How this happened...

For a long time Jonathan and I have considered home schooling.  The timing just never seemed right and then when the timing was right we had our fears and doubts about the whole process.  I ran (and still run) my own photography business that kept me very busy with photo editing during the week.  Then I was pregnant and felt like the hormones wouldn't allow me to have the patience and then there was a newborn.... and well if you've ever had a new born you know what I'm talking about.  We were always afraid of taking our son's education into our own hands because if we messed up there would be no one else to blame but ourselves.  But the bottom line was that the public school system was NOT meeting the needs of our son.  Our son is very smart for his age.  I'm not just saying that because he is my child, I'm saying that because he is a year or two younger than all of his classmates and smarter than most of them.  School simply didn't challenge him enough on a daily basis and this led to one behavior issue after another with each of his teachers.  Very few of them wanted to acknowledge the fact that he was much younger than his peers and therefore was not on the same maturity level - I was even told he had ADHD by one teacher and that I should consider medicating him...I didn't know a teaching degree came with a psychology degree as well.  And by the way, my son was tested and he has no form of ADHD.... he just wasn't challenged enough.  So even though my son was very smart he wasn't eligible for the gifted program because he wasn't mature enough... in other words he didn't fit the cookie cutter mold of our current education system.  None of this is to say he didn't have a couple of good teachers along the way, because he did, but in today's world our most of our teachers are just too over worked or they have lost the desire to care because they have been beaten down by the system.  We had other issues with public education such as the bad behavior problems that Tommy was learning from some of his peers that we had to deal with at home, the fact we had to talk to him about sex before he was ready because the school insisted he was sexually harassing a girl by pushing her on the play ground swing, the lack of communication between the parents and the teacher about what was going on in the classroom and the fact my son was loosing his passion for learning.

So here we are.  For Christmas we ate lunch at our church and sat next to a couple from our Sunday school class.  We were talking causally and suddenly the subject of home school came up.  I sat and talked with this couple through the entire lunch and felt as though God was talking straight to me about all my fears about home school.  With every sentence that passed I became more and more convinced that this was the path my son needed to be on.  This was the answer to my prayers about my son's education.  The answer could not have been more clear.  My husband and I sat in the car after lunch and looked at each other and said, "We are going to do this."  After four days of research we picked a curriculum (K12) and a bible study for our son.  We unenrolled him from school (they treated us very nasty by the way) and he never went back.  Our school supplies arrived a few days later and it was like Christmas in our house.  It was SO good to see my son excited about learning again.  He was ready to dive in and that is exactly what we did the very next day.... and so our story begins... its our new beginning.