Homeschooling, just like raising kids in general, is this fluid process, as dynamic as anything I have ever seen in life. Take, for instance, the saga of our school desks. We started out at the kitchen table, in preschool and kindergarten. Also, on the couch, reading books.

During the second semester of kindergarten, I realized our son needed to plant his feet firmly on the floor and adopt a good posture for his handwriting exercises. So we moved to this ToysRUs preschool table we bought when he was two or three. It’s a tiny thing with chairs shaped as Winnie the Pooh and Tigger. He used this table successfully until the middle of first grade, i.e. now.

My son looks like an eight-year-old even though he is only seven. He is rather tall for his age. The desk is getting smaller and smaller, so to speak. The desk is also getting crowded with all the manipulatives for math, not to mention my teacher’s manuals. Even if I keep only one subject on the desk at the time, we are getting cramped. 

Daddy to the rescue! He came up with this idea for a desk that grows with our children. It is called an Uplift Desk, from The Human Solution. You push this button on it and it raises or lowers itself. Plus it is wide and long to fit many books on it at one time. The top is actually an oversized butcher block from IKEA, called Numerär. It looks like they discontinued it, but it is very similar to Karlby.

Our IKEA Numerar Desk, with an Uplift Desk base from The Human Solution

Little did we know that the IKEA countertop was made in Romania. My son discovered the stamp while helping daddy put it together. So we have a desk which came to us from Romania via Sweden, just like I came to the US from Romania via Sweden. That’s just my symbolic nature – I see connections and metaphors everywhere.

Made in Romania stamp on our IKEA Numerar tabletop

But the point is, this desk is perfect. It is long and wide. We can put lots of books on it. I sit on one side and my two students sit across from me and color while I read their history lesson. The day after we assembled it, my son wanted to do school even though it was a no-school day – just because he wanted to sit at the desk. We have been so excited to use it, we don’t have many pictures of us using it. We are too busy using the desk to think about immortalizing the moments. Now that’s a perfect desk…

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