About

Current status

I am leaving the original “about” section below so we can remember how we all started and will periodically update this with our current status.

Update September 6, 2023

• Ken and Lorena: moved to the Fort Worth, Texas area
• Lorena earned an AA degree (college transfer) from Clackamas Community College
• Ken: earned a Ph.D. in Natural Resource Sciences from University of Nebraska Lincoln — hooding ceremony in December
• Kelly: Continues at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
• Christian: Continues at MIT Lincoln Laboratory

Update March 18, 2020

• Christian: Scientist at MIT Lincoln Laboratory
• Kelly: Scientist at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
• Ken: Started a PhD in Natural Resource Science at University of Nebraska Lincoln
• Lorena: Working on her AS at Clackamas Community College

Updated March 24, 2017

• Christian: Fourth year PhD candidate at Arizona State University. Worked as an Information Theory researcher at MIT for the summer of 2017.
• Kelly: Passed to PhD candidacy at University of Washington in 2016 but decided to take her MS and go to work so she can get experience to decide what she wants to do next–continue on to her PhD or stay in industry.
• Ken and Lorena: Currently living and working in Washington State, remodeling our house.

About the blog

This blog was started in 2004 to chronicle our second pass at homeschooling.  Dad (Ken) is the principal author¹.  We homeschooled the kids until Kelly was in second grade and Christian entered Kindergarten.  After two years, we moved to Albany, Oregon where we left them in school for one more year.  The school was so bad for our children, we decided we needed to get them out of there. We looked at some of the private schools in the area and decided a return to homeschool was our best option. We are still grateful to the Albany, Oregon public school system for giving us the impetus we need to return to homeschooling. I started the blog in April of 2004 when we knew we were going to pull the kids out of government school and I had started to investigate homeschool systems and products again².  We finished homeschool, depending on how you count it, one to three years ago.  It has been such a good exercise and a nice way to remember things, I decided to just keep going.

About the homeschool

Homeschools are commonly run by a stay-at-home mom with the dad helping out on subjects for which he is better qualified when he gets home from work.  We ran our homeschool a little differently.  I did all the planning and implementation of the academics while Lorena did all the work.  I had great joy for the first month of summer because I spent that time choosing and buying the books and other materials for the next school year.  Lorena saw it as a relief from daily running around to classes, music lessons, tests, and sports activities.  She says she was the lunchroom lady, janitor, and nurse of the homeschool.  Here is how a typical day usually went for both of us:

Lorena

• Wake the kids up and give them breakfast
• Make sure they are working through the stuff given to them to do
• Make lunch
• Run the kids to swimming, piano, guitar, gymnastics, soccer, tennis, or other lessons
• Make dinner

Dad

• Go to work a couple hours early (usually about 6:00 AM) to get off early to help with homeschool)
• Arrive home at 4:00 PM to correct papers for an hour while the kids play
• Help with math, spelling, art, etc. for an hour before dinner
• Read for an hour with the kids after dinner
• Prepare/adjust the next day’s plan for each of the kids

About Christian

Christian is a sixth generation Oregonian.  At the time of this post (April 2016), he is a PhD candidate in his second year in Electrical Engineering at Arizona State University and a research fellow of Fulton School of Engineering with sponsorship from MIT Lincoln Labs for work on Information Theory. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Applied Mathematics (Summa Cum Laude) from North Carolina State University. He skipped high school by achieving a good enough ACT score to be accepted in college when he was 14 year old.  He is into running, swimming, and plays classical guitar.  Spanish was his first language.

About Kelly

Kelly was born in Florida.  At the time of this post (October 2016), she is a PhD student in Management at University of Washington’s Fulton School of Business with a research area of Marketing Strategy.  She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Statistics (Magna Cum Laude) from North Carolina State University. She skipped three years of high school by achieving a good enough ACT score and had passed enough CLEP tests to be accepted into college as a sophomore when she was 16.  Kelly wrote a daily comic strip called Betty Blonde for two years.  Her first comic strip in the NCSU student newspaper will be published tomorrow.  She also loves to run, sing, and plays piano.  Spanish was her first language.

About Mom

Lorena was born and raised in Monterrey Mexico.  She is a stay-at-home mom who is three quarters of the way through an Associate Degree at the community college.  She has faithfully worked out at the YMCA four days per week for many years.  She is game to live just about anywhere that is within fifteen minutes of a Costco and a Trader Joe’s.  She ran her first half marathon a couple of years ago.  Spanish was her first language.

About Dad

Dad is a fifth generation Oregonian.  He is a machine vision engineer, has a black belt in judo and a Master’s degree in Industrial Engineering, and loves having been a homeschool parent and maintainer of this blogger.  English was his first language.

About the family

We are Christian.  We speak Spanish at home.  We did almost everything together all the time when the kids were at home so we are suffering a little now that we live many miles apart from each other.

Footnotes

1. The kids (Kelly and Christian) have written some and Mom (Lorena) has even written once or twice.  And there were a couple of posts by a good friend (Giles).  But, in the end, this is Dad’s blog.
2. My first attempt at blogging was with a now obsolete, flat file, blog program.  After I switched to WordPress, the first chunk of my blog was missing.  I eventually pulled all of the original blog posts into the blog, but all the photos from that first set of posts are missing.  We have all the images and I hope to have enough leisure time someday to add them back into the blog.