I am a homeschool mother of 6. I don't have everything figured out, but I can help you with the experience I do have.Please join me as Christian mothers who seek answers through prayer in study in raising our children in a Godly way.
It has been so long since I’ve wrote on here. I had some technical difficulties at first and then some hard family issues came up and I had to quit doing all my extra things for a while. Thankfully, homeschooling gives us the flexibility to take life as it comes at us and to take short breaks when we need it.
“All you can do is all you can do, and all you can do is enough”
Ellen Nelson- my grams
Since I last wrote we have decided to become foster parents. We have had two little boys in our home for about 9-10 months. It has been quite a drastic change on our schedule. Usually I have 9 months to prepare to have a new baby. We had one night to decide yes we will have our boys join our family. We then had one week to prepare for them to come to our house.
I’m definitely not about to tell you that homeschooling has miraculously got done and our home is so peaceful. It has been a rough 9 months where all our family are trying to figure out their new roles and where we all fall in our home now. Homeschooling has got done but it has definitely proven more difficult with our little 2 and 4 year old joining our home. I will write another post in the future about entertaining toddlers. During this 9 month period we also potty trained our 2 year old that turned 3. He really rocked it and is doing awesome. If you want tips of how we handled that let me know. I may or may not write a blog about it. I do wish I would’ve potty trained him in the summer though so I didn’t have to worry about lots of clothes on outside. Since we got the boys, they have turned 3 and 5 and we’re starting to figure things out. My older kids have stepped up a lot with helping the little ones.
Along with having our little boys, I had to take a step back from things I normally participate a lot in. I went from teaching 3 out of 4 classes at our homeschool cooperative to only teaching 1. I also didn’t choose to be a head coach in our local soccer league. With all the extra stress and change, my husband counseled me to let go of somethings and catch my breath. This was very good advice. I have really needed it. Sometimes it has meant not attending all our cooperative classes or not attending different activities. I’ve had to take more time for self care and emotional resets.
This year we also changed up our curriculum and added our new foster children to our homeschool. I’ve had to figure out how to keep our toddlers busy so that we can do school. That has proven a little more difficult as they really need more emotional time. Additionally, my 5 year old daughter went from doing very little school to being very involved in our regular school day. Furthermore, we switched up what we used for math with my oldest son. We changed from mymathassistant.com back to The Good and the Beautiful. With his request and my personal taste we will be switching back to mymathassistant.com next year. It is life changing for me to have his math graded by someone else and to be able to see the overall percentage he has.
Christmas and New Years was not quite what we planned. My husband surprised our family by telling us we needed to take a trip to see our family several hours away. The kids and I were sad because we really just wanted to be home for Christmas. We all decided we’d make the most of it and booked a hotel and planned where to stay with family. A few days before we were supposed to leave our kids got sick with a stomach bug. We were happy we didn’t have to go on vacation anymore but sad we wouldn’t get to see family we’d made plans with. Overall, we had a wonderful Christmas break. The kids and us adults were thoroughly spoiled by each other, we ate lots of yummy food, we cleaned up lots of throw up buckets, and we watched lots of movies. Despite the sickness, we had a much needed break from normal life and homeschool.
My husband and I have recently decided we’re going to start saving for land and a home. That means that we’re having to shrink our homeschool budget and tighten down, yet it is so exciting to think of having a place of our own and something we can pass onto our children.
In addition to saving up money and growing our family, I have been busy making new teacherspayteachers content. I have also been working on a Detective Unit Study that I hope to use with my own children and then share it with you at a future date. Our family really enjoys watching Sherlock Holmes and other police and detective movies. I decided, since we enjoy those shows, I would try to create a unit study based on Sherlock Holmes.
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