Day: May 4, 2009

Long time no post is a good excuse to use bullet points!

• We’ve already planted a dozen things in our garden! A couple of weeks ago Mom and Christian and I bought two cherry tomato plants (yellow for Christian, grape for me) two normal tomato plants, lavendar and basil. Saturday afternoon, Dad and I went to the Wal-Mart and got cucumber, pepper, cantaloupe, carrot, beet, radish, zucchini, watermelon and chive seeds. Mom and I planted those on Saturday evening.  I even made cute little popsicle stick signs for them!!  I’m super excited for the plants to come up.  We still need lemon cucumbers, chard and lettuce, but I have no clue how we’re going to fit them in the boxes.
• I don’t know if it was just me, but I think that the special meeting we went to yesterday was one of the most amazing ever. Words really can’t describe how helpful it was to me. It’s embarrassing to say, but I usually listen on and off at meeting! 🙁 This time I took in the entire thing, and I am so so so thankful for that.
• Swimteam starts May 18!! We’ve already started talking to all our old friends.  Everyone is super excited!!
• I’m going to start a series of interviews with random friends and relatives for the blog. I think Grandma Conchita will be first, as she has a close-up look at swine flu in Mexico… 😉

I think that’s it. Thank goodness for bullet points!

On my drive into work this morning, I listened to a morning talk show guy interview a public school official who seemed to be quite smug.  The school district had just won an appeal to the state supreme court and won the right to force kids into year-round schools of the districts choice, even if it did not work out for the family.  A little later, I found an LA Times article on Slashdot about how difficult it is to fire bad teachers.  There was some horrific information in the article.  We lived through some of that same kind of horror when our children were in the Albany, Oregon public school system.  Some of it is even documented on this blog.  It was good to have some more confirmation that we made the right choice to homeschool.  The crazy part is that, in spite of the really weak academics and the horrendous socialization at both the schools in Oregon and the schools in our area of North Carolina, many parents praise them as great schools because they never took the time to figure out what is really going on.

That got me to thinking that it is kind of sad that most people decide to start homeschooling, not so much because they think homeschool is good.  They start homeschooling because the alternatives are so bad.  That was certainly true in our case.  We did not realize, until after we had done it for awhile, that homeschool was the very best option for our family on just about every measure.  Our kids were especially better off socially, but they were also better off academically and with respect to health and happiness.  Now that we have some experience, we do not think so much about having had to leave a bad school with bad teachers because we see the positive benefits of homeschooling daily.  Still it is good to have a reminder every now and then of why we stared in the first place.