How to Make Time for Adventure in Your Homeschool
Let’s cut straight to the meat of it… You want more adventure and excitement in your life, but you have kids, a job, and little free time. The days of wild and fancy free went out the window with the birth of your first child and now you’re feeling stuck in a life of minivans, sports practices, and short people who rage when given the exact snack they just asked for.
How could you possibly find the time (and energy, of course) to travel to all those Insta-worthy destinations that are taking over social media?
Friend… it’s time we had a talk.
What I have to say might sting, but hang in there with me. There is something that’s holding you back from experiencing a more fulfilling life with your family, and I don’t want to see you miss out. So here it is, and it’s just one word.
Priorities.
It’s all about your priorities. You see, the things that we prioritize are the things we make the most time for. For example, if eating dinner together as a family is important to you, you might spend an hour or more cooking a homemade meal from fresh, whole ingredients and linger at the table to foster connection. This takes a lot more time than throwing ready-made pizzas at your kids as they run out the door for their next activity. If reading is important to you, perhaps you spend time shopping for great books, reading to your babies and visiting the library. These are all good things, and if they are important to you then they are worthy of your time. But what other things consume your precious minutes and hours of the day? Scrolling social media? Shopping? Shuttling kids to and from classes, club meetings and sports practices? Hours of researching new recipes, or the perfect family vacation? Perhaps your schedule is filled with LOTS of worthy practices, but because you place such high value on all-of-the-things you’ve left yourself little room for anything else.
Here are a few questions for you
If you limited the number of less important activities, or the amount of time you spend doing them, do you suppose you could find extra time in your schedule? What if you shifted a few different activities and were able to free up an hour? Three hours? Suppose you dropped an entire sports season and had NOWHERE to be after 3pm? (gasp!) Or you only did formal lessons 3-4 days a week instead of 5? And here’s one more… what if you DIDN’T enroll in (as many) classes or co-op?
You may have heard it said that every “yes” you say is also a “no” to something else. If all your yeses go to these good and worthy activities, there is nothing wrong with that. But if you’re wishing you had more free time, more time for travel, more time for adventure and fun, then perhaps it’s time you reassess your priorities.
And so we traveled
When we decided to travel the country for 4 months, we knew that we would have to say “no” to some of the things we enjoyed. It meant no sports, no rock climbing class or chess club, not seeing our friends in person for a while, and the hardest of all: not being physically present in church and fellowshipping with a regular body of believers. But our temporary “no” to all of those GOOD and WORTHY things, was a YES to some of the most amazing experiences of our lifetime.
Friend, you don’t have to walk away from your life for a few months to experience something wonderful. Can you just find an extra weekend? A day of the week? Even just an afternoon? Any amount of time at all can get you outside with your family, enjoying God’s creation together. You might have to start small, but that’s perfectly okay. What matters is that you just start.
You can do it. It might take a little adjusting and some hard decisions, but you wont regret the experiences you’ll have together and the memories you’ll make.
