Homeschool Adventures

I can say with utmost certainty that homeschooling is not for the faint of heart! It is not for every child, nor for every parent. I speak as one having been an homeschooled child, and now as a parent who is homeschooling.

Obviously there are challenges. What's not so obvious is the kind of challenge one will face.

Such as, the "motivation" factor. What is used to motivate one to get one's work done (public school, home school, employment, whatever-- everyone needs motivation) is not going to be the same for every person.

The public school system had a difficult time with providing "motivation" for my Girl. She's incredibly intelligent. . . and lazy! Kind of like her dad, my dear Hubby. She's always off in la-la land instead of doing her work. "Work is boring. I hate doing work," she often tells me (or writes some variant of that for spelling words!). I've been struggling lately with finding proper motivation for her (that is always a challenge with my Girl).

This evening during our quesadilla snack, I mentioned that she's smart, but that this work would be easy if she would just do it. "All you have to do is get it done, but you'd rather stare at the ceiling!"

Without a moment's hesitation, my smarty-pants and witty Girl said, "Well, there's a speck of dust up there! I have been wondering how it got there."

How much like her Daddy is my Girl! I am still giggling over that, and just felt the need to share that bit of wit, since she definitely didn't get "witty" from me!

To wrap up, homeschooling is challenging. Finding ways to motivate anyone with external factors is extremely difficult, particularly when the one you are trying to motivate has no internal motivation!

And now for a little chuckle at a plan my Girl came up with, being that she misses her daddy so much. Hubby is deployed, as most of you know. He is all the way across the globe somewhere-- far enough away that no homemade goodies make it there without some sort of foreign growth (at a minimum). My Girl came up with a plan of how to ship herself there, after she learned Daddy's address.

"I'll put myself in a box," she said, "and put Dad's address on it. I'll poke air holes in it so that I can breathe."

I replied, "It's a long way, Sweet Pea, and it'd take about a month to get there like that. Probably not a good idea. Also, you'd probably run out of oxygen."

"Oh, don't worry," she said. "I'll bring an oxygen tank, a flashlight, bottles of water and MRE's, so I'll be fine!"

Yeah, she is much wittier than I am! How on earth am I supposed to respond to a 10-year-old who's got that much planned for mailing herself?


Perhaps that will also give some of you some idea of how hard it is for kids to deal with a parent being gone (deployed)-- and this was after Hubby had been gone for only 3 months. What's next?

~~Cedeham