his health and how to proceed. Then came home, and well, I will say that all of the driving together always allows for so many good conversations. We are either listening to music. We are a musical theater family, so we are often listening, not just to musical theater songs, but that is a lot of it. We listen to music together and we just have really good conversations on our drives. Which, again, I imagine most families do experience that if you have a drive to and from school, that’s a great time to have conversations. I just really appreciate that any time a question pops up for my children, I am usually there to hear it and I get to talk with them through these things and brainstorm and imagine and wrestle with questions. That’s just such a gift to me to be present and with them when those questions just, because you never know when these types of, you know, life forming questions are going to pop into a child’s mind, and it’s great to be there, to witness it and be a part of it.

After the vet, we got home, we made lunch together. We have conversations about adding more fruits and vegetables into our diet. I am not great about having a healthy diet, so that’s been something we’ve all been working on together, including new and different recipes, more balanced meals, another life lesson that’s just baked into a normal day.

One funny thing that happened that particular Wednesday was that my middle child had some leftover Chinese food from…my husband takes each of the children out for, we call them Daddy dates. So they have one on one time together and she had just gone out with her dad for Chinese and had leftovers. And my oldest was saying, can I have some? Can I have some of your leftovers? And she said, well, I will give you some of my leftovers, if you will work on these sibling tricks that I want to work on. So she found some videos of like kind of acrobatic tricks that siblings can do together, and she really wanted to work on them with her sister. So she was bargaining with her sister over, You can have some of my Chinese, if you will do these tricks with me. Anyway, they actually ended up spending most of the afternoon working on that. I was just busy doing dishes or something, I don’t know, reading. I can’t remember exactly what I was doing. I just knew that they were very occupied working on these acrobatic tricks, and soon they came after a while, not soon after a while they came to me and said, come video! We want to see if we’re doing it right. So that’s just a fun, sibling bonding experience that they had that afternoon.

I believe my oldest also worked on some laundry that afternoon. That’s her chore that she is faithfully committed to. I do pay our kids for their chores. I read a book by Dave Ramsey and his daughter about teaching money sense to children, and they highly recommended paying for chores just as, again, just trying to mimic real life that if you work a job, you get paid and then talking about how to use that money, we divide it up into a portion that’s given, a portion that’s saved and a portion for spending and living on. And that is just real hands-on practical learning that they can have and it encourages them to participate in contributing to the work that needs to be done at the house.

At this point, I can’t remember what my other daughter was doing while the oldest was doing laundry. She often is either reading a book or researching something. She loves researching. Or she may have been working on some sort of physical challenge she’d set for herself. She practiced doing a back bend for a long time. Lately, she’s been working on doing handstands. So who knows? She was doing something. And eventually, they both finished what they were focused on and came to me and said, hey, can we watch Brain Games together? So it’s a psychology show that we’ve been watching. It’s, I believe, on Netflix. It’s a pretty fun show of just the basics of how our brains work that I recommend. I think the two episodes we watched were about intuition and common sense. So, yeah, just really interesting topics to think about. And it’s fun to see how the things that we learned and saw on the show just come up in conversation with things that we notice day to day.

Anyway, okay, so I think, and then, yeah, that led us up to their time going to the farm, and that was our Wednesday, random Wednesday. Maybe it looks a little bit like a summer day for a family that goes to traditional school and maybe hopefully that’s helpful to you to just get a glimpse of a typical, I would say that’s a pretty typical day in our unschooling life thus far.

I may share an overview of our week sometime to give you an idea of what we do schedule and what time isn’t scheduled, but I’ll save that for another day. All right, I hope this has been helpful to somebody. Thanks for being here!