User Profile

We are a homeschooling family of 5. We've been homeschooling since our oldest child was born - 10 years ago - aside from a brief one month hiatus of insanity when we put the two oldest (9 and 7 at the time) into public school. It's not that we believe that public school is evil - most of them aren't. Homeschool is just a better fit for us. We aren't protecting our children from knowledge of dinosaurs, we aren't protecting them from knowing that sex exists. And we don't think we're superior to those who don't homeschool, either. It's all just a different form of making it work, and trying the best we can to create successful, healthy, happy adults out of the beautiful creatures that have been entrusted to our care for a while. So this journal is mostly to document the educational side of that journey.

So, I'm the Mom. My husband, Shane, is Computer Guy and Math Whiz. Our son Khy is 10 and is obsessed with video games and swords, and likes to listen to Nirvana and Queen. He once re-wrote Romeo and Juliet because he didn't like the sad ending. Our daughter Stormy is 8 and she loves skull jewelry and Bratz dolls. One of those interests concerns us and the other one pleases us. She always fights for the underdog. Our youngest son, Nicky, is five years old and a big fan of the x-box and panda bears. He had big plans to move to China to live among them (the pandas, not the x-boxes) up until recently when he decided he wants to be a rockstar. Now he spends most of his time on his sister's karaoke machine, and made me paint his toenails black.

We unschooled for the first 9 years, and then, as I mentioned, I freaked and we put them in public school. (Yeah, I KNOW - from unschooling to public school. Not my finest hour.) It only took a month for us all to see that the way it was had actually been working pretty well. It was also a valuable chance for me to see, personally, that the grass was actually sort of brown and weedy on the other side, not too unlike my own. And maybe all of our ideals and plans could actually work and probably had been for a long time, and would continue to with a little faith. So I found some, we brought the kids back home, and since then we've become very eclectic in our approach to schooling. To some I seem ridiculously structured, and to others I'm far too lax, but we've more or less found the balance that works for us. I have to have the illusion of complete control over the chaos so I can then relax and let it all unfold. Essentially. So, that's us.

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