One on One?

Simply Lovely One-on-One is a new homeschooling blog fair. The blog fair has many great ideas on spending one on one time with kids.

At first reading,however, I winced at the title. Finding time to simply be with my kids, to simply be even with my dh is, well, hard.

I felt like a bad mum. Like Rachel felt.

Only Rachel is not a bad mum. She chats to her kids. She snuggles with her kids.

And, in my own way, I am not so bad at mothering. Or at finding alone time with my dh.

Yes, I tend to be more of a management person than a Love person. I do love and show love in my own way, however..

As I look at my weeks, I see that I manage some alone time with my children and with my dh, but in different terms. In snatches here and there.

I rarely go shopping or on errands or anywhere by myself. I take dh and/or one or two children. We talk. We joke and laugh. We listen to music. Yes, sometimes we argue. But we also get to spend that time together.

Things come up. Sometimes important things.

Sometimes we pray.

Little bits of time alone occur naturally. I tend to grab hold of these, to snatch and use these bits and parcels of time, as they arise.

For example, Tuesday night I was sleeping and missed the St Anthony Mass ( I have been unwell). When I woke, the house was empty. Most were at Mass. I got up, tidied up and then son Luke arrived home. We made tea and sat together, talking, in the sitting room. An unexpected snatch of time but an important one, time to talk about decisions this week.

Another example. Last week, I was hanging out washing and saw that the garden needed some weeding. I called Anthony to help and he and I made a few jokes, he asked a few questions, we had time together talking while weeding.

More examples? Dh and I went grocery shopping together last Saturday, no kids!, sharing a drink and some chat at a coffee shop on the way.

Our family times may look different to the family times of other homeschoolers . At least, it seems that way when I read homeschooling blogs.... We pray ( Anny is learning the Anima Christi right now, in Latin). Yes. We read. Yes. But we also watch TV/movies together A LOT and sing lots of Singstar. And watch 80s music clips. And listen to music. And all talk at once.

And have people over. We love having people over, as several of us tend to be a loud, social bunch.

The great gift of family life is to be intimately acquainted with people you might never even introduce yourself to, had life not done it for you. ~Kendall Hailey, The Day I Became an Autodidact