If You Want to Hear God Laugh, Tell Him Your Plans

Since I last shared a post here, our family has grown!  Much to our surprise, a new baby arrived into the mix two years ago.  As a result, this past year we had three children in college, a daughter learning at home with the Classical Conversations (CC) curriculum and local CC community, and a curious toddler enchanting us all amidst the mayhem.  Our oldest daughter also got married last summer, and thus we have added an amazing son-in-law to the family as well!

Making a mid-life transition back to being the stay-at-home parent has been both tough and delightful.  Homeschooling with a baby was certainly not on my bingo card of life goals!  But in my late forties I know better how quickly delicate newborns transform into babbling babies and then energetic toddlers. And I can anticipate how suddenly children sprout into teens and then young adults.  Consequently, I tried hard to savor the early months with our youngest baby boy.

Meanwhile, as a parent who was brand new to the rhythms of homeschooling, I had many expectations that didn't match our challenging reality.  But thankfully my daughter has gotten some of her father's gifts of administration and she managed to stay on top of things. We also were buoyed by the weekly community day where she could interact with an experienced tutor and her peers. I doubt we would have made it through these past two years at home without that critical structure, support and accountability.

This past year I was thrilled that we were invited to go on field trips with the CC students and parents.  Field trips were one thing I was truly excited about doing once we decided to try homeschooling.  I even bought a membership to the DuSable Black History Museum because it offers reciprocal privileges at other museums and educational attractions.

For my teen daughter, going places with her friends added much more to the appeal. Last fall, we went on two field trips with the part of our CC community.  The first was a trip to Broken Wagon Bison, a local ranch in Hobart, Indiana.  Even before we heard about the group opportunity, I had already wanted to go there because we were reading the novel Little Britches: Father and I Were Ranchers, by Ralph Moody, as part of the Challenge B exposition (ELA) strand.

The second group field trip was to the Illinois Holocaust Museum Presents Experience360 in Chicago.  The exhibits were impactful, and we also heard a live presentation by a holocaust survivor who described how she hid with her sister in a barn in France. One reason we went here was to deepen our understanding of what Jewish people endured at that time, as a follow up to reading The Hiding Place, by Corrie Ten Boom.  The previous year, we also read Number the Stars, by Lois Lowry, which was set in Denmark.

During that first year of homeschooling, my daughter was learning world geography as part of the Challenge A (7th grade) debate strand (which equates to social studies).  Learning all fifty US states and  their capitals was one of the early assignments.  One day as we drove on the highway to Valparaiso, we spotted license plates and tried to name the capital of whichever state was on the plate.  I have since turned that interactive review activity we did into a printable page that tucks into a Geography Fold-and-Go Travel Kit with other printable activities, like ad lib fill-in stories, a prediction game, and a map of the US and Canada to color.  

We hope to go on a short road trip or two this summer and enjoy putting those screen-free activities into action.  Once school starts, our opportunities to roam for field trips and other adventures will diminish, especially since my 14-year-old is registered to attend the same local high school where her older siblings went. For the first time, it will likely be just me and my youngest son at home during school hours.  We will surely miss his big sister, as well as his brother and 20-something sisters and brother-in-law when they are away at college and in the workforce.