I Took the Plunge

It's official.

I am a home school mom. Whew!

I actually finally did it.

Ever since my kids were tiny I secretly wished I could keep my kids home and teach them myself.

I honestly didn't know how legal home schooling was. I kind of thought that people were kind of cheating the system when they said they were doing it.

But every couple of years my husband and I would visit a new church and each time there were more home schooling moms than the last church we belonged too.  About 5 years ago we started going to our current church where I would venture to guess at least 80% of the kids are home schooled!  And not only that but they all belong to the same home schooler's group. Olive Tree.

My son started junior high 2 years ago and things got a little scary for me. I saw how horrible the kids were these days, my kid had a small bout with harassment from another kid. Mine was blamed for doing something that I fully believe he didn't do and so did the dean of students at the time, she backed my kid up! Which I was sincerely grateful for. And my poor kid fell "in love" with a girl and got into a pickle in that situation as well. Noting major, but nothing I was prepared to deal with already. :/

Not only that but he was getting into trouble at home for not getting good grades, he was failing classes, not turning in assignments, just doing enough to pass his tests so he didn't fail the classes. This did not sit well with me. Not to mention he would come home telling me stories he had learned in his science class that I definitely didn't think were right. (We won't go there.)

Then there was just my side of the story. I missed my kids! On any given school day this is what would happen.  We all get up, kids would get ready for school but every time one of them would hold still for more than 30 seconds either myself or my husband would start running of a checklist, "Did you do this? did you do that?"  No quality conversations were had all morning. no time for that.
Off to school they went. 7 hours later we returned home to have the same conversation every single day. How was your day? What did you learn today? (reply was almost always 'I don't know") What do you have for homework?

The rest of the evening was homework, homework, dinner, one tiny little chore because we still have homework to do, homework, shower, bed. No time for fun, smiles, laughter, conversation, LIFE.

Did you notice something missing? God. yea, Him.  I found out that I was saying to my kids, "We need to do our Bible study" every day but it kept getting put off until tomorrow because we didn't have the time.

So I finally sat my husband down and asked him what he thought. My husband, the love of my life, I sincerely love this man... He loved the idea and in fact had kind of wanted me to do it all along but never thought I wanted to or I would have already been doing it. Can you tell we both think we know each others thoughts more than we actually talk about them to each other??? :sigh:

So the ball got rolling...We signed up for an online school and started home schooling the last week of August. Woo-hoo!

We have had tremendous support from everyone in the Olive Tree/church group we belong to and we are all so excited to see how the school year will play through this year.

tomorrow...Homeschool, love it or leave it?