Homeschooling wasn’t on the radar when I was in college, planning to teach middle school English. I grew up in the public school system, and so did my husband. We planned to enroll our children in that exact same system.
Fast forward to 2001, when our first son, Isaac, was born at twenty-six weeks gestation. I sat by our tiny baby’s incubator every single day for the three months he was in the hospital. When he came home, I had no desire to work, or to be anywhere else but with my baby boy. We had lost two babies before Isaac clung on for dear life in my womb, until my body kicked him out at only six months. I think something about losing children and then finally having one made me realize how precious every single moment with him was.
We were blessed with a second child in a short amount of time: Kaleb is only thirteen months younger than Isaac, and he was born a month early! I thought I had miscarried Kaleb early in the pregnancy, but it turned out to be his twin. Another loss. Another reason to treasure the lives–the gifts–that God had blessed us with.
When Kaleb was eleven months old, I got a call from my friend Judy, who asked “Want a baby?” It turned out, a couple from our church had a grandson in the foster care system. Their daughter was incarcerated and was not going to be able to parent him. We had planned to “have a couple, adopt a couple” and had tied my tubes after a difficult and dangerous pregnancy with Kaleb. We prayed, met everyone, placed a polaroid photo of a dark haired baby on our fridge, started with the paperwork, and eventually adopted our son Noah when he was fourteen months old.
We had a preschool in our home! Isaac was three, Kaleb was two, and Noah was one. It was lively, fun, loud, and sometimes chaotic. I tend to strive for order, and I decided to create a little bit of order in our days. We would have “Circle Time” and sing songs. We did laundry together. I taught them how to unload dishes. We had story time, and snack time, and outside time, and lunch time, and nap time. Truth be told, sometimes I sat in the hall by their bedroom door and prayed through tears: “Please, Lord, I need them to take a nap.” Those days were long.
Because Isaac was born so early, he had occupational therapy appointments, feeding therapy appointments and Early Intervention through the public school system. Isaac had a hard time gaining weight, was in the hospital several times, and was eventually had a feeding tube surgically put into his stomach.
I started doing preschool-style activities at home when Isaac was only two, and I continued with those activities when we adopted Noah.
When Isaac was five, I had hesitations about our original plan of sending him to school:
- I liked teaching my boys at home. I loved spending my days with them, and I really enjoyed seeing their faces light up when they learned new things.
- Isaac was so much smaller than other kids his age, and he was blind in one eye and had a lazy eye. I worried about him getting teased in public school.
- He also had a feeding tube that he carried around in a backpack. It was so much easier to monitor that at home than to send him away to have other people doing that. There was less risk of injury (the tube accidentally being yanked out of his belly) if he was home. AND, Isaac vomited often and needed quick baths and outfit changes throughout the day. Keeping him home just made sense.
- I couldn’t picture separating our three boys for several hours a day. They really enjoyed being together and I loved seeing them play together.
- All of the appointments plus half a day of school seemed like too much to juggle. How do moms of medically fragile kids make it work? I couldn’t imagine how to do it all.
- I wanted to be a teacher, and started realizing that my favorite students in the whole world were under my own roof.
As I began homeschooling, I dug into books and blogs by other homeschool moms. I also observed other families around me who homeschooled, and those who didn’t. Over time, I developed my “why” for homeschooling. Our boys are now twenty-two, twenty-one and twenty, and our daughters (who we adopted after the boys) are sixteen and fourteen. I’m still homeschooling, and I have pretty solid reasons to homeschool. I’ll share about those tomorrow!
Why did you start homeschooling?