I love reading other people’s day-in-the-life posts (especially other homeschool moms or money diaries). And I love having a record of what a “typical” day looked like for us at a certain point in time. I’m just really terrible at creating that type of post! But here’s a random Tuesday in October.
7am- I’m the first one downstairs and I’m making tea when Stubby comes down. He recently ordered a Pyraminx (pyramid-shaped Rubix cube) and it finally arrived on Monday. He settles down on the couch to fidget with that. When Smiley wakes up, she checks on the crystal she’s been growing for the past week and decides it’s done. We take it out of the growing solution and take a picture to send to Mr. McGoozle- who is once again exploring the wilds of Canada on a business trip. I make a family favorite for breakfast- baked pancakes- and we eat while listening to our Bible reading plan. We’re in Jeremiah right now.
8:30am- After breakfast, Stubby and I fall down a rabbit hole of “cubing”. We watch the world record Pyraminx solve (0.75 seconds!). And then we look up other records and find out that there are cubing competitions near us. Are we going to turn into “that family”? Hmm… The girls have already started on their morning routines (brush teeth, brush hair, get dressed, fold up beds, physical therapy exercises for flat/stiff feet). Stubby and I finish ours too and I get the school things laid out for the day. Our rabbit hole and my late start to the morning mean we’ll be starting school late today.
10am- We begin our school day with a daily news program (World Watch). Then we do PE (Swedish Drill) and practice our emotional calming techniques. The emotion check-in is something new we added to our school routine this year and it’s been helpful for me to have a gauge of how the day is going to go. It also helps us pray better for one another in addition to whatever each person requests prayer for when asked and the prayer requests they share about friends, family, and the news. We pray, sing a Psalm, and read a New Testament Bible passage and some poetry. Today’s poetry selection includes a poem by A.A. Milne so we pull out our book of his poems and each child chooses an extra poem to read for the day. We take a short break for a snack and some outside time.
12pm- Everyone just had a snack but it’s also lunchtime. We have a leftover soup that no one particularly likes. While we eat, we do our Spanish picture study lesson. This involves looking at a picture and learning words, phrases, and sentences in Spanish that describe the picture. We also learn hand signs to go along with the words. The kids don’t love this but randomly sneak some Spanish into conversations so I know they’re learning something from what we’ve been doing for the past several years.
12:45pm- We press forward with our next block of school. Stubby starts working through his independent list- chores, copywork, recitation, and a least starting on math. I work with Smiley on her subjects- math, reading lesson, recitation, and, one of her favorite subjects, literature. Squeaky plays outside or in the basement while everyone is working. Sometimes she helps with chores too but usually not when it’s Stubby’s turn. After that, Smiley starts on her independent work- chores, reading practice, and copywork. I check in with Stubby and help him with world history.
2:30pm- We have several more school subjects on our schedule- geography and art together and science and dictation for Stubby- but we’re all tired and really just done with school. We call it a day. We’ll combine some short lessons in the future or do a make-up day if we need to. The kids run off to play and I do a few things for work. I also put away our school mess and start writing the book blog post. Squeaky comes to me for a snuggle and I’m happy to oblige.
4:15pm- Our daily clean-up alarm goes off so we turn on our pick-up playlist and get going. There’s still a lot of stuff out because I haven’t finished putting away everything from when we had the carpet installed upstairs. But we get things looking OK. After pick-up, the kids can spend their screen time points and they all choose to spend some. I do the lunch dishes and get dinner ready. I also continue working on the blog post while waiting for things to cook.
6pm- We eat dinner. Everyone does their evening chores. It’s shower night so everyone does that too and gets ready for bed. We videochat with Mr. McGoozle for a while. Then I read the kids their “special Mama reading time” books in their beds and tuck them in.
9pm- I start going through some of the stuff still in the living room that needs to go upstairs into my memory chest. I snap a few pictures of old diary entries and text them to people while chuckling at my silly teenage self. Then I watch too many YouTube shorts before heading to bed around 11.
