Flip Day

When we started our homeschooling journey, I had one student and our school day took about 90 minutes.  Fast forward seven years and I have five students and our school day takes around six hours!

I honestly wonder sometimes what I did with all my 'spare' time, then I remember that by the time Thomas started kindergarten, he had three younger siblings.  Apparently my days were filled with toddler antics.  Honestly, I can't even remember where the energy came from (my energy, not theirs).  Just the Lord's way of sustaining us in those early years!

Now that our school days are fuller, we struggle to keep up with the housework.  I'm not talking about window washing and baseboard cleaning, y'all.  I'm talking about vacuuming, mopping, clearing the clutter.  Just having things in a general condition where I can (usually) walk without tripping over somebody's something or finding the couch for drop in company!

To mitigate the feeling of losing control over the house, we instituted Flip Day.  On Wednesday or Thursday each week, instead of breakfast, kitchen chores, and straight to school, we get up and have breakfast then hit the floor running to clean up the house.  This is mop day, bath tub cleaning day, room cleaning day, decluttering day.  And we still make it to the school room by 10:30 or so.

It doesn't seem like much but it gets the job done.  We appreciate the break in routine as much as we do the calmness of a cleaner home.  And on those weeks when our routine gets totally thrown and Flip Day falls to the wayside?  It's just not pretty.