The kids and I spent many, many hours laying on the floor or sitting at the kitchen table or on the sofa correcting homework, reading, drawing, etc., etc., etc. On Friday, Christian hit a new milestone by passing his PhD qualifying examination. He has not finished his schooling yet, but has moved from PhD student status to PhD candidate status. He has anywhere between two and a half and four years before he has a chance of finishing, but that he passed his PhD qualifying examination on Friday was a very big deal. Many of the people with whom I have spoken on the topic say that is often the most difficult single part of the PhD process. Lorena and I looked at a bunch of old pictures while we celebrated and got a little nostalgic. Mostly we reminisced about how fast it all went. All-in-all, because we sent the kids to government school for three years (counting kindergarten), we homeschooled them only a total of seven years and one of Christian’s years was really preschool. We would not trade those years for anything.
Betty Blonde #408 – 02/08/2010
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Christian sent me the paper he wrote as partial fulfillment of his qualifying examination and will turn it in later today. He does the oral qualification examination for his PhD on Friday, his last day as a teenager. What a great way to leave teenager-hood. Actually, he has done much more than we ever anticipated he might do by this time in his life. He has a few more classes after this, but the bulk of his time will be spent on identification of a research topic (he has a pretty good idea what it will be, but needs more specifics) followed by research for his dissertation.