What is the Hardest Thing For You?

In terms of homeschooling, that is.

I am not a morning person.  I can try, I can attempt to fake it, but it isn't who I am.  It has never been who I am ~ my own mother was annoyed to no end that I preferred not to speak or be spoken to in the morning.  I need a very gentle transition to the land of the waking.  I suspect that coffee might help, but I don't drink coffee, never have, and can't start now.

My boys wake at fairly normal times, somewhere between 7 and 8 although J-Baby has been known to sleep until 9.  If T-Guy wakes early he does his dog chores and then reads until someone else awakens, which is Papa 99% of the time.  T-Guy has always been a cheerful person, morning, noon, and night.  The words spin through his brain at a million miles a minute and he tends to share all of them with us.

The fact that I am not a morning person isn't the hardest thing for me.  It's the fact that not being a morning person leads me to hide in bed even after I awaken, desperate to prevent the barrage of words that I know will come flying at me the moment I show my face.  It is a battle between my essential nature and my child's, a battle I don't want to fight and don't know how how to wage.

Now, some people will simply say that they don't see the issue. Papa is up with the boys, so I could continue to sleep later and then stay in my room until I feel that I can face the day. That could be the beauty of homeschooling's famed flexibility. There are no rules that say we must start lessons by a certain time each day. But there is the reality of our rhythm.  The morning is ideal for lessons, the afternoon far less so.

(I am catching up on old posts that I had drafted and never posted. I almost deleted this as the biggest change between when I wrote it and now is that I AM most definitely a morning person after all, and have been for about a year and a half. I'm giggling thinking about the fact that I have been awake since 4:20 this morning, lol.)