Changing Classrooms is Hard!
Y'all change is hard!
It's hard on me mentally, physically, emotionally, gah, it's just hard.
These past few weeks we have been working on the transition of flip-flopping our playroom (affectionately known as the blue room) and our classroom (formerly located on the third floor of our home).
These changes have been really hard on basically no one...except me. I am such a weirdo.
You can see some of my favorite photos of our classroom in this blog post.
Our classroom has always been on the third floor. Nick had to custom make our shelves and book cases to get them to fit to the pitch of the roof. It was a really, really special place to me...in my mind.
The reality of the situation was that we found ourselves in a predicament that we were hardly ever able to get everything accomplished when we had school up there. We were lucky to start our day on time and if we didn't finish by lunch I could pretty much kiss any chance of finishing our work goodbye.
In addition to that, the homeschool room very often during seasons of the year looked like a clumsy SWAT team had been searching for something amidst holiday decorations. Things were strewn all over, nothing could be organized amidst the chaos. It was bad. Bad, folks, bad. If you need to see something to understand you can read this old post but I'm warning you...it's bad.
Why was schooling so hard up there you ask? Well, it was really hard to pinpoint the reasoning...I always blamed it on a multitude of things which included it being so far removed from the rest of the house, it being too sunny and warm in the afternoon, it being really dark in the morning hours, it being too cluttered, and on and on and on.
A couple of years ago God started working on my heart. I still wanted to homeschool but I wanted it to be an ever-present pulse in our family. For us it had always been something we do only up in the classroom and then we come downstairs, shut the door, and put it out of our minds. I didn't want that anymore. I tried incorporating school more into our every day life. We did more school in the dining room over tea and after lunch, outside. While we found ourselves enjoying school more we found our house starting to look like a used curriculum sale was taking place...random papers, books, and projects started to stray to every nook and bump out of our victorian. And this Momma was getting mad.
We tried for seven years to make it work. But there came a breaking point when we decided it was time to change. For the reasons mentioned above but also with the pitch of the roof it was starting to become difficult for the three of us (including two growing like weeds children) to maneuver around the desks like we had when they were so little.
So one day on a whim, we changed. I declared that we were moving the classroom downstairs.
So we did.
The toys and craft supplies went upstairs. We are still muddling through where everything should go on the third floor. And downstairs we are struggling with where to put everything. We no longer have an entire floor of the house for our supplies but rather a single room. Downsizing is now our middle name. In the process I have found that it was a long over due process. Projects, books, manipulatives, and supplies for children with much shorter limbs and much chubbier fingers are still hanging around. Once we've gone through everything I'm hoping it will be a manageable amount for our classroom. But it will have to be so we will make it work.
There are parts of the classroom I will really miss but there are parts of the new classroom that I am really starting to find such assets to our family. For example, our new classroom (the blue room if you'll remember) has three rose of sharon bushes outside of our massive picture window. Four birdfeeders later and we have officially become "bird people". Also, the classroom is right off the downstairs laundry room and powder room. We have a large utility sink for washing brushes, taking our science experiments, and more. I can also now fold laundry while watching them do their math. Very convenient.
Before the move, our families biggest arguements were about legos. Dumb I know. But the kids legos were in the blue room, which we have to go through to get to the laundry room and we have to pass through to get to the dining room from the kitchen. It was always a fight to get them to pick up their legos in the middle of creating something or to at least scootch them over so I didn't have to plow through them with laundry in tow. Now the legos are upstairs and, while we still insist on them picking up, they can at least display their finished projects without fear of someone stepping on them. Where the legos once were downstairs is now a monstrous desk we found at Restore.
With the children getting older, needing more head room, using less supplies, and wanting to create, this is a better solution for our family. We also have school books on hand in the room off our dining room now for more dialectic discussion around the dinner table. Words are starting to be debated and chewed upon.
All that to say, the whole "still in transition" business is so hard for me. At least once a day I find myself having to re-convince myself that this is a change for the best for the whole family and one day, eventually, I will love both spaces as much as I loved our little classroom in the sky.
I struggle so much with change. Do you? How do you talk yourself down from despair when things are not perfect?