The Brick Wall

I have always homeschooled my children, beginning ten years ago when my older daughter was almost 5. Because she was born in October, she would have missed the cutoff for Kindergarten; in the meantime, she could read and had learned to write her letters and her name. Homeschooling was what we wanted for our children anyway, and so we moved ahead with it.

Our older daughter is a smart girl, and I don’t say this simply as her mother. She really is smart, and breezed through most of elementary school with hardly a worry. The only subject she had difficulty with was math; when we got to division, we literally had to put the book away until her brain could cope with it. (Mathematics requires a straight-line thinking pattern, which is nothing like the creative splotches of thinking that our girl has in her head.)

School got tougher in middle school, and she started slowing down in some subjects. Reading still came easily – even difficult books weren’t a problem – but research and organization (or the lack thereof) caused other problems. But they were relatively minor.

When we started high school last August, I looked at the daily lessons from Seton and didn’t see too much work for each day. I surmised that we might even be able to get done early with some subjects. We stumbled a bit, trying to find good study strategies that worked for her as a hands-on, kinetic learner, and eventually figured out a few tricks. But we never have been able to quite keep up with everything the way I thought we could.

I was really thrown for a loop here. I felt like I was hitting my head against the wall with her, like I had to drag her through every subject, no matter how easy it was supposed to be. Subjects that were “easy A” material still required me to be standing over her like a slave driver, constantly berating her to keep going. Focus! Pay attention! Why can’t you just do the test in a reasonable amount of time!!?? It was making us both miserable, and making me feel like I suddenly wasn’t able to teach my child any more. What was happening to me? Was I making a mistake in continuing to homeschool her? Could I even do it?

Then I read an article at Catholic Lane, and I realized that what I needed to do was staring me in the face.

Kindergarten schoolwork hit us like the proverbial ton of bricks. First, I yelled and screamed and fought with my daughter. Not my finest hour.  Then, I yelled and screamed and fought with various school and medical officials to get help for our daughter, who found reading, writing and arithmetic to be so terribly difficult. We obtained preferential seating and extra time on tests, we hired tutors, and I worked for hours with my daughter teaching her in the way she could best learn. Other parents skipped these “behavioral management techniques” and went straight to a medication regimen, but we persevered without it.

When my daughter began middle school, we realized behavioral management wasn’t enough. “We’re going to have her evaluated for medication,” my husband Manny and I informed the school’s vice-principal. “Good,” the vice-principal responded immediately. Still, I wondered and worried.

After this, I started considering the idea that perhaps it was time to deal with what I suspected for years: my 14 year old daughter likely has ADHD. I e-mailed Mike from Distracted Catholic with questions about his diagnosis and what I was seeing in my daughter. He was gracious enough to answer all of my questions, including the one where I asked if this was a familiar story to him. When he said it was, indeed, a lot like his experience, I made an appointment to have my daughter tested.

When I called, I learned that the testing was going to be out-of-pocket – the center does not file with insurance for ADHD testing – and I struggled for about five minutes with the idea that I was going to spend so much money on this test. When I realized that this could really make a difference for her, I berated myself for even questioning whether or not I should do it.

I ‘m waiting for the testing date to arrive, and First Things  has run an article on ADHD:

We really don’t have an ADHD epidemic in this country. Our brains are not less healthy than the French. Instead, we have an epidemic of parents looking for a scientific excuse for their own disappointment in their children, and we have a glut of lazy doctors willing to prescribe whatever drugs parents request.

Hyperactivity? Yes, many of our children are hyperactive. Inability to focus? Yes, many of our children cannot focus their attention on a particular task. I’m not saying that the symptoms of ADHD aren’t real. These symptoms, however, do not stem from biological imbalances that require medication. The problem isn’t our children; the problem is us. We’ve created their social context, and it’s not a place where they can thrive. It’s time to admit that parents are the problem, not the children.

Insulted is an understatement for how I felt when I read this article. I don’t really know much about how the French do things, but frankly, having someone basically telling parents like me that we’re lazy, that we’re doing a poor job of telling our children “no” when necessary, that we are trying to medicate our children into compliance makes me kind of want to scream.

I think my daughter would be surprised to learn that we’re lenient parents who don’t say “no” often enough. Heck, most people think we are, as Dr. Ray has put it when he speaks to homeschooling conferences, Quasi-Amish in the way we have raised our kids. We don’t lock them in the closet to prevent them from being exposed to the outside world, but we do shelter them from harmful influences until the time when we see that they’re mature enough to handle it. We aren’t permissive, and we don’t give in to the demands of our children. We don’t fill them with junk food, I do what I can to make things from scratch as much as possible, and we try to make sure they get lots of outdoor exercise. (Let’s face it, my 14 year old just finished up a season of soccer that started in January; she had four nights of two-hour practices every week. Our 11 year old just finished her school year schedule of dance with a minimum of three nights of dance per week. There’s lots of physical activity.) They go to Youth Group and Sunday school at church, we’ve been involved with other homeschoolers for co-ops, they go to birthday parties and hang out with friends when possible.

When I was a teacher, I did see some kids who just weren’t told “no” very often. Their parents never seemed to take my comments about their defiance seriously. And I worried that some boys were being put on medication for ADHD too liberally. I  thought that, perhaps, there was an over-diagnosis of the condition. (How many third-grade boys needed to be on meds? I seemed to have a lot in my classes.) I was extremely resistant to medicating my daughter, even though I knew she displayed a lot of the behaviors associated with ADHD, such as being wiggly, touching everything constantly, talking out of turn, lack of organization, etc.

But when I read the article by Caree Santos, I realized that maybe homeschooling didn’t have to feel like pulling teeth every. single. day. Maybe I was needlessly acting the slave driver part. Maybe – just maybe – my daughter couldn’t concentrate through no fault of her own, and she really was trying her best to do things quickly. Maybe it wasn’t my fault, and maybe it wasn’t hers.

And maybe there is something more I can do for her. 

 

ADHD
By Psyc3330 w11 (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

Note: I’ve asked my daughter to consider writing about this from her perspective, and asked her to read and approve what I’ve written. She will be contributing to this topic soon.

Jesse Tree: December 24 (Christmas Eve)

Candle

Theme: Jesus is the Light of the World

1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 The same was in the beginning with God. 3 All things were made by him: and without him was made nothing that was made. 4 In him was life, and the life was the light of men. 5 And the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.

 

 

Read the rest:

John 1:1-14

Jesse Tree: December 23

Host and Chalice

Theme:Jesus is Emmanuel

22 For the Lord is our judge, the Lord is our lawgiver, the Lord is our king: he will save us.

Read the rest:

Isaiah 7:14, 33:22

Jesse Tree: December 1

Moon and Stars

Theme: Creation

God createth Heaven and Earth, and all things therein, in six days.

1 In the beginning God created heaven, and earth. 2 And the earth was void and empty, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the spirit of God moved over the waters. 3 And God said: Be light made. And light was made. 4 And God saw the light that it was good; and he divided the light from the darkness. 5 And he called the light Day, and the darkness Night; and there was evening and morning one day.

6 And God said: Let there be a firmament made amidst the waters: and let it divide the waters from the waters. 7 And God made a firmament, and divided the waters that were under the firmament, from those that were above the firmament, and it was so. 8 And God called the firmament, Heaven; and the evening and morning were the second day. 9 God also said: Let the waters that are under the heaven, be gathered together into one place: and let the dry land appear. And it was so done. 10 And God called the dry land, Earth; and the gathering together of the waters, he called Seas. And God saw that it was good.

11 And he said: Let the earth bring forth the green herb, and such as may seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after its kind, which may have seed in itself upon the earth. And it was so done. 12 And the earth brought forth the green herb, and such as yieldeth seed according to its kind, and the tree that beareth fruit, having seed each one according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. 13 And the evening and the morning were the third day.14 And God said: Let there be lights made in the firmament of heaven, to divide the day and the night, and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days and years: 15 To shine in the firmament of heaven, and to give light upon the earth. And it was so done.

16 And God made two great lights: a greater light to rule the day; and a lesser light to rule the night: and the stars. 17 And he set them in the firmament of heaven to shine upon the earth. 18 And to rule the day and the night, and to divide the light and the darkness. And God saw that it was good. 19 And the evening and morning were the fourth day. 20 God also said: Let the waters bring forth the creeping creature having life, and the fowl that may fly over the earth under the firmament of heaven.

Read the rest:

Genesis 1:1-31, 2:1-4

(Pictures are of our home-made ornaments.)

Repost: Jesse Tree Introduction

This is a repost from 2008, as will be the readings for the Jesse Tree. We’re using our Christmas tree again, and it’s all set up and ready to go now! Tomorrow I’ll begin the readings daily. I hope you enjoy them! (Also, we’ve made new ornaments, which means new pictures!)

One more update for 2012: I’ve uploaded all the readings in a PDF format here, in case you’d like to print them off and keep them in a little folder or notebook, as our family does, for easy reference around the tree. (If you need it, download Adobe’s PDF Reader for free here.)

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I mentioned before that we’d made ornaments for the Jesse Tree. This year, we decided to use our Christmas tree as the Jesse Tree and create dough ornaments that will last for years to come. The results of the ornaments are beautiful! I’ve taken a picture of each one and will post it with our readings and theme for each day’s readings and ornament.

The Jesse Tree’s history can be read here and here. In short, it’s a way to look back through our salvation history and see the anticipation of the Savior that was held throughout history, just as we anticipate the coming of our Savior, Christ Jesus, at the end of time. One day, He will come, and all the world will be judged. As today’s Gospel warns us, let us not be caught sleeping when the Master returns!

 

(Note for 2009: The reading of being caught sleeping is not in this year’s cycle, but all the readings caution us to not be comfortable in our faith. We should always be striving to improve. Our work as Christians, our faith journey, is not finished until Christ comes in glory. We cannot simply declare our belief and fool ourselves into thinking that our work is finished! For more commentary on today’s Gospel, go here.)

[image source]

 

Letter to Joe Biden

For her religion class this week, my 11 year old read a chapter about respecting life. Her assignment for the chapter is to write in her journal about her experiences with 40 Days for Life, which she plans to do; however, before she did that, she asked to write a letter to our vice president, Joe Biden. Knowing that Biden was raised Catholic and claims to be Catholic to this day, she’s saddened to know that he supports abortion openly.

I gave her no input at all (except to confirm that Mr. Biden does, indeed, have children), and the medical information, while it can be found at any pregnancy information site online, was found in a 1999 pamphlet from Focus on the Family called “The First Nine Months.” (This link is to their updated version of the pamphlet.) Her letter brought me to tears, and I asked her if I could share it with people. With her permission, here is her letter (with her personal information redacted). The picture is the one she put on the letter, with the same caption.

††††††††††††

Mr. Vice President Joe Biden,

My name is *****, and I am Catholic. I am eleven years old and very strongly pro-life. I understand that you are a Catholic. But are you really a Catholic? You support abortion, which is a very harmful act. This letter is on the topic of abortion.

Baby In the Womb at Five Months

As you know, the Fifth Commandment of God is: Thou shalt not kill. This goes for everything, including little tiny ‘clumps of cells’ inside a woman’s body. Are you aware of the fact that a baby’s heart is beating at the age of 3 weeks in the womb? At five weeks, you can begin to see tiny fingers and toes, and the eyes are darkening from pigment produced. At week 8, the embryo is called a fetus, which is Latin for ‘young one’ or ‘offspring.’ In this week, everything is present that we have now, only it is small. The heart has been beating for more than a month, and  many other things, such as the kidneys, have already started their work. The eighth week is when most abortions are performed. In the fifth month, it is easy to tell that it is a baby: he/she has visible fingers and finger nails, eyes, lips, and nostrils. How can you say this is not a baby?

Besides the fact that it is a crime to kill someone (‘someone’ counts as a tiny baby not even out of its mother’s womb), it is not our job to decide when life begins or ends. God alone decides it. If you murder someone, you are committing both a crime and a mortal sin.

Even just supporting abortion is a mortal sin. Would you kill your child? You saw how precious they were when they were first born. A baby in the womb is already a whole person, only littler.

I know someone who has recently had a miscarriage. They were very unhappy when the baby died. Would they be unhappy if it was just a clump of scar tissue and cells, and not a child?

So you see, if you really were a Catholic, you would recognize these things. I hope this letter helped you spiritually.

“Anyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that eternal life abides in no murderer’s heart.”                                 

-1 John 3:15

Sincerely,

****** ******

Choosing the Better Part

I’ve struggled with daily Mass attendance, even though I need to assist at daily Mass as much as is possible for me, for a long time. The older my girls get, it seems it becomes harder for me to get to Mass.

We have so much to do for school this week. There are so many activities going on.

Even working in Morning and Evening Prayer and a daily Rosary seems hard some days.

But recently, we have had some difficulties with our nearly-14 year old. She’s struggling with temptations, and more contact with the Sacraments is just what is needed here. And, again, I’m supposed to be attending daily Mass anyway. Yet, this week and next are what can only be described as the beginning of my insanity. I had a 3 hour appointment at my church (counting the collections) Monday morning, then a quick lunch before we brushed our teeth frantically to fool our dentist, then there was supposed to be a soccer game (which was cancelled, but we had grocery shopping to do instead). Tuesday was co-op, soccer, tap class, and a talk at the church – all without a break at home. Wednesday was pointe class, Mass, Adoration. Thursday is only ballet in the evening, and Friday will have a soccer game in the evening, then Saturday I’m up at 5:30 so I can drive 2 1/2 hours for a Lay Dominican meeting, then we’ll have dinner guests. Sunday is Mass, then a dinner party at our friends’ home. Monday is an eye appointment, homeschool co-op, soccer game… See what I mean? In here, I’m trying to fit daily Mass. And, oh yeah. We’re still homeschooling. Lessons need to fit in there somehow–high school lessons.

Called to deepen our faith

So, Mass has been pushed off a lot lately.

But it’s the Year of Faith! And I’m hoping to be received as a Lay Dominican in January! And, good gracious, my children need the graces afforded to those who attend daily Mass! (Yes, I need them, too.)

I’ve been felt very drawn – called – to participate in daily Mass for a while now. I even did it during Lent, with very few misses. But lately, it’s just been more misses than hits. But my children and I needed it, so I stopped everything at 11:30 on Tuesday and we got ready to go to the noon Mass.

At first, my mind was having a difficult time slowing down. How many pages of grammar were we supposed to get done? Did I finish science with my middle schooler? Will my high schooler be ready for her biology lab this afternoon? Do I have enough leftovers for all this week? Did we pack dance stuff in the car for after co-op and soccer?…

I forced myself to listen to the first reading, respond to the Psalm, and then stood as we sang Alleluia before the Gospel.

And that’s when it happened. That’s when God spoke directly to me through His Holy Word in the Gospel. Father began the reading:

“Jesus entered a village
where a woman whose name was Martha welcomed him.
She had a sister named Mary
who sat beside the Lord at his feet listening to him speak. …”

“Mary has chosen the better part.”

I knew this story. I knew where it was going. My eyes welled up with tears as I realized that I was Martha, struggling to fit in time to sit with Mary…

“…Martha, burdened with much serving, came to him and said,

‘Lord, do you not care
that my sister has left me by myself to do the serving?
Tell her to help me.’
The Lord said to her in reply,
‘Martha, Martha, you are anxious and worried about many things.
There is need of only one thing.
Mary has chosen the better part
and it will not be taken from her.’”

 

It took everything in me not to just break down and cry. I’d had it all backwards. 

 

Rocks First

It’s been said that when you write a schedule, you should do it like you’re filling a jar with rocks, gravel, and sand. Start with the rocks, then pour in the gravel, then the sand. Each smaller item will fit in the crevices left by the larger objects. Even after the sand, you could add water to the jar and more things would fit. The key is to start with what’s biggest – what’s most important.

 

Mass and the Faith are the big rocks. In this Year of Faith, I want to be sure that I start with including all my big rocks: daily Mass, Morning & Evening Prayer, daily Rosary, reading the Catechism a little at a time, and writing. (Yup, I’m finally going to start writing more consistently and see if I can’t get a project done that has been weighing on me for a while.) Other stuff that’s more like gravel is the homeschooling (for our goal is Heaven, not Harvard – with apologies to a blog by that name, it’s a perfect way to sum up our goals as parents!), activities at the parish, etc. The sand is the less important stuff that we’d still like to do: hiking trips, watching movies and playing Wii as a family, relaxing and goofing around online… there’s a lot of sand in my life sometimes.

I’m never going to completely stop being Martha, but I can learn from her and strive to have my own Mary times, sitting at the feet of my Lord, resting my head on His knee as he comforts me and helps me put life in perspective. I need to have Mary times.

Because I want the better part, too.

Best. Week. EVER!

That’s what my 13 year old – my rising ninth grader – has dubbed this week.  We finished her eighth grade work (with the exception of Summer School Math) last Friday, and this week, she’s been getting up early and heading to an all-day theater camp, complete with two performances of “Twice Upon a Time” tomorrow.  But the preparation for high school has already begun.

Lotsa Loot

Early in the week, we went to Best Buy and picked up a Kindle Touch with 3G for her. With all the classic literature she’ll be required to read by Seton Homeschool, we figured, “Why not get something that we can find free classic literature for?”  Free is almost always better than payed for.  Especially when it’s my money (our money) doing the paying.  And carrying one Kindle with thousands of books is, well … kind of dreamy for a bookworm.

Then, on Tuesday, we ordered a MacBook Pro for her.  This one. It’s not the Latest and Greatest, but it’s quite nice. I think it is now considered two generations back from what was just announced at WWDC last week. We waited to see what the new MacBook Pros would be like, and we waited to see what the Back to School special would be. The new MacBook Pros are amazing (and, for what you get, not badly priced – only the new retina display is more expensive than the models that were out two weeks back); the Back to School special is not amazing. But the fact that the refurbished MacBook Pro that we’d been seriously considering for her dropped in price by another $70 – making it $170 less than the educational price of the lowest-end new MacBook Pro – THAT was something worth celebrating. So we went ahead and picked one up for her.  It should arrive on Tuesday.

I don’t know anyone in my circle of friends or even circle of acquaintances who is getting their rising ninth grader stuff like this. When I think about it, I feel positively decadent! Almost wasteful!

We must be spoiling the kid!

But somehow, we’re not.

This was actually a concern of ours as we discussed our plan to buy the computer. We’d actually planned it three years ago while I was still working for Apple on the sales line. Did we actually need to buy her a computer? Were we being too indulgent in doing so?

We took stock of the things she has, as well as the reasons behind us wanting to do this. After all, we don’t have MacBook Pros, Kindles, or even iPads.

First, her stuff: she and her sister saved up for a Wii, they each have iPods, and she has a digital camera (budding photographer). She has use of one of the family computers, with lots of parental controls built in. She has no cell phone (we firmly believe there is no reason a 13 year old needs one), she doesn’t own an iPod Touch (though she has access to my old one, as does her sister). The girls don’t have phones or TVs in their room. And, of course, we are completely indulgent when it comes to purchasing books. (We’re all bookworms.)

Now to why we wanted to do this for her: We take a lot of family vacations; we don’t live anywhere near our families, and seeing grandparents involve a 12 hour drive for one set and a 23 hour drive for the other. When we travel, it’s harder to do things like essays, since she’s been writing them on the computer consistently since the seventh grade. When we go to the all-day, once-a-week co-op, she can’t write her essays out because doing it by hand not only means doing it twice just for a first-draft, but also means her first-first draft is not going to be nearly as good as when she can type it out.

Plus, having paperwork on the computer means it will be easier to keep track of.  Neater. Fewer papers left in around the house in various stages of done-ness. She’ll even be able to use Evernote to take notes on her projects and research papers.

Even though this is a great gift for her, it’s going to also be a great gift for us, making our homeschool life easier and more portable.

So buying the MacBook Pro won out. It’s on the way.

When I ordered it, I said to her, “You know none of your friends are getting this kind of thing for high school, right? Not a single one has parents who can do this right now.”

“I know,” she answered.

“Remember that, please. Remember not to be flashy about it or show it off a lot to your friends. Don’t make them feel bad.”

“Oh my gosh, no! I know not to do that! I won’t!”

And, really, I should have known. Someone mentioned that a MacBook Air might have been better for her, with its solid state flash drive that’s more durable and all. We compared prices and weren’t sure it would be worth it. “It even looks cooler!” said the salesman.

“I don’t care how it looks,” she told us later. “You’re buying me a COMPUTER! It doesn’t need to look cool. Besides, I think all Macs are cool – so there!”

She didn’t care that it was refurbished (which, as a sidenote, is really a great way to go with Apple – we’ve never once bought anything new from them with the exception of my iPhone). She didn’t care that we didn’t get the Biggest and Best. She didn’t care that we didn’t get all kinds of Goodies On the Side to go with it. And if our budget had taken a serious hit (as it did last Summer with a dead car followed by a dead refrigerator), she would have been disappointed-but-fine if we couldn’t get it at all.

So it looks like she’s not spoiled, in spite of the Best. Week. EVER!

Raising the Girls I Wanted to Be

My kids constantly amaze me. When I started homeschooling Big Girl 9 1/2 years ago (!!), some people wondered about how she’d learn to socialize when she wasn’t in school all day with other kids. Meanwhile, we plugged on, got involved with homeschooling groups, got her into sports, theater & church groups and put her sister into many of the same activities, plus dance.

My Dancing Princess

Today, much to my surprise, I have a rising ninth grader and rising sixth grader.  It’s hard for me to believe sometimes how grown-up my girls are getting! And they have bloomed into unique and wonderful young ladies.

Today, Big Girl is at her first day of drama camp – but a different group than last year. Yet she knows a lot of the kids there, who also dance with Little Girl.

We arrived at the camp location (a small community theater about 25 minutes from our home) and signed her in for the day.  Entering the theater (without me, I might add), she sat down in a big group of girls and just started chatting it up, talking about mutual friends and all sorts of things.

As I looked at her in the middle of this scene – with a group of four or five girls watching her and listening while she talked animatedly – I thought, “Whose kid is this!?” I think this partly because, really, she’s not a kid any more, but a beautiful young woman and partly because she is this amazing and outgoing, confident and cheerful girl. She seems fearless to me, and she jumps with gusto into situations that make me just cringe and want to hide in my introverted Hobbit-hole-shaped shell.

All this goes to prove, really, is that a lack of social skills isn’t dependent on your schooling situation as much as it is on your personality. Introverts will be the way they are – and extroverts, as well – no matter where they go to school.  Since I have one child of each variety, I have some pretty good proof of that.  Well, that and the fact that after 13 years of public school, a college degree, a Dale Carnegie speaking class (and even a GA session in another round of it), and various leadership roles in church activities, I am still an introvert who’d rather be home with my books and a nice, warm cup of coffee than hanging out in a large group of people without the benefit of having my entire family there to support me so I won’t die of fright.

Oh, did I say die?  I’ve improved a lot since the days when I’d hide behind my mother rather than say hello to a friend from school when I see them in the store.  I’m all the way up to waving at people, and even sometimes talking to them.  But it almost always still takes an effort for me.

But my girls…back to them.

Little Newbie

I’m amazed to see who they are growing into.  Big Girl has always liked being around people, but her confidence has grown so much.  When she was first born, I feared she would lack confidence in herself – that she’d be unsure, like me.  But she isn’t! She shines, she is so much more confident that I ever thought she’d be.  I tell her sometimes that she’s the girl I always dreamed of being: smart, funny, confident, outgoing, popular, athletic.  I often watch her with her friends and just gape in amazement.

Little Girl, though she’s introverted like me, has gained more confidence in her (almost) 11 years than I did in my first 22.  I give a lot of the credit to her dance teachers, who have helped her realize her talents and let her shine in her dance numbers.  In addition to dancing (she just finished her sixth year of dancing at the same studio), she also started singing in the children’s choir at our parish where the choir director started giving her small solos.  These solos started with a line or two sung from the safety of the choir, but culminated this Easter with her singing part of the Responsorial Psalm, alternating verses with another girl.  Though nervous, she worked hard to learn her part and stepped up to that mic and nailed it!  Even though the public parts of sharing her talents make her nervous, she has learned to work through those nerves, pull herself together, and give a great performance.  (Often, her motivation to do so is to share the talents God gave her and give Him glory through her actions.)

Sweet Sisters

I’m so proud of the people my children are growing into, and I thank God every day for the blessing of being able to raise them.

When What’s Comfortable Suddenly Isn’t

There has never really been a time when we didn’t plan on homeschooling our children. Even early in our marriage, we felt called to do it, though I

Graduation Starts at Home

doubt we would have phrased it that way.  But today, I see it as a part of my vocation as a wife and mother.

As our daughters get older, and especially as our older girl approaches high school this Fall, my comfort with homeschooling K-12 was suddenly … less. I couldn’t explain it, but I started feeling nervous about my older daughter’s entrance into her high school years, and my abilities to educate her.  I couldn’t explain it, and only shared my feelings about it a very little bit with my husband.  I still felt the call to homeschool her, but I had doubts that I was doing a good-enough job any more.

I knew I wasn’t willing to put her in public school.  I know that spending $6000 a year for Catholic school wasn’t going to work for us, either.  As much as our finances have improved, I can’t possibly afford that kind of tuition for a private school! Less-expensive Christian schools are out of the question. I don’t doubt their sincerity or their love for Christ, but I don’t want my children in an environment where their own faith would be questioned and challenged on a daily basis.  (Plus, I’ve noticed a lot of anti-science going on in the evangelical circles in these parts; faith and science are not enemies or opposites.)

So I have been plugging on, working towards finishing this year and trusting that my decision to continue to homeschool my girls through high school is the right one.  We looked at various curricula and finally made the decision to re-enroll with Seton Homeschool for high school.  While their lower grade curriculum didn’t work for us, their high school curricula does look like it will.  Our daughter chose her science class for ninth grade, and we’ve discussed working towards getting her ready for high school math (her weakest subject).

But this nagging doubt still bothered me: Am I doing the right thing? Can she do this? Can I do this?

Today, I finally emailed Seton and asked about how to go about giving her the high school placement test, and started marking off the books on the list that I didn’t need to purchase.  More perfunctory actions, more stepping out on faith.

Watch Out!

And, suddenly, I realized that I had a great peace about this whole thing.

What a gift!  I hadn’t even made it a conscious prayer, but I had been – in a very roundabout way – asking God if, indeed, this was the right thing for me to do. Am I doing right by my children by choosing to homeschool through high school?

And the answer was yes. What a relief! What a joy! 

So now I can look forward to the end of this school year with the knowledge that I’ll also be able to look forward to the next!