Critics of homeschooling will often see overwhelmed homeschool moms and be the first to advise: "Put your children back into school and peace will return." I believe however that putting your children back into school will have the opposite effect on you. This article is first going to address this misconception, then I will list some practical ways to bring back peace into your home.

If you are feeling overwhelmed with your calling as a homeschool mom and you are advised to consider sending your children to school as a way to alleviate your stress it would be best to first examine the new stresses you will be adding into your life. Here are a few that I can think of off the top of my head:

Financial worries:
While I do not believe any parent should scrimp and save of the children's curriculum, it is know that homeschooling is more frugal option as versus private schools. It is not just the school fees but the sports equipment, lunch money, outing money, school uniforms and other fund raising things that come up.

Time:
Instead of moving easily into your morning as a family, you will be rushing your children out of their beds, giving them a hasty breakfast and then sitting in traffic to get them to school on time. This is then repeated at collection time where you have to get to school early to get a good spot to collect your children. This all = time.

Homework:
Then, your afternoons are not your own. You have to get them to their sports as well as oversee homework. These days the numbers of children in classes are increasing and as such teachers often have to increase the student's workloads so that they complete the required amount of work each year. This means more homework after hours.

Just these three things alone are enough to make me think that anyone who advises you to put your children into school for less stress, are clearly saying this from a predjudicial point of view. There is to me, however, a 4th more worrying concern that stems from children going to school.

Character:
Your child's character will require much more work and attention as now that they are facing wordly influences every day for 8 hours (instead of being at home with you where you can address character issues as they arise) you now have to play the part of "fire fighter" as you can be guaranteed that your children will bring home undesirable attitudes (fires) from what they learn at school. This in my mind INCREASES the stress in a parents life.

So now that I have had my say on my soap box about why putting your children into school will not alleviate the stress of overwhelmed homeschool moms, but rather add to it, here are a few practical ways to bring back peace into your home.

Sports and other extra curricular activities:
These activities have the innate ability to suck a homeschool mom dry! Fill up every day of your week with activities and I can guarantee you that within a month of less you will be burned out!

My advice is to limit your children to 1 or two activities each week. The way we chose our children's out of home activities is by deciding what it is that we cannot do ourselves and only offer those. We have found homeschool music programs which we can do from home as well as art programs for their enrichment. However, our daughter's passion for ballroom dancing was beyond our skills base, so she has chosen to do that.

My son wanted to play guitar so a program was bought to self teach, however we cannot cater for his rock climbing in the home so he attends an indoor rock climbing gym twice a week.

I am sure you get the idea, but let me reiterate, if you are stressed with your homeschool lifestyle, the first thing is to assess how many extra mural activities each child is doing, and trim back.

Food, cooking and eating
If your family is not eating properly and you are always running out of things and having to pop to the shop for food, then you need to spend a day or so getting this area of your home organized. Start by making a meal plan for 2 - 4 weeks with easy to cook family favourite meals. Then go out and buy all the items that you need for these meals. Set up an inventory list so that as you run out of the items you can write them down straight away.

Then get your children involved in helping you to plan, buy and cook the meals. If you do not have time to make a meal plan, here are two suggestions:

Ultimate Moms Meal Planner and Menu in a Box

Messy homes, chores and helpers
There are many pages on my website around getting your home clean as well as how to get even the youngest children to help around the home by doing chores. I also have lots of advice for you on how to get your home organized.

Planning schoolwork
If you use a bought curriculum there should not be much planning involved other than making sure you have all the right books each Sunday evening ready for the next week of school.

If you have chosen to put your own curriculum together, then you life is a little more complicated. But planning can be done easily by setting aside some time each weekend to make sure you have your resources together for the following week. A big planning session for the 36-39 weeks of required schooling should happen in vacation time so that you simply have to look ahead each week to see what you need to have.

If you do not have time to plan, then I suggest for this season of feeling overwhelmed that you consider a bought homeschool curriculum that is simple and easy to implement and that comes with all the resources that you need.

Time for yourself
Us homeschool moms have chosen to selflessly give our time to our children to walk in obedience in the calling to homeschool them. This, by its nature, is time intensive and demanding on us as woman.

However it is still important to make time for yourself, whether it be 15 minutes a day or a morning or afternoon once a weekend. Different seasons allow for different things. When my children were small it was very hard to leave them with anyone and I found things to do which rejuvenated my soul while they were with me. Daily nature walks were the best thing for me at this stage.

As they got older I was able to have a scrapbooking evening once a week and ride my mountain bike on a Saturday morning. Now that I no longer have interrupted nights I am able to get up at 5.30 and go to exercise from 6 - 7 am each day.

But all through these seasons, there was one thing that was sure to keep me going and that was my quiet time with the Lord. Finding time each day, before my family awakes is something that I have done for the last 11 years. I believe if this one thing is in place, my focus, heart and strength is renewed to serve my family.

I hope that this article has brought you encouragement and tips to help bring back the peace into your home and with time and implementation, you will no longer feel like one of the overwhelmed homeschool moms in all that you are called to do as a homeschool mom.

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