The laundry is piled on the couch, the dishes are piled on the counter. We are outside on the rug, on the picnic hill, on a dry brown lawn, in 70 degrees. Our feet are bare and our socks are in a pile next to us.

Last week we had snow. The week before we had rain, flooding, and ducks. Alaska is a capricious frontier, thumbing her nose at anyone who tries to tell her what May should look like.

  But today it is glorious. Trees that were naked this morning unfolded their leaves by the afternoon.

We school in summer and it changes things. We read our books outside, eat lunch outside, make lots of laundry outside, and try to recover the house somewhat before bedtime. Today, we interrupted a planned assignment to examine a freshly killed mosquito under the microscope. We finished Oliver Twist and Ten Apples Up on Top. We walked to the mailbox.

Summer isn’t the only cause for change, though. We’ve homeschooled since Mattie’s birth and it’s been the most natural thing in the world, this reading and learning together family thing…but 12 years into it, we find that we need to make some adjustments to fit everyone’s needs that go beyond just our yearly tweaking. What used to work needs to be set aside for what actually works right now. Maybe we’ll pick it up and dust it off later, after the dust actually settles.

I still read to all of the kids. Bigger kids still read to littler kids. We still use the buddy system that works for us: the one where the kids are buddies with each other, and I am buddies with Sophie, whom I periodically run upstairs and hide in the bathroom with. Sometimes one of us brings chocolate.

My laptop of almost five years recently endured some violence – it went swimming in coffee, and then broke its hinge, among other ailments indicating demise – and had to be replaced with something a little more reliable. Something new (ish). So we got something newish and I tried really, really hard I sort of tried to learn how to use it. But I wasn’t happy about it.

The icons looked funny and the email looked ugly and the Word program was weird and the photo editing program worked differently. Things that were streamlined for the sake of efficiency weren’t very efficient when my my fingers kept looking for the “end” key but hit the delete key instead. Or worse, the insert key – who uses that, anyway?! (I despise you, Insert Key). Nothing was normal and I raged in frustration and finally cried…more than once.

Our coffeepot has one button and I can work that machine beautifully. The microwave and I get along because most of the buttons are numerical and I really only need a couple of the other ones that have important words on them like “start” and “cancel.” If I concentrate super hard, I can even reset the clock on the oven after a power outage.

Stupid computers.

I finally figured it out, though. See? I’m typing on it right now. The other night I fixed two quirks on it as Vince looked on, and I did it by myself. No help, no crying.

I felt like a genius. It was awesome.

What is really changing around here is our expectation of what things are supposed to look like. Out of six kids, three of them are only a few months apart in age, but all are learning math at a different level. The only two that can really be paired together right now are Andrey and Chamberlain, who are three years apart. So, grades, schmades. Out the window they go.

The grades, I mean, not the kids. Well, sometimes…never mind.

This doesn’t mean we lower our standards. Those haven’t changed. We keep a vision of greatness for each of our kids, and we notice more and more that when we hold a high standard up for them, they live up to it. If we give them a pass for low standards, they live…down…to that, too.

We want our kids to live it up…not live it down.

We have high expectations, but we’re learning that we need to take some new routes to achieve them. We can cry in rage and frustration because it feels weird, because this place doesn’t look normal, or we can learn some new programs and really get somewhere.

This also doesn’t mean that we cave to pressures of political correctness, or to visions of what armchair quarterbacks think things should look like. We don’t relinquish parental authority or our own common sense to let other people take over areas that are our responsibility as parents. We can ask for help with discernment without falling to the faulty assumption that “experts know better,” because they simply don’t. They don’t know our children better than we do, and they don’t know their needs better than we do…and unfortunately, many of them are only experts in their own eyes, for their own ego. Hard-working parents have no time for that.

Sometimes it feels like we are constantly letting go of what we thought things should look like right now, letting it break, letting it soak, letting Him scrub us, letting Him move. We’re taking on His vision for what things actually do look like right now, in order to get to His vision of what life should look like later: a destiny of greatness.

We can embrace snow in May because we know glorious is coming. It will be awesome. And you know what else?

Weird is just a side effect of awesome.