Chickens

Hey look! I'm actually back on topic today! There will still be a picture with a baby though.

The chickens are all grown up! Those noisy little chicks have been replaced by a quietly clucking herd of hens (and a couple of roosters). They love to wander around the yard and have a nasty habit of making patches of mustard greens and kale disappear if not watched. They also leave lovely large brown eggs behind for us every day. Every few days they leave an egg or two more than before. I see much custard and many boiled eggs in our future.

Working Motherhood

I work outside the home. I can not express how odd that phrase feels to type out. Why is that strange? After all, our culture is laden with working mothers. I know plenty who work from home, plenty who work outside the home, and plenty who spend each day busting their butts watching their little ones every day. It's not like any of these things are unusual.

I suppose it comes down to the fact that I never expected to be working outside the home if/when I had children. I wasn't sure I wanted to be a full time stay home mother either, but working part time from home seemed reasonable. I've also spent most of my life surrounded by people with negative views of stay at home parents, so maybe that has clouded my own views. No matter how much logic I apply to my brain, sometimes old stereotypes I was raised with lurk in my subconscious.

Stereotypes go both ways though. Part of my reluctance to consider my work to be a "real job" may be related to abnormal hours and feeling odd about calling something I love to do "work". I suspect that is only part of it though, as another deeply flawed idea I was surrounded with growing up is that mothers who decide to work are doing so because they're bored at and these aren't real jobs, but glorified hobbies. It is difficult to reconcile that, no matter how much I logically know it's a bunch of bull, with the fact that I have some rather sizable student loans that drag us down as a family and should not be my husband's responsibility just because he was soft hearted (or stupid) enough to marry someone that was lugging around that kind of debt.

So now I work. I am working my way through midwifery training and doing my best to also take clients for a variety of other things to pay the bills. I love what I do, but I also miss my babies. I worry that I'm missing too much of them growing up. I'm in the very lucky position of being able to take my youngest with me to many things and having two bosses that could not be more breastfeeding supportive, but it is still not quite the same.

It's an odd conundrum, this working mom thing.

Picking Up and Moving On

..But not from our home for once! In fact, we're quickly approaching the one year mark of living in our current abode without being in the process of moving or trying to move.That is a feat we've only managed one other time in the past 8-ish years, but I digress.

The long and the short of it is that I got oh so diplomatically fired from teaching the homeschool co-op class I had been hacking away at. To be honest, it wasn't working out and I had not planned to offer to teach again after this quarter was completed, but I was expecting to finish the last three classes before throwing in the towel. I learned a great deal during the experience. Unfortunately, I think I can only say the same for about a third of my students. My respect for k-12 teachers with large classes has also doubled or more. Whoever said "Those who can't do, teach." was clearly never in the position of trying to convince a semi-hostile pack of preteens to get up and work on a group project. I think I'm much better suited to "Do, or do something else."

In any case, I'm not a big fan of feeling like I failed at something, or calling it quits on something I've committed to before completing it. I like to think that's a desire to make things work talking, but it could be pure stubbornness and ego. I'm trying to swallow the idea that this is for the best. I guess only time will tell.

In the meantime, I think this is perfect opportunity to use the time I now unexpectedly have free to get some of my to-do list checked off. My desk has been accumulating an ever growing collection of half finished personal projects the need some attention. I also have a very intimidatingly long list of vocabulary words I need to be working my way through for study purposes.

There's also the fact that I may have lost sight of what drew me to the concept of homeschooling to start with; I want to spend more one on one time with my children. Maybe it's time to refocus myself, not just on work and education, but on cardboard box fort construction and pine cone collecting expeditions as well. They grow up too fast as it is. No need to rush the process, and I definitely don't want to miss it.