Won’t Be Long Now….

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The scent of sunblock no longer gives me a thrill. My pots of flowers look overgrown and a bit dehydrated. The weatherman’s announcement of another day in the high 80s makes me cranky instead of happy, as it did back in May. Yep, slowly but surely, summer is on its way out.

Now it’s the thought of the apple harvest, cooler nights and going back to sweaters that makes me smile. Oh, and new books, new glue sticks and crayons, support group meetings starting up again and a fresh start to the school year.

I couldn’t wait to put away our school stuff a few months ago, yet now I’m eagerly thinking about getting back to the challenges and joys of homeschooling every day.

I wasn’t always like this. Those first few years I homeschooled, I faced each fall wondering if I’d be able to pull it off for another year. Sure, I’d taught my kids to count, to read, to print letters. But that soon seemed like small potatoes. Up ahead loomed cursive writing, fractions, topic sentences, science projects, and someday, chemistry, foreign language……trigonometry!

I’d had some success in the early years, but how would I tackle the big stuff? I faced each fall with trepidation. I’d think, “We’ll try it for one more year, and then decide…..”

And the years passed, and the kids kept learning, sometimes in spite of me. Seemed like I learned along with them, though, and things came back to me that I hadn’t thought of in years. Fractions made sense this time. Geography was so interesting. And once they reached high school, I learned that you could sign them up for community college chemistry if you didn’t want to turn the house into a Chem lab. What a relief!

So, are you scared? Or are you excited? Or both? It doesn’t matter, really. What matters is that you want to homeschool, you enjoy seeing your kids’ eyes light up when they catch on to a difficult concept, you know where to go when you need help in helping them. The emotions come with the territory. Just keep thinking, “One more year, then we’ll decide whether to keep going.” And before you know it, you’ll find yourself facing every fall with excitement, not fear.

(Looking for some tips to get your year off to a great start? Check out my free e-course, “Top Ten Tools for Homeschooling Parents.”)

Thirty Years and Counting….

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Today my husband and I celebrate 30 years of marriage  🙂

I don’t know where that time went, or how we got old enough to be married 30 years, because when I look at him, he still looks like my boyfriend. But numbers don’t lie.

For me, it’s been a remarkable time, full of fun and challenges and all sorts of things I never expected. Soon after we began dating, I told him I didn’t want to get serious with a guy because I had big plans to be a reporter in New York City, with my own apartment and a baby blue Chevy Camaro (17-year-olds are nothing if not dreamers!) Instead, I’ve spent the bulk of our marriage as a stay-at-home, work-at-home mom. I’m grateful that it worked out this way.

The odds were against us from the beginning. Firstborns aren’t supposed to marry each other because of their perfectionist tendencies, and supposedly people who marry young don’t have good odds for lasting marriages either. I’ve also read that there’s a pretty high divorce rate among parents of special needs kids.

But statistics mean nothing when it comes to God. He brought us together, and kept us together. There’s really no other explanation.

The past 30 years haven’t always been easy, but there have been far more good times than hard times: watching our kids grow and develop, learn to ride bikes, read and write, dance and play basketball, and later, learn to drive, get jobs, and become independent. Over the course of a few exciting weeks we saw our son graduate from college with honors and marry a nice girl from a Christian family. We pray for happy Christian marriages (if God intends for them to marry) and blessed futures for our daughters, one of whom begins college in a few weeks. And we’re enjoying each sometimes-slow-moving stage of development of our youngest son, who did indeed have Down syndrome and who has brought more joy to our lives than we could ever have imagined.

We look forward to watching our family expand with new family members in the future. Maybe someday someone will call us Grandpa and Grandma. Maybe we’ll even call each other Grandpa and Grandma (grandparents tend to do that, I’ve noticed). But no matter how old we’re allowed to become together, my husband will always be the calm, quiet, stable person in this marriage, my beloved best friend and yes, still my boyfriend.

Thanks, God!

The Spice of Life

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By now I imagine you’ve amassed quite a pile of books and curriculum as you get ready for another great year of homeschooling. There’s nothing like the sight of all those new materials to get the enthusiasm going.

But the books that look so inviting in August are often less loved by November. The fact is that for both kids and parents, homeschooling can become boring if you just rely on a set curriculum.

It took me a while to figure that out. As I said in The Imperfect Homeschooler’s Guide to Homeschooling,

Like many people, I began homeschooling by imitating the schools of my youth. I bought a boxful of curriculum, divided it into daily assignments, and taught my kids right out of those books.

And there wasn’t anything especially bad about that, except that after the initial excitement wore off, my kids started to get bored. Instead of being excited about doing school, they ranked it right down there with making their beds and setting the table-something we have to do, so let’s get it over with.

That was not in my game plan. I didn’t want them to be bored. I was bored in school, and I still recalled how bad that felt. I wanted my kids to enjoy school.

What I soon realized was that while they might have been bored with school, my kids still loved learning. They enjoyed visiting museums. My daughter read through stacks of books without my telling her to do so. And my son drew beautiful, detailed pictures that were not assigned by me.

I even became bored by the assignments I was teaching the kids, and it must have been around that time that I came up with the idea of playing store. I labeled some items in our pantry (using prices written on sticky notes), then dug up all the spare change I could find.

I became the storekeeper, and the kids became the shoppers. They’d choose an item from the pantry and pay me for it. Often I had to make change for them. Soon they were buying more than one item at a time and figuring out how much they owed me. Before long, they started taking turns being the store-keeper. This became a game they enjoyed for a long time, but I think I probably learned the most from that experience, because I saw that homeschooling didn’t have to be boring, like formal school was for me as a child.

This success led me to become more creative with our homeschooling…..(read the rest of the chapter HERE)

The moral of the story? Enjoy those books, and take advantage of that carefully crafted curriculum. But make sure you don’t spend the whole day with them. Provide your kids with plenty of time for creative learning, independent learning and free play. As the old saying goes, “Variety is the spice of life.” Keep that in mind, and your children will learn more, and have fun at the same time.

A Great Way to Spend a Summer Afternoon

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A Mother and Her Baby Boy Take a Nap Together by Joel Sartore
A Mother and Her Baby Boy Take a Nap Together

When I was a child, I spent a lot of summer days at my grandmother’s house. One of her unbreakable rules was that everyone had to take a nap after lunch. I remember saying, “Someday my kids won’t have to take naps!” I imagine I usually muttered that shortly before drifting off.

But once I had children, I found that I loved naps more than I could ever have imagined. After a morning of playing out in the summer sun and heat, the kids were tired, I was tired, and everybody enjoyed a siesta in the cool house during the heat of the early afternoon. After naptime, all of us felt good!

It was Dorothy Moore who helped me get my kids into the nap habit from the time they were tiny. Here’s what she had to say in the book that introduced me to homeschooling, Home-Grown Kids:

There is both research and clinical evidence that children who do not either nap or have at least an hour of very quiet rest time during the day are not able to get to sleep as well at night. Because they are overtired, they do not sleep as well when they do get to sleep. They are restless and more susceptible to bad dreams. This poor quality of nighttime sleep makes them vulnerable to fatigue again the next day. A vicious cycle is established, and then parents wonder why the children are excitable, irritable, hyperactive, and difficult to handle.

One benefit she didn’t mention is what it does for moms! Either you get a chance to renew your energy with a lovely nap, or you get a bit of time alone for reading, exercising, or doing something else you want to do. I believe naps were a huge factor in my being able to raise and homeschool four lively kids for many years without losing my marbles.

As the kids got older, we changed the name from naptime to peace-and-quiet time. The rule for the older kids became, “You don’t have to sleep, but you have to do something quietly in your room.” It was good for everyone to either sleep or have some alone time. Afterwards, they’d have a snack and run out to play, refreshed and ready for fun.

So if naps aren’t already a part of your family’s summer routine, try snuggling with your toddler on the bed in the heat of the afternoon for a little while. Suggest that your older child lie down for a bit with a good book. It’s a great way to keep cool, and to renew your energy for the rest of the day. We don’t have any napping kids in our house anymore, but I’m known for occasionally flaming out for a while in my favorite chair. Unlike the four-year-old me, I think naps are awesome!