Homeschooling Realities and Frustrations

Life has changed so much over the past year. I never imagined homeschooling this year, but here I am doing it. I've learned a lot of the past few weeks and I'm still in the process of changing our curriculum or parts of it. It seems I chose the wrong one for my boys and I'm finding that they learn in different ways to boot which means I teach them separately instead of together. Right now I'm focusing on Clayton since he is in 1st grade and Eli can technically wait another year. Eli is very anti-school at the moment which is OK because he is still learning it's just through play type activities that are fun and not worksheet related. I've found that I'm not much into worksheets either I mean can you get much more boring that drawing a line from one picture to another. Learning should be fun and I hope to make it fun for my boys.

I have so many people asking what curriculum we are using and so many times I feel like I'm getting the "your ruining your child" look when I tell them. It's usually the ones who are in their first year of homeschooling who give me that look, others who have been doing it longer seem to understand. I hate being judged though, maybe I'm taking it wrong, maybe they are just trying to understand. I guess we all have an idea of what school should be and mine is very different from theirs.

I would love to meet some people in the same boat as me though. Someone who has very active boys and a toddler who wants your undivided attention 24/7, someone who works part-time from their home and needs to work in the afternoon so school must be done in the morning. School must be done in the morning also because by the afternoon the boys have checked out...they function better in the morning as do I. Someone who can relate to being a first time homeschooling mom who wonders if she is making a mistake or if she's doing this right. Someone who doesn't have perfect kids who will sit and read to themselves all day. Someone who LETS their children watch Sponge Bob and play video games in the afternoon.

I'm so sick of hearing about these perfect children who read War and Peace for FUN summer reading and who don't watch any TV and do everything they are told to do. Come on people...GET REAL!!! Do these children really exists? Do the parents just want you to think they are perfect, what good is that to anybody? I need real life people. I guess I'm just different I like to tell it how it is and homeschooling is hard but I know I can do it and will do it and my boys may not be perfect but they will succeed in life. After all they say the most successful people were strong willed children and that was me and is now my boys.