Encouraging Moms Who Homeschool

Once upon a time there was a busy homeschooling mother who had to plan out her school days in 15-minute increments.... Now there is a far less busy homeschooling mother who no longer plans out school days beyond updating her calendar with her last child's dual enrollment college class schedule. And it happened in the blink of an eye. If you are just beginning to homeschool ~ perhaps even starting mid-year in January ~ then it is very important for you to know that the busy-ness you are facing will come to it's end far more quickly than you can imagine. And if you are nearing the end of your homeschooling journey, be sure to take time to remember what it was like during those hectic days early on because, who knows, some sweet mama may need a little bit of encouragement from one who has gone before her. In this quiet pause between Christmas and the New Year, try to think of some way to encourage another mom, whether she homeschools or not. (And if you read my blog but ar...

Job 23:10 reads like this: "He knows the way that I take..." Is this verse a reality for you right now, in whatever spot life may have landed you? Are you confident in the certainty that the Lord knows the way that you take? That He knows exactly where you are at this precise moment and that He knows exactly how you got here? Can you trust the Living God to manage the path of your life and believe that He has His eye on you right now? Do you know that He knows the way that you take today? Life does not play out the way most of us wanted it to. Rarely do we get what we planned to get out of our short number of days on this big, blue spinning ball called Earth. But, nevertheless, for those who know Jesus, the long walk of our short life is not walked alone. Not only does He know the way that we take, He walks that way alongside of us. It's a wonderful thing to walk the path of life hand in hand with Jesus. Don't think you have to do this on your own; you don...

Warren Wiersbe has said that sooner or later, every believer discovers that the Christian life is a battleground, not a playground. He is spot on. And for the homeschooling mother, we have one very intense battlefield. Our enemies are, of course, on the outside. From the checkout lady at the Piggly Wiggly to our distant third-cousin (twice removed on our father's side), we know people are going to question us in regard to homeschooling. (Why, just last night at a banquet where my husband presented five awards, a very kind woman at our table asked me the never-ending question about....socialization. It's like the Dorothy and Toto jokes for those of us who live in Kansas ~ I sometimes was to say, in a voice rich with sarcasm, "You know, I have never heard that one before....!!") Those battlefields, we know how to prep for those. But what about our own internal battlefields? What about those nagging fears that every mother has, but the homeschooling mom has on st...

#Goals Unless you have been living under a rock for the last couple of years, in the social media sense, then you have most likely seen hashtag/Goals floating around. Millennials seem to love throwing this term around. To be honest, it's not a bad concept. We all have goals, right?  So I was thinking about this idea of goals, and how using the hashtag almost sort of puts those goals "out there" for the whole world to see. It's like a unique form of accountability, in a way. If everyone knows your #Goals, then it stands to reason that everyone can check in with you about how those goals are coming along. Several years ago, when I was relatively new to this whole homeschool thing, I wrote out a list of goals for us. I typed it up in a fun font, cleaned it up and centered it, printed it out and taped it to the kitchen wall (also known as the homeschool classroom). There is was for several years, right at my eye level in the room where I spent the majority of my...

Socialization. The one word homeschoolers dread hearing the most! Why is it that people so readily assume that, if you homeschool, you and your children must have so much trouble making friends? interacting in social settings? holding a normal conversation? living life as a human being on this planet? As women who home educate our children, we deal with this whole "socialization" thing on a multitude of levels. When we first decide to homeschool, we may lose some old friends who just don't get why we are doing this. As we continue to homeschool, we may lose some friends because our time is allocated more toward our kiddos education and less toward normal "friendship-y" sorts of things. If we ~ GASP! ~ dare to continue to homeschool into the high school years, we again face the prospect of losing some friends who homeschooled in the younger years but feel high school is a bridge too far, for whatever reason (some of those reasons are legitimate - this ...