The WHY

I have a dream :)

Well, I have many dreams but in starting this blog my dream is to look back and be able to see our family's journey as we homeschool our daughters. I want this to be a fun place filled with stories, pictures, resources, questions, answers, questions and more questions...

It will NOT be a place where I will document every lesson, every activity, every field trip but more a platform to share what's on our hearts and our minds as we take on this awesome challenge.

Now, instead of taking you through the two years of discussions, pondering, dreaming, debating, going back and forth and back and forth... I will just share where we are now and what our motivation is behind wanting to make our home the place where we school. Here's the thing though...it's hard to share these thoughts without offending someone out there. It seems like human nature to get defensive or argumentative when someone chooses to do things differently, especially when it comes to raising children. Please know that our family believes any avenue chosen to teach a child can work well as long as God is the One leading the effort so we beg you not to take our choice as a judgment of yours.

The main reason we are choosing to homeschool is because the Lord has put in our hearts not only the desire but also a vision for our family and we are choosing to follow His lead. This did not happen overnight. We both started out believing mainstream schooling was what we needed to do since that's what we experienced growing up. Many of our friends shared with us their plans to homeschool and their reasoning behind it and we still weren't very interested but the seed was planted and from time to time we would have a conversation about it and say "yeez, wouldn't it be nice if we had it in us...". That's how it started and after several of those conversations we just decided to start praying about it. We took to God our worries about a number of different things but one by one He demolished all the arguments we had against homeschooling and painted a beautiful picture of how it could work for us. Some of Jim's worries were different from mine and I will not speak for him but this is what I personally wrestled with the Lord about:

I went to Him with feelings of inadequacy and worry about my ability to teach. He gave me peace and made me feel equipped and lacking in nothing.

I went to Him with worries about the social aspects of homeschooling and whether we would have a support group to rely on. He introduced us (in the span of a couple of months) to no less than a dozen homeschooling families between our church and our community and a homeschooling coop with over a 100 children in it.

I went to Him feeling overwhelmed after looking into curriculum options and how to get started. He narrowed down our choices and put some experienced HS Moms in my path willing to help.

I took to Him concerns about Lucy and Jenna's specific needs and my thoughts about them missing out on experiences that conventional schooling provides but He assured me that all my girls need is praying parents.

We are just starting out and still have about a year and a half before it's time to teach Kindergarten so at the time we are focusing on having some preschool fun with Lucy (who also attends a Mother's Day Out program once or twice a week depending on our mood) and looking forward to things like attending our first homeschooling conference in Houston, designing our classroom and choosing a kindergarten curriculum. I hope to have tons to share as all this starts unraveling so stop by again!

Happy Learning!
Danaly