As my oldest edges towards kindergarten this fall, we’ve found ourselves flip-flopping regarding all of the options available for educating our kids. In the age of the internet, there’s no doubt that the world and its resources have opened up to almost all of us, and so the nature of general education has begun to shift too.
I’ve mentioned a few times on this blog that my husband and I weren’t sure how we wanted school our lot. After spending the last five or more years achieving our (new to us!) debt freedom, our priorities and our ability to budget for them have developed and shifted drastically. We’ve finally settled on homeschool for our family’s needs (at least for now), with the support of an awesome weekly co-op.
But there’s more to our choice than that.
We knew we wanted the ‘every day’ to look a little different for us, especially in the early years of our kids’ learning journey. We wanted to minimize stress for ALL of us as much as possible, while maximizing both family time and life experiences at the same time. That is not an easy balance my friends, and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t take a whole lot of planning, soul searching, and quite frankly some serious ‘dying to self’ to move in that direction finally.
I am not a ‘born’ homeschooler. I haven’t pursued the call; on the contrary, I’ve shushed at it for as long as I can remember. But the reality is that we want to prioritize the opportunity to stand beside our children and see the world, and allow its possibilities to come to life before them. We want to foster a sense of adventure and limitlessness that we pray will follow them into and enlighten their own ‘every day’ for the years and decades to come.
We can’t do it all. We couldn’t send them off to public school and still balance their learning requirements alongside the amount of travel we’d like to do with them. We couldn’t live in a huge house in the best neighborhood and still afford to leave the state every couple of months or so. And we couldn’t preach to them about how huge and wonderful the world is, and how they should experience more than just what is laid before on the average day, without taking them by the hand and making it a reality for them.
