Oh, y’all. You parents out there right now who NEVER entertained the idea of Homeschooling. You never wanted to do such a thing. You think you CAN’T do such a thing! These are absolutely insane times. So many of us are reeling from day to day. One of my favorite memes is one that says one day we’re baking banana bread and running 3 miles one day, and the next day, we’re drinking gin at 9am. I used to say there are few people more bi-polar than 2 year olds, but I take that back. I think many of us are feeling some pretty deep emotional swings every single day. The people on my heart specifically are all you parents out there who have no idea what to do with your kids this year. We are now at the end of July. For many of you, your kids normally head back to school in early August. And your school district has either said, “Nope, No school for you,” or provided you with options that you just don’t like, or options that are quite literally a complete impossibility for your family. Far too many of you are in impossible situations right now. For now, I just want to speak to those of you who are slowly realizing that Homeschool is the best of all your bad options.

I want to speak platitudes, I really do. I want to say, “This can be a GREAT thing for your family.” But I recognize the reality. A very popular phrase that’s been going around is that “Crisis Schooling is not the same as Homeschooling.” And so many of you are feeling like you are headed back into Crisis Schooling, which is what you spent the Spring doing. So here’s the thing…if you are feeling forced into Homeschooling this year, then COMMIT to it. Otherwise, you’re just going to be Crisis Schooling. Take this year, decide that YOU are the best option for your kids this year, and go with it. Let’s figure it out! The best numbers I could find were from 2016, which estimated about 3.3% of U.S. kids were homeschooled. Recent data has suggested that this particular year, it may be a 400% increase. 400%!!!!!!! YOU ARE NOT ALONE! And you CAN do this. You truly, truly can. I hear two phrases re homeschooling over and over and over: (1) My kid needs his school friends, and (2) I don’t have the patience.

For #1…yes, your kids have school friends. Your homeschooled kids will also have friends. Except YOU have to actually a little work on that. You have to join local Co-ops or Homeschool Meetups or get to know your neighbors. I will absolutely guarantee you that my 7 year old is as much as or even more socialized than your pubic/private school kid…except her friends range from the 2 year olds to the 80 year olds in the neighborhood. If your kids do any Extracurriculars at all, they’ll be fine (last winter, my daughter did tennis, horseback riding, 4-H, Gymnastics, Ballet, and Choir…plus an active, weekly Homeschool Group). Does that sound like she was stuck at home as the “weird, unsocialized, homeschool” kid? A Homeschooling bonus is that you actually have TIME to do all the extracurriculars. As for #2…PATIENCE. I had zero patience when I started Homeschooling. Zero. Y’all know the saying about asking the Lord for patience, right? Don’t ask Him for patience, because then He’ll put you in situations where you need it. Well I have NEVER asked the Good Lord for patience. No way, no how. I knew what might come my way if I did. Here’s the thing about Homeschooling. The Patience comes second. Now some of you sweet, few, blessed Mamas were just born with your soft voices and calm demeanors. I’d guess the rest (most) of us are mostly screaming banshees in our natural state. So I always laugh a bit internally when someone tells me they aren’t patient enough to homeschool. Honey, none of us are. It’s like the Chicken and the Egg. No, it’s nothing like that. It’s like this…Homeschool first, Patience follows. Very few of us attain the Patience character trait FIRST.

There are as many ways to Homeschool as there are Homeschool families. If you have very young kids, then quite frankly, you could pull them from school and follow an “Unschooling” plan…read books from the library, visit local nature centers, animal parks, observatories, museums…follow your kids’ rabbit trails. Start baking with your kids, and they WILL learn fractions! Play card games and a ton of math follows. Our favorites are Skipjo, Skybo, and Garbage. Read, Read, READ!!!!! That can be Read Alouds that you do with them, Audiobooks, Podcasts, whatever…your kids do not have to be reading on their own, or even enjoy reading on their own, for you to make reading a priority. There are plenty of bedtime apps that consist of books/stories being read aloud. That right there…that’s reading for your kids. I’m going to go off on my personal tangent now…read up on developmental stages of children. We are doing it wrong in our country! VERY FEW children are developmentally able or ready to read at age 5. And yet that’s what our education system insists. Children MUST read at the end of Kindergarten. This is farcical and sets the stage for many bright, highly intelligent children to be sent off on mediocre paths that last their entire school career, merely b/c they were being forced to do something their precious, tiny brains were not developmentally ready to do. If you have a child in the K-2 window, then RELAX! Your child will read when your child is ready to read. Throw out the idea of what “must” be done, what “has” to be done, and instead, learn what your kids enjoy, how they learn, what is the thing that puts a spark in their eye? GO WITH THAT!!!! In touching base with friends around the country and hearing about the different plans from district to district, my honest take on it is that there is almost nothing you can do to your younger kids in the next year that would make them LESS competitive with the kids who are heading back to “traditional” (it WILL be anything BUT traditional) school.

I specifically mentioned younger kids. My daughter is only 7. I have zero experience with the teen crowd. But I sure have a lot of friends homeschooling teens. Some of them put their teens in regular school, and the trauma of bullying was so intense that their kids begged to come back home. Some have always homeschooled, and the teen homeschooling is a follow on. ALL of them speak to the challenges of homeschooling a teen. As much as I wish I could be your gal help on that, I’m just not. Ask me in another 7 years! For now, I will just say again, YOU ARE NOT ALONE! There ARE people around you who are either going through what you are experiencing or who have been doing this for years. Desperately seek out those people and glean from them. I’ve yet to meet a Homeschool Mama who isn’t completely open and welcoming in holding out a hand to someone trying to join them! (Not bashing the amazing Homeschool Dads, here…They are awesome, too!).

One of my absolute favorite sayings comes from Julie Bogart, of BraveWriter, “There are no homeschool emergencies.” Doesn’t that just make your shoulders drop down an inch? Or two? There truly are no homeschool emergencies. Repeat that. No emergencies now, not six months from now. Now sure, you may find yourself moved to a new state and realize school just started, yet you never filed with the local school district the required homeschool paperwork, and now you are panicked that the Truancy Officer is on his/her way to your house, even though your rational brain realizes that said Truancy Officer would have no idea you actually just moved to the state. But whatevs. I’m just speaking for “a friend” here about hypotheticals. Truly, there are no homeschool emergencies. I LOVE weeks where we throw my carefully crafted lesson plans out the window and meet fellow homeschool families at a field trip or just at the park or head to the zoo or find out about a cool, State Park Ranger talk. Those end up being our best weeks, by far! The enrichment opportunities for homeschooled kids are ENDLESS!

Let me give you a window into our last year, my daughter’s “2nd grade” year (you’ll find in the Homeschool world that many times, grade levels become quite arbitrary). We moved across country over the summer of 2019, moved into our house in August, and had one of our toughest moves we’ve ever had just in terms of logistics. As a military family, we are a “two weeks and done” move in family. That means all boxes unpacked (3 days), all things put away (10 days), and house finished by 2 weeks. Four weeks if we count curtains up – we are Curtain Procastinators. You may not have met this species before. I’m still feeling shell shocked from this move. It took us MONTHS to get unpacked, and considering my husband and I are both pretty CDO (that’s Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, but the letters are now in their proper, alphabetical position), this move was HARD!!! On all of us. We’d come about 60% of the way through when my husband’s LOOOOONG delayed promotion was all of sudden, “You’re promoted, when do you want to have the ceremony?” What???? We had so many family and friends who wanted to be present, we had a house not nearly ready, I needed to plan an entire weekend event in a city I didn’t know, and my homeschooled daughter was getting some basic core schooling and that was about it. You know all the fun stuff we get to do as homeschool parents…tons of Art (do schools really even get to teach Art anymore? I don’t know.), Nature Hikes, Zoo Trips, local Museums, Science Experiments? All of that became afterthoughts that happened occasionally throughout the fall, rather than the regularly scheduled events that is our “normal.” We got through the fall, the holidays happened and took over early Winter, and after Christmas, we FINALLY hit our stride. We had routines, we had lessons, we had tons of extracurriculars. And by the end of the school year, even though I felt like a total failure as a mom, wife, and teacher, I could look back through my daughter’s portfolio of work and see that she’d done amazing work…WE’D done amazing work together! So here’s the thing…we as moms are far harder on ourselves than any one person or any outside influence is ever going to be. And that’s what actually makes me an amazing teacher for my kid. And it’s what will make YOU the best teacher for YOUR kid this year. Even if it’s not what you want to do or feel called to do.

So now…concrete steps. What should you be doing now? I’m not your Arbiter, Judge, and Jury. Your choices are yours alone based on innumerable factors that apply to YOUR family. But in my limited, personal experience:

(1) Make a decision…this is actually your hardest step. But once you MAKE A DECISION, you have a path open to you, you know who to contact, how to proceed, what research to continue with. WHAT IS YOUR CHOICE? It is entirely yours as the parents. If you feel stuck and powerless, pull out paper and write down every single choice open to you. Traditional school, if your district is doing that. Virtual school. Private School. Homeschool. Buy an RV and drive away from all the noise. Whatever it is…MAKE A DECISION and COMMIT.

(2) Breathe. You made a decision. Relax. You are now ready to face what comes. You now have a single path forward rather than 18 that are keeping you up at night. Take out another sheet of paper and write down all the things you need to research based on the path you have chosen.

(3) Rest. Take a walk with your kids. Talk to them. Get their input on the path your family has chosen. Find out what is important to them. Incorporate their ideas.

(4) Join local FB groups focuses on your chosen path. They will be a wealth of information. Reach out to your friends and family for guidance and help IF they are good options…but absolutely do NOT let those folks tell you what you “should” do. Remember, everyone has to make decisions based on their own family dynamics. It does not matter what Best Friend, Sister, Mother, Father, Mother-In-Law, Uncle, Starbucks Barista thinks. It. Does. Not. Matter. Free yourself RIGHT NOW of the voices of other people in your head. Seriously.I know they are there! Stop reading right now if you must and FREE Yourself!

(5) Do some initial research. Do NOT try to figure it all out immediately. For Reals! Do that initial research to get some ideas percolating, and then…Let your brain relax for a day or two. This has been a stressful few months with no sign of it abating, so think of three things that will help you relax your brain. While your brain is relaxing, it will be working in the background, so you can come back to your chosen path calm and ready to take action. (As an aside, I recently did one of those Salt Water Floats in a Sensory Deprivation tank…ummmmmmm…AMAZING! If you need to turn your brain off, head on to one of those right now!).

(6) You may feel under a time pressure. If you are homeschooling, and your local school district is starting traditional or virtual classes in 2 weeks, then you might think you have to keep that schedule. YOU DO NOT. You have time. There are so many gifts that come out of homeschooling, but one of the biggest is TIME. Time with family, time with your kids, time to take a break when your kids need it OR when you need it. Time.

And finally, y’all, this all sucks. It really does. I’m a total introvert and LOVE staying home. But even for someone like me, I don’t want to live in a world where I’m surrounded by masked people. I don’t want to live in a world of “social distancing,” (even though I’m secretly happy that I might never have to hug other people again). I don’t want my child growing up in a world where “The Virus” is the dominant thought. I don’t want to live in a world where every action becomes a political statement…or where every silence becomes a political statement. I don’t want to live in a world behind Plexiglass. I don’t want to live in a world of outdoor activities only. We are all handling all of our thoughts, fears, and hopes in our own ways. To add on top of all of that the desire to do right by our kids, to make the best decisions for them in a world of chaos, to try to ensure they are living a “normal” life as well as shielding them from the chaos we are experiencing…well, let’s just try to remember to offer Grace and Kindness wherever and whenever we can. That’s what we want our kids to do, right? Let’s make sure we are leading them by example. Every day has become something none of us could have even imagined six months ago, so let Grace lead your way.