Why This Isn't A Homeschooling Blog

So those of you who visit here may not have picked up on the fact that I homeschool the kids.  The homeschooling isn't mentioned a lot in this blog, mostly because I haven't a clue what I am doing and also because a lot of what you might have read about homeschooling on the Internet - you know, the fun projects and the children reciting Latin at breakfast? That isn't really happening around here.

For example, last year some other homeschooling moms and I expended a lot of time and effort putting together a high school co-op to teach the kids Biology and Physics and Spanish.  Lab sciences and foreign languages tend to be the toughest items to cover when you have high schoolers, so we were pretty ding-danged (thanks for the word, June) pleased with ourselves for overcoming numerous hurdles and getting everything ready to go by September of 2014.  Pleased as punch, I would say. Oh, the self-congratulatory emails flew!

Of course, in late July, our location fell through. We spent August scrambling to find a place to hold classes and dealing with all the fallout engendered by the change of location.  Fun.

So, it's planning time again.  The location is solid, but there are different classes to be set up - Chemistry, Maths, etc.  That means, new teachers to be found, schedules to be decided.  At our first planning meeting this week, we ironed out details, set our priorities, and congratulated ourselves on the fact that we had already lined up a Chemistry teacher - we interviewed her last year, as a matter of fact, and told her we'd be interested for September 2015.

Today? We learned that that teacher will NOT be available.

This, in case you were wondering, is how homeschooling parents actually spend their days.  Forget all that propaganda you might read in homeschooling blogs about creating lovely unit studies for eager-to-learn kiddies, doing lapbooks, or even introducing the children to the wonders of our natural world by taking them on outdoor hikes. In truth, we ignore our kids in order to spend hours on email setting up learning co-ops for them, even as we know that unforeseen circumstances will eventually lay waste to all our efforts.

I've managed to do this ONCE, in 17 years of homeschooling...

Essentially, we homeschooling folk are a lot like all of you, only with more of a penchant for self-punishment and less of a grasp on reality (because, yeah, I still think I am going to get around to that lapbook thing). Just think of us as the Don Quixotes of the parenting world, okay?


[Lapbook image: Cathy Duffy Reviews]