My Top 3 Reasons for...

Our next house not being in the country

  1.  Maintaining a swimming pool costs you an arm and a leg because all of

       nature's cast offs end up in the water and screw up the balance.  

  2.  Busy country road = no bueno for riding your bikes anywhere

  3.  Walking to the store can be hazardous to your health (see #2).

I'll take this one!

Being thankful that our kids are getting older

  1.  Date night.  Happens way more often now that they aren't wee ones.

  2.  They are much more "convenient".  If we want to go somewhere drop of

       a hat, we tell everyone to get in the car and we go.  No extra clothes, no

       extra luggage, we just go. 

  3.  All of them know how to read.  I have a love hate relationship with teaching

       kids how to read.

Not being a helicopter mom

  1.  I'm just not that motivated.  Seriously.  

  2.  They gotta make mistakes at some point and thank God they know they

       can talk to me about them.

  3.  I want them to be their own person.

Being myself

  1.  I could say all the above things and not feel guilty or worry about what

       others think.

  2.  I kind of actually like the real me. 

  3.  I'm not a pretender searching for myself anymore.

Only 6 Weeks Away...

...school for the kids that is!  Having surgery not only changed my life but our kids lives too.  Being told "hey you might not have made it through" makes you really evaluate things in your life.  Makes you look at what's really important.  The kids were on spring break when we came back from Mexico and they never went back to school.  

We cannot say enough good things about the Middleton School District.  Teachers and staff were wonderful.  All the bells and whistles you could ever want in a school.   However they weren't home.  Home for school.  For the most part, it didn't both us too bad.  At first.  The kids were content for the most part.  I was crazy busy with work and with going to school myself.  Jason was crazy busy with his job.  Little by little something just didn't seem to quite fit.  Like there was a piece of our lives we were missing out on.  A piece that we have always known should be there.  Enter life changing surgery.  Exit public school.

After the exodus to home, something really odd happened in our house.  A crazy phenomenon really.  The kids liked each other again.  The constant bickering stopped.  Siblings became friends once again.  Oh, and the dog lost weight since she was no longer sleeping the whole day away.  The missing piece had been put in place.

We tinkered with math and language arts for the remainder of the year and read a lot of books.  After being in school for the last almost two years, they needed a break.  I needed time to wrap my brain around what we had just done, even though I knew it was the missing piece.  Brain wrapped...let's do this!

I'm jacked for the new school year.  Really!  I've been slowly buying books and am getting closer to the end of the list.  We are using some old favs and we are gonna try out some new things.  I love the smell of books and I really love getting mail now days.  I can't wait to buy school supplies.  It's an addiction.  Really.  All those cheap crayons and notebooks make me giddy.  Who doesn't love the smell of scotch tape, glue sticks and new pencils??  Maybe it's just me.

Our journey isn't for everyone.  Our schooling choice isn't superior to others.  Our journey and methods and stances and outlook have changed a whole lot since we were last in the homeschooling sphere.  Thank God!  Truly.  As I put it on my Pintrest board, we are homeschooling without all the stereotypes.  You won't find a single jean jumper in our home.  EVER!  You won't even find us having "family worship" as part of our school day.  GASP!  NeWsFLaSh:  We may be homeschoolers but we are all original in the Waitley casa, cut from a very different cloth.  All of us are jacked about that.

(because who doesn't love the Dos XX guy!)