Not Another Homeschool Blog

The kids are at their respective colleges and I am in the process of reclaiming and reorganizing our home.  As this is the youngest one's 2nd year at college, I feel comfortable infringing into their space a little, where necessary, and working to make the house work best for my husband and myself. For example, my son pretty much has the entire basement to himself, and I will be reclaiming the exercise room as a storage room to get rid of clutter all over the house.  I am also thinking of claiming an area for sewing, and of course what exercise equipment I don't give away, will go in the large space outside his bedroom. I will also be putting some of my daughters items in said storage room to make her room more presentable and buying a bigger bed for her room for the occasional guest when she is not here.  (Not really planning any guests... ever, but it is nice to know I have an extra clean bedroom if the need arises.) In the meanwhile, I posted about the set up of th...

I am still buried in packing bins (plastic boxes from Walmart), Ikea Bags, and Space saver bags.  My daughter asked me to help her organize her belongings, but at the same time, she is also calling me anal retentive. The good news is with careful packing, unpacking becomes a breeze as the items are organized intuitively and can just be slid into drawers or set in it's appropriate place. This is all of the hanging clothes I am sending out... less than half from last years amount, even though she has twice the closet space. The hardest part is preventing her from bringing all of her clothing to college.  So I insisted on X number of pants, shirts, dresses, skirts, etc... enough clothes to last 3 weeks, which is plenty if you do laundry twice a month.  I put each type of clothing in either a dress bag, or rolled it military style and put it in a space bag, then in a bin (all the non hanging clothes fit in one bin!) Then there are the bins for all the other stuff. ...

Barely two more weeks with the kiddos, then back to college. By this time two weeks from now I will be driving home from dropping off child number 2 to college.  I thought it would be easier to have 2 kids in the same city for drop off and pick up purposes, but it really isn't working out that way.  He goes back on Friday, and she on Sunday, and we have to do two round trip drives due to volume of items, lack of rental truck availability and schedules that don't mesh.  Oh well.  That's how it goes. All my back to school shopping is done.  I really should have given them money and let them buy their own notebooks, and textbooks, and clothing, but they are still rank amateurs when it comes to finding bargains.  They try, bless their hearts, but they don't have the patience or fortitude to to stretch a dime in the way I do.  They also don't know when it is better to just pay full price for item, and

I posed the following question to each of my kids: Now that you are done homeschooling what do you think of it? My son, age 20 said, " I love that I was homeschooled, but if I knew then what I know now, I may have requested private school for high school" .  He felt that he would have had an easier transition time into college if he was forced to have a more stringent time in high school, both socially and academically.  He added however, "at the time, you couldn't have gotten me to go to any formal school though, so I don't know how that would have worked" .  I will add here that elementary school was traumatic and he still hadn't gotten over it by the time he started 9th grade. My daughter, age 18 said, "I am glad that I was homeschooled, but it is not for everyone.  I believe it was best for me though and what I needed" .  She added, "I feel like every homeschooler should have some kind of community though, like a high school pr...

So, while I was homeschooling, I also worked from home as content writer for numerous websites.  When the economy went bad several things happened: 1st: Web writing became popular and I noticed a glut of new available writers began to lower the amount of money I could make on my articles. 2nd: The writing on the web became bad. All the new writers in the market resulted in quite a lot of poorly written articles. 3rd: The web revolted.  Good in particular thought up PANDA which resulted in "Content Mills" as they were called being being penalized. This all resulted in a long slow decent of the industry. It seems the final foot has fallen, and Yahoo has closed Yahoo Content Network and Yahoo Voices. The good news is that they returned my 1800+ articles to me.  They didn't have to, but they did. (I've been writing for them since 2006.) So here's where I could use some help.  I am creating a blog/website to feature all of my best articles. I am letting the...