On Fire

My dad asked me today if we were going to take a break from homeschooling for the summer.

Well, that was my original plan when I mapped out our year. However, not long ago I attended a homeschool convention and now my mind's so full of all the wonderful things I want to teach them and all the cool projects we can do that I can't bear the thought of stopping for a minute. There's just not enough hours in the day to explore everything we want to learn about. Why should we stop for the summer?

Now, you may think that I sound like just another obnoxiously perky Holly Homeschooler, but I want you to understand something. I haven't always felt like this. Years ago I wasn't interested in sitting down and doing lessons with my kids (in fact, that sounded intolerably tedious to me) and I didn't want to give up any of my time in my own little world in order to work with my kids. My enjoyment of homeschooling has come gradually and has gone hand-in-hand with a real grieving process of giving up my own pursuits in order to give my children this time. But now I am on fire!

A big part of this is that Bean is finally old enough that he is catching fire too. More and more now he really wants to learn and he's a lot easier to teach than he used to be. After everything I've been through with him, that's so exciting that I want to capitalize on every second of it. Fish is now old enough too that they can do stuff together and that makes things much more fun.

And the convention! It was emotionally exhausting because it was so wonderful and stimulating and I got so excited about all the different curricula available but I had to balance that against my budget of both time and money. You would not believe all the awesome, fun, exciting books and CDs and toys and computer software and programs that are available now for homeschooling. I just kept seeing things that looked so fun-- the Badger and I agreed we're going to plan ahead next year and budget a thousand dollars so we can buy everything we want at the convention. I really think a key component of homeschool success is for the parent to have curricula that they're excited about. If the parent is truly enthusiastic, the kids will be too.

I only had a little money to spend, so in the end I went with only one big new thing for now, but I'm very very excited about it. It's the Artistic Pursuits art curriculum and it's really neat. The kids love it and so do I.

So no, we're not going to take a break for the summer. We're having way too much fun.