16th Blogoversary Post

 16 years ago, George W. Bush was in the final days of his Presidency, Illinois Senator Barack Obama was about to become the 44th President of the U.S., the Chicago Cubs were nine months away from going 100 years without winning a World Series and a little blog called Home School Dad published it's first post, Why We Homeschool.

That little blog still exists, in fact, you are reading it.  Its name has changed since then and may change again, as I mentioned in my last post.

In the inaugural post, I answered the title question with 2 pictures and 7 words.  The words were: Three precious reasons: Lucy, Emma, and Charlie, and the pictures were of the aforementioned children. The post did not go into further detail but one of the main reasons why we home-educated our children was part of a concerted effort to build into our children a Godly character.  

Those reasons are all now adults and the youngest is 5 years removed from her last homeschooling, unless you count her Freshman year of high school where she was having school at home because of COVID. At the moment, all 3 of our children are at home until the youngest goes back to Champaign later this month.  

In the past few months, I have had sufficient opportunity to evaluate the character development of all our kids.  Each of my children has talked with me or my wife or both of us recently about individual issues they are going through.  I'd detail them here, but it wouldn't make it through the vetting process.  They are handling these issues in a mature and Godly fashion.  After we talked to one of them yesterday my wife reminded me that their response was a specific answer to prayer she had sent to our church just a few months ago.  I can also see the beginning of adult friendships taking place between them.  We just came back from a trip out East to a family wedding and most of the family squabbling was relegated to me and one of my siblings who accompanied us on the trip.  

I don't look back at our home school adventure as a qualified success.  However, on the 16th anniversary of this blog, I am glad to look back and see that God has at least used it to help meet some of  our purposes for it.  

Why we Home School Part II

Pictures, they say, are worth a thousand words. You also don't have to use spell check on them. I used pictures in my first post to communicate why we home school. Pictures of our children. If my wife and I didn't have any children, we probably would not home school. We'd spend far less on curricula, at any rate. The truth be told, Amy and I wanted to home school our children even before children came into the picture. We actually separately desired to home school any children God might bring even before we were we.

The reason we had wanted to home school was that when we separately spent time with home school families and liked what we saw. We saw children who were sharp, well behaved, and knew how to talk with adults. We saw Dads and Moms and children who were unified as a family.

When we got married and became parents we wanted to be the main influences of our children. Not because we thought other people would do it worse, but because it would be a great blessing to do it ourselves.

Now, I must be honest, there are times that if we want to spend time with children who are sharp, well behaved and know how to talk to adults, we need to spend time with other people's home schooled children.

But now a full 9 years into this great home school experiment, we would not have it any other way. Which is why when I lost my job this summer, we said "let's both apply for jobs and whoever doesn't get one first gets the privilege of teaching our own children." And I won!

Next Time: The old switcheroo.

Why we Home School Part I

Three precious reasons: Lucy, Emma and Charlie!












Next time: Beginnings Part I: When I first heard about Home Schooling.