In this free homeschool chat, Mystie Winckler and Celeste Cruz discuss the unique challenges and blessings of living a full life at home with a large family and lots of little ones. They cover interruptions, to-do lists, expectations, and strategies for keeping your head in the game and your attitude organized.

Mystie, homeschooling mother of 5, loves to take big ideas and grand visions and make them practicable in real life. So she blogs about organizing attitudes & systems and about classical homeschooling at Simply Convivial.

Celeste is a Charlotte Mason homeschooling mother with 8 children 10-and-under (at the time of this recording, July 2016). When she has free hands, she enjoys distance running, nature journaling, beach days, reading, and writing about home education at Joyous Lessons.

You can also find Celeste on Instagram: (@celeste_cruz).

Full audio version:

Mystie – There’s a spread of abilities and also needs. How do the expectations that we have as moms going into that situation affect how we do it, what we do, and our sanity as we do it. So, how would you say that your expectations have maybe changed or when you go into a school year.

Celeste – Since I’ve always had little kids while I’m schooling, usually a toddler and a baby, pretty much every year since I started homeschooling,.. I have a certain curriculum, a certain amount of work that I’d like to get done with my big kids but I have to be flexible in terms of where and how we fit in those things, and I have to be willing to think outside of the box in terms of our school day…

Mystie – When there’s so many interruptions and you have to get up and take care of the baby, there are just a lot of things all going on at once, and you’re trying to decide do I do [this] or [this]. How do you keep track of what you should be doing or what you need to get back to when the interruption calms down?

Celeste – I think of my day really in terms of blocks. At the beginning of each year I set out a schedule for myself where I have time slots and that is not actually something that we’re going to live by, that’s me making sure I’m not over-scheduling myself, that technically these things could potentially fit in this order on a given day that might or might not actually occur…

Make smart changes for the school year.

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