Reagan is next to me, reviewing letter sounds. And not just that, but she’s also reviewing other important things, like how to pronounce “the” like thuh, not duh – and she plods through all of them in order: Thuh…E…says…ehh. Thuh…F…says…fff, and so on. It may be the first time in my life I’ve ever wished the English alphabet had less than 26 letters.

People often ask how we homeschool all these kids (“all these kids,” they say, as though we’ve collected them like so many postage stamps) and I hate to disappoint them, but the answer is pretty boring:

We don’t, really.

At least, not anymore. We put in our time with the older ones when they were younger, and now they mostly homeschool themselves; we just check and discuss their assignments and read with them a little. Life is all learning, of course, but as far as school goes, they’re pretty independent now.

So school-wise we direct our efforts to working with the Littles, as far as they will cooperate, which is…ah, how do I put this…extremely variable. And if you know us, you know that the category of “Littles” has less to do with age and more to do with ability and maturity. Our big kids are 18, 15, almost 13, and 9; our Littles are 13, 13, 3, and 2 months. Our 18-year-old recently moved out, and our little Kavanagh is just learning to take the world in. He’s growing like a weed; he smiles and laughs. Which might all be the same thing.

Last month I made filling the lake a priority again, and it’s working. I’m remembering that this is why we chose to write from home full time: I feel alive again when that’s what I’m actually doing, as opposed to the administrative, publishing parts that consume certain phases of it.

When we like what we’re doing, we forget that we’re working.

I like the movement of standing up to reach over the back of my laptop to grab a favorite style guide from my stack of writing books on the back of my desk. And I like having a row of finished works next to them, and different notebooks and journals scattered all over the place.

I like that one of the works-in-progress is not just a digital file like the one I’m currently typing on, but it’s a stack of research materials, a notebook, and Oh My Soul and its companion journal. Eric Liddell said he felt God’s pleasure when he ran; I feel God’s pleasure when I am in full nerd-mode with a pencil behind my ear, going through familiar books, rifling through pages and marking up passages, and typing as the words flow easy, fast, and furious.

And I even kind of like it – in a perverse, self-flagellating way – when I am in front of the laptop with no words, frustrated with the wrong words, and aggravated as all get out trying to pull a piece together before a deadline when the clock is ticking down (like right now, she thought nervously), because I know the thrill of accomplishment and relief when it’s done.

I don’t love it so much that I forget that I’m working, but I know that it’s worthwhile because whatever I’m doing is working. Purpose comes easier when we see the headway we’re making.

Like when Reagan pushes through and makes it to Thuh Z says zzz – it’s progress, and she is gaining. In the effort and aggravation, we see achievement and increase, and it’s worth it. You know, sort of like childbirth: Ta da, look, we did it. We made this.

The other day one of my kids asked me for harder books, but she didn’t say it that way. She said she wanted “books that would take longer than a day to read” and I had the happy task of going through the library with her to find a new stack that would keep her occupied. She didn’t want The Hunger Games, she wanted the challenge: The Scarlet Pimpernel, Mother Mason, My Antonía.

And this is when I love homeschooling and forget that it, too, is work: Learning, like teaching or writing or any other job, ceases to be work when we get lost in it.

Along those lines, this month I got to dig into the first chapters of Bleak House with my writing student. I almost wrote “dive” into it, but no, one does not dive into anything of Dickens. You wade in cautiously, stir a foot around the water to check for sharp objects, and, finding none, keep going deeper and deeper until you’re surrounded by 43 characters swimming around and splashing you in the face and pulling you under, and you like it. At least, I do.

And I might as well confess up front that I’m already reading Pickwick Papers with Iree and Nicholas Nickleby (one of my favorites) with the family as a read aloud. So, no, I didn’t pick Bleak House, but I’ve read it before and was thrilled that my student chose it.

Each of us read from our own copies. I leaned over to see where she was at, and she was a full page ahead of me, because I had gotten lost in sentences like,

Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.

And I forgot I was supposed to be working.

So now I find myself in the middle of three, count ‘em, three Dickens novels, and perfectly happy about it. Vin thinks I might have issues. I think I might want to be a Dickens scholar when I grow up…and that, too, might be the same thing.

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