A few dozen miles away, Monique Schaefer perches barefoot on a kitchen counter stool for the only structured part of her children’s “unschool” day. Both Monique and her husband, Andy, remember elementary school as an endless stream of rules, an experience that they want to spare their three children.

The world won’t end if eight-year-old Melissa chooses to accessorize her sweatpants with sparkly fuchsia flip-flops and a knit wool cap. The sun will still rise if her big brother isn’t interested in reading about the Civil War this year, or if he decides to base his science education on raising chickens in the backyard.

The kids may not always be interested in what’s written on a formal curriculum, but they’re interested in something, Monique says. Unschooling is all about relaxing the rules and letting kids be curious.

Monique sips a morning cup of coffee as the two older kids get ready to start their day, her pink flannel pajamas and mussed brown curls making her seem more like a coed than a 42-year-old retired civil engineer making full-time motherhood her second career.

Noah pulls on a pair of rubber boots and trudges out the back door into the rain, one of the two black cats that even the family can’t tell apart trailing him across the muddy yard. Bits of plywood have been stacked under the low-hanging branches of a tree in a makeshift fortress. A soggy pile of dirt is littered with the flotsam and jetsam of childhood — pails, shovels, water guns — left behind when mom called for dinner.

Some days, Noah’s school is focused on caring for his seven cranky hens. Other days, his education takes the form of books on tape in the family van as Monique runs errands and ferries the kids to swim team and Cub Scouts and Brownies. And sometimes, the kids spent the afternoon talking about politics with their parents, and reading books about past political scandals to put their concern about the current war into perspective.

“Our kids get to see who we are in the world,” Monique says.

But in a household where both parents trained as engineers, the Schaefers aren’t taking any chances with math. Although cozily ensconced in Corvallis, Oregon, they spend time with an advanced curriculum from Singapore nearly every morning.

Ten-year-old Noah is already solving word problems that require basic algebra, tapping a pencil on his forehead as he works through the question of how many cars are on the roads in a town where there are four times as many cars as motorcycles.

“Four, zero, five … uh …”

Monique swivels to the left, where she has lured Melissa into a 2nd grade geometry exercise with the promise of shiny gold origami paper. The little girl slides the shimmering squares and triangles around the counter with a limp finger, halfheartedly trying to echo the strange shapes in her workbook.

“This is a parallelogram. Can you say parallelogram?” Mom asks.

“Pamalamagram.”

“1,089! Mom, It’s 1,089!”

“When you do your math Noah, you need to look to see if it makes sense,” she says, looking over her son’s shoulder. “Your astronauts could be falling out of space right now because you were sloppy with your math.”      

Luca, still in his backwards pajama top and diaper, sidles up behind his mom and starts beating out a rhythm on her calf with a sticky little paw, “Mommy. My little bagel popped up. Mommy my bagel popped. Mommy!”

“Parallelogram.”

“Paramellogram.”

Monique scoops up Luca and plunks him down on the playroom rug, as two extensions and a cell phone begin to ring in different corners of the house.

“I said I would help you in a moment Luca-boy.”

“Paralellogram,. ”  She pronounces the word slowly and precisely, looking straight into Melissa’s eyes, then rushes across the room to grab the phone.

Melissa grins.

“Paralalalalalalala …”

Monique rubs her temples and sighs, but she’s nowhere near as harried as she has a right to be when Noah abandons his math to start pounding out the first few bars of Coldplay’s “Clocks” for the thirtieth time since his piano lesson earlier this morning.

This is the life she chose. And even when Andy (who works from home as an engineering consultant) goes away on a business trip, leaving her to navigate the chaos solo for a few hectic days, it’s the only life she wants.

When Monique works with Noah on his math, she doesn’t assign reams of practice papers to fill his time.  She knows what he knows, and when he’s mastered a difficult new skill, she lets him take refuge in his favorite “Magic Treehouse” books.