Copies

My whole life is contained within five copy books.

Five squared exercise books. Squared ruled 7 mm, 88 pages. Three of them are blue, one is orange and last one is red, with about a hundred and ten stickers stuck on the covers. I did get a fancy diary from Hubby for Christmas, but I find the pre-written dates daunting and the pages unapproachable. There’s a lot to be said for a humble copy, where you can easily tear off a few pages from the middle for an emergency drawing session for a bored child, or make a shopping list without disturbing the perfect flow of days.

So technically, the bit about 88 pages wasn’t true.

The first blue one belongs to Captain. It moves from my back pack to my canvas shopping bag, and comes with us everywhere. That way she can draw all her important creations before they escape. Also, playing “five in a row” is a great way to kill time. This involves her cheating considerably and always winning, even though she only draws one giant “O”.

The second one technically belongs to Mr Buttons, but is a huge part of my life. This is the copy, where I write down his plans for each week. We have settled into an eclectic style of homeschooling with him, where he does math from a book and has started to read the Harry Potter series for his English. He set his own target of pages per day for math, so we map that down onto this copy. He also decided on a few things he wanted to learn about this year, and does projects on them most weeks. These get divided into reasonable chunks too, to help him visualise what he’s planning on doing. Any trips, activities and going to visit his mom also get written into this ‘plan’, so he can easily see what is happening each day. He likes having this physical plan, and it seems to help him work independently. He often changes things around in it himself, which has really made him take interest and pride in his own work. He also uses the copy for ideas, math work (though he prefers to do calculations in his head) and working things out.

The last blue one is for me tracking every bite I eat, thanks to being diagnosed with gestational diabetes a few weeks ago. It’s the only one of the copies I can’t wait to get rid of, as writing down foods brings back bad feelings of the eating disorder I had from my early teens right into adulthood. It’s always in my bag, with times, foods and trying to figure out any spikes in my blood sugar. Roll on February, is all I’m saying about this part of my everyday kit.

The orange one is a very recent addition. This is the one I’ve taken to writing little notes about the books I read. At the moment, everything I’m reading is about breastfeeding and parenting, thanks to a sudden urge to do a good job as a LLL librarian and actually try to read the books in our group’s library suitcases. That way my baby brain can forget everything safely, and I have quick reference guide to whatever it was doctor so-and-so said about family beds or omega-3. It also helps to compose my thoughts on paper, as I can get quite anxious about talking in front of a group of people, as lovely as they all are.

The red one is the most time consuming, but most definitely my favourite. That’s the one I use to keep my homeschooling records on Mr Buttons. I write notes every day (recently, anyway) about everything he’s doing. This is where I translate the unschooling into subjects, record all his reading and write down math progress. I also add any observations, that I feel are important in his development in general. It gives me so much satisfaction to look at the pages of enjoyment in learning, when less than a year ago the same boy “hated reading” and did “nothing” in school when asked about his day. Now you couldn’t stop him from learning if you tried. Trust me, I’ve tried. (True story. I announced a family-wide holiday for his birthday, and he taught me all sorts of interesting facts about coffee plants at the end of it.) This notebook is the magic potion that makes me feel happy on days when I’ve had to explain to yet another person why we homeschool, or heard another comment on how I only do arts and crafts around the table with the kids all day. I can see the love I’ve poured in on those pages filled with my horrible handwriting, and that helps me tolerate people’s views on what I do as a stepmother. And that more than makes up for sitting there, surrounded by my copy books after bedtime, writing things nobody will ever read.