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JodieLyn
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| Posted: March 30 2009 at 10:45pm | IP Logged
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Why do I stay home? hmmm I didn't want other people raising my babies.. neither did dh.. it was never a conflict that I would stay home so we never delved into it much for reasons.
Reasons it's good that I'm home. I contribute a great deal to the household budget by what we do NOT spend. There's two sides to every budet.. the money coming in and the money leaving. My contribution is keeping the money leaving under the money coming in. DH brings the money in. By being home I have time to cook from scratch, to comparison shop, to do all those things that save money. Do I always use the time wisely? or can fit everything in on any given day.. no way.. but I CAN do it.
My babies are raised by me and my dh.. and their siblings  and it's good.
Why we homeschool?
My dh's schedule is the antithesis of the typical school schedule. When he'd have time at home, they'd be in school, when they'd be out of school he'd be working overtime. Bad bad news for family life. This way when he's off, the kids are here too. 
I love that I have that one less inflexible schedule to deal with.
I love that we can set our own daily schedule and our wake up time and bedtime.. and if we need a day off mid-week or if we do school on a saturday.. it all works. (and yes I've had kids pull out workbooks at the oddest times just because)
I love that my kids are around each other more than they're around other people. How well would my 12 yr old know her 2 yr old sister if they only saw each other at dinner and a bit of the evening that homework didn't gobble up. Instead, the 12 yr old is 3rd in line (after myself and dh) for who the 2 yr old goes to when she needs something or is hurt etc.
The ability to adjust teaching styles and content is wonderful of course. And the fact that they use what they learn more than if they sat in school. My daughter didn't even know that she was multiplying by 3's when tripling a recipe  because as she learned to cook I taught her to double or triple the recipes long before she got to multiplication in her math books. Just from being with me, she knows how to comparison shop (important skill) and she was impressing people the other weekend as cashier for our lacrosse club tee-shirt sales.. she was figuring totals and counting change faster than the adults who were there to help her  Both things she learned to do by working with me and shopping with me, not from a book.
I have kids that tell me they love a subject and are good at it even if they're behind in it.. because there's just no real comparison.. here the numbers on the books are just the order of the books not grade levels.
I like that my older kids gain in maturity and responsibility without getting the full dose of mock-adult non-sense.
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Jodie, wife to Dave
G-18, B-17, G-15, G-14, B-13, B-11, G-9, B-7, B-5, B-4
All men who have turned out worth anything have had the chief hand in their own education.
-Sir Walter Scott
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SuzanneG
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| Posted: March 31 2009 at 2:00am | IP Logged
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Here is a past thread with some more input: Why Do you Homeschool?
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Suzanne in ID
Wife to Pete
Mom of 7 (Girls - 14, 12, 11, 9, 7 and Boys - 4, 1)
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crusermom
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| Posted: March 31 2009 at 7:54am | IP Logged
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I was a working mom for quite awhile. I found I was never at peace - never fully at work, never fully at home. Being able to quit and stay at home was like a dream come true. Yes, there are days it is very hard - but I would never choose to go back to work full time and not even part time for quite awhile. I am thankful that my husband has good job security (the Army - looking good these days!)
I believe that God gave me these children and the most important work that I can do is raise them. They are the treasures I am storing up. No matter how important my job is - it can never be as important as this. Yes, the day to day can be very menial and tiresome. You need to have the big picture.
"You can be something to everyone or everything to someone." I think that is Chesterton, and it is so true. I am the only person that can be a mother to my children. No one else. They deserve that.
If you feel you are depressed or have low thyroid - see a doctor. Do you need more support as in IRL friends? The housework, the mess, the homeschooling are all challenges and will be challenges probably as long as you have little ones around. You are doing a job with eternal significance - you need to really see the importance of this - or else it would seem so much easier to bring them to daycare.
Mary
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Mary
Army wife and Crusermom to 8 wonderful children!
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JodieLyn
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| Posted: March 31 2009 at 11:16am | IP Logged
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Oh Mary.. I have the quote from Chesterson on hand.
Quote:
How can it be a large career to tell other people's children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one's own children about the universe?
How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No. A woman's function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute. I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her task; I will never pity her for its smallness. ~G.K Chesterson
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Jodie, wife to Dave
G-18, B-17, G-15, G-14, B-13, B-11, G-9, B-7, B-5, B-4
All men who have turned out worth anything have had the chief hand in their own education.
-Sir Walter Scott
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Cay Gibson
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| Posted: March 31 2009 at 1:09pm | IP Logged
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All by Domestic Felicity (a lovely Jewish blog):
The Love of Home
Our great potential at home
College or Marriage?
Days at HomeHome, the forgotten realm
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Cay Gibson
"There are 49 states, then there is Louisiana." ~ Chef Emeril
wife to Mark '86
mom to 5
Cajun Cottage Under the Oaks
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RamFam
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| Posted: March 31 2009 at 1:57pm | IP Logged
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Thanks for sharing your reasons and the links. I will begin reading as soon as I conquer Mount Launder.
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Leah
RamFaminNOVA
Tom ^i^, Kyle (my Marine), Adeline '00, Wyatt '05, Isaac '07 Philip '08,Michael '10, and John Xavier Feb '13
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happymama
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| Posted: March 31 2009 at 7:04pm | IP Logged
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Leah, I want to tell you that recently I have had a lot of the same thoughts as you mentioned in your original post. My oldest is an amazing, helpful, bright child, and on my "bad" days I feel so bad for not doing more with him. Instead of forging ahead in a subject he loves, I am storming around complaining about new messes, trying desperately to tread water with house keeping. BUT I also know that in school he would be one of about 20 kids stuck in one room for 8 hours a day... Away from the siblings he loves so much, subjected to influences I don't like, and so on. I pray at least he will grow up with a realistic idea of what family life is really like. We intend to send him to school eventually, but I think the foundation we're giving him now will help enormously later.
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crusermom
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| Posted: March 31 2009 at 7:18pm | IP Logged
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Thank you for the quote Jodie! Thank you for the links Cay! Inspiring.
Mary
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Mary
Army wife and Crusermom to 8 wonderful children!
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SallyT
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| Posted: April 03 2009 at 9:58pm | IP Logged
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Hi Leah --
I'll be praying for you. I've just been dipping in and out of here lately, as I am increasingly doing some work from home and cutting down on forum-reading time, but wanted to answer your questions.
Background: I have worked part-time with one child, had two children in preschool/part-time daycare, and then my oldest went to school for four years. We now have four children; our youngest two, six and five, have never been to any kind of school, and I have always been home with them.
Why do we do what we do, with me at home, albeit working from home a couple of hours in the afternoons:
1. I won't belabor here the reasons we changed from school to homeschooling, because they were honestly a lot more personal than philosophical. I will say that I do not miss having to stay on a school schedule, which our entire family found exhausting. As tiring as homeschooling can be sometimes, I found it much harder to have to get people places and pick them up -- whatever "free" time I might have had during the school hours evaporated so fast between school runs that it really wasn't that productive.
2. We want to be the ones who influence our children the most. That's not to say that we shelter them completely from outside influences, because we don't. But we have them most of the time. The fruit of that, in the last six years (the time we've been homeschooling), is that we have older children, 11 and 15, who like to be with us and don't consider time spent at home as a kind of sentence that they have to get through until they can be with their friends again. They do have lots of friends, but mostly homeschooling friends with the same kinds of family-oriented values, so their outside relationships reinforce, rather than erode, their family loyalty.
3. I honestly love learning with my children. Yes, it gets old now and then, and this time of year I start to feel burnt out. But I love choosing books, love reading together, love watching them have little epiphanies -- when those happen! -- about things like reading and writing.
4. Ditto what someone else said about helping the family budget by controlling a lot of the "outflow" of funds. One of the best things that ever happened to me was that a friend gave me a copy of The Tightwad Gazette. I'm not a total tightwad, but I have learned some tricks and skills which help us to live in reasonable comfort on one decent-but-not-enormous income. Seeing that I can cut our budget, especially our food budget, which was always our biggest item, helps me to feel more that a) I'm contributing to our financial picture in concrete ways, and b)that I have some control over things like this. Those realizations are very empowering.
5. We love having family (well, and God and Church) as the organizing principle in our life -- homeschooling and my being home means that we HAVE a home, in the sense of a safe center, if that makes any sense. We're not all going different directions, doing different things, and our older and younger sets of children (our kids are 15, 11, 6 and 5) don't lead the totally separate lives they would lead if they were all in school. The year our now-6-year-old was a baby, his older siblings were both in all-day school, and I remember thinking that, gosh, it was nice to be with the baby, but they older kids hardly knew him. Now our 15- and 5-year-old daughters have time to be together and be friends -- and of course homeschooling also is free of the age-segregation mentality which school can reinforce.
6. Homeschooling enables us to go to daily Mass, and things like our parish Holy Hour on Thursday nights, which I'd be much less inclined to go to if I had to get everyone in bed to be up in the morning to go to school. Granted, my youngest child is old enough that these kinds of things are just starting to be easy and feasible, but that time does come, and I'm grateful that with greater and greater actual ease we can avail ourselves of the Sacraments and the Church's life of prayer, without fitting things in around the edges. We're converts, and I started taking the kids to Mass when the youngers were 2 and 1, and it was a discouraging experience then (and I wasn't very intentional about it for a long time), but I am glad I even made the gesture of making the effort, because somehow even half-trying imprinted itself on all our minds -- that daily Mass was there, and we could go to it, and this was a good thing. I would not give that up now, even if the best school in the world opened across the street. (also praying at home, starting our day with prayer -- until very recently that was also really chaotic, but we did it, and it's my favorite part of the day).
7. Housework and laundry have gotten easier as kids have gotten older, though I will lay no claim to being a great housekeeper. I am a pretty good cook, though honestly that's the thing I get tired of the fastest. Many days the very thought that I have to come up with a meal, or even put a plan into action for a meal, makes me exhausted, and I get sick of thinking about food when I'd rather be thinking about something else. But we get through it . . . and the budget really proscribes eating out, so I have to come up with stuff to eat. Sometimes it's kind of a challenge: what can I do with the five weird things left in the cupboard the night before grocery day? Now my oldest can make dinner if need be, which helps, but my husband is a total non-cook -- I can't imagine what we'd eat if I were not at home to coordinate these things, even in my own slapdash way.
I was a rotten cook when we first married, too. I have found that rather than having a great quantity of cookbooks, having just a few that either teach techniques (like Julia Child's The Way to Cook, my hands-down favorite) or present whole menus (Vegetarian Pleasures by Jeanne Lemlin is my other favorite, though we're not vegetarians), or educate about food and nutrition as well as just supplying recipes, is a golden way to go. I'd just assign myself a certain section of a cookbook to work my way through, learning some new tricks or basic techniques that could be varied and built on, and then I'd move on to something else when we got tired of, say, variations on baked chicken for a month solid. I still have a fairly small basic repertoire that can be varied with different sauces, seasonings, vegetable accompaniments, etc. And I only do something really ambitious about twice a year, maybe, for a holiday.
Uh, I think I'm wandering from your questions, but I think the ultimate answer to why we homeschool and I stay home is that I like freedom. I like being answerable to God and nobody else, really. Well, and I like raising children who can think and talk and form positions and convictions and teach themselves things and learn alongside us. I like sitting down, as I did today with my 11-year-old, to talk through what we're going to do next year. Working with them is intellectually stimulating to me. I think I might start to be brain-dead if I weren't homeschooling.
So -- I don't know if any of that's helpful or not, but those are the reasons I come up with when I ask myself why we're still doing this. And I will say that this year has been so much easier than the last, as the younger kids have matured. Previous years have been far more chaotic. Actually, it's weird that this year should have been harmonious, because we moved to a new town in August, the teenager was unhappy for a while, we've been doing the whole finding-things-in-boxes routine, and so on. But we have stayed home a lot, since we're new in town, and our life has been simple, and I think that's contributed to a lot of the peacefulness of the year. (and the teenager's made friends and is on a prom committee, so life is good for her, which makes the whole house happier . . . )
And as I said, I am working -- I've been writing for a magazine on an adjunct basis for a couple of years, and now they've put me (very modestly) on their payroll, so I have to produce a little more regularly than I had been. That means a couple of hours most afternoons I have to make myself at least halfway unavailable to the kids. This would not have worked when the youngers were really young, but at this stage, it seems to be okay so far. I only took this gig because it's REALLY something I want to do, and because the people I'm working with know me well enough to know that I'll only do so much and no more, and they share my values when it comes to things like family and homeschooling (my editor is a homeschooling father himself, so we're on the same page). I would not have gone out looking for work; this came to me, in God's time, and I'll do it as long as it doesn't encroach on family and homeschooling. Otherwise, it wouldn't be worth it to me.
OK, making up for months of not posting, all in one post . . . It is good to stop by and "see" everyone. I do look in on prayer intentions and pray for you all regularly, and Leah, I'll certainly be praying for you.
Sally
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Castle in the Sea
Abandon Hopefully
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4Real Forums : Mothering and Family Life
Topic: Why?
