A New Kind of Day

Tuesday, January 7, 2014

A New Kind of Day

With Sarah having trouble with her eyes again (she was able to see a bit better before bedtime last night, so that is good news) I started to think about something that has stayed with me since the moment it popped into my head. The question is this:

If Sarah only has a little bit longer with her vision, what would I want to show her? What would become the important things in life?

(Now, please, please, please understand that this is not at all what I would like to happen. I would give up years of my own life just to allow her to have the ability to see, and even better, to be able to see clearly, for the rest of her life. I just think that in all that we have been through these last 7 months I need to be able to look at this situation from all angles.)

Bob suggested that we take this week and just have fun. So we are because, you know what? Diagramming sentences are not that important. Learning Latin is really not that important. Doing worksheet after worksheet is, guess what? - Not that important. It's really not.

Yes, there are some school related things that we will be doing because I don't want the kids to stop learning, and some of their book work is important to me. So we will continue to do some of that, but I don't want to look back and regret any of my choices that I made during this time in terms of what I did and what I could have chosen to do. I don't want to bog everyone down with pointless paperwork when we could have instead chosen to read together snuggled up on the couch or put on plays or made forts or baked together or played hide-and-go-seek.

Instead of hour after hour of work - that I am not sure is even very relevant in the adult world - we are going to take a new approach for a while. It is scary for me to take this approach because some of our learning will not be visibly quantifiable. I am the type of homeschooler that wants to be able to show everyone what we have been doing. To be able to produce papers upon papers so that everyone knows that I am not a slacker homeschooling mom who let's her kids run amok while she watches Oprah eating Bon-Bons.

If this recurrent vision loss is telling me that my time to show my Sarah the world is limited I want to make sure that the memories stored in her mind if her world goes black are full of color and beauty. Doing paperwork on diagramming sentences is going to produce neither of those things in her minds eye.

For the time being, this is what our life will look like - unstructured media free time together - playing, laughing, and loving on each other.