Confessions of a Homeschool Mom

I must admit, I always was afraid that God was going to call me to homeschool so I fought against it. When God finally won the battle 3 months ago, my attitude going in was, "Ok...I'm going to do it but I'm not gonna like it." Even though I truly heard God saying "This is the way, walk in it" (Is. 30:21) and was convinced that this was what was going to be best for our family, I never thought that I'd ever truly enjoy it. After one week of official homeschool I have found this quote from Oswald Chambers to be so true: "But as soon as we do totally surrender, abandoning ourselves to Jesus, the Holy Spirit gives us a taste of His joy." God has truly flooded my heart with excitement this week and has given me a supernatural joy for the journey that lies ahead. (A friend told me today that she wished she could record my conversation with her so that she'd have it to play back to me on the days I call crying). :)

It was fun to see this week how all of Anna's science experiments...

...turned into Anna and John Caden's experiments.

But also how John Caden's preschool work became appealing to Anna as well.

"Feed the animals" was one of their most favorite activities. On Friday, for a review of what we'd learned during the week, they were each given a stack of little cards (aka animal food). If they were able to identify the correct letter sound, shape, color (for John Caden) or correct word (for Anna) then their animal would say, "Roof, roof, yum, yum, yum" or "Meow, meow, yum, yum, yum" and they could slide the card through the animal's mouth. Thankfully, both animals ended up with full bellies (in other words, Anna & John Caden identified all of their cards correctly--so they did indeed learn new things this week)!

God was so sweet to drop one more blessing in my lap (literally) to end our first official week.

At the start of the week I was trying to come up with a way for the kids to clearly be able to distinguish "school time" from "play time." One friend told me that "shoes on" is school time in their house, "shows off" means that it's playtime. Great idea, but we don't wear shoes in our house. So I came up with the idea of me wearing an apron. When the apron is on, it's school time, i.e., Mommy is the teacher---when it's not then Mommy is Mommy and it can be playtime. (The pockets also are handy for putting my glasses in which I realize I'm needing to use a lot more of these days). I only have full aprons so I pondered borrowing a friends sewing machine to make one or asking one of my sewing friends to whip me one up real quick, but I ended up deciding the easiest thing would be to order one already made from etsy.com. The apron arrived today with the sweetest note of encouragement. I had mentioned to the seller my plan for its use. The seller (now a grandmother) unbeknownst to me happened to once be a homeschool mom herself and she shared this story with me: "I distinctly remember our first day of homeschool. Our books hadn't all arrived yet and I was terrified to start. The older kids had started school that day and I wanted to keep the same school calendar as them. So we took the 'first day of school' pictures and headed down to the school room---me with no true curriculum in hand. I had no idea what I was going to teach. My answer was waiting for me in the window well -- there sat a huge praying mantis. We caught it and did a whole day's research and projects about the praying mantis! It was as if God knew I needed a lesson plan so He handed it to me. He is faithful!"

What a great reminder of the verse that I've claimed for the year! On days when discouragement attempts to rob my joy I can look down at the apron, remember the story of the praying mantis and remember that "He who called you is faithful and He will do it." 1 Thes. 5:24