Homeschool Spanish Lessons - Online Learning

I recently found myself having to ponder the difference between preschool and daycare, and having to decide which one I wanted for my son.  As a “work at home” mom, it’s always a struggle to try and get a few things done during the day while I watch my 2 toddlers, 2 and 3 1/2.  I’ve actually found that one of the only ways to work at all is to get up 3 or 4 hours before the kids do. But as my son has been asking about going to school, we felt that a preschool environment would be great for him this fall. I visited 7 or 8 places, and registered him at a local Lutheran preschool. Well it turned out there was a large waiting list ahead of me, which I only found out about a few days before school was to begin in September. So I had scrambled a bit, calling some places I had thought about but had not visited. One seemed very nice; a nurturing bilingual environment, in a very clean facility.

As we visited my parents for my dad’s 80th birthday not long ago, it left me wondering what more I could do to try and give a little back to my dad. He has certainly always been there for us, with a supportive word and a helping hand whenever we needed it.  Now he finds himself in an era of life that is not easy for many people – la tercera edad, or the twilight years, when many people find it harder and harder to stay animated and positive about life. My dad seems to have good days and bad days. Health wise he’s in good shape for the shape he’s in, with a pacemaker/defibrillator and a regime of meds to help out. But I don’t think it’s so much the physical limitations that get him down. My dad has always been a big believer in the future; an optimist; somebody who always argued that time is on your side and that through hard work and patience you’ll eventually get to where you’re going.  So now he appears to be struggling with the fact that he just doesn’t have the same amount of time to look forward to. For some people, they might be inclined to make their “bucket list” like in the movie with Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman. But for others it’s a slow road to an inevitable end, one they think about all too much before it comes.  It doesn’t help that many of his contemporaries are gone – or that they live in a largely senior community where many people are indeed facing illness that comes with age. But as my mom has pointed out, she has neighbors in their 80s who seem to be pretty happy just to live each day, and she wonders why my dad can’t be more like this. 

Rob and I belong to the new breed of later life parents who seem to have 1 thing in common: we have been very slow to have any kind of childcare for our children; even babysitters.

In fact until a few weeks ago when my mom hired a woman to watch the baby and her cousin during my dad’s 80th birthday party, neither of my kids had ever had a babysitter. Now we’ve been fortunate enough to have Rob’s mom, known as Nana, here a couple of times a year, for stretches up to even 6 weeks last summer. That has been great. But no outside childcare, no leaving our kid with friends, no teenagers, nada!  Part of that has been because we just didn’t have somebody right off hand that we knew would be reliable, and I guess the other part was not wanting anybody to look after them other than us. 

But with the big new overhaul I’m doing to the e-learning system in order to accommodate homeschoolers, as well as just to make the entire system more user friendly, I’m having to work more hours than I have since having the kids. And even getting up at 6 am, I found that the couple of hours I got to myself didn’t make enough of a difference to truly boost my productivity.  So I finally admitted that unless I found somebody to help me, this project was never going to even get off the ground.

I’ve been wondering a little lately whether our country will undergo some major cultural shifts if a real, prolonged recession hits. I guess if you’re sitting in Michigan right now you might be thinking “hey we already ARE in a recession!” – but it seems to me as I can’t find a parking space at Costco, the local movie theatre, or Best Buy, that at least up here in Alaska, a real and serious recession has yet to hit.

But what if it does?