Ok. I am feeling marginally less hysterical. Let me see if I can be a hair more clear about this.

If you are confused about where we are going and when… that’s because there isn’t a solid plan yet. I would be unable to clarify for you because I don’t know yet. We have a lot of options and possibilities and things we are thinking about and talking about but no decisions have been made. Beyond Malaysia, no apartments have been rented and no airline tickets have been bought.

Malaysia is the final two weeks of October.

Let me try to be a little clear (with very little time) about what has happened and why my emotions are bouncing.

Eldest Child… does extremely well at maths when she tries. I uhhhh don’t check very often because when she makes a mistake I can put the problem in front of her a second time and she does it correctly without noticing that she had ever made a silly error. When she is unclear she asks because we are around all the time. For a long time I was checking frequently and then in the last few months… uhhh I got lazy.

That’s my fault. Absolutely top to bottom my fault.

She noticed I wasn’t checking.

She started saying she did work when she didn’t.

This went on for a while. Ooops.

Now catching up has been a bit painful because it is so much but she has almost halfway caught up the previous three months of assigned work in almost two weeks.

THIS IS WHY IT IS SO INFURIATING THAT SHE WASN’T JUST DOING IT. YOU HAD THREE MONTHS. ALL OF THIS WORK CAN BE COMPLETED IN LESS THAN A MONTH. WHAT THE CHEESE!?!?!?

Why am I pushing maths this way? Because she wants to transfer back into “regular” school for high school. If she is way behind in maths then the school will make a lot of incorrect assumptions about her general intelligence and that will be tremendously shitty for her personally and will will reflect very badly on me as a home schooling parent. I am vain enough (and she is WAY SMART ENOUGH) that I am absolutely not ok with this outcome. She needs to be at grade level or beyond. She just does. She’s a fairly classic 2E kid. (Twice exceptional: she is incredibly gifted in many areas and she has a learning disability [dyslexia] and a non-neurotypical brain [ADHD] so teaching her is not a straight linear path like it is for many kids.)

She will already have a lot of struggles when she transfers in. I can’t let her be massively behind in the only track of education where that will impact her educational experience until she is a college graduate. It would be my fault. I don’t like the idea of damaging her educational experience. That’s not ok.

Why is she behind? Because she was completely and totally not ready to start book work at 5/6/7. She just wasn’t. She didn’t really start sit-down academics till she was 8. She’s been catching up. She will finish catching up this year. By the beginning of sixth grade, she will be perfectly able to walk into a standard sixth grade class and do the maths.

She and I talked a lot last night about her goals for her life and how I should be helping her.

If I am failing to educate her at home, then she has to go to school. I can’t allow her whole childhood to pass by without education. That’s neglect. That’s wrong.

She was a trifle frustrated with me saying it that way when the only area in which she’s lagging is maths and she’s not that far behind. Fair. (Everything feels like an 11 in intensity right now and that’s not about her.)

We talked a lot about trust and discipline. (Self-discipline, not parents forcing you to do shit.) We talked about how over the past few months there have been a couple of places where we tried to add more trust and uhhhhh we uhhhh went too far. She’s not ready. Which doesn’t mean she will never be ready! She’s 10!

She said it as, “Maybe I just don’t deserve any trust yet.” And I said, “Oh yes you do. I trust you to do:………….. (long list of shit)”. She said, “Oh my god. When you list it like that it sounds so exhausting. But yeah, I can do all of that.”

Maybe that long, exhausting list is enough for a ten year old and I need to be providing more scaffolding in new areas for several more years. That uhhhhh seems fair.

She does not want to go to elementary school. She’s pretty sure that she isn’t interested in middle school. (Middle Child feels the same way.) They want to go to high school because they want to go to college and they think that high school will be an important step for them in learning how to be more independent from me.

The fact that they view it that way? That makes my little heart go pitter patter.

Most of the moving around we want to do is seeing if we can find a place where we feel comfortable, where we can make a home, where they can go to high school.

How long will we spend in each place trying it out? It will vary. All of the places we will try out will have appropriate for them high schools. That’s a lot of what we are going to wander around and explore.

What I know for sure is the house is going on the market the first week of January. So Noah can retire at a reasonable age. If I continue to be as good at investing as I have been so far (knock on wood) Noah will be able to basically retire at 45. He will do occasional contract work because it’s fun for him but it won’t be necessary to sustain our life. We will literally be financially independent.

The kids told me that they would like me to stop being so lazy and I need to actually check their progress every single week. Well…. that’s fair. They don’t want to fall behind again and having the self-discipline to keep working without checking isn’t something they are ready to do alone.

Ok. I will make a calendar entry. I will do that for you. Yes. Ok. That’s appropriate and fair.

I’m very sorry I let you down.

Because I did. Then I got mad at you for being a kid. That sucks.

Fuck. I didn’t cause this alone. But I am the grown up. This is part of what I love about home schooling. I don’t get to blame anyone else.

Ok. Middle Child caught up on his maths. So we are going snorkeling together this morning. After lunch Eldest Child will be given a break and we will all go play on the beach together as a family for our last afternoon here. Because we are flying during the day tomorrow… she will be doing maths in the airport and on the plane. Because life is rough. But she wants to be caught up before we go to Disneyland. Oooooooooh boy she wants to be caught up. She is sad she missed so much of this trip. She doesn’t want to miss Disneyland and Malaysia too.

Makes sense. That would suck.