Homeschooling

I wondered if I would like homeschooling my kids. Would I want to continue after the trip? Would they really thrive with me teaching them? If you would have asked me any other time in my life if I would homeschool my kids, I would have replied with a confirming, “Hell No!” After much discussion on our dream of doing a long trip, we decided to forgo a year away living in Costa Rica, where we would have enrolled them into school, and instead replaced this idea with life on the road where I would become their teacher and homeschool them. I never pictured myself as the homeschooling type...whatever that means. But months before the trip I got really into researching what program I wanted to do. Would I pick an online program or do workbooks or a mix? I joined Facebook groups and talked to the few moms I knew who homeschooled. I was ready and even excited about homeschooling! I had visions of us sitting on the beach somewhere, me drinking my coffee and them with their faces in their books studying away. I would answer all their questions and each of them would have one on one attention from me. They would return to school next year and their teachers would say, “Wow! They are doing so well! They must have worked really hard over the summer!” I would smile inside, patting myself on the back telling myself I did a good job😊. 

Reality? It has been a nightmare! My beautiful image of me drinking coffee while they study away has been replaced with the sounds of whining and them begging not to do school. Me repeating a hundred times, “All your friends are in school for 8 hours a day! I am asking for 2 hours!” The sound of the crashing waves among one of them crying, “I can’t do this! It’s to hard!” I have threatened sending them back to school for 8 hours, sending them to boarding school while Scott and I finish the trip🤫, sometimes begging to just finish the work! Scott and I looking at each other with the look of, did we really sign up for this🤣? Me trying to explain to them how they could be done in a fraction of the time if they would just do the work instead of whining the entire time! 

So two months into this trip I have answered my question, I WILL NOT continue to homeschool them when we get back. I will be sending them back to their school and dropping them off on day one with a huge smile on my face.

Ok, I must admit there are good days (mostly with Harper, rarely with Crosby). I am grateful for this time with each of them and as we continue to get into a groove it does become a little easier. I just do not think I was honest with myself how difficult it would be for all of us. I know I will learn so much from them and be able to help them better as they navigate through school, but I am no homeschooling mama. Not that I couldn’t be, if it was something I really wanted to do, but it’s not. So each picture I post of my kids sitting doing their school work with the beautiful scenery in the background, just know I probably have already lost my shit on them and threatened to send them to boarding school😆. So to all those people, both at home and along this trip, who tell us what an amazing thing we are doing for our kids, that this experience is nothing they could learn in the classroom, know that I cherish those comments and hope to god you are right! Sometimes in my head I say to myself when someone says that to me, I think, “Ya, they may not read or write well, but at least they have picked up a starfish and release endangered baby turtles back into the ocean.”