My First Post

I thought it was about time that I started a home school blog. I mean, I have a blog for just about everything, why not make one for the life of my family! I’m not always good at keeping up with this sort of stuff, but I am going to do my best. I have the time at the moment to write for this sort of stuff, but I am about to have my third baby, and I expect that will keep me busy on top of homeschooling, my baby carrier business, my doula business, and being a Children’s pastor. So, if you don’t hear from me for a while, I’m off somewhere doing WAY too many things. I love it!

I guess I could start out with why I homeschool. Honestly, I thought I would homeschool when I was younger but when it came time for my daughter to go to preschool, I must have forgotten that this is something I wanted to do. So, I started looking for preschools. Well, we had recently moved to the “hood” but it bordered a really awesome neighborhood in Atlanta. I was hoping that we’d somehow be able to get my daughter into one of the billions of awesome preschools nearby. No such luck. So after the trials and tribulations of looking for a good school to send my daughter to, we decided to educate her at home.  

I’m glad we started at her age, because it was easy. And FUN! I am glad things worked out the way they did, because the more I read, and the more thought that I put into it; the more I wanted to teach the kids at home. There are so many of our family values that are contradicted the way public (and many private) schools are run, and I really enjoy being the person responsible for my children’s education.

So far we have completed preschool and Kindergarten. Nevaeh (my daughter), has just started first grade material. But we are in no rush. She will be six at the end of September, so we do try to take lots of time between learning for fun adventures, leisure activities, lots of snuggles, and to give mom a break. This actually works out great, because Nevaeh tends to want to read a lot during her breaks and she spends a lot of time developing her own interests. So it’s working out.

But maybe I’m jumping ahead. I’ll tell you a bit about our family. My husband (Dale) is a priest in the Anglican church and I am the children’s pastor at the church. It’s a new church less than a year old in downtown Atlanta. We live in East Lake, just east of East Atlanta Village. We have two kids, and we are expecting another in the next 8- 10 weeks or so.  Nevaeh is 5, and Aidan is 16 months. Our parenting style is pretty traditional. Discipline is important in our household, and we enforce our rules with time outs, loss of privileges, and repeat offenses get the mega punishments. We also reward good behavior with lots of praise and the gaining of privileges. We try to parent as biblically as possible, and hope that our parenting style is helping to develop people with a strong foundation that reflect our family values. 

Our values center on our belief in Christ. As Christians, we try to take care of ourselves and the things around us. We do our best to teach our children to live minimalistic instead of being wasteful.  We try to teach them to be conservative in our spending and generous with our giving. As a result, some of the surface things that you might see in our life style is a lot of second/third/fourth hand items in our household. I also make as many things as I can by hand out of whatever I can get my hands on. Occasionally, we will make our own soaps, we make as much food from scratch as we can, and we try not to waste. I cloth diaper my kids, and try to teach the understanding of toilet use from an early age (also known as elimination communication). We hardly watch TV, so we do not have cable. It was polluting our lives and thought that it would be necessary to get rid of it. We try to be very active in our community as much as possible.  Hopefully my blog will reflect the lifestyle I have just outlined. If not anything else, it will be a good record of the goals set forth and things we have achieved over a period of time!

Anyhow instead of rambling, I’m going to end my first post and we’ll pick up the next time something interesting happens!