If there’s something that I can say about homeschooling, it’s that it will make you flexible. I’m the type who likes to do a lot of research, and before our children were school aged I’d researched, planned, formulated, you get the idea. In any case, I had so many idealistic, formalized ideas about what our lives as homeschoolers would be like. What our educational philosophy would look like. What we’d allow and wouldn’t allow.

Isn’t life funny though? Homeschooling has stretched me and made me more flexible. Part of it is obviously that the ideas I’d picked up weren’t true convictions, but were rather external philosophies I adopted and tried to make my own. Other times I realized that my children needed something different than I thought they would, they turned out to have different needs, and be different people than I thought they would be.

We were never going to use ‘readers’, we’d go straight to reading ‘real books’.  We were never going to use computer software to supplement one-on-one teaching, it was going to be all Mom, all the time.  And we were definitely never going to watch silly cartoon movies on DVD, we would be media-free.

I’m not saying that we’ll always do these things (life changes, and we have more children coming up the pipe), but yes – we do them sometimes, we do them…often.  And that’s okay.