Is everything you do about your children's education? Or maybe you focus primarily on their interests in order to aid them in building their future and possibly their career. Maybe you just want your kids to be emotionally stable. Your end goal may be helping them get into a certain college or university or program. It could be an intentional focus on sports due to their athletic abilities (or any other myriad of activities wherein they excel). None of those is wrong. Lots of parents choose home education for reasons such as these. But as I reflect on my own five children and our 25 years of homeschooling, I know for sure that their character and their love for the Lord were the things I did right in focusing on, while simultaneously being the areas I wish I had spent more time, energy and focus on. It's a coexisting of two things in the same space; we did it well, and we should have done it better. Some of their deepest struggles may have been lessened had I, th...
A few days ago, while I was out running errands, I saw a house (in a fairly nice neighborhood) with seasonal (read that: Halloween themed) "decorations" in their yard. ... Okay, before I even get going with this post, I have to hit "pause" & state for the record that the word "decorations" feels wrong when what I saw was a means of glorifying death & very macabre ... As a mom of five now adult children who homeschooled for 25 years, every now and again I get a bit reflective and do a "rear-view mirror cross-examination" of things we did in our family that I would do differently if given the chance. One of those things is the way we "celebrated" Halloween. We did all the things. Went to the pumpkin patch , did the corn mazes , carved the pumpkins, decorated the house with "creepy" things, let the kids pick (or design and create) their costumes, attended harvest parties , church events (and hosted a lot of church ...