“I could never home school. I don’t have the patience for it.”

People who home school their children are as familiar with this comment as they are with their facebook passwords.

When I home schooled my three hooligans, I heard this comment ALL. THE. TIME. And I would think to myself, I can’t imagine that my patience is so much greater than anyone else’s. But you know what? They were right. They DIDN’T have the patience for it. But they were also wrong, because what I’ve learned this year is that patience is a muscle. They could have developed the patience for it. Truly.

For the past year, we’ve been killing it on the public school scene, and as we are now enjoying our first 24 hours of Spring Break, I have noticed that my skills in patience are WEAK.

Weak, y’all. Like, lazy, spoiled and rotten.

When you spend hours and hours (and hours…so many hours) each day with your kids, your patience gets exercised over and over and over (and OVERRRR), (and over)….and, just like a muscle, it gets stronger.

So it’s not patience that makes a good home school parent, it’s being a home school parent that grows your patience. This is real, people. This is not a drill.

So here we are, experiencing our very first public-school-style Spring Break. We’re relaxing our little hearts out. And when I say relaxing, I mean fighting. #ofcourse

Fy. Ting.

It’s been less than 24 hours and we are driving each other CRA—ZY. My patience is embarrassingly small. And their ability to fight over things that DON’T MATTER….UGH! it’s impressive. (Did you know that the Penguins of Madagascar movie is DIFFERENT! FOR THE LOVE! than the original 3 Madagascar movies? Very different. It MATTERS!)

Last year, we were together all day, almost every day. But this year, I can feel how frail my patience has become because it just sits around all day. My patience takes long naps. She doesn’t get a huge workout everyday. She is UNFIT.

Public school is where our family is supposed to be right now….maybe I’ll blog about that soon. But one of the things that has suffered in the light of the changes this year is my dwindling patience. It’s definitely not as strong as it had become after 10 years of being with my kids for most of the day.

So the next time you meet a home school mom, instead of telling her how terrible your patience is….even though it’s probably true….say something like, “I admire the patience that you have developed by investing hours and hours of time with your children. You’re a patience ninja. I want to be like you. Here’s a Starbucks gift card.”

She earned it.