Our Story

Before my husband and I got married over eleven years ago, we worked through a book called Preparing for Marriage with a mentor couple. In one section of the book, we were to reply to questions about how we saw our future...questions such as "how many kids do you plan on having?" and "will your wife work?". I recently pulled our books out and I had a good chuckle over our answers...obviously at the time, we had NO IDEA that God had planned for us to homeschool. Both of our answers about my working were that I would return to work once all of our children were in school...I guess in our case that probably means college :)

When we got married, I was in the middle of working toward my M.Ed in Elementary Education with plans to work as a teacher until we were blessed with children. I graduated in May 2001 and a few short weeks later, as I was preparing to begin scheduling interviews for teaching jobs, we found out that we were expecting our first child. I have to admit that at the time I was quite shocked...that was not "the plan"...but the shock wore off quickly and I was soon looking forward to welcoming our new blessing into our family.

In January 2002, we became first-time parents to a beautiful baby boy...shock #2 ~ the sonogram showed that we were expecting a girl! Once again, it took but a moment for my shock to be replaced by utter joy...we named our first born Ryan (instead of Emma :) and we embarked on a wonderful new adventure.

Once we became parents, we felt the need to re-examine our schooling choices for our child (and future children). The kindergarten program in our county school system was in the process of transitioning from half-day to all-day...and the school our son would attend would be all-day by the time he entered. I had worked as a teacher's aide in a half-day kindergarten class while I was training to be a teacher, and I knew that even a half-day was a long day for most k'ers...especially boys. Neither my husband nor I were comfortable with sending our son to all-day kindergarten...so we began praying for guidance and researching our alternatives ~ it was at this time that we were first introduced to homeschooling.

Up until this time, neither one of us knew much of anything about homeschooling. I hadn't even known that people did that sort of "thing" until coming across some articles on homeschooling a few years prior during my one of my M.Ed classes. But the more we researched, the more we became convinced that homeschooling was God's will for our family.

Our family continued to grow ~ we welcomed Abby in 2004 and Caleb in 2006...and all of our childen have always been at home with me. Do we plan to homeschool through highschool? We don't know what God's plan is for our future...but that is our desire. Do we feel like everyone should homeschool? Nope, we believe that is a decision that every family must make for themselves.

And that is our story so far...