What A 10-Hour Study Day Looks Like

I've been taking part-time classes for the last three years, but last year the company I was working for closed and after spending 8 months applying to over 100 positions and not even being offered a single job interview, I decided maybe I needed to shift my focus away from finding a fulltime job and onto my education. 

I've prayed about this shift for months. I knew it would be a tremendous strain and take a lot out of me and my family, especially when I'm already homeschooling my four children. To go from taking a part-time load of 3-6 units to 12 units of college classes is a huge difference. Ok, but here's the thing...I know that YHWH's plan for me is better than the plans I have for myself. If I'm being honest, sometimes that's easier to say than to actually live out, but you know what? That's what faith is. Walking out it, believing and action upon your belief. 

I need to trust that my Father has my best interests at heart and as hard as it is in the day to day, maybe it's a blessing that I can't find work at the moment because I'm meant to focus on earning my degree. It's challenging to be out of work with the prices of everything being as high as they are, but I chose to trust that YHWH knows what is best for me and my family.  

This semester I'm taking four classes, each are worth three credits, that means I am a full-time student this semester and I plan to continue being full time until YHWH shows me it's time to do something different. I'm currently taking classes on public speaking, Shakespeare, the Romantic era of British literature as well as linguistics.

By far my most challenging class is linguistics. I don't have a ton of formal background knowledge on the subject, and it requires an incredible amount of my time each week and so much more of me mentally than my other three classes combine. Mondays are my designated linguistics days, and they are long...

Discover what a day studying linguistics looks like in my life:

On a normal day I wake up between 2:00am-2:30a.m. but I didn't go to sleep until 11:30p.m. the night before. For the record, I do not get 8 hours of sleep on any night. My alarms were going off at 2:25a.m., 2:45a.m., and 2:56a.m. but I couldn't pull myself out of bed until 4:45a.m. 

Once I was up, I brushed my teeth, drank some water and reminded myself how important it is to drink more. I've been rather thirsty lately.

After that I started a fire in our wood stove, because it was super chilly that morning! The temperature was only around 21 degrees Fahrenheit the night before, and we hadn't had a fire since we went to bed after 11p.m. 

I bundled up in a wool sweater and two cozy warm wool blankets in preparation for my study time. 

First thing I like to do is look over my planner to write down things I know I need to do and to remind myself of things I may have forgotten about. 

Not that I needed the reminder, but there on my planner was the word that directed my entire focus for the day. Linguistics. 

I had an essay due in my linguistics class in two days and it was on the way language changes in culture, so I spent some time outlining the essay and scribbling down my thoughts. I decided to write about how the terminology for sexual assault is slowly changing and what the effect that has on our culture, the accused, and the victims. 

After that I checked my emails and for updates from my professors, but since it was so early in the morning there was nothing to see. 

I spent 30 minutes working on an essay for a scholarship. The essay was on "What success looks like to me" and since I have an unconventional idea of success it was rather fun to write about. 

By that time, it was 6:00a.m. and I began reading, I don't have much, if any, interactions with the professor so I need to make substantial amounts of notes to help me learn what I'm reading and be able to go back and reference it during discussions and quizzes. I was able to study until 7:30a.m. but then my kids began waking up and that was my sign to stop studying and start mom-ing. 

I folded up my cozy blankets and put away my notes, books, and my laptop in preparation for the morning. 

At 8:15a.m. I got dressed and put on some makeup. By "get dressed" I mean I threw on some clean black leggings and paired it with a t-shirt and a sweatshirt. Nothing fancy today.

I like my makeup to be light and I've found that Beauty by Earth is a nice tinted facial sunscreen that I love! It only comes in four shades so I find that if I buy the light beige and the cocoa colors, I can adjust the shade to match my skin color. A little darker in the summer months and fairly light in the winter months. I've been trying to wear my hair natural, which means, I'm trying to take a break from using my flat iron on it every day. I have super curly hair but today I didn't do much to it except put a few bobby pins in it to keep it back from my face.

On a normal, non-linguistics day I would make a nice hot breakfast for my family. Something like fried potatoes and eggs, pancakes, biscuits, cinnamon rolls, or something similar, but today I offered them cereal, which they happily ate up. 

At 9:00a.m. I wrote out a grocery list for my husband who offered to take the kids with him to town to buy some groceries, wash the dirty clothes, check the mail, and take the kids to the library while I stayed home, cleaned the house, and did my linguistics work. 

It's important to note here that while I do homeschool my kids, we usually don't homeschool on Mondays because of my linguistics study day.  

Around this time my oldest son began coughing. Coughing. Coughing. Coughing... My husband asked if he was sick to which he responded, "Nooooooo" like the teenager that he is. My husband and I suspected he was faking being sick, thinking he would be able to stay home alone and play on his laptop while the rest of us went to town. After some questioning, he eventually came clean that that was in fact his intention and he wasn't sick after all. Needless to say, he didn't go to town, but he didn't get to stay home alone either. 

After my husband and the younger three kids left around 9:45a.m. I began washing dinner dishes that my daughter hadn't washed the night before. Then I moved onto cleaning the floors and trying to tackle a laundry and Lego mess my kids lovingly left for me. An hour of cleaning ended with my breakfast of cold cereal at 11:00a.m. 

I had sat back down to begin my studies at 11:15a.m. but my son wanted to discuss the book he's currently reading, Looking for Alaska by John Green. As a literature lover I am happy to discuss books with my kids whenever they ask to!

11:20a.m. checked my school email once again, still no updates to my grades or updates from my professors. This is my grade percentage for linguistics, 90.86%, the lowest grade I have ever had in three years! I'm working hard to get it closer to 100%, but it's not an easy task. 

11:30a.m., I polished off my essay for the scholarship and got that submitted! That took me about an hour and half to review, edit, and submit. 

At 12:00p.m. I shifted my focus back to studying linguistics and continued for the next two hours. When my husband and three younger kiddos came home, I took a break to spend time with them. 

I needed to move by body around since I woke up late, and I didn't do my regular morning stretches. From 2:35p.m. to 2:45p.m. I was able to stretch my body and lift my hand weights.

I was quite thirsty again because I hadn't been drinking water like I should have, and my loving husband brought me home a Roar, an organic hydration drink, which I happily drank all at once.

My sister from a state over called at 3:00p.m. and we chatted for twenty minutes or so. 

From 3:20-3:35p.m. I took a YouTube break to zone out and watch a handful of shorts. Some were inspiring, others were hilarious, and others were just mind numbing and a waste of my time. 

I realized I needed the liquid glue to glue in printed parts of my textbook into my notes, but it was nowhere in sight. The entire household went on a glue hunt from 3:35-3:45p.m. Thankfully my middle son found it. For some reason it was in the kitchen behind our flour mill. Weird. 

By 4:00p.m. it was time to get back to studying which I did until 5:30p.m. when I took a quick bathroom break, but then came right back to my schoolwork. My husband made a scrumptious dinner, of BBQ steak, mashed potatoes and salad. At 6:30p.m. I ate my meal as I continued to read more about linguistics. At 7p.m. my husband dished me up some organic vanilla ice cream that I also ate as I continued studying. 

7:45p.m., I helped my daughter wash dinner dishes and at 8:15p.m., I put my kids to bed. 

At 8:45p.m. I got back to studying. Taking notes like crazy and trying to comprehend all that I've read. At 9:12p.m. I had finally finished my textbook reading but had to start the supplemental articles, take a 10-question quiz that took about 30 minutes and finally answer a weekly discussion question about a child's acquisition of language and respond to two of my peers' responses to the question. 

Take a peek at my linguistic notes so far this semester. This is only 9 of 17 weeks of class! Like I said this class takes more of my time, effort, and mental capacity than all three of my other classes combined. 

By the time I had finished everything it was 11:00p.m., and I fell into bed at 11:30p.m. with plans to wake up the next morning at 2:30a.m. 

Spoiler alert! I didn't wake up at 2:30a.m. the next morning. I forgot to set my alarm and I was extremely tired after a 10-hour study day, but I was able to crawl out of bed at 4:35a.m. and prep for a busy homeschool day ahead!