Happy New Year! (Onward with homeschooling!)

Hi friends, remember me?! I used to post here, regularly, with stories and pictures telling about our family's adventures. I'm hoping to get back to it as I have so many pictures to post from the holidays. For now, those will have to wait, but I wanted to post this while I was thinking about it.

At the end of last semester, Nathan and I made the tough decision to pull Amos out of school and start homeschooling him. It wasn't an easy decision but we felt that for Amos and for this stage of his life, that homeschooling would be best for him.
We were starting to notice that his heart and attitude were regularly in bad places, and that he was picking up things at school that were subtle yet not good. We realized that because of the timing of school, we were getting Amos' worst hours and energy of the day and that was really sad to us. We also weren't comfortable sending him away to be "parented" by his teachers and peers, at his age, with having little to no information about what was going on during the day. And we felt like with him only being 5, that the time constraints and stress of waking up, hurried breakfast, hurried homework in the afternoon, and hurry to get through the evening so he could go to bed at a decent hour, were just not worth it, again, for our five year old!

So we are going to give it a try. We are borrowing a curriculum, Sonlight, that will give us daily lessons and will loosely structure the day according to the schedule that Amos grew accustomed to, at school. He ended the semester well and we were happy that we weren't changing school options because of his behavior or because he didn't do well. He thinks of it fondly, so if he does have to go back, it will be an easy transition.

We are following our parental guts here, so I'll keep you updated with how it goes.
For now, we are excited and a bit anxious, but mostly happy to have Amos home again with us, with a schedule we can dictate and information of which we know the origin.
We started today, with an informal school day and it went really well. I think Amos will miss being with his friends, but there are other opportunities for him to play and be with them, so that might be the hardest part of the transition.

This morning, Amos asked me what we were going to do today. When I replied, "I don't know," he said, "Can we start homeschool?" And even though I am not prepared, I decided yes, to start today and we ended up having a great day. the only hard part was figuring out what to do with Flannery, who always wants to be involved and is teething, but we worked through it and had some good lessons in counting to 100, space, matching and reading.



***Thanks to all of you who helped me process through this. It's been a tough roller coaster that at times, has been more emotional than rational, but I feel happy that we've decided to try this and will know how both school options work out for our family.***