Major Changes

Those of you still reading and who know me well - this is going to knock your socks off.

Have you ever made a decision/choice and then later thought better of it? Thought maybe I could have made a wiser choice? Perhaps a situation isn't what it appears to be at first and the 'other' option(s) may have been a better fit? My point is, often times we make decisions and later find those decisions may not have been the best choice. This had happened with the choice we made for schooling for Christian and Carson.

Coming from Madrid, Spain and the private school ASM we gravitated towards the private schooling here. We searched, we visited, we asked questions, we compared, and thought we had made the right choice. Now, we are sure we made the wrong choice. It has been 12 weeks since the boys began school - 4 of them while we were in Ukraine. Every night, they have had between 4 and 5 hours of homework - yes homework. Their routine consist of arriving home, 30 minutes to eat and play, then to the dining room table for homework. From 4 in the afternoon until bedtime we (Christian, Carson and myself) are at the dining room table with studies. They have absolutely no time to hang out with friends, socialize, play sports, or be apart of any community activities. I have no time to cook dinner, talk with a neighbor, on the phone, or go to the bathroom! It has been stressful and not very fun. They have cried and I have cried. It is terrible to see your kids so miserable. It tugs at your heart when they say, "We moved here on base to have friends, we don't have time for friends because it is always homework, homework, homework!" What do you do?

So we took a huge step back and looked at this objectively and asked ourselves..... Why do they dislike school? Why are they begging us not to send them to school every morning? Are they being pushed too hard and/or too quickly? What happened to enjoying and loving to learn? Where are the hands on experiments? Where is their community involvement at? Where are they learning team building? Do we want them to "learn" the material or "know" the material? How do we make learning fun? How do we make this work for our family?

After careful consideration, much thought, and a whole lotta praying and asking for guidance, we have decided effective Friday, October 31st Christian and Carson will no longer attend the private school they have been attending or a public school. They will be home schooled. Yes, I did say home schooled for those of you who thought you didn't read that correctly.


I never thought in a thousand years I would be homeschooling my children. I didn't think I had the personality or drive to teach my own children; but here we are at this juncture in our lives where we must make decisions that are selfless and in the best possible interest of others. We are excited and looking forward to this new challenge for our family. As we move forward in this new journey we hope to bring the fun back into learning math, science, language, history, spelling, reading; and to teach them new and exciting things, to have hands on experiences that go hand in hand with what they are studying, to be apart of their community and learn about citizenship, team building and volunteering, to join the football, baseball, soccer or swim teams AND just be a kid.