A new chapter...

Well, tomorrow starts off another year of homeschooling! YAY!! When I step back and look at my life it still amazes me that I'm a homeschooling mom and this will be our 4th year of homeschooling! When my son Keegan was 4 years old I was working full time as a CNA/unit secretary at our local hospital. I worked 3-11:30pm so that he wouldn't have to be in daycare very much and this meant that if he was going to attend a preschool, that would have meant less time for me to spend with him and more time of him being sent off to be cared for and taught by people that weren't my husband or I. The thought of that seriously made me sick. I opted to buy the same curriculum that his daycare used for their preschool program and started working on it at home during the mornings before I went to work. The longer I did it the more set I became on homeschooling. Before that I was so anti-homeschooling! I thought homeschooled kids were weird and that they'd turn out to be weird adults, unable to really socialize with the rest of the normal world. LOL It seriously cracks me up to think back to those days. I quickly came to realize that even kids sent off to public school could turn out to be outcasts or anti-social people, not able to really function in the real world. I'll skip all the other points of why I choose to homeschool and we'll just say that it's what the Lord placed on my heart and He made it VERY clear that I was to homeschool! So yeah, that was 4 years ago! We're still learning a lot as we go along. I'm learning what works best for Keegan and what works best for me and this year brings a whole new challenge...a younger sister full-on into her terrible-two's! LOL It's definitely going to be hard trying to balance keeping Tatym entertained and being able to help Keegan with his daily school work. This year I'm vowing to get up every morning before the rest of the family, get showered and dressed and ready for the day and sit down for some prayer & quiet time with the Lord before the rest of the family wakes up. Ideally I'd love to be getting up around 5:30am but I have a really hard time getting up earlier than 7am so it will take me awhile to build up to it. I'll be happy with 6am! :) This past week I managed to get up at 6:40 two mornings in a row! HOT DANG, that's awesome for me! LOL

Tomorrow we start a new tradition for the first day of school: we're going out for donuts and chocolate milk at the new bakery in our town! Keegan doesn't know about it yet but he does know that we've got something special planned and he's excited and anxious to find out what it is!

Tomorrow begins my new journey in scheduling our days more. Since I started homeschooling Keegan a year early (due to his birthday falling in November he missed the cut-off for starting school but since he could already read and knew so much we opted to go ahead and start kindergarten early) I used it as an excuse to be more relaxed with his schoolwork. I was lazy! So this year we're buckling down and getting serious! I also know that for both my son, and I, we do better with structure. We do good when we know what the plan is and have a schedule of what to do during the day.

So as I get ready to tuck my kids into bed tonight and say our prayers, I'm going to be saying a special prayer for the Lord to help us adapt to our new schedule and for Keegan to have a happy heart about his school work, for me to be more patient and understanding, for us to keep pretty close to the schedule (allowing God to still do as He wants with us day-to-day), for Tatym to not terrorize her brother while he's doing his work (LOL) and for this year to go smoothly! Here's to a new chapter in our lives! Thank you Lord for this amazing blessing you have given me, to be a homeschooling mom to two amazing and wonderful children and a stepmom to another homeschooled young man! Bless our school year Lord, we do it all for YOU!