Chapters and Seasons

Life has chapters and seasons, and God has brought me once again to the beginning of one.  This time though I am reluctantly turning the page.  After 5 and a half years of teaching my children and spending the better part of 24/7 with my children I am now sending some of my children to public school.   Homeschooling, like many jobs in life, becomes a part of your identity.  It is an intricate part of who you are.  Some people look proudly on your decision and others think you are a crazy, reclusive family.  The simple truth for our family is that I was mostly home schooled, and it was the comfortable route for us.  I loved spending time with my children and watching them grow, change, learn, and explore over the years.  I love knowing what they are learning and meeting their friends.   We have every year evaluated the decision for our children knowing there might come a time when our family, or maybe even just one child, would need to go to public school.  I firmly believe that homeschooling is not for everyone.  It takes a lot of time, patience, money, and commitment (which, besides having a lot of the time, I have very little of).  Somehow when it came time for our decision it was a harder one to make than I expected.  Today 3 of my 5 children will explore the world of public school, teachers that are not their mom, and new friendships.  We may venture into this season and find out we love being involved with schools, or we may come to next fall and find that our experience was not good and, by experience, that homeschooling is the best for our family.  Truth is I will still be a home school mom, not only because I will still be teaching Bre, but I will also still be as involved as I can in my children’s school learning.  I hope I will always be one of those homes that my children proudly invite their friends over too and hang out at for long periods of time.  As I look at the friends that I admire and look at their upbringing it was not whether they were home schooled or not, most were not.  I see one thing that connects them all; their parents took the time to be involved in their life.  And whether we do public school, or home school, that will never change.  In fact I hope with public school I will have more energy to focus on the heart issues and not just the 3-R’s.  So as I turn the page in our family history I also change a page in my heart.  I take a moment to trust that God will work all things out for good and that this will be a blessed experience for all of us.