Homeschooling is a Joy

If I can tell you that homeschooling is a slog, I must also rightfully tell you that homeschooling is a joy.

I did not enter every day of my homeschooling skipping around and full of joyful energy.  However, in the end what joy it was to educate my children at home.  Obviously, we were home.  All of us home together.  We experienced life together, the highs and the lows.  We talked about a lot of things all the time.  I called them my tribe (which sometimes they hated by the way).  It was the best description I could think of – one tribe doing life together.

They learned all sorts of things I didn’t set out to teach them in a curriculum plan.  By necessity, when they were younger, we all went to the grocery store together.  They learned price checking; especially how to look at the unit price vs the price of the whole.  If the unit price wasn’t provided, they saw me using the calculator to figure it out. They learned about reading labels and nutritional values. In those days, they also learned all about couponing.  That was just from weekly trips to the grocery store.

We took them on all of our projects.  For a few years we had a couple of rental properties.  They were along for the purchase and even cleaning between tenants was all hands-on deck.  Except that one time, we unfortunately learned about the life cycle of fleas and what it takes to eradicate them. They didn’t help clean that house.  I liked to bake cheesecakes as Christmas presents.  Eventually, I had helpers in the baking process and Dad took them on delivery trips until the last few years when an older sibling did the driving.

We even moved my mother in with us for her care in her last years. Wound care, pressure ulcers, dementia – they learned about those.  They also learned how to run a Hoyer.  They were skilled at getting her in the wheelchair van and locking it all down so we could get on the road.  I teased them about being a good pit crew. They also learned how to talk to many nurses and doctors.  They were there the day she passed – sitting at her side giving cups of water and letting the tears run.

I say it was a joy and it was, but perhaps the better word is privilege.  Privilege is defined as: A particular and peculiar benefit or advantage enjoyed by a person, company or society, beyond the common advantages of other citizens. (Websters 1828).

It was a joy, and indeed a great privilege.