Five Days in Her Shoes

This is the dad of the Plattner Ranch.  Very rarely have I ever hijacked my wife’s blog and written a post, but I thought it would be fitting to make a public confession.  My confession is this: I have immensely underappreciated my wife’s sacrifice that she daily makes as a stay-at-home mom home-educating our children.  For the last 5 days she went to North Carolina to visit her sister.  During this time, I took time off work to try to attempt to fill her role.  Three of these days were school days.  I could have just said that our school is going to have a fall break, but I wanted to experience what school actually was.  Now that I have walked in her shoes for this partial week, I must say that she is awesome!  What a feat it is to home-educate 6 children.  The 7^th child (just turned 4) is begging for your time to do school with her, while the 8^th child (17 months) has to be constantly monitored and if he’s quiet something is not good.  I have been very impressed with her system of organization to track of each child in all of their subjects as well as her system of chores that keeps the house functional (meals, clean up, etc.).  It is a major multi-tasking feat.  Don’t take from this that our home and school run like a well oiled machine because they don’t.  The root of the challenge is facing your children’s sinful character issues and your own at the same time.  This role is only done by God’s Grace.

So, to home-educating moms(especially if God has blessed you with a larger family), my hat goes off to you.  You now walk 10 times higher in my eyes.  I look up to you.  To my wonderful wife, thank you very much for what you do day in and day out pouring your life into our children.  I'm sorry you have been underappreciated (and will probably be in the future).  I’m ready to take a vacation by going back to work.

Disclaimer: To public school moms, please don’t think that you are unvalued in my eyes.  I don’t doubt for a second that your lives are filled with its own unique challenges and you also are heaping sacrifice into your children.  I am just reporting what I have experience firsthand.  Disclaimer #2 - I'm no superdad-my doing school in her place was probably only doing 80% of what normally gets done.  I asked the children at the end of the week how I did, and they concluded I was a softy compared to mom.

 

Chad