Tag: relationships

On being Emotionally Absent

      Light’s are on but nobody’s home. As a homeschool mum I had given up any notion of a career outside the home. I did this joyously and because I wanted to. I didn’t want to miss the everyday happenings of my children…I didn’t want to be absent…but would you believe that a Christian homeschooling mum who dearly loves her children struggled with this very issue? It all started about five years after we started homeschooling. I had tried a school-at-home approach, tried unit studies and was burning myself out by trying to rigidly conform our home and family to fall in line with Charlotte Mason’s methods. Previous to this my dear mother had *graduated* to be with the Lord and we started homeschooling within a few weeks. I also had a 6 month old baby at the time. My husband was away frequently and I found it hard. Then we completely uprooted from everything and everyone familiar to go to a new job in a new town, in a new state! My health was slowly going downhill. I think I’ve mentioned before that it can be draining and tiring to go our and make new friends and start all over again, so I didn’t. I was at a place where I was content…or so I thought. The Internet is such an easy place to get lost...

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Don’t lose the “HOME” in Homeschooling

The story below is an allegory of a homeschool journey. The names and personalities of the people I knew have been altered to protect privacy. No one person described below is real, though the stereotypes are common enough. If you think you see yourself here,  it is merely an accident.  The Setting Sometime in 1996 I got “wired”, on-line, with my homeschool. My oldest was  in first grade and my other three were a newborn, a toddler, and a preschooler. These were the days before the Well-Trained Mind, when we were relying on Dorothy Sayers’  on-line article, The Lost Tools of Learning and Doug Wilson’s book,  Recovering the Lost Tools for most of our classical information. We were lost, like the tools, but happily plugging along by trial and error, as indeed, we still are.  Through a couple of novice classical email loops I met various ladies and forged friendships which have lasted to this day. We all came from different  states, different church backgrounds, and had different levels of education. What we shared in common was a love for classical education, which later blossomed into many different endeavors and interpretations of how that classical education was to be realized.  The Group This was back in the days when  you were fortunate to find ONE Yahoo group (though back then it was not Yahoo) dedicated to homeschoolers pursuing a...

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The Recipe for Success

Aha! I bet that subject line roped you in, eh? We all want to achieve success – successful , godly children eh?   I’m learning that my initial thoughts and ideas on things are not always what is deeply in my heart. Over the years, I have been asking God to cleanse me, to reveal my heart that I may surrender it to Him. He has been showing me the darkness of my heart. This is scary on the one hand yet good on another because I know that it is because He loves me that He is doing this work.   We all know that there is no formula for guaranteed success with our children, right? Well, I believe that many of us deeply believe that there is a formula: 1 child +homeschool = Success I also believe that many of us believe there is a recipe for failure, and it looks like this: 1 child + school = Failure. Oh, I know that when we see it written so boldly like that we don’t agree that we think that way but…when it gets down to the heart of the matter… In my opinion, this is way to simple and basic and it is missing some key ingredients of which the main one is Relationships. I have met and had the pleasure of knowing a few Christian young...

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