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Welcome Fellow Homeschoolers!

Your mind is a garden. Your thoughts are the seeds. You can grow flowers or you can grow weeds.

Hi! I’m Jamie. I’m Mom to 2 amazing kiddos, doing the best I can to give them the best childhood possible. I wish I could post perfect pictures of my perfect house with my perfectly dressed, perfectly happy kids baking made from scratch pies together with the organic peaches we grew in our perfect backyard.

But, this is real life!

It is messy and it is hard. There are days any of us could really use an attitude adjustment. There are days my level of patience is concerningly low. Our snacks often come out of ahem… packages. Peanut butter and jelly is an acceptable main course. I often wear my clothes to bed. (Bonus:  A fresh coat of deodorant, a pony, and a toothbrush, and I wake up ready to run errands!)  Makeup is reserved for special occasions even though it takes 3 minutes to apply. We’re currently living with my mom…. Thanks Mom! You’re the best. I work from home and we are homeschoolers so the house is never clean unless we have special company coming, in which case we drop everything and clean like mad and act natural when the company arrives!

But I digress to focus in on why I’m here…. We’re homeschoolers.

I’ve been obsessively absorbing homeschooling information via a multitude of Facebook groups and Google searches for 3 years now trying to decide which type of homeschooler I am. I’ve been genuinely concerned with the quality of crayons I purchase for my kids. If I was a really good mom, I’d shell out $20 and buy beeswax crayons. I’ve questioned my decision to allow my children screen time and many times, felt bad for doing so, after reading posts suggesting that any amount of screen time is bad for my kids.  I’ve seen countless photos of impeccable homes with picture-perfect farm tables and cute little galvanized pails perfectly labeled and organized… (you know with all the shades of blue in one pail, etc.) in beautiful custom kitchens. These were things I wanted one day in my perfect homeschool. Am I a Charlotte Mason homeschooler? A unit study homeschooler? An unschooler? A gameschooler? Wait…. What’s the difference between Montessori and Charlotte Mason? What are living books? What are morning baskets? Worksheets are bad for children, even if they enjoy them? Well, my mom went to Goodwill and bought us 3 of those last week. Out with the trash! Note to self…. Remove anything resembling a worksheet! Cute schoolroom but you really shouldn’t make it look like a “school” room.  The list goes on and on of what is good and what is bad, what is right and what is wrong.

If you are just starting out on your homeschooling journey or making a chage and feeling this pressure, first, take a deep breath. You’re doing great. There is a lot to take in. Most of these approaches and recommendations are interesting, valuable, and well-meaning. I will continue to read about them BUT instead of letting them make me feel like I’ve been doing it wrong this whole time, I will take from each, little bits of what I want to apply moving forward and still be proud of what I’ve been doing so far. My kids are 6 and 3 and I finally am to the point where I feel like I can “officially” consider myself a homeschooler. I want to invite you to join us on our journey.  I want to share our struggles and our successes in a diverse community of fellow homeschoolers who support one another. Welcome!   

Our First (and almost last) Day of Kindergarten

I promised real so I wanted to share the story of our first day of kindergarten. I first shared this last year on Facebook and the response was what pushed me to finally make this blog…. even if only my friends and family are visiting. 🙂

July 31, 2019

Yesterday was our “First Day of Kindergarten.” I finally had a schedule that was going to work for us. I wanted it to be magical. I wanted her to love it so much that she didn’t feel like she is missing out not going to “real school.” We picked out her favorite dress, did her hair with her favorite bow and I strategically picked the place I wanted to take her first day of kindergarten photo… the same bridge where my senior pictures were taken. It did not go well! Her younger brother was supposed to be wading in the creek and I told him just to get his shoes wet because he wouldn’t be able to go on the slide later if he had wet pants. I tried to get her to smile “naturally” for the picture. This was a special picture. I mean this was THE first day of kindergarten photo! I was excited. I felt like a good mom. This was going to be awesome… school at the creek.

Then my boss texted and needed something pretty urgently. I knew we had to hurry. My daughter wouldn’t stand up straight. She wouldn’t stop touching the water and then her wet fingers smeared the sign before I could get a good picture. We were in a hurry and I couldn’t even get the picture checked off my list, let alone any learning. I turned around to find her brother with his shoes off and pants off in the creek! That’s the opposite of what I said. I got really frustrated. I did not handle this combination of events well at all. I was clearly frustrated. She was upset that I was frustrated. I couldn’t let him stand in the creek in his underwear so I decided we had to leave. She was disheartened of course. He was upset. We drove back home on high emotion to regroup. I cried. My daughter cried. I felt like such an incredible failure and I was… It was really bad. I felt like I had ruined her first day of kindergarten. If she was in school and her teacher had acted the way I did, I would’ve been so upset. My first reaction was I can’t do this. If I can’t handle this, she’d be better off in public school. It starts this Friday. I’ll call and get her in and I’ll go to work full time so she only has to see me a couple hours a day. She’d be better off with someone else as her teacher. I almost picked up the phone.

BUT THEN…. After emotions calmed down, we played Sum Swamp and laughed. She was doing an amazing job adding and subtracting in her head without her fingers! We had lunch and I read Ice Cream from Frog and Toad All Year. Both of my kids were engaged. She summarized the story and I wrote it down. Then we ate fudge bars outside together. She dripped it on her favorite dress and said she was just like Toad in the story. We decided to go back to the creek for a do over. We went back to the creek without the pressure we first went with. I had no urgent work project. I wasn’t even going to try and take a picture. This was a redemption mission. I only wanted my kids to enjoy themselves. A bug flew in the van and she asked for the insect field guide because she wanted to try and identify it from memory.I didn’t care if he got wet this time. In fact, I wanted him to go for it and he definitely did! We practiced writing our numbers on rocks around the creek with chalk. When we were almost done playing, she, unprompted, sat down under the bridge and got the 1st Day of Kindergarten sign back out of my backpack and sat down and posed for a picture.We played! We had fun! We learned! The difference was night and day.

I’m reframing the way I look at things. A big part of why I am homeschooling is in an attempt to preserve childhood for a few more years. My first method would not have done that! I could keep kicking myself for the way the morning went or I could learn from it and look forward. I’m deleting that first picture I took with her perfect bow and perfectly clean dress with the bridge strategically placed in the background and I’m going to cherish the second picture that she WANTED me to take… bow long gone from playing hard, sandy beach shoes, ice cream stains, smudge from the wet fingers she got from finding a “seashell” in the creek she couldn’t wait to pick up, and a REAL GENUINE smile.

Staged Photo Attempt
(Pristine sign and clean dress with perfectly placed bow strategically under the bridge where my senior photo was taken)
Genuine and Real!
(Smudged Sign, Bow Knocked Off, Ice Cream Stains, and Water Shoes, when she chose to sit in front of a dead tree and ask me to take her picture again)

I learned a lot of things yesterday. I decided to let my boss know that between 10 and 1, I won’t be available because I’m homeschooling at those times. I CAN do this and you can too. <3

Get Out of the Weeds

“Your life is a garden. Your thoughts are the seeds. You can grow flowers or you can grow weeds.” It says it right there and yet here I am…. I’ve been growing weeds for a good week now. You might be wondering why I’m writing about this…. this has nothing to do with homeschooling right? I think it does because it doesn’t matter how great your lessons are if your mind is in a toxic place. The energy we exude is the energy they absorb. Just writing that makes my heart hurt because I’ve had such negative energy lately. It’s easy to go there; easy to feel sorry for ourselves and to get stuck in a mindset of “I can’t feel happy because (insert your choice of unfortunate or less than ideal circumstance you find your life in).” The biggest problem with weeds is that they multiply so quickly, they can get out of control fast!

For me, it was going something like this…

I live with my mom. We don’t have enough bedrooms. My van is definitely not going to make it through the year and I don’t even have a penny saved for my next vehicle. I don’t even have a real bed of my own. I so wish my marriage would’ve worked out so I didn’t have to work so hard to make ends meet. This job is never ending stress! I wish I could just go back to retail and at least when I clocked out for the day, I could leave the work at work! I’m spread so thin I’m about to disappear… who am I kidding? The only thing disappearing around here is the stash of candy I’ve had to replenish a good 7 times in the last month. Well, that and my chances of ever finding love. I can’t believe I can’t even have a garden here…. children should have a garden. What am I doing trying to raise kids without a proper yard….. no tree house or any hope of ever having a treehouse? I wish I lived out in the country where I could have all of that… a real yard. If there’s a will there’s a way right? Well, I have a will to go out on my own. I have no idea the way but I’m going to find it. I’m going to go buy a $50,000 house and fix it up with some good old fashioned elbow grease and the knowledge I learn from You Tube videos. (Spends 2 hours on real estate websites seeing what I can get for $50,000) Then, I’ll furnish it with things I find on the side of the road or at thrift stores and grow all the vegetables I could possibly want in my homemade compost. I’ll adopt a pregnant cat and raise all the kittens on my little “farm” and get a couple Araucana chicks to raise so the kids can collect green eggs for breakfast. STOP!

Ok so let’s be real… I still am keeping some of those pipe dreams in my hope chest… I mean fixing up a house with your kids would be a pretty awesome learning opportunity and think of the memories we’d make together, but I digress. All the time and energy I wasted in those weeds lead to absolutely nothing productive. I just felt exhausted, dissatisfied, and depressed. Maybe one day I will be able to do some of those things but it’s definitely not today and the key to happiness is not hope that tomorrow will be better. It’s finding the beauty in today. So, I decided to take a few key points from my weedy journey and turn my inner dialogue into something a little more productive and a lot more healthy.

Bloom Where You’re Planted

  • I want to grow a garden. I’ll try to find a community garden in town to join or ask family who lives nearby if we could use their yards to grow a few things.
  • I don’t have a real bed. I’ll have to research my options. If people can live in tiny houses with real beds, surely I can figure out something here.
  • My van isn’t going to make it through the year. I redid my budget so I could start saving $100 a month for my next vehicle and crossing my fingers that I’m wrong about the year thing.
  • Most important of all, I made a list of what I do have that makes me appreciate my life as it is today. After all, perception, as they say, is reality.
  1. My kids are healthy and happy.
  2. We have a safe place to live.
  3. My mom is amazing and supportive.
  4. We have family right in town.
  5. There’s a park across the street.
  6. The art and music classes are nearby.

If I worked harder, I could’ve made the list longer but that was enough for me to get my focus back where it belonged. I immediately felt better, just by changing the way I looked at it all. If your inner dialogue is making you feel dissatisfied and drained in your life, try weeding. It’s amazing the impact our mindsets can have on our lives and the lives of our families. I’m sure I’ll have to continue weeding out those negative thoughts as the days progress…. probably about as often as I’d have to weed an actual garden…. but I will try to remember to bloom where I’m planted. I could probably use a reminder of this in about 3 days. 😉