**You may find affiliate links in this article. This will not add to your purchase but will give me a few cents per your purchase. Thank You! Please see my disclosure page for more.**
My teen years were filled with staying up till dawn than magically I would get tired. I dragged myself through morning classes with many long blinks. My peak hours to get things done were the end of the day through late into the night. Not school hours.
Later as a young mom sheer exhaustion and a child that woke with the sun kept me to a more ‘normal’ schedule. Though my natural night owl, insomniac schedule slowly came back. Then when I got sick my body lost all sense of night and day.
I am back to being an insomniac. I am back to spending days with no sleep than bam I sit down and you can’t wake me for 12 hours. Sure this might not be a true insomniac given it’s from my mitochondrial disease and waky brain issues but the exhaustion and tiredness are the same.
Somehow even with this extreme sleep patterns I have to be a homeschooling mom! I have to figure out how best to keep the kids engaged and learning even if I am slurping down my 5th coffee and feeling no surge of caffeine.
- Write things down. Lesson plan! Trying to think through the sleepy fog will leave you missing things and frustrated. It will also cost you time that means your kids could get bored and wander off. Making your homeschooling day all the harder.
- Work at your peak hours. Sure some start right after breakfast with text work you might start with art or even a couple hours of play. Then mid-morning when you are feeling more alert and ready to tackle homeschooling the whole family will be better off for you waiting until you are ready.
- Some days are worse than others. Have online or a movie or an audiobook to cover for you on those days. As much as you try to regulate your days and get some sleep stuffed into the day there comes those days on end that have little to no sleep. You are tired and there is nothing you can do to stop the fuzzy brained, short tempered, achy bodied day. Let it go but use your back up plan to be sure your children are continuing to progress and learn.
- Don’t try to drive to co-op or that preplanned field trip when you are scary tired. Staying home or calling a friend to pick you up is a much better option than doing the Jello-neck-head-bob down the freeway. Sleep problems at their peak and driving don’t mix. You know this. I know this. I also know how a mom can talk herself into almost anything if you think it’s what is best for your kids. Gee this trip to the zoo with the co-op and all my child’s friends is a wonderful opportunity. They will love it. I don’t want them to suffer because of me.. I’ll just pull it together and get a super huge venti mega coffee and that will work. Hmmm will it??
- Don’t let others schedule make you feel like less of a homeschooler. Just because you aren’t teaching physics at 8am does not make you a lazy, bad, underachieving, or otherwise bad homeschooling mom. You and your family are wonderfully and uniquely different. Embrace that let the nosey Nellie comments wash right over you. Don’t feed into that kind of pressure.
I do hope that your time here in sleep deprivation land is short and you never return. I am writing this article at 3am wishing I could sleep but my body is too achy and nauseous. Ugh… Tomorrow is homeschooling so before I wrote this I followed my own advice and made sure my lesson plan was prepped and ready to go. Oh and the coffee maker was set.
How do you keep your homeschooling in order?
How do you help deal with your sleep problems?
Love some answers to either of those questions!