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I have never heard the same homeschool story twice. Every family enters this journey with different colored bags, and end up traveling on innumerable types of transportation. For us we knew, even before we had children, that we would homeschool our children. Biblical conviction, flexibility, concern with institutionalized (and industrialized!) educational systems, and and overwhelming desire to hold our babies close...while we still could! These were other reasons too, but these were the ones we that started our journey to a stay @ hime kind of school.
Biblically speaking, parents are called and charged (over and over again) with the task of raising and training our children.
“These words that I am giving you today are to be in your heart. Repeat them to your children. Talk about them when you sit in your house and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up.”
Deuteronomy 6:6-7 HCSB
After doing some studying, the call was overwhelming, Education is wonderful, and we want our children to be smart, but not at the cost of their relationship with our Creator. While we know that it is possible to live through an institutional education and still come out believers on the other end (we both did), yearly the statistics for this are on a steeper and steeper decline. Knowing God and seeing all subjects through His lens was a primary goal of ours, and that is not a possibility when you send them away to secular (and often religious) institutions. My homeschool mentor at the time told me something that has stuck with us ever since: ”When you send your kids to Caesar for their education, don’t be surprised when they come back as Romans!” The calling for our family was clear!
As much as we are homebodies, we also do our fare share of outdoor-wanderings. With family on opposite ends of the country, music gigs and the call of adventures, we need the ability to go. We could not imagine a life worked around school breaks and vacations...we are just not that kind of family! When we are studying the Presidents and need inspiration, we hit up DC...sure, it may be cold in January, but soo affordable and no crowds! When Dad has a mini music tour or gig in the midwest, then we all get to go! On the flip side, my kids will complain that we don’t have summer break- but who wants to be outside in the boiling heat anyway? We can play when the weather is lovely and hide inside when it is not. We are homebodies, with flexible flair.
Our children are not products and, therefore, we do not wish them to be put out on an educational assembly line. I have often wondered how Thomas Jefferson or Benjamin Franklin would have fared in our modern-day schools: where the purpose is to get jobs and the means is standardized testing and grouping by age rather than ability. Where learning is sectioned by subjects that have nothing to do with each other and in overfull classrooms led by underpaid teachers. Jefferson and Franklin were both engaged in so many different fields of study and discovery, they would have been so limited by our compartmentalized and production-based school system. I don’t want that for my children. I want them to love to learn and get to explore subjects fully and integrally. I want them to look at an apple and be so overwhelmed by possibility: how do I grow it, how can I draw it, what are it’s mathematical proportions, how do I cook it, how does it compare to other apples, what is it’s history, where did it come from, how can I make it different? I want them to be in awe and wonder of anything and everything our God has made, and created us to make. I don’t want their brain powered stifled by what a book says or the constraints of a worksheet.
When we started our family, both of us (the parents!) worked full-time out-of-the-home jobs. We took our babies to daycare and subsequently I cried about it everyday. We hated all minutes not spent with them, missing milestones and moments. They were our babies, but only spent a few hours with them a day- most of which were in the car. We made a drastic decision to leave our jobs, sell our large house and move across the state to be near family and start a smaller life. Big sacrifices were made, but it meant being together as a family, like, all day! That’s really when the stay-@-home-family really started, it has just taken us 8 years to be ready enough to share it with you!
After that, it was just a matter of finding out how to start! We joined a local homeschool group and that was it. We loved it, the program and the people. It is our mission here to help you find your way too. Check out our Homeschool 101 page where you will find everything you need to know to get started on your own homeschool path! Homeschool Blessings!
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