The school bus

Every morning our children and I lie awake in bed sipping on our morning drink.

We gaze out the window watching the birds fluttering around the telephone pole on the other side of the road, and at 08:25 on the dot, the school bus rumbles past, and I have the same thought every morning:

"Thank heavens I didn't have to get them up, fed, dressed and on that bus."

That's reason to homeschool in itself.

I've always been a night owl.

I've just always functioned much better in the evening.

• It's when I've revised for exams
• It's when I'm most creative
• It's when I'm most productive

Everything useful that I've ever done has been a product of an evening, not the morning.

All the coffee in Columbia couldn't make me a morning person, and it seems at least three of our children share this trait.

I do not function well in the morning - certainly not until about 10 am - and I can be pretty sure that I didn't learn anything in any lessons at school before 10:30.

In the morning I was hungry, I was grouchy, I didn't feel ready to get up, and I was being forced to sit down and be still and listen to someone talking about something I wasn't ready to learn about, and I didn't take anything in.

The kids are exactly the same

They want to go to sleep later and they want to wake up later.

No matter how we:

• exercise them
• read to them
• whether we wake them up early in the morning
• or change dinner time

Nothing has changed the fact that they will always want to go to bed later.

And that's okay - because we can just adjust our schedule and work around it.

Adults are allowed to be night owls, to find ways of living that suit their circadian rhythm - shouldn't kids be allowed to do the same?