When the Time is Right

Has it really been more than a month since I last posted? I guess it has. This photo is more than a month old, too, but that bag of clothes that needs to be sent to the charity shop is still sitting there. The thing that no one tells you about slow living is that the time still goes by awfully quickly. There have been a lot of things that didn't get done within the time frame I thought they would, because living slow means we do things, well, slowly. And that has proved to be a good thing for us.

The Homeschool Sweet Spot

I promise this isn't going to become a homeschool blog, but I am just so enamored of our current situation that I can't help wanting to talk about it. This is by far the best year we've had as a home educating family, and I am enjoying my days with my children immensely. I see that they, too, are enjoying each other's company and our life as a whole, and I don't think it's really any mystery as to why. We've figured out how to make this thing work, both at home and away from home. It's like everything finally fell into place.

Nature and Me

As I round out my fourth decade of life, I find that I am becoming a lot more honest with myself and with others about who I am and what I like and what I really want to do and who I really want to be. For example, I'm comfortable admitting that I like doughnuts more than I like being thin. I wanted to be the woman who could end up not liking brownies or cheese after making changes to diet for health reasons, but you know what? Brownies and cheese give me raging adult acne, but I still think they're delicious, and if you see a zit on my nearly-forty-year-old face, you can bet your bottom dollar that it was a pastry or cheese that put it there. Or four pastries. Whatever.

Chilling Out in the Interest of Academic Success

The children and I got down to business with homeschool this week. Z is the only one officially studying, but I had a new set of markers and fresh paper for E to use to occupy her, plus the iPad if she earned it by falling asleep like a sweet little girl instead of a raging lion. (She has been known to roar repeatedly to show displeasure at bedtime.) We use a method I jokingly call Charlotte Mason for Lazy People, which basically means that we have failed at nature journaling and decided to stop trying.

So Long, Summer

Today marked the end of our last week of summer break. On Monday, we begin our fourth year of homeschooling. I keep thinking that each year things will become more and more normal, with few surprises, but I'm usually wrong about that. This year, the surprise is that we feel very much ready to begin book work again. I didn't see that one coming.

Why We Homeschool

Like many other home educators, I come from a past in which I spoke things aloud like, "I think homeschooling is wonderful, but I believe in public education, and I'll send my kids to school." I remember wanting to be homeschooled myself, but when I started to think about what I wanted our family life to be like, taking our children to school was part of that fantasy. And then we actually had a kid in our family, and that changed everything that I thought about school. Homeschool was what she needed, and so it's what we did. Now I've been drinking the homeschool Kool-aid for three years, and I wouldn't have it any other way. Like most people, we have multiple reasons for choosing the type of schooling we did, and for choosing to keep doing it year after year. I'd say there are four main reasons we prefer to home educate, with about a million more little reasons that make it just right for us right now.

These are our four big reasons: