Introducing Our New Guest Poster... Author of Ordinary Time

I'd like to introduce our first guest blogger... author of Ordinary Time, and parent to 9 children! She's a homeschooler and homemaker... and she'd like to kick off her new arrival to The Homeschooling Blog with a little information on how her family started their homeschooling adventure!

How we started:

"What made us decide to start homeschooling?  This is a question we are often asked when others discover that we educate our nine children at home.  I’m never sure if the question is asked out of genuine curiosity or because the inquirer is anxious to know what to do to avoid what is perceived as outrageous lunacy.  My reply is often that we sort of “forgot” to send our oldest daughter to school when she was old enough for kindergarten.  This response often puts the other person at ease, since it confirms in their mind that we are obviously different from themselves, and therefore there is no fear of contagion from associating with us.

And it’s true; that we really didn’t ever get around to sending our oldest to kindergarten, that is.  When we were young(er) and had our first baby, visions of homeschooling never danced through our heads.  We bought a house in a “good” school district in the attendance area of a “good” school.  The school my husband attended as a child, incidentally.  But as our daughter grew we realized that while the rest of our community sent their very young children off to preschool (and paying through the nose for the privilege, I might add), we didn’t want to.  I was having too much fun watching my little girl explore and learn about her world and I didn’t want to share that experience with anyone else.  Besides, why does a three year old really need to be separated from her mommy for multiple hours each week?  Instead, I happened across a pair of mothers who planned on doing their own preschool with their daughters, switching each week who would plan and execute the activities.  I expressed interest and they agreed to let me join them. 

After jumping off the acceptable track the first time, it became increasingly easy not to get back on.  Since we weren’t enrolled in a traditional preschool, we never heard about the kindergarten information nights or registration days.  I suppose if I really had wanted to know when these events were, I could have found out, but I was enjoying raising my daughter and it never really occurred to me to find out until afterwards.  This combined with the fact that kindergarten in our city is a full-day program only helped us to make our decision that we wouldn’t send our daughter to kindergarten.  How hard could kindergarten be, anyway?  It wasn’t as though trigonometry and chemistry would be a part of the curriculum.  So we began, telling nervous grandparents that we were taking it a year at a time.

That one year has now turned into twelve and that one child has turned into nine and we are still homeschooling.  Very happily, I might add.  We also have many, many more reasons for choosing homeschooling now, though if I am honest, number one on my list continues to be that I am jealous of the time I have with my children.

But to the details and numbers of who we are…  I am E., married to J., and we blog at www.ordinary-time.blogspot.com  Our 9 children are:  M (girl, 17, and is currently on a mission trip with Teen Missions International in Samoa), B (boy, 15), A (girl, 12), P (girl, 9), TM (boy, 7, adopted from Vietnam at the age of 3 ½), D (boy, 7), K (boy, 4, adopted from Vietnam at the age of 2), and G and L (twin girls, 1 year old)."

Thanks so much "E" for sharing a bit of your story with us! If you've enjoyed reading her introduction, please either let her know here with a comment, or follow the link provided in this post and visit her blog directly. You'll also find her button in the upper right sidebar.  :)

If you'd like to apply to be a guest blogger on THB, follow my contact email under our THB header and let me know! You'll get a free spot on THB to place your site's button or badge and permission to share your link within the content of each guest post.