Not Another Homeschool Blog

Today was one of those kids of days that I completely despise.  Spring in the south in completely exasperating to me, and it looks like it is going to start early... that means TORNADOES.  So the day was spent watching the news, keeping track of tornado watches and running errands when it looked safest. (Of course errands were kept to a bare minimum.) I just watched a news segment that shows what they do in the schools during this kind of weather.  When it is determined that a tornado is within a certain distances (up to a half hour away), kids are lined up in hallways and positioned facing walls, on their knees with their butts in the air. Now, the buildings are seldom strong enough to stand up against a tornado (which I don't understand at all... we should have schools made from monolithic domes in this part of the country), so I don't know see how being in the butt-up position is going to help kids any more than hopping around on one foot.  I actually like th...

I am very proud of my daughter.  She's apparently the type that you either love or hate.  I prefer that type of person to the type that would rather be invisible than to risk being disliked. Reading over her adjudication sheets from this weekend, it is clear that in each case, one of the two judges LOVED what she did and the other DID NOT!.  I find it very interesting as I am seeing a pattern.  The exact same thing happened in her competitions from the fall. So, in reading the comments, I was directed to look at who the comments came from and understand it from that point of view.  I can tell you in once case, the person wrote that she should not preface a piece, but jump into to it.  Well, she did jump into it... what they thought was an aside was actually part of the monologue, and so the judge did not know what she was judging. A grain of salt. Also, let's keep in mind that she was suffering from laryngitis,  and so one of the judges that ju...

Whopper of a migraine today... I am afraid that I could still have lingering effects of the flu (2 weeks later), but who has time for that? I hope I feel Ok through the errands I have to run tomorrow.  Tuesday is a long-long day for me. My dogs are officially geriatric.  One may have heart issues.  A very expensive ultrasound will tell me more. Still trying to sort out what I will do after I am done homeschooling.  I have come to realize that my idea of helping other homeschoolers can be no more than a labor of love.  The people who actually need my help can't pay for it.  So, I will need to either need to find my own funding to do it full time, or do it very part time in addition to a job. Daughter is finally herself, I think, after being sick.  Still got my fingers and toes crossed that she stays healthy for the rest of the school year, most especially, the rest of the month. I think I'm being too retrospective about our homeschooling journ...

It is nearly 5 pm on Sunday and I'm still in bed. I did get up for a couple hours to buy groceries and cook brunch. My daughter and I got home at 1:30 am hopped up on sugar after stopping for a group get-together at a 24 hr restaurant on the way home from her competition. A lot was learned this weekend. We gained a lot of insight that should help make the final college choice easier and she got to try out her audition pieces in front of a large audience and get feedback from theater professionals. We were actually there to compete but after much tears and a bit of an emotional breakdown, daughter had to come to grips with the fact that she was not going to cut mustard because of her lingering side effects from the flu. Once we got past that, she was able to accept that her best this weekend was not going to be good enough to go home with a plaque but it would be good enough to get valuable feedback she could use in the coming weeks. If you are the praying type please rem...

My daughter has been on vocal rest all week, and will be through the weekend to make sure she is able to sing in her full range when she gets on stage.  It seems she got the secondary infection (after the flu) that we fought so hard to prevent.  There has been some improvement though... it's looking good.  Cross your fingers for her. Meanwhile, treatments to help her get her voice back have been....  messy and interesting. She has to 1. Gargle 2. Breath steam 3. Use a netti pot (yes, we have to pour saline water into her nose and watch it come out the other side!) 4.  Use Ricola cough drops or put a drop of tea tree oil in the back of the throat.

I meant to write about this a few weeks ago when my son returned for second semester. I had spent the latter half of the holiday break going over his classes and ordering books. I went to the bookstore, got the list of books and their corresponding code and searching the web for these books. At first accounting, the books cost over $500 and that did not include art supplies. His biology book set alone cost $200 and English was $120 and psychology was over $100. I was pretty annoyed because finances were spare at the moment and I didn't know how I was doing to fund this semesters' books. I tackled the most expensive first finding the individual books of the set online for very little. I was able to purchase the lab book and online study guide access code for about $49, and we asked around and got a friend to lone him the textbook. Next, we realized that he already owned the books for one of his art classes as they were the same books from the previous semester. (We wer...

Forbes.com says homeschooling is a good way to "tell the state to stick it". I guess..... It goes hand in hand with my observation that most homeschoolers in my neck of the woods are anti Obama hence all of a sudden, anti government, and all of the noise that goes along with it.  The article goes on to describe homeschoolers as " The God-fearing, flag-waiving, gun-toting homeschool crowd (that)  embodies the American spirit of mutual self-reliance." and " Christians aghast over an academic establishment overrun by progressives." This is not necessarily my experience, but I do understand that there are homeschoolers around me that feel that way.  It kind of makes it hard when I don't necessarily agree with the rhetoric.  So let's take the fact that I don't fit into my immediate homeschool community for this reason, and others.  Then consider the notion that homeschooling (in the way that we approached) it is a microcosm of public school...

I don't know if people are really ready to hear this. In all the years I have homeschooled, I have formulated one well-kept gem. It is the tool that every successful homeschooler I know (and I know a lot) has relied on.  It has saved many a homeschool disaster and re-railed a lot of  derailed trains. It is simple. R E L A X It's not that serious.  Sit down, put your feet up, let your kids put their feet up too.

Well, not so much, actually.  We have officially been sick long enough to be completely over the flu, but secondary infections are a trip! Regardless, I am claiming health in this situation.  Sorry, I've always wanted to say that.  Like when you're at church and someone asks how you are, and if you have the guts to actually tell the truth, they like to declare it all-better in the name of the Lord?  I'm usually thinking... no, no, my ankle still feels sprained.  Nevertheless, I am sick of being sick, and so we are healed. Back to homeschooling.  I need to look through my daughter's stuff to see where we left off... it's been so long since she's picked up a pencil.  But she's been memorizing monologues every waking moment because.... Next on the agenda... three weekends in a row of competitions 1. CITA (Christians in the Theater Arts High School Festival).  The homeschool group/school competes in this. 2.  College choice #2 theater sc...

So my daughter got very, very sick. I haven't seen her this sick in about 7 or 8 years. All of her friends are also sick. This will be remembered as the plague of 2013. Of course, since I'd been taking care of her I also got sick. Thankfully I didn't do the fever and moaning part. We are now trying to get back to life as usual. I had to drive about 3 hours today and am wiped out. I was not alert enough to realize I got cheated of $14.00 at the grocery and will have to go back tomorrow. But I'm getting there. Cross your fingers for my kid. After the less than awesome role she got in the school play it would be great if she got the summer internship she interviewed for today.

I can't ever remember taking a sick day from homeschooling.  I usually encourage some math and some reading no matter what.  My motto has been, If you don't have a fever, you can use your brain. Maybe I have softened. Of course right now, I am trying to will my daughter to sleep.  I have fed, medicated, and wrapped her up, no easy feat since she is hardly a child, and she is laying on the sofa wide awake and feeling like crud.  I think that's why I always give her something else to do anyway, because she does not know how to sleep. I'm kinda upset that she is sick right now because I know a horde of sick kids showed up at the homeschool program on Tuesday, because they were auditioning for the play.  So, by last night, at the call back, everyone was visibly sick, and my kid had a headache. She woke up this morning, with full-fledged flu symptoms.  So here we are... My trying to will her healthy in record time.  I even have her on oscillococcini...

True Story: Friend decides to try homeschooling and puts very desperate sounding messages on FaceBook, so I contact them.  They are at their wits end.  They need help.  They've been homeschooling for just a few months and they are struggling. I set a lunch date and spend hours upon hours putting together information that I think will be useful to them, and show up at the designated time and place.  We sit down and have the niceties and person informs me that kids are back in school. She gave up.  I'm fine with that, but I am not fine that she wasted my time.  I would have gladly still kept the lunch date, but I wouldn't have spent time preparing

My head is spinning. My confusion began with a blog post about What To Do with Unmarried Daughters , which led to a post that looks like it could have been written in the 1940's at best.  It made me mad... really, really mad to come to the full realization that there are people who still raise their daughters differently than their sons.  I knew they existed... I homeschool.  I've met them.  But, I've always thought these were isolated cases.  I never realized how strongly some people felt that education for a girl was pointless. I feel like if we, homeschoolers raise girls with the single-minded purpose of homeschooling their own, and load their homeschool lessons sewing, cooking, cleaning, and maintaining a house, we are treating

I am spending this morning getting my son's laundry done  so we can take him back to college. ( I know he should do it himself, but these kids will let a wet load sit in the machine for hours).  It has been an interesting break.  He is clearly more mature (and bossy) than he was when he left home.  His opinions are strong.  His patience is also short. ... and I can't tell when he's serious or joking anymore. I look back at the period of my life when I left home and remember how necessary the distance was.  I was getting to the point when I was becoming my mother, and I was still a teenager. Every glance, every opinion, every argument I had, and someone would comment how much like my mother I was.  Now, my mother was a perfectly lovely person and I wish I had half her sense of humor, but I was not her, and in order to become uniquely me, I needed time and space- off by myself to deal with the world.  This is my son's time.  I may not like...

I realize the title is a bit redundant, or perhaps more of an oxymoron, but homeschool classes and programs have been very valuable to us. I feel  classes outside the home was the thing that we needed to give my daughter (especially) the extra boost to get into even her most far-reach college choice.  She was able to show that not only had she met the recommended academic guidelines to make her college ready, but that she had far exceeded it by taking as many elective classes as she did core classes. Now classes outside the home are not for everyone.  There are certainly many pros and many cons.  I will list some of them for you. Pros of outside classes: Reference letters:  We had to find people to call on for academic and other references for college admissions and for internships and such.  The outside classes provided plenty of people to call on to help with these letters. Mom is not the font of all knowledge.  In fact, I actually despised...