At 1pm today, Gabriel and I met with his resource teacher & recieved our curriculum "grid", textbooks, workbooks, practice books, test books, independent reading books, study books, standard books, teacher books, answer books and all the other kinds of "books" one needs for a complete and full 5th grade education.
After a 1 hour crash course on the "grid" I was sent home with a crate packed to the gills with "stuff".
Made a delightful supper, and sat down at 6pm to plan out my first quarter as a homeschooler. "I've taught preschool before, I've made lesson plans" I cavalierly thought. Ha! "This should take what? An hour? I'll be having a whiskey on ice by 7:30!"
It is now 9pm and I've just barely finished my first week.
What, in the name of all I hold sacred could I possibly have been thinking? This sinking, overwhelming feeling is strangely familiar to me. I am reminded of the first month after bringing Gabriel home from the hospital.
Sleep deprivation, panic, and paranoia taunted me as I vaguely recalled the romantic notions Ralph and I had of becoming parents and bringing our newborn home. This crying, hungry, wet, smelly, relentless tiny "thing" had begun to control our lives. One by one the fantasies of "and baby makes three" disappeared.
Reality set in, and eventually became better than anything we could have ever hoped for. There was only the brief period where we felt like we'd hugely underestimated what we'd gotten ourselves into.
My early imaginations of homeschooling resulted in Gabriel graduating two years early, going to medical school and working on research that will largely by the catalyst for the AIDS cure. In his spare time he'll run marathons for charities and patent vastly useful medical equipment that will net him millions of dollars. In his various humanitarian award acceptance speeches, Gabriel will mention me as his inspiration, without whom he'd be lost.
After I began to work on my lesson plans, which by the way is something akin to translating latin stereo installation instructions. My fantasies shifted to Gabriel enlisting in the military and being dishonorably discharged for illegal sales of black marketed items and returning home to live on public assistance. I supposed that then he'd join an elitist militia group bent on bringing down the dvd rental industry as a poison to the American public.
I am sure that the truth, reality will lie somewhere in between, and that's ok with me. Right now, I feel like I've opened that can of comedic worms and I had no idea how to shove them all back in there.
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