Thanks to a chalkboard wall, a Pout Pout Fish letters book, and the eager mind behind Ray’s sparkly eyes, I started homeschooling last year. If I’m honest, I started well before her third birthday was in sight because I was bored. The hot days drag without any sort of structure to them. We had routine, but many days nothing concrete to fill those long morning hours. I never thought I would be so loathe to be stuck in my own home, but there it was. I found myself counting seconds until Brian came home for lunch giving a dash of difference to the minutes. Homeschooling gave me another dash, even though it was so brief (she’s three… 45 minutes is a good day for her toddler attention span). And Ray wanted school. She’s a learner… a reader… and I wanted to give her the tools to explore books just as soon as I could. After we started the task, I quickly realized that if I chose to move ahead with homeschooling, I would need practice and lots of it, preferably before Ray hit the age where she could recall my embarrassingly bad behavior.

“Remember?!?! In your very last breath you told me what this letter was. I know you know it. What is it? Remember??” I pleaded, becoming ever so loosely held together, my fingerprints under the offending letter on the chalkboard an ever present reminder of my frustration.

“Member?? Member?? What’s that. Member?” she consistently replied while flopping on the floor and heaving great sighs of contentment at the game she was apparently winning.

“No, don’t repeat me. Just tell me the letter. That one. Right there. The one you identify on every wall, book, poster… that one. What. Is. It.”

“Member??? That one. What’s that. That. One. There.”

Argh. ARGH. Then I stepped back, looked at her tiny hands, tiny feet, happy eyes, and saw the person I was becoming. The parent who knows so well what her child is capable of despite her youth and won’t stop pushing. She has mastered the letters and their sounds, just like I knew she could. Reading may take many months yet, even years, but she adores her talking letters. Fortunately she learned them in spite of me, not because of me. Her mind is spongy and curious, and she has great potential to soak in the world around her, but I am in danger of ruining that. I am in danger of taking that sweet knowledge that I have of my child, of what she can do, and instead of gently guiding her to challenge herself and move forward, I just berate. And huff and puff. And groan. She got good at groaning right back at me. She’s a scary little mirror, that one.

When I feel my impatience reaching a fever pitch, my brain pulsing like it’s going to implode simply from frustration, I’m learning to stop. To just stop school for that day, and let her work on puzzles while chattering about geckos. Because I actually love homeschooling and I don’t want that time to become miserable for her, for so many reasons. And I don’t want to sully the times I get to see her learn and grow and DO with explosive bursts of annoyance. Thus far, I’m in the clear. She wakes up asking to do school and is great at recognizing her own amazingness with a, “Good jjjjjjob!” when she’s successfully completed a task she has more than often set for herself. I’m usually not entirely sure what job she’s patting herself on the back for, but hey, like father like daughter.

One of God’s demonstrations of grace to me, is that despite my attempts to sabotage it, my child does wake up asking, “Do school now?” The way I have behaved towards her, inwardly and outwardly, does not warrant such enthusiasm. Maybe tomorrow I will do school better. Because I love it.

In that vein of thought, we are praying about what the future holds. There’s another option we just found out about in town that looks really great. We would still have to look into it quite a bit, but it seems like a viable option. Even though I was the person pre-marriage saying, “I’ll do anything and go anywhere with you, but I WON’T homeschool!” I’m now the person saying, “Umm… I kinda like it.” So I’m not sure that I want to look into this new option because it might take her away from me. But then I think about the girls being around peers, learning from other adults, generally expanding their horizons, and I think we should at least consider it. In the meantime, I plan to keep cheering Ray on as she explores the world of books and keep a close eye on my own heart attitude. I do think both of us will come out better for it.