Wind Rose Homeschool Academy Blog

The other day, I felt super frustrated.  My daughter was struggling to transition back to learning after a play break, and I snapped at her verbally.  There’s that moment, right after I snap at one of the children, and I am sort of outside myself just for a second and actually hear myself and think, “Well, that sucked.” Know that feeling?  And, despite that inner voice, I sometimes feel this temptation to lean in and hold onto my pride in “being right” or “being in charge”. I have a choice in that moment to lean in to that pride, or I can stop and make a change. Unfortunately, this time, I leaned in a bit more.  Said, “I don’t know how often I have to..” a few more times and expressed my frustration with “We need to get moving” a few more times, before I finally stopped and took a deep breath.  I can’t tell you how important that dang deep breath is. And then I owned it. “Wait. I’m sorry. I’m not breathing before I talk, am I? And my commitment is to breathe before I talk. I’m sorry

Teaching and parenting are not simple, easy tasks for anyone, including us. There has been a lot of change in our lives and the lives of our children over the last few months.  We are all adjusting to the change from public school to homeschool. We have changed our primary location for our learning time, which led to less time for the adults to collaborate and less opportunity for all our children to feel connected to their adults.  I’m not going to paint a perfect picture of our homeschooling adventure. We have had some seriously rough days so far this year, and I recently found myself questioning, “Is homeschooling really right for us?” and, worse, participating in harmful self-talk: “This isn’t working.  I’m failing.”  I reached out to some great friends and colleagues, who reminded me that we are all going through some major transitions right now, and that we need to make time and space for the big feelings we are undoubtedly going to experience during this time.  As a former