12. Hello from Costa Rica! Homeschool On The Road

We make homeschool work while both of us work full time, even from Costa Rica before a Spartan race. We answer rapid-fire listener questions on hours, schedules, curriculum, reading breakthroughs, travel schooling, routines, and why we quit a co-op.

• why a focused two-hour block four days works
• how shift work can support homeschool
• three-day and weekend-only schooling options
• curriculum we use and why it travels well
• early reading gains with daily micro-lessons
• making writing bearable for creative kids
• priming trips with research projects
• simple rules that keep school moving
• chore charts, laundry days, visual aids
• guarding 6–10 a.m. work time
• staying flexible while keeping standards
• leaving a co-op that wasn’t a clear yes

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

Why We’re Homeschooling Now

SPEAKER_00 0:02

We are two full-time working parents who just made a crazy decision.

SPEAKER_01 0:07

After four years in public school, we're homeschooling our three kids and documenting the whole thing.

SPEAKER_00 0:13

Never in a million years did I think we would be homeschool people.

SPEAKER_01 0:17

Welcome to, well, this wasn't the plan podcast. I'm Slate, and school's in the kitchen now. I'm Scotty. We says Scott when I say so. I'm a sailor, and this whole podcast was my idea. This podcast is our real-time journey. Unexpectedly juggling homeschool, jobs, parenting, and everything in between.

SPEAKER_00 0:44

Follow along each week as we document how it's going and share the good, the bad, and the ugly. Because we know some days are going to be ugly, and we're not holding back.

SPEAKER_01 0:55

We're learning to expect the unexpected. So let's get into it.

SPEAKER_00 0:59

Let's go.

Costa Rica And Spartan Race Plans

SPEAKER_00 1:04

Hello from Costa Rica.

SPEAKER_01 1:07

Hi, we're here in San Jose.

SPEAKER_00 1:10

We're doing a Spartan race, so that's how we came to San Jose. I don't think it's probably the most like touristy place in Costa Rica.

SPEAKER_01 1:18

Yeah, people typically go to the Guanacosta area or the uh what's the other one called?

SPEAKER_00 1:23

La Fortuna. I am probably butchering that, but that's where all the like ziplining and white water rafting and all of the things, and there's a volcano, you go to the jungle. So that's where like all the people do like the active things, hiking and all that.

SPEAKER_01 1:38

But Spartan races need population centers to thrive. So of course they have it close to San Jose. And so we're excited to be here to do that race.

SPEAKER_00 1:48

The kids are so, so excited. It seems like something you would have to make your kids do because it's like one of the races, it's two miles, but they love it so much. This is their third one. So we thought this year was like the perfect opportunity to do one not in the US. They have them all over the world.

SPEAKER_01 2:07

So I think if you say to your kid they're gonna run or do something like that, I wouldn't tell them that. I would just show them pictures of the obstacles, and then it just looks like a giant playground.

SPEAKER_00 2:17

So it really is. And they are like completely muddy and wet afterwards, and they just they love it so much. So this has been on our list to do forever. It feels awesome being able to finally do it, even though we came right after a deadline day and we had the worst travel luck that we've had in a really long time. The kids had to be troopers, but I do think that that's teaching them obviously that travel doesn't go according to plan a lot. If you travel, you know that. Sometimes you have trips where everything goes off without a hitch, but sometimes you have trips where it's just awful. And we had a 24 hours of that. Everything went wrong, but everything's fine now, and the race is tomorrow, so we're super, super pumped to do that.

SPEAKER_01 3:03

Yeah, it's exciting.

Listener Q&A Setup

SPEAKER_00 3:04

So today we're just gonna do like a really quick episode on the questions that I got on Instagram, a rapid fire QA. We're trying to keep it short. The kids are currently doing some of their homeschool right now, and we obviously don't want to be locked away in a room podcasting a lot. So these next two episodes will be relatively short.

SPEAKER_01 3:25

But what if we don't know the answer? We haven't screened these questions yet. I guess we'll just be honest and say, I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 3:32

Yeah, all honesty, I just polled everybody on Instagram like 30 minutes ago. So we're gonna answer

Homeschooling With Shift Work

SPEAKER_00 3:39

those. The first question did come from one of our fan males, though. So I'll say that first. She was just wanting to know because we always comment on how yes, our jobs are like work from home, we're our own bosses. Obviously, that makes it really easy to homeschool. But she would love to hear from like someone else, like a nurse or like firefighters, someone like that. And she was asking if we would be willing to have a guest on our podcast.

SPEAKER_01 4:09

I would.

SPEAKER_00 4:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 4:10

Sure.

SPEAKER_00 4:11

So my answer was like, for sure. So if you are listening and that's you, please send us a message and we're we'll definitely be willing to have someone on the podcast. Because I think a lot of people are listening just to see, like, okay, I want to do this. How can I do it? So I think that that would be really helpful.

SPEAKER_01 4:30

I think 312s, though, like many nurses work, is actually maybe more conducive to being a homeschool parent than a typical eight to five job that you would work five days a week. Because yeah, I mean, you will be exhausted from those three twelves. I know that nurses, you know, are tired on their days off, but if you can fight through that fatigue, then you have four full days a week. And that's what we only do four days. So four full days that you can get two hours a day in, three hours a day, whatever it takes for your child to learn. But yeah, I mean, that's actually very doable. It's it's the people that are working five, eight to fives that they might have to get a little bit more creative. I it's still possible. But yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:09

And I think one thing with that schedule, if you have someone working it, you've already set up child care and your routine for that the whole time that they've been alive. You know, if you have a firefighter who is literally away and can't be reached during those hours, you already know what you do. So the child care part of that isn't an issue. It's just, can we get homeschooling done during the time that they're home? And the answer is yes. So the next question is kind of funny because all of these kind of go together now that I'm looking

How Many Hours Homeschool Takes

SPEAKER_00 5:42

at them. The next question is how many hours a week do you spend homeschooling?

SPEAKER_01 5:47

It depends on what you mean exactly by that, because we're always teaching our kids stuff. Sometimes just on the drive, we're teaching our kids stuff. But if you're talking about specific curriculum-based, it is generally in the two to two and a half hour range, four days a week, on the actual math, language arts, handwriting, the spelling, those types of things. And then an additional 30 minutes per day of required reading at their reading level. And then they're all choosing to read outside of that. It's not always at grade level. Sometimes it's easier things, but they're still reading on their own outside of that. And then there's of course all the things we're teaching them that aren't really curriculum, but you know, how to cook, how to do laundry, how to live life, finances, how to be healthy, everything.

SPEAKER_00 6:35

But I think what they want to know is what, like what is the time commitment? And for us, let's just do a simple answer. It's two hours a day, and we do it four days a week. So that's eight hours that we are committing to doing homeschool. Now, of course, we're teaching our kids all kinds of other things. So are you. If your kids go to school, you're still teaching them things at home, of course. But eight hours is like the commitment level. If you have one child, you can a hundred percent do it in eight hours. So, and you can do it any other way. So let's that brings me to the next question that came in is do you think it's possible to do it in three days a week, or do you think it has to be five?

SPEAKER_01 7:16

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_00 7:16

And obviously we're like, yes, three days is completely fine. And it gets easier the older the child is. So, like our kindergartner, we sorry, she's in first grade. I keep thinking she's in kin kindergarten. Our first grader, she sits down with me and we get through it so quickly. But honestly, she really couldn't sit there much longer. She's six. The older kids, they could, if we needed to, do longer. And that way we didn't have to do as many days. So if your child is a little bit older, I think it gives you a lot more flexibility on what you could do.

SPEAKER_01 7:54

And to go along with that, yes, that that's an average. But I would say that if it was just the first grader, it might only be six to seven hours a week total. If it was for the second grader, probably right at that. And then the our oldest who's a fourth grader, I think a lot of times she might spend two and a half to three hours, especially if there's a longer writing workshop or something that is a little bit

Three Days, Weekends, And Reading

SPEAKER_01 8:18

more time intensive. And that's okay. As they get older, they're able to handle a little bit heavier of a load, and that's still a pretty light day.

SPEAKER_00 8:26

And her grade, which is fourth grade, is the age at which our curriculum starts putting some of the work on the child. So they may be schooling a little bit longer, but there's things they do themselves. So your commitment still stays about the same. That's kind of the beauty of it. The kids do need more schooling as they get older, junior high, high school, of course. But at that time, their maturity is there, their ability to do it longer is there, and the parent doesn't need to help them.

SPEAKER_01 8:57

So versus the first grader, where yes, it's less total time, but you know, 80 to 90 percent of it, we are sitting right next to her. One of us is.

SPEAKER_00 9:05

Yeah, and she just has like one page that she does herself at the end of the lesson. So it's it's not very much time she can do it by herself.

SPEAKER_01 9:14

But that that does tie in well with the question about the, you know, a nursing person that works three shifts, and you asked if you can do it in three days, that's actually perfect because it gives you three days of work, three days of homeschool, and a full day off to, you know, rest and recoup, go to church, whatever you do on that day off.

SPEAKER_00 9:31

Absolutely. And so the next question was just could you only homeschool on weekends? And we don't do that, but a lot of people have messaged me saying that that's what they do. So if you're saying you need eight hours, then you would just need four hours each day. And probably is that ideal? No. But if it made it to where you could do something that you want to do for your family, absolutely. And if you have an older kid, 100%, you could do it on weekends. And that you could also, if you had a traditional job, squeeze in like 30 minutes to an hour after work. So you could split it out a little bit more. Or if you're like, no, I don't want to think about it during the week and do it on Saturday and Sunday, you could. There's really so many ways to do this.

SPEAKER_01 10:17

You could do it, but I would recommend having them read during the week. You know, even if obviously if you're working full time and they're not in school and you're doing homeschool, they're somewhere with somebody during that work time. And or maybe they're at home with you, but you can have them reading during that time. They don't need your help with that as long as they're old enough to know how to do it.

SPEAKER_00 10:36

I agree. I think that you do need to put some things on the child, no matter their age. So our first grader, she still has 30 minutes of reading a day. And is she reading the whole time right now? No, she's not because we've already done it with her. But it is setting her up for that routine so that whenever she is able to read for longer periods of time, she can do it. So, whatever you can do, if I were in that situation just doing weekends, I would definitely have them take like an out school class, you know, once or twice a week. I would have them set up something that they're using their brain, either either maybe just like something creative and reading every single day, if you're just gonna do two days a week. But that's just you don't have to. That's just my personal advice. So the next question that comes in a lot is what curriculum we're using. And

Curriculum Choices And Travel

SPEAKER_00 11:32

I don't think we should go into a lot of detail on this because we have an entire episode, if you'll just go back a few episodes on we chose a curriculum and then we changed. So now we're using the good and the beautiful. And I was just gonna address like the basic reasons why we chose that. So we like it because it's pretty much all paper and pencil, and we like it because you don't really need anything else except for the workbooks for it. And we like it because it is pretty far ahead. So the standards are higher than our school was, and we like that. We want to push our kids in a good way, and also it makes it really easy to travel like we are now. We just pulled out the worksheets for those weeks out of their book and brought them with us. Super easy to travel with that. All we need is the paper and some pencils.

SPEAKER_01 12:25

Right. They're they're like paperback textbooks with perforated pages, so it was really easy to although they could have made them better perforated, I will say. If you're listening Good and Beautiful, it's one thing you could fix. Make it easier to tear those out for when we travel.

SPEAKER_00 12:37

But we had to use some scissors on some of them. But it was no big deal.

SPEAKER_01 12:42

But that would be make it easier. But yeah, it was, it did make it easier to do that. There's a few lessons that we're doing while we're here in Costa Rica that require they come with these little boxes with accessories like a clock so that the kids can learn about telling Tom on a clock, an old-fashioned clock and everything. And we didn't bring all that because it's hard to travel with all that stuff. So on those lessons, we're having to get creative and like draw a clock and have them point to the, you know, where the hand should be and things like that. But yeah, it's been going great.

Reading Breakthrough With Apps

SPEAKER_01 13:09

And one other note on curriculum, a special shout out to the reading.com app because our youngest, that's what she used. She was way behind on her reading, and now she's actually way ahead of where she's supposed to be. She has done 91 lessons now, and she has seven more to go, and she'll have completed the full program. And her reading, I mean, comprehension, her reading speed, her vocabulary, it's just phenomenal, the improvement there. So, and we we didn't we knew the older two were smart. We really didn't know. She finished kindergarten and she had a rough class, and they didn't learn a lot. No, they just it wasn't the teacher's fault. It was just a hard year, you know. A lot of behavior issues with other students and things that slowed everything down. And I'm like, I'm hoping she is, you know, I'm really hoping. We all want our kids to be smart. We all tell ourselves they are, but like there's a part of me that's still like, I don't know yet, because we haven't seen her do anything. And today I was like, oh my God, thank God for this app because now I know that she is.

SPEAKER_00 14:05

Well, even just you said, thank God we started homeschooling because you're like, Scotty, you're so smart. And she was not thriving in that environment with all the kids. She was behind, and she's just kind of a kid that if you push her, she will excel. Like she will always meet those expectations because she's a driven little six-year-old. Unlike our other two, not so driven, but she's so driven. And I just she wasn't being pushed, and now, like just taking over for these two months. We're super, super impressed. And just so proud of her. But you mentioned reading.com. You said it really quickly. So I just wanted to say it's an app. They don't sponsor us in any way. We just we're looking for something to work on it and do consistency. It's 10 to 15 minutes a day. You can find it in the app store. It's called reading.com. And we absolutely love it. It took her from being super behind, which she was a very young kindergartner. So that wasn't surprising to us. And then now she in just a few days, like she'll get her certificate saying that she'll be at a second grade reading level. So she made progress very quickly. And the first part of the app was like kind of a struggle. She was not getting it easily, and it was very remember, it was so frustrating giving her those lessons.

SPEAKER_01 15:29

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:30

Because she would be like, ca at. And I'll be like, okay, what's the word, Scotty? And she'd be like potato, meatball. She would just be like, and and that went on for weeks. So just how quickly she completely changed and learned everything is awesome. I cannot recommend the app enough. Save your money. Don't buy like the little readers off of Amazon that are like first, kind of, whatever. Just do this because you know the books that she's reading in that are words that she already learned.

SPEAKER_01 16:02

Yeah, we we've noticed that with other things like other reading programs and everything, or they're supposed to be kindergarten, first grade, and they're phonics-based. But then you look and half the words in there aren't not phonics words. And they're not really even sight words. They're just words that don't follow the rules of phonics. I'm like, okay, I get that those words exist and I need my 10-year-old to know them, but we're trying to teach the kids something based on phonics. And then you give me all these words that I'm like, well, that one doesn't follow the phonics rule, sorry. And how do how can they learn that way? So anyway.

SPEAKER_00 16:32

They can't. It makes them frustrated too. So highly recommend reading.com.

SPEAKER_01 16:37

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 16:37

All right, let's go to the next question.

Making Travel School Exciting

SPEAKER_00 16:41

What are your tips to get kids excited about homeschool in another location? I know my answer to this, but what did I do this summer?

SPEAKER_01 16:50

What did you do?

SPEAKER_00 16:52

Yeah, okay. He doesn't know what I'm talking about. So this summer before we went on a trip, I had them do like a project and they researched where we were going. So they did like a poster board on every country. They did their currency, their language, they looked at foods we would try. That got them very excited about the trip and about learning about different countries, which is not part of the curriculum, but that is something that is part of education, you know, geography, all that. They had to make a map. So that's something that I think that we'll be doing on every trip is just learning about where we're going. But what are your tips for making them excited about learning here whenever they usually do it, like in a certain spot? And you know, like, okay, like like we got here and today is Saturday, and our kids don't usually do homeschool on Saturday until there was like, what? We're homeschooling on Saturday? We're like, yeah, we need to because we missed one day and then we're just gonna stay caught up. She was like, Oh, well, I just I didn't realize we were doing it on Saturday.

SPEAKER_01 18:00

Oh, and Slata said, wait, I thought people went on vacation, you know, to take a break from work and school. And I was like, and and we will, we're not going to school the entire time we're here, but we missed a couple of days that we normally would school because of travel, and we have to make up those days, and we we if we're gonna travel as much as we're planning to, we can't, you know, we we can't just skip all of those days and stay caught up. And I mean, he understood that. Now, how to get them excited about that, I'm not so sure. I mean, it's more like if you'll get it done, we can go do the fun stuff, but we have to get it done.

SPEAKER_00 18:36

Yeah, they were pumped coming here because they were like, look, we can go anywhere. We can take school with us. But when it came down to it, then they were like, what? And so what we do is we're just like, hey, as fast as you can get this done, we can be out doing other things. So, you know, you make it go as fast or as slow as you want. That's kind of what gets them. We have to be kind of harsh with the learning, I feel like to them, which we I would feel like when I'm when I say harsh, I mean like, guys, you have to get an education, we're doing it. You know, we don't really play into the, oh honey, like so sorry. Like this is oh no. That's not the kind of parenting we have. It's kind of like, hey, life has things you gotta do, like we're gonna do them. So that's kind of how whenever they give us like pushback, I'm like, we can sit here all day if you'd like, or let's just change our attitude and get it done. And that usually helps.

SPEAKER_01 19:31

I mean, it's not much different than at home, except they're a little more amped up. It's a little bit harder to get them to focus because there's exciting things coming. But just like at home, you know, they're excited to do mental math. They all enjoy that. They're not excited if they have to write a long thing. They hate doing that. It's the same when we're here. They're like, oh yeah, mental math or or the logic puzzles in the math. That's all fun. Oh no, now we got to the point where we have to write a short essay for our oldest. And she, I mean, she hates it. So she still hates it here. She hates it at home, but you know, we have to do it either way. So I don't know. I don't know how to get them excited.

SPEAKER_00 20:09

Shout out to Night Zookeeper. I just worked with them. They have like an online platform and it's for getting kids to write. So if you have an older kid, which I would say for Sailor, it's a little bit harder still. She's in fourth, but I would say fifth and up, they make writing really fun. Their program is pretty cool, but they have to be pretty good at typing for it. So I feel like it helps them with typing and writing. So it helps them sit down and like write stories and be creative. So if you do have a kid like us that's struggling with it, check out Night Zookeeper.

SPEAKER_01 20:45

Yes, it does make it fun. She really enjoyed those versus, you know, I do think the writing she's doing for the Good and Beautiful program is is really helping her writing. Yes. But she does not like it.

SPEAKER_00 20:57

No, she doesn't like it. So

How Long We Considered Homeschool

SPEAKER_00 20:59

this is just something to make it more enjoyable, and it's in addition to it. So she'll she can jump on Night Zookeeper and it will, in a fun way, disguise writing and make her write even more.

SPEAKER_01 21:12

Yes. Which is good balance because you I don't want that her to have a hate for it, because I still think that she might have a future as a graphic novelist and Oh, she loves writing.

SPEAKER_00 21:22

She was in creative writing UIL at school. But I think for ADHD kids, the focusing on making sure your punctuation and everything is correct, sh it's really hard for her. She just wants to like get the story out. And sometimes you read it and you're like, hey, you can tell it came from an ADHD brain sometimes. So I don't want her to hate it. I want her to continue with that because once she gets over the hump, I do think she will continue to love creative writing. Okay, we have two more questions. The kids are getting like super antsy in there.

SPEAKER_01 21:53

So rapid fire.

SPEAKER_00 21:54

I do love this question. She says, How long did you consider homeschooling before you made the move to actually do it? And I think this is like the biggest part of our story is that we never wanted to homeschool ever. We never talked about it. Before we had kids, we never talked about it. I actually told Carson, like, you know, I'm working. Like, I am not gonna be staying at home with the kids. Like we met in college, I had a degree, like that was all we talked about. So the homeschooling was like, I don't know, it was like a big bomb dropped on us whenever Sailor said that she wanted to homeschool. But before that, I was really unhappy with the school situation. I remember I remember telling you, I wish there was a school that like got the kids outside and like fed them healthy meals and like taught them like more things about life and stuff. And he was like, that doesn't exist. And I said, in an ideal world, I would homeschool. And he laughed at me, like, you are absolutely ridiculous. You're not homeschool material. You could never. And I don't know how that changed, but the conversation from our daughter kept coming up. And we're like, no, you're not gonna homeschool. And I think we just started researching at that point. We just were like got really curious about it because we kept having issues at school. So from the time that this came up till the time we actually homeschooled, I would say almost two years.

SPEAKER_01 23:28

Right. I would yeah, I would say from the time that it was mentioned and that we were looking even into other options, not really homeschooled specifically.

SPEAKER_00 23:35

Yeah, something different.

SPEAKER_01 23:36

How could we do a private school or how could we do something different two years? But then any other private schools that we liked that were different enough from the public school, they were in another state and $50,000 a year, and that didn't seem like a good option. So we we kept looking, but from the time that we seriously started looking into homeschool to when we decided we were going to do it was probably only two to three months. But then we decided, but that didn't mean we did it. We were like, okay, that's gonna

Planning Activities And Chores

SPEAKER_01 24:04

be for next school year. So then we, I mean, almost the entire final school year.

SPEAKER_00 24:08

No, the whole school year, because it was that summer before that we were like, okay, yeah, we could actually do this, but we needed time to get our work situation in place. So we had to make a lot of changes in our work. I mean, I know that we own our own business and everyone's like, oh, like that's so easy to homeschool. And it it really wasn't. Are we lucky? Absolutely, because we can make those decisions. We can work our work around our family, and we're so lucky, but it's not easy. We had to make all of these changes in our work, and the kids kept being like, please, like, why do I have to finish the school year? Like, I'll be fine. You don't have to start homeschooling until the next year anyway. I'm like, you're just gonna sit around and do nothing. No. So that entire school year, they knew we were homeschooling, but they could they had to finish the school year. And it was a rough school year, especially for Slate. It was not a great school year. So we just had to make all of these work changes. We had to completely change the way our business worked, which was really hard. But if you are looking into it, just know that like you can take time to do it. They're uh okay at school when they're younger, and to do this when they're a little bit older is easier on you anyway. So it took us some time.

SPEAKER_01 25:30

For sure. It did. It it was a long process if you look at it from the whole picture.

SPEAKER_00 25:36

So the last final question is how do you plan activities and chores for the week?

SPEAKER_01 25:44

So Well, when when we're home, we're on a pretty tight routine, at least Monday through Thursday. So and even Freddy, we're on a tight routine. It's just a different routine from the other days. But those four days, the four days we do homeschool are Monday through Thursday, and I mean, Taryn and I wake up at the same time, work the same hours, we do school at the same time, we go to the gym at the same time, we eat lunch at basically the same time every day. So all activities and chores, we try to fit around that, although there's exceptions. I mean, if you sign up for a sport, then it's at a certain time. And so then we might have to adjust through the year what times we do certain things. And we we have done that.

SPEAKER_00 26:25

Absolutely. That just because we have a routine doesn't mean that it doesn't change sometimes during and we have to adjust. But the thing with us working from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m. every day is that activities don't get in the way of that. No. And we're being very mindful of protecting our work because it's our livelihood. We can't just say, oh, there's a homeschool meetup at nine o'clock. We'll just do that. We don't. So we don't take on anything between the hours of six and ten. And then a lot of times we are working in the afternoon. So but that doesn't mean that we're not saying yes to afternoon things. The kids do art once a week and it's at like one. So that means that one person, which is me, takes them to art and then Carson gets some extra work time and meeting time during that.

SPEAKER_01 27:16

It's a great time to book phone meetings. I try when possible, I try to have people booked during that time because the house is quiet. So it works out well.

SPEAKER_00 27:25

But for the most part, whatever your work time is, you should protect it. So don't sign up for things that don't fall into that category of your routine. You just have to make sure that you're protecting it. And you might have a different work time, and that's completely fine. But we protect that. And so there are so many things to choose from, though. So we just make sure to do that with the activities. All of the sports are in the afternoon. The kids did do a homeschool gymnastics class, and that was at like two or three. So I'd say all the homeschool type classes are usually in the afternoon. So

Routines, Flexibility, And Co‑Op Exit

SPEAKER_00 28:00

you'll just have to check those times and make sure that you are protecting your work because that's number one priority. And as far as chores, those are done every single day in the morning. They have a chore, and how we stick to those is with the chore chart. They have a chart and we have a routine that tells them when to do those. We have everybody has a laundry day. So they know if it's Monday, I have to bring down my laundry. And I think part of that is just sticking to it for a little bit until they get into the routine. And then I think in the afternoon, evening, it's just more of they have to be picked up and clean up their mess from the day before they get to watch a TV show and start winding down for the night. So we kind of hold that over them. It's like they're ready to turn on their show. And we're like, okay, have you cleaned up your mess? All those things, and then they get that done. So there is an expectation that they help pitch in at night to clean up the day's mess. Because if you can imagine, houses get very messy when you have three kids at home all day. And then the daily chores, that's just a chart that we go off of. So I'd high highly recommend making one of those for your kids, not just being like, we're doing chores every day, because that's really hard to stick to. We've tried that. And all of the printed out like PDFs that we use around our house, we use a lot of visual aids because Sailor has ADHD, and visual aids really help with ADHD. We have so many of those. You can click on the link in the show notes. I did put those in there. So we have a lot of free ones. And our routine is in there, our chores list, our laundry list, all of the things.

SPEAKER_01 29:40

Yeah, all of the things. Those will help. And Taryn already created it so that you don't have to.

SPEAKER_00 29:45

And you can tweak it to fit yours. And if you just want some ideas, those are the ways that we kind of keep the train on the tracks here because the only way all of this works for us is just to be organized and stay on a really good routine.

SPEAKER_01 29:58

And I do recommend. Recommend staying flexible. Stick to your routine when you make it for that season of whatever things you're doing. If if the art class lasts for that semester, I mean the next semester, it might be at a different time or you might be in a different thing and you might need to make a new routine. So be open to changing that routine as things come up. Because I don't know about everyone else, but for us, one of the main reasons we want to homeschool is so that we don't have to say no to things that we that really enhance our lives.

SPEAKER_00 30:25

Yeah. And listening to this, you might be like, man, they're so type A. Like you need to have some flexibility for children. We absolutely do. If we get at the park and our kids are fri playing with their friends and they're having a wonderful time, we stay. We we just push the schooling until later in the day. Now the boundary is school gets done. No matter what, school is going to get done. Yes. But if they're having fun and playing outside and it's a beautiful day, we're staying. That's the kind of flexibility that we are having for the kids. If somebody is like sick, I love that we're like, that's fine. You don't have to do homeschool today. Don't even worry about

Wrap Up In Costa Rica

SPEAKER_00 31:05

it. We have a day to take a rest. So we are very flexible. Just our day-to-day routine. I feel like kids thrive in routine. And so do I.

SPEAKER_01 31:15

And so do people that are not type A like me, actually. So if you are not type A and either neither spouse is type A or the spouse that is type A happens to have a job that doesn't allow them to help with homeschool that much, then let Taryn be your virtual type A spouse. She's my type A spouse. And she's already created all these things so that you don't have to, if you'll just print them. Even printing it sounds hard to someone that's not type A. I know. It's like an extra step you gotta do. I've been there. But go do it, print it, tape it up, explain it to your kids, and then you'll never have to be type A again. Taryn already did the type A-ness for you.

SPEAKER_00 31:53

Exactly. And it does help. I think it helps make all of this worthwhile and easy. And what I want to wrap on is just you don't have to sit in something that's not working for you. We were in a co-op and we just decided what yesterday that we're not doing it anymore for the next semester. So we tried it. It's not the co-op for us. And so we'll try something different. And I think homeschooling that has so many things like that. We changed our curriculum, change our schedule, change the routine, change what we're doing. So it's gonna take a little bit of time to figure out what feels good for you. And it depends a lot on your work schedule.

SPEAKER_01 32:37

Right. Yeah. And it wasn't anything against the co-op. It was mostly the the time of day that it was, which day it was on, and how long it took.

SPEAKER_00 32:45

Well, and the kids did like it toward the end. They were like, oh yeah, yeah, we think we want to do it. But the commitment that it took, we needed them to love it. So if you in our family, if you're not like if you're like a yes is like yes, and it's not a hell yes, it's not worth it because there's so many things, so many priorities in life. We we need a hell yes, and it wasn't a hell yes.

SPEAKER_01 33:08

Right, that's true.

SPEAKER_00 33:09

So I think that's a good good place to wrap this up. We will have one other short episode in Costa Rica. So thank you so much for listening to Well, this wasn't the Planned Podcast.

SPEAKER_01 33:22

We will work you really hard on this podcast. Make sure you scurry so you don't miss a single podcast episode. Thank you, have a good day.