Imagine the warm glow of a candle lighting the corner of your dark kitchen where the aroma of your favourite tea is filling the air as it steeps. Notes of lemon balm, and the sweetness of rose hips are soothing to the mind. Your most used mug sitting next to the tea pot awaiting the arrival of that warm, nourishing tea paired with the sweet smell and flavour of local honey.
Your mornings can start out slow, intentional, and filled with a deep connection to who you are. But this isn’t the reason you choose to homeschool, there’s a deeper relationship to that decision, one filled with love, laughter, memories, and time with your family, the ones who mean the most to you, that you share four walls with.
Our decision to take the home education route for our daughters wasn’t taken lightly because it can directly impact our children’s future, however we felt the benefits outweighed the potential drawbacks. When you’re an involved parent, especially in today’s education system, you really start to rethink the way your children are being treated and spoken to in a school. It starts to boil up within you until you hit your explosive breaking point.
For us, it was a lot of bureaucracy. It was seeing and witnessing things first hand that shouldn’t be happening. The way our children are physically handled or spoken to, shouldn’t be from a place of disrespect or crossing the line, it shouldn’t even be toeing the line between right and wrong. But, when you witness it first hand and are silenced, that makes waves in your decision making when it comes to the public education system.
Our girls have grown tremendously in the past three years of our home education journey. I’m calling it “home education” because I’m not recreating the rigidity of school in our home. I’m creating a more calm, caring, interest driven space where our nervous systems feel safe, we aren’t living in survival, and we aren’t burned out from the rushed mornings and long days. Our girls were on the bus at 8:00am, and weren’t home until 4:00pm. At 5/6 years old, that leads to burnout before Christmas…and that IS a problem. It’s a serious health problem, physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually…Never mind the energetic body too.
We’re a single income family, and that doesn’t make home education (or homesteading for that matter) any easier. There’s a lot of extras when you choose to home educate, but if you budget and prepare yourself for them, it doesn’t hit as hard. Running and keeping a solid budget is well worth it, so you know your ins and outs, and what to expect financially in the next couple of months (this is a post for another day).
Choosing home education has provided our family with so much more than just “keeping our kids out of government schools”. The quality time we have gained and get to spend as a whole family, has changed our daily lives. We’ve gained hundreds of hours back with our daughters, we cherish their love, their laughter, and their saucy attitudes. We love to watch them grow and change, their creative talents are ever evolving, their physical abilities are on a consistent growth pattern, and they’re not really missing out on anything. They have a small circle of incredible friends, they’re physically active and registered in extra curricular activities, and they really just make us so abundantly proud with how beautiful their souls are becoming.
redhavenhomestead.ca 