Homeschooling AND Full-time Work: Solving the Time Puzzle with Anandi Raman Creath EP 456

00:00:09
Speaker 1: Hi. I'm Laura Vanderkamp. I'm a mother of five, an author, journalist, and speaker.

00:00:15
Speaker 2: And I'm Sarah hart Hunger, a mother of three, practicing physician, writer, and course creator. We are two working parents who love our careers and our families.

00:00:24
Speaker 1: Welcome to best of both worlds. Here we talk about how real women manage work, family, and time for fun. From figuring out childcare to mapping out long.

00:00:33
Speaker 3: Term career goals.

00:00:34
Speaker 1: We want you to get the most out of life.

00:00:41
Speaker 3: Welcome to best of both worlds. This is Laura.

00:00:43
Speaker 1: This episode is airing in late April of twenty twenty six. I'm going to be interviewing Anandi Rahmen Kreith. We're welcoming her back to the show. She's talked in the past about her career in tech and the various different styles of work she and her husband have both did in their pursuit of the best of both worlds. But she's going to be back talking about homeschooling while working. She has two children and has done a few stints of homeschooling while doing her various tech jobs over the years. So I know that homeschooling is a hot topic and lots of people have looked into that, but we also talk about people who generally are building their careers as well.

00:01:23
Speaker 3: It seems like these things are at odds.

00:01:26
Speaker 2: Yeah, I would think there's a lot of challenge to doing both at once. Super curious if you've seen some time logs of people successfully juggling these two possibly opposite forces.

00:01:38
Speaker 1: Well, the thing is they don't have to be at all. I mean, people hear this and think that's impossible. Homeschooling and working cannot be done at the same time. And so this has become a particular fascination of mine, not because I am interested so much in homeschooling personally, but because it is an exercise in showing kind of misplaced assumptions about where the time goes. I mean, first school, whether you send your kids to public school, private school, It is not generally childcare. As a lot of people who have kids have figured out, school is generally about one hundred and eighty days a year, roughly six and a half hours a day. That is eleven hundred and seventy hours. A work year is more like nineteen hundred and sixty hours. So if you work full time, you are going to need something else. Whatever that happens to be.

00:02:29
Speaker 2: And plus the school can like close on a whim. You had an air conditioning outage the other day and we receive this text that was something like, if you'd like, you can pick up the kids, the air conditioning is out. And of course, and they said pick them up like after eleven or something. And of course this was an absolute frenzy and some of my children were texting me as if it was the end of the world. And I took a walk at noon and was like, it's probably seventy two degrees out, not.

00:02:56
Speaker 3: Really inside of an oven level at that moment.

00:03:01
Speaker 2: Correct, But it was a nice illustration that with they are not really under any obligation to I guess keep our kids, and things may happen.

00:03:09
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:03:10
Speaker 1: No, there's definitely been virtual days for snow for us. Various half days were the thing in the past. That's we got rid of most half days this year, but that means we also have a lot of holidays off or teacher in service days.

00:03:24
Speaker 3: So if you are thinking that.

00:03:26
Speaker 1: School is your childcare and you're going to work full time, like you very quickly discover you probably need something else, whether that's aftercare, before care, summer coverage because a lot of schools are not operating in the summer, so you'll need camps for your kids or a babysitter or something. So all parents who work full time need some form of childcare. School can be part of it, but it cannot be all of it. And so if you are homeschooling and working, you will also need some form of childcare, most likely for some of the time, but that might just be a different chunk of your hours than the traditional one. So the homeschooling requirement and a lot of states is also one hundred and eighty days. And the general assumption is that you would have four to five instructional hours each day, right, so if you think about a public school day being six and a half hours, there's time for lunch, time for recess. They may or may not count various specials like art and music against your instructional requirement, time in the hallways, whatever else. There is, but four to five hours of instruction a day is seven hundred and twenty to one thousand hours a year. If you multiplied by one hundred and eighty, so eighty seven hundred and sixty hours and a year, there would definitely be space to both work one nine hundred and sixty hours and homeschool seven hundred and twenty to one thousand hours and.

00:04:44
Speaker 3: Not have the two overlap at all.

00:04:47
Speaker 1: Right, You, again, you'd have to be creative about when it happened, either when you are working or when you are doing the homeschooling, but there would at least theoretically be space for both of those without any overlap. Now, of course, they obviously ca overlap, and a lot of the families who do wind up homeschooling and working, especially if they have older kids. At least some of the classes might be done online for specialized instruction, which means that if a parent was, for instance, working at home, you could each be off in your separate office verus school space. And if you're working flexibly, that can work and you can overlap it at some of the times. But I've seen a bunch of different versions of this. So one person I interviewed for Big Time, my upcoming book was working five to nine am most days on her own business. Then she would homeschool after that. She also worked in a regular office job on Tuesdays, but because they were a homeschooling family, her older kids were able to just stay with the younger ones during that and they homeschooled on the other four days a week. And if you spread that over a longer period of time, then you can do that. Right as long as you're getting one hundred eighty days, you don't have to take a traditional summer if you don't want to. I have also seen a time loog of someone who would homeschool from eight to one on her one hundred and eighty instructional days, had a nanny come around noon, transitioning over the lunchtime, as she would generally do consulting work from one to six pm while her kids were in this other childcare during that time, and that person could do a lot of the afternoon activity driving and come in and be fresh blood at that point as well, and then could do full time hours if you wanted, with working from home and older kids are more self directed, or just work different hours, homeschool different hours than nine to five at nine to three. Homeschooling doesn't have to mean you do all the teaching. Some kids do virtual classes. There are more homeschool co ops these days, so I've seen a number of situations where you have like four families and some combination of the eight parents involved in that take a day or take a couple of hours to do instruction on something that they may have had more space. And like, so if somebody who is an engineer, they might be teaching a math class, as somebody works in a pharmaceutical company, maybe they're doing chemistry, and somebody speaks Spanish fluently, they might be doing language. So they can create a co op that way, and then each individual parent is not doing all the instruction as well, and so that opens up a lot of time, especially.

00:07:22
Speaker 3: For flexible work, So lots of different things.

00:07:24
Speaker 1: Like I said, bit of an obsession of mine, but well, I think it's something that people can consider if they want.

00:07:30
Speaker 3: Sorry, you never have considered it, right.

00:07:32
Speaker 2: I am not patient enough. I love teachers. I am so grateful they do what they do because I would not be good at it.

00:07:40
Speaker 4: Yeah.

00:07:40
Speaker 1: I have not personally had any desire to do this either. I wrote my senior thesis in college on homeschooling policy. But I am also not cut out to do it. I mean, my kids could have done a co op or something, but no.

00:07:52
Speaker 2: I applaud people who do it. I mean I think it can be great and I think especially the more people do it in a way it's better because then the opportunities for family is getting together and creating a whole social structure around it are certainly there. I mean I live in Florida, it's very common to homeschool. Yeah, I just personally don't have the the right personality.

00:08:10
Speaker 3: Well, we saw some of this with COVID right with the co ops.

00:08:13
Speaker 1: People would do with that, like you have your pod of like four kids and trade off, And it's certainly a way to do it as well. There's lots of different educational options out there. But Anandy and her husband have made this work through several stints. They are not currently do it, but she's gonna tell us about how it has worked in their life.

00:08:30
Speaker 3: So can't wait to hear that.

00:08:31
Speaker 1: So, Sarah and I are delighted to welcome Anandi Rahmen Creed back to the show. So On and d please introduce yourself again to our listeners.

00:08:41
Speaker 4: Hi.

00:08:42
Speaker 5: Everyone, I'm an Indie Rahmen Creith. I live in Phoenix, Arizona with my husband, two teenagers and dog, and I work as a project manager for a small software company.

00:08:54
Speaker 3: Yeah, and you've had a wide variety of tech jobs.

00:08:57
Speaker 1: That was sort of the topic of our last conversation, where you talked about the various different flavors of part time and full time and virtual work you've done. But we wanted you to come back on the show to talk about homeschooling while working. And we certainly know that a lot of people think those two things are sort of incompatible, that it requires at least one parent to have stepped back from their career for a while to manage. But you've done both at the same time. Can you talk a little bit about when your family used this as an option.

00:09:28
Speaker 5: Yep, we used it for both kids at a couple of different times, so I believe in twenty nineteen, we had moved to a kind of a rural part of California where the elementary school you went to was your neighbors school, and that was the only choice really in the area, and that wasn't meeting the needs of our older kid, who was I think in second grade at the time, and we kind of let that year progress to see how it went, and it really wasn't working for her. They offered to skip her a grade over the summer, so we took that, not kind of not having any other options, and as soon as we did that, she wilted, for lack of a better word, like, she stopped reading for fun, she stopped telling us things that she had learned at school. And so when we went to talk to the school about it, we found out that she was basically spending about three quarters of her day reading in the back of the classroom because she had finished her work and there wasn't really anything else for her to do, and so we kind of realized we needed to change, and so we took a huge leap of faith and pulled her out of school. At the time, I was working part time remotely for Microsoft as a contractor, and so my schedule was fairly flexible, and so we figured out a way to make it work. Basically through the neighboring public school district had a home school support program where they would assign you a teacher to meet with every couple of weeks, and then you would go and talk to them about your plan to cover the major subjects that you needed to cover. The state of California had requirements for that. You filled out a form every two weeks talking about what you worked on, and we just took it from there. And figured it out as we went to be honest, with a lot of help from the internet.

00:11:10
Speaker 1: Yeah, and so was that kind of were you teaching her or were there other courses you were using?

00:11:18
Speaker 3: How did that work?

00:11:20
Speaker 4: So we were lucky at that time.

00:11:22
Speaker 5: I think my daughter was almost nine, and so at that time she was pretty self motivated. We used a lot of for that half a year that we pulled her out of school. It was like a weird time to enroll her in classes and things because it was the kind of after the second semester had started. So we used a lot of workbooks that we got from our homeschool support teacher. She kind of recommended things for our daughter, and then we had a couple of online classes that were shorter term, like things from out school and some other online providers. It muddled through the rest of that year just trying to figure out what it was that we wanted to do and cover for that year, preparing for the next year to really enroll her in actual online classes that were the whole academic year. It was basically outsourcing most of it right Either we sent her to classes locally. There were a couple of homeschool co ops that people had set up where you drop off your kid, they'd take whatever classes you sign them up for, and then you pick them up later. There were online classes which she was pretty good at focusing on, and then just self working through workbooks for a specific curriculum.

00:12:28
Speaker 1: And so how did you manage your work schedule around this? Were you able to sort of i mean be in like a virtual meeting while she was doing her stuff, or did you have to move your hours around when she would need support.

00:12:40
Speaker 5: I didn't actually, so we were lucky. This kid is i don't know, like unusually focused for that, like for how young she was. And so my husband also worked remotely, so we were able to tag team a little bit if she had a question. He is a software engineer and doesn't have very many actual meetings, so she can interrupt him and not didn't have too much impact on his work, so that was helpful too. But basically, we would sit down at the beginning of the day and say, here's the things you need to get done for the day, here's the class that you have at this time, which we'll have to drive you to, that sort of thing, and then she would kind of just crank through it until she had a question and either ask him or me. So I didn't change my work schedule at all for that. I would occasionally have to duck out to drive her somewhere, like at two PM or whatever, but other than that, it wasn't really very different from my normal work schedule.

00:13:31
Speaker 1: Interesting and so you did it at another point too, I mean there was a later than homeschooling episode as well.

00:13:38
Speaker 5: Yes, so my older daughter we homeschooled basically from twenty nineteen through COVID obviously, and then she went back to school in seventh grade, so she basically homeschooled continuously from the middle of fourth through seventh So then we sent her to school and thought was fine and great actually, and then my younger kid obviously was home for the COVID year, and I don't know if we can.

00:14:04
Speaker 4: Really count that because that was a little bit of a disaster.

00:14:07
Speaker 5: So my younger kid is we found out later much later, is also autistic and so but was having like a lot of challenges with online school and also was just seven. So we would get notes from the teacher during the COVID schooling, which we enrolled this kid in a fully online elementary school program, so it was like basically in school at home through ASU Prep Digital and they still do that and anyone can enroll in this. I think it costs money if you're outside of this state of Arizona, but it was free for us, and it was excellent, like if you could get your kid to focus, it was great, Like they covered it, the teachers were amazing, the teachers had plenty of online teaching experience. It just was a terrible fit for our seven year old who had trouble focusing, like was playing Minecraft while supposed to be in class and.

00:14:57
Speaker 4: Things like that.

00:14:59
Speaker 5: So we kind of muddled it again, muddled through that year and basically moved that kid into our office. One of us basically took the kid for the day and they would do their work in our office so we could keep an eye on them. That was not ideal and I would never repeat that particular scenario again. But then as this kid got older, sent them back to regular public elementary. There was a kind of a transition year for sixth grade where we felt like they needed a little more academic challenge before going to the same school that their sister was attending, So we pulled them out to homeschool just for sixth grade. We knew it was temporary and that we would be sending them back to school, and that went so much better. Because they were older, they were able to focus. We had a different kind of schedule. It wasn't just a solid block of morning classes where you're sitting at the computer and focusing. It was you might have a class twice a week, you might have another class once a week, but most of the time was either getting homework done from those classes or in person, either extracurriculars or classes.

00:16:01
Speaker 4: And it worked really well for.

00:16:03
Speaker 5: That kid, even though they have executive function challenges getting things done, but it was amazing academically for them.

00:16:10
Speaker 1: All Right, well, we're going to take a quick ad break and then we'll talk a little bit more about homeschooling resources for families in this situation. Why I am back talking with Anundi Rahman Kreith, who has homeschooled while working with two children, different situations with the older and younger, So they were not homeschooling simultaneously.

00:16:40
Speaker 3: Then there were different times for both of them.

00:16:43
Speaker 4: That's correct.

00:16:44
Speaker 5: So the only year they were together at home was the COVID year, and as we know, that was difficult in many realms, so like I wouldn't take that as a typical homeschool year. Yes, so each of them had our full attention for the other years that they were being homeschooled.

00:17:00
Speaker 1: And because you had flexible jobs that you guys could work from home, you were able to incorporate that all. It's sort of into the family schedule.

00:17:07
Speaker 4: Absolutely.

00:17:09
Speaker 5: Both My husband and I have been working remotely from home for tech since like twenty sixteen, so it really does make it easier to do some of these things a little off the beaten track.

00:17:21
Speaker 3: Well, let's talk a little bit about the resources for it.

00:17:23
Speaker 1: I mean, a lot of people when they hear homeschooling, they assume that mom is sitting at the kitchen table teaching from some curriculum. I guess that you may have purchased or there's a lot of major publishers that do full curriculums, if people are interested in that sort of thing. But it sounds like you went a different route and found in different resources. I'm curious how you went about finding those resources to make sort of a hybrid schooling situation.

00:17:48
Speaker 4: Yeah.

00:17:48
Speaker 5: I would say the homeschool charter program in California was really instrumental for me and getting some structure around it.

00:17:56
Speaker 4: They required us to report every two.

00:17:58
Speaker 5: Weeks what we had done in like math, science, ela pe and social studies, So we had to cover all those things over the two weeks and talk about what we did, and they filed that somewhere officially. So that really helped me kind of at least get a start on what things we needed to cover. And the beauty of homeschooling in this way is like you get to pick the subject, you get to pick the curriculum, you get to pick the level for each thing independently. Right you're not doing second grade everything altogether. You can pick different levels based on how your kid is doing. And so we discovered by accident that our first kid was like three years ahead in math, and we had no idea, Like, we just kept giving her the final year tests for the curriculum she was already using at public school and found out that she was actually ready for sixth grade, and so we just started where she needed to start. So for some of it, we just got the workbook from the school curriculum and she just worked through it on her own. Math was not her face, so having a live math class was not really adding value for her. She just wanted to get it done. But for other classes, we found online providers. There are a number of them. There's a place called Athena's Homeschool Academy. There are the Davidson Institute has online classes that are taught by real teachers for gifted kids. There's out School which is amazing because it has both academic things and fun classes. So my daughter took a ton of drawing classes. Just you pay for one session, it happens at one time, and you're done, so she could try out a lot of different instructors and do things that way. So there's a ton of stuff online if your kid is good at paying attention for online classes. But we also, like I said, we had a homeschool co op, and most big cities will have a homeschool co op that teaches classes like they hire teachers and they will teach different subjects and you pick which ones you want. Our homeschool charter also had a day one day a week where they would basically go there for the whole school day and take a bunch of mostly elect They also did hands on science projects and messy art projects, things you might not always do at home, so she was gone one day a week for those until COVID shut that down, So it was a nice experience to have both. She could be around other kids at least that one day a week, and then the rest of the time she was doing stuff online or a few classes at.

00:20:18
Speaker 4: The co op.

00:20:19
Speaker 1: And with a co op, like, how does one go about finding a good one one that you think is doing or at least it's like philosophically aligned with you too, Because I imagine there's a mix of them that is very true.

00:20:31
Speaker 5: So there are a lot of religious ones and some of them are also you can if you have to do a little digging and.

00:20:38
Speaker 4: Ask about it. I did a lot of Google.

00:20:40
Speaker 5: Searching because I didn't know anyone. We had also just moved to California, so I didn't really know anyone who was also homeschooling until we actually started doing it, so a lot of googling. There are religious homeschool co ops that their classes are not religious, so you can still take them. They're happy and welcoming. It might be at a church, but they're happy to have you. But there are some require you to sign a statement of faith before you send your kid to their class, and if that's not aligned with what you want, obviously you wouldn't sign up there. There's also a really good Facebook group called Secular Eclectic Academic Homeschoolers that I used, and they're like almost militant about the content that's shared there and the online classes shared there being incredibly secular, like more than I would be worried about, and we were somewhat concerned about it, but they are like really strict about that. So if that's something that's important, that's a great resource for those kinds of things. The Internet, Like I don't know how people would have done this before the Internet, but for us, like the resources online were amazing to find, even local meetings and local groups that we could find resources there.

00:21:46
Speaker 1: And you mentioned that you'd had a variety of experiences with virtual classes, and I think a lot of us learned this during COVID, that some children do better with that than others. And some of that is a function of age, some of it is a function of their executive function or how interesting they find the class, or other temperamental things.

00:22:04
Speaker 3: With the kids.

00:22:05
Speaker 1: I'm curious how you think people should think about that with their children, like whether they'll be able to do it, or if they are, you need to take a virtual class.

00:22:13
Speaker 3: If there's ways to make it better.

00:22:14
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think the best way is to try it and see what happens. Because I was actually pretty surprised that my almost nine year old was like really receptive and attentive and was like it worked great for her, and we just jumped in and signed up for a class that had a whole bunch of sessions. But I think out school is the perfect place to try this because they'll have like a one off session, pick something your kid is interested in, and see like, can they pay attention to the screen. Are they getting distracted by other things? Like our second kid definitely, until they were maybe nine ten would have incredible trouble focusing just on the screen and what's going on there. So it's just I think you got to try it and see if it works. Some kids are great at it and some kids aren't.

00:23:02
Speaker 1: Yeah, was there anything that you saw right away like this isn't working and we had to pivot?

00:23:07
Speaker 4: Yes?

00:23:08
Speaker 5: Actually, And it goes against the topic of this podcast as far as working and homeschooling. So when we were homeschooling our younger kid in sixth grade school starts here in August, so we started all of our classes and things in August as well, and it was working okay at the beginning, but then I would come to check on the kid after a couple of hours of meetings, and then nothing had gotten done. They were researching dragons online, completely unrelated to school. There was some minecraft happening, So my husband and I were trading off each week who was more closely supervising so the other person could concentrate on work, and one person was responsible for school that week, and about like I want to say, two three months in, it was not working super well. To be honest, I think again it was the executive function challenges. Being left alone to get their work done was not working for this kid, and it wasn't going to help to just like plunk them in our office like it did when they were seven. So at ten and eleven, you need a little bit of a different focus on that. And so I ended up, actually for other reasons also burn out related in things, leaving my job to focus and help this kid basically like teach them how to set up a plan for the week. And it's interesting because I worked myself out of that job probably four months into it, Like eventually the kid caught on, Like at the beginning of the week, we write in our planner, we figure out all the things we're gonna do, and then we just do them. And it was really a good reward because basically, once they were done with their school work for the day, that was free time for them. So if you finish by noon, you've got half a day to do whatever you want. And so that caught on pretty well. I didn't even really, I mean, I probably didn't need to quit. We probably could have muddled through that, and I had a lot of other reasons for quitting. But sometimes they need a lot of hands on support at the beginning, especially if a lot of it is independent work that's not in class being led by another teacher.

00:25:05
Speaker 1: Yeah, although I'd point out that many times children with special needs need a lot of parental involvement, whether you're homeschooling or not.

00:25:13
Speaker 5: Yes, yes, I'm still setting on assignments online.

00:25:16
Speaker 1: So yes, yes, exactly exactly. We're going to take one more quick ad break and then I'll be back with more. Well, I am back talking with Anandi Rahman Kreeth about homeschooling and particularly homeschooling as an option while you are working as well. Now, do you think there's any way you could have pulled this off if one of you was reporting to an office.

00:25:46
Speaker 5: I think if I were working part time remotely, yes, for sure, one hundred percent. I think the part that was actually the most challenging was driving kids somewhere in the middle of the day, because there were I mean, as homeschooling has become more popular even since COVID, there are a lot of interesting classes that happened during the day, specifically for homeschoolers at local pe classes and other things, and so just getting them there was probably the bigger challenge. But yeah, I mean, I think we could pull it off with one parent as long.

00:26:17
Speaker 4: As your job is super flexible.

00:26:19
Speaker 5: You're not tied to a bunch of meetings or a specific a lot of things that have to be done at a specific time.

00:26:25
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:26:26
Speaker 1: Although even with that, I mean there's people who like, are a nurse who works night shifts or something, and you could trade off with flexible slures as somebody else for instance. But that's funny that you say that it's driving kids places is the thing that takes the time, and you need the flexibility for and people hear that way, like, wait, homeschooling doesn't mean you're just staying home.

00:26:44
Speaker 5: Right, Yeah, And for us, I mean the social piece was also really important. I didn't want them to be home eight hours a day or longer without seeing other kids at all. Right, So we did definitely seek out more extracurriculars and other social classes where they would be in class with other kids in person. Because we were doing so much of it online, we also wanted to make sure they were still getting that same amount of social time with other kids as well.

00:27:11
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:27:11
Speaker 1: Well, certainly socialization is something people occasionally worry about with it. But it sounds like you were doing so many things in community with other people that you almost might have too much of it.

00:27:20
Speaker 5: Yeah, for sure. I think that's a pretty common misconception. I mean, there's so much social homeschooling stuff you could sign up for that you would actually not get a lot of academic work done. Like a lot of the co ops will have days where they go hang out at Like for younger kids, obviously they go hang out at the park and they're there two hours, three hours, right, And so you could find those little meetups and gatherings and then classes like fun extracurricular classes and really have trouble squeezing in the academic stuff if you're not careful.

00:27:51
Speaker 1: So you wound up transitioning both of your children back into sort of more regular schooling situations. I'm curious why you made that decision than after having made the homeschooling decision with both of them.

00:28:03
Speaker 5: Yeah, So for us, homeschooling was always temporary. It was to fix or improve something that we saw that needed to be fixed in that time, like immediately in that time. Like it was for us, we were never intending to do it all the way through until they graduated. I think my husband for sure, was very skeptical of homeschooling in general when we started, so I think the fact that he even came around to it was pretty surprising enough to do it.

00:28:30
Speaker 4: We knew that we wanted.

00:28:31
Speaker 5: Our kids to go back at the very latest in high school, just because I didn't want Like, it's a little more complicated to you can do it, absolutely, people do it all the time, but homeschooling high school you have to make sure you get in all the requirements that colleges need, specifically in the state of California, they have really specific requirements that if you don't meet, you're not eligible to apply to the University of California system. So it gets a little more tricky around documentation and making sure they've got all the classes, and you don't always have access to them, Like a lot of homeschoolers will have trouble finding AP exams they can take because you have to take those in person, and not every public school will let you come and take the exam there. So it gets tricky as they get older, And I think we just wanted them to like, we wanted to be able to find a school. If we had a good school for them all along, we would have just sent them to school. But we did eventually want to find a school for them that was a good fit, and we found a great one. I mean, that's partially why we're here in Arizona. So they go to the school and ideally they will both graduate from it, and it's been a great environment for both of them.

00:29:33
Speaker 1: Is the school a little bit more focused on something that's different from a normal public school.

00:29:38
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's a tiny private school on the campus of Arizona State University, so it's focused on gifted education and letting kids basically when they run out of classes to take at their school, they're allowed to take classes at Arizona State, which is like the catalog for that is amazing. So it's just been a really good fit for both of them. It's also small nurturing, so it works for my kid with some special needs as well, which is great.

00:30:05
Speaker 3: Yeah, do you miss homeschooling at all?

00:30:08
Speaker 4: I do?

00:30:08
Speaker 5: Actually, I still I've got friends who have been homeschooling the whole way.

00:30:12
Speaker 4: Through, and I am a little jealous.

00:30:14
Speaker 5: Like it affords a flexibility for vacations and things. You can either take your work with you. You can decide that you're not going to do some of that work that week, like you can call into class and turn in your homework, but everything that you're doing on your own you can skip. There's a flexibility where you're not tied to a school calendar that I really miss for sure, and just having the kids around it's difficult as that COVID year was Like having them actually home altogether was great and I do miss that, but also I'm happy for them to be at the school that they're at now, So yeah, we would not trade it.

00:30:49
Speaker 3: Yeah, the vacation thing is totally real.

00:30:51
Speaker 1: I mean, we had to fill out the absence for educational purposes so I could get two days extra to take my sixteen year old to our spring break trip to Japan, and I was like, it would have been a longer trip if we weren't tied.

00:31:03
Speaker 3: To the calendar.

00:31:04
Speaker 1: For sure, for sure, So Ana, do you listen to the show? Of course, you know that we like to end with the Love of the Week. I'll go ahead and throw one out that is homeschooling related that you mentioned, the Davidson Institute, So if any of our listeners are curious about programs for children who need more academic challenge, you should definitely check them out. You don't have to be homeschooling, though. They do stuff for kids who are in regular schools or any other sort of school. But they do have a ton of homeschooling resources if you're interested in.

00:31:32
Speaker 4: That, all right.

00:31:34
Speaker 5: I would say mine is not homeschooling related, but my love of the Week is actually bullet journaling. I returned to it a few I think earlier this year instead of using an actual printed planner, and I just it's working for me really well, and I should never have left that method.

00:31:53
Speaker 3: The bullet journaling is awesome.

00:31:55
Speaker 1: Yes, well, Anady, if people did want to connect, where should they go?

00:32:00
Speaker 4: Yes, I have a substack.

00:32:04
Speaker 5: It is not homeschooling related, but I think you can send me messages there or leave comments. It's on in d R C A N A N d irc at substack, so you can find me there.

00:32:17
Speaker 3: Awesome, Anandi, thanks so much for joining us.

00:32:19
Speaker 4: Thank you.

00:32:21
Speaker 3: Well, we are back.

00:32:22
Speaker 1: So glad to hear about how people make working and homeschooling work simultaneously. I know we probably have some other listeners who have experienced with that, and so if you have structured your hours in a cool way to make that possible, I would love to hear about it, like I love collecting these, So email me Laura at Laura vandercam dot com get send me your time log.

00:32:41
Speaker 3: I would very much enjoy seeing it. So today's question.

00:32:46
Speaker 1: This came from our Patreon community Best of both worlds ever at Patreon. How do you handle parenting when one kid requires more time and attention than another, or than the others if you have more than two. In this particular case, it's because of a medical issue, but obviously it could be other reasons too, So Sarah, what would you say.

00:33:04
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean this is the reality for us, but I feel like the kid that needs more in our particular case, it varies. I just always feel like there's some kid who has extra needs, and the way we get around it is just really paying attention to making sure that the others who are not in that place at the moment feel and notice they're one on one time. Because I think that the more that it's like, oh, you have your special day and you talk it up and you plan it and you do it, the more kind of salient you make it, or the more that it's like specifically for them, the more it means even if the time spent is not proportional. So I would say that's how we've done it. I also think this can be a really good kind of like divide and conqueror situation where if like one kid needs a lot, then one parent can focus on that and then the other parent can shower attention on the others.

00:33:54
Speaker 4: Yeah.

00:33:54
Speaker 1: No, I mean we have some version of this, not because of medical issues, but just because one of my kids is so much younger than the others and so he naturally requires a lot more attention. I mean somebody is like actively putting him to bed, whereas the other kids it's kind of more of a just send them to their rooms and they manage that themselves. Or one kid, I have to get him food, whereas the others are very much capable of feeding themselves if they need to, or showering themselves, dressing themselves. And the six year olds still needs assistance with all those things. So it's not because of medical issues, because of the age. So what we have done is I just try to make sure that I am getting one on one time with the other kids doing something that they find enjoyable, like entering.

00:34:39
Speaker 3: Their world for a while, whatever it is that they.

00:34:41
Speaker 1: Happen to enjoy. Sometimes it's been trips. Sometimes it's just like taking a Starbucks trip, going to the library together, just driving somewhere in the car, getting driving hours practice all those things.

00:34:51
Speaker 3: And activity. If you can have only one kid in the car to an activity, that's always like a bonus treated as their time.

00:34:58
Speaker 1: If they might be on their phone, try to get them to be the DJ, like have them choose music for you all to listen to together as a way to get them out of that. And then we've also gotten extra care for Henry, like, so sometimes we have a babysitter just for him and do stuff with the other kids. And I I'm sub love. I feel like, well, he should be part of the whole family stuff too, But it changes the entire dynamic if he is part of the family stuff. So we do it for some things but not for all the things, so that the big kids can have big kid fun with their parents in a way that they would have if they didn't have a much younger little brother. And I also figure he's going to be with me for years after they are gone, which means that even if I have extra care for him now, I'm maybe getting some of that time back when he's like age twelve to eighteen and most of the others are gone.

00:35:51
Speaker 2: It's a long time. It's a long time about that time too, I mean, I'm looking forward to it. But like, yeah, the last kid gets a lot of concentrated attention at the endeah.

00:35:59
Speaker 1: Or will just be so tight that he'll raise himself at that point. But we'll see, we'll see.

00:36:03
Speaker 2: You'll certainly be available, that you will not be divided.

00:36:06
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. This has been at best of both Worlds. We have been talking about homeschooling while working. We will be back next week with.

00:36:14
Speaker 3: More on making work and life fit together.

00:36:18
Speaker 2: Thanks for listening. You can find me Sarah at the shoebox dot com or at the Underscore Shoebox on Instagram.

00:36:25
Speaker 1: And you can find me Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. This has been the best of both Worlds podcasts. Please join us next time for more on making work and life work together.