When my three older kids were young, I ran a home day care for seven years. I frequently had six (most days, in fact) young kids in my care and I sometimes had up to nine for short bursts of pandemonium. Somehow, I felt pretty much in equilibrium, even as the chaos of kids swirled about me.I would even take the usual six on outings to stores, zoo, and lots of parks. I had a cool seat rotation plan in the mini-van, and things seemed to work relatively well (though for years, my map book was indented with the writing of one child who must've used it under a piece of paper as she wrote "Dustin is an idiot, Joe is an idiot, Elyse is an idiot, Ryan is an idiot...") so we all had our moments.
Fastforward to now, and I am the full time working mom of my youngest two, Austin and Trevor, who are 10 and 4. They are so much farther apart in age than my first three, who were all two weeks short of two years apart, yet they get along like cats and water. Each one is an interesting boy in his own right, but put them together and you have a train wreck.
What's worse, somewhere in those years between home day care and working mother, I lost my equilibrium. It may be because my job requires SO MUCH of that - the 10th graders I teach come from a mix of circumstances, but there is a high population of at-risk-kids in the school, and they need a lot of me. Maybe I'm just too drained by age and job stress to handle the bickering that permeates the air of mi casa.
So, if anyone has a good recipe for equilibrium, send it my way.
I don't have it (a recipe,) but I'm sure you're right about the double shift of kid management being the un-equalizer. Among many stand-out memories about the day I left nursing school, never to return: I was in our small "Adult Care" group on day one, and the instructor was beginning to talk about care of hospitalized, bed-bound patients, and my mind just went to static, like tv snow. And then I left. It was so irrational. But I truly believe it was the dog-like level of my brain that intuited what was coming, hi-jacked Executive function, and high-tailed it out of there.
ReplyDeleteNot that I have a suggestion, but at least to some extent Trevor and Austin's interactions will evolve (to possibly better,) even as the dynamic of your 10th graders will remain roughly the same.
On the other hand, I was driving to Mom's the other day with my 19 and 21 year old children in the back of the car, and their behavior was starting to give me PTS syndrome...it might as well have been 10 years ago. Well, that's not a helpful note to end on.