The Learning Umbrella

This whole Earth Scouts experience is getting a little sour, unfortunately.  It’s a really cool program, and I like the idea of it enormously.  Carbon enjoys the badge process, and he’s still talking about scotch broom and excited about earning more badges.

But I started this project along with other people on the RE Committee of my church.  I knew I was going to have to do most of the work - because that’s just the way it is in group projects that I get involved in.  Maybe that’s a personality flaw, but that would be another post entirely to explore that!

I actually ended up doing EVERYTHING, not just “most of” the work.  And I’m out of pocket for flyers and expenses and I’m bringing home made snacks to every meeting.  I don’t have a co-leader, and even the other church people who said they would join the group just haven’t shown up to any meetings.  And, as the final straw, I’m down to only one other family participating.

The other homeschoolers have said that evenings are just too hard to get out for an activity, or that they couldn’t supervise their older kids with their babes in arms as well.  OK - but I can’t do days because of daycare and I can’t help them with their babies - I’m not going to go out of pocket to pay a teen to watch the babies for meetings.

It’s really frustrating.  And it brings up all sorts of feeling of failure - I “should” be able to make the meetings so much fun that they would all want to do it, I “should” be able to create “buy in” from the parents and the kids.  Those “shoulds” are the voices of my professors from the teaching program.  I have a freakin degree in this sort of thing - why can’t I make it work?

With that interior dialogue and then the way things are going, I end up dreading each meeting and coming home crying and cranky with my family.  DH, not surprisingly, says he’d like me to quit this if this is the way it makes me feel.

And the evenings ARE hard.  Carbon is tired and not-his-best-self by that time of day, and we end up running over to unlock and set up the church without getting any dinner first.  Last night I cooked dinner for the family, but then had to leave without having time to eat it myself.  I got cranky with Carbon on the drive home, and arrived home to find a messy kitchen and one of our cats licking the dish of dinner that had been left open on the counter for me.  I was mad, and I lost it a bit.  DH ended up going and buying me fast food.  Ugh - I don’t like being the cranky woman but sometimes I feel like life drives me into it!

I think I’ve come to a decision.  I’m going to move the meetings to only once a month, on a Saturday morning, at my house.  I’ll offer that to the one family that has “paid up” and is still coming.  If they don’t want to do that, I’ll give them the option of either taking the badges and supplies I ordered so they can start their own during the weekday group, or I’ll pay them their money back.  That will bring my total out of pocket loss for this project to about $250.  But I’m going to keep doing this with Carbon, even if we’re a lone family.  I’ll keep inviting others to join us and putting up the contact flyers, and maybe eventually I’ll have a group that likes to meet on Saturdays.

Sometimes life doesn’t go perfectly.  Other people didn’t step up like I thought they would.  The timing here isn’t great.  It’s really hard to get people for activities when everyone is already busy (like we all are).  I’m trying to tell myself those things, and stop the damaging self-talk that just keeps telling me I’m a loser and a failure.