Getting inspired... and then doing the dishes

I've been shopping for birthday presents for A. [she'll be 5], which started me daydreaming about all the cool unschooling activities in our future. The Klutz company has a lot of good stuff: a cat's cradle (string figures) book with strings, kits for making your own jewelry, that giant bubble maker thing I had as a kid, great art supplies, Chinese jumpropes, magic trick equipment, etc. We invested in a big Lego set for her birthday, which I am at least as excited about as A. will be. My brother and I played Legos constantly for about a decade, and I still play with them when I get the chance.

Yep, I'm inspired all right-- I've got a "to do" list as long as my arm:

1. Bake cookies-- ideal time to learn arithmetic, measurement units, fractions.
2. Get a beginning drawing book, let A choose some figures, help her draw them.
3. Figure out how to start A. learning French.
4. Get out the recorders and show her the (very basic, general) idea of musical notes.
5. Use our fields guides on a nature walk.
6. Investigate frogs, cranes, various things on the web.
7. Read from her library books more often.
8. Get to the beach, already!
9. Learn more card games (all A. knows is Uno, without the complicated cards).
10. Play Memory, Chutes and Ladders, etc more often.
11. Do a science activity every week.
12. Learn a new word a day (make list of useful words).
13. Learn to spell one more word per day.
14. Fly a kite.
15. Teach A. to make paper airplanes.
    
16. Shall I go on?

The problem, of course, is that I am carrying T. around half the time because he is teething (and when is he not?), the house looks like a bomb hit it, I'm barely cooking at all these days, the yard is slowly reverting to a weed jungle, etc. I have a ton of inspiration and could fill a notebook with all my plans, but in my daily life I seem to be treading water.

I remind myself that if A. were in school, right now would be vacation time, and I wouldn't be bothered that she's learning more from animated software characters than from me, or that she often likes to spend virtually the entire day playing with her farm animals. And that fostering her imagination is incredibly important to me, so what's the problem if she's "playing pretend" for most of her waking hours? And that when it's 90 degrees and so humid you'd be better off with gills, it's not the ideal week to haul out the badminton, balls, and frisbees to develop A's gross motor skills.

It's not very unschooling of me to make a list in the first place, I suppose. That's not a list of A's ideas, it's a list of mine, although I wouldn't insist that we do any of those things unless she was interested. And it's not so much that I feel compelled to accomplish all those things, but just that I get so many ideas... and then I realize that I have no clean clothing, there's an odd smell in the fridge, the kitchen floor is so dirty T's knees are black, we have videos overdue at the library and we're out of orange juice.

I don't know how you homeschoolers do it! But I'm hoping to be a better unschooling mom once T turns... oh, about 3, maybe 3 and a half....