From the Happy Holidays to Happy Homeschooling

I've not been posting too much these days because I'm working 32 hours/week, plus was hosting for Christmas this year and was busy getting ready to homeschool Penny. She brought up the idea of trying homeschooling back in September, but then decided in December that she definitely wanted to do it. We've just about finished our first week and so far we're both really enjoying it. It's made for some good bonding times together, already. Now we can go back and get her caught up on subject areas and English at her own pace.

For Thanksgiving, we went over to Jay's parents, who just live across town.
For Christmas, my (Chandra's) parents came from SD, as well as my brother. Jay's sister also came from Limon along with his folks.

Having my dad and brother here was very helpful, as they helped me move furniture into our homeschooling room. My mom also helped with some organization. We've been blessed that we have so many people who have gone before us in this homeschooling venture. So, we've already received lots of advice and even free materials that we can use for our homeschooling. Penny decided to dub the name of our homeschool as "Happy Homeschool". I was pleased to find out that I qualify for an educator's discount card at Barnes & Nobles. Thanks to the kind gifts of some of my preschool families at the school where I work, I was able to use gift cards to purchase some books and a calendar/planner for my lesson planning, all for free. Not to mention, that Jay won a free laptop computer from his work's Christmas party. It just seems that God is providing everything that we need to begin this new journey. We're sensing lots of affirmations along the way. We're privileged to be in a town with some great home school networks/associations. In fact, just in the Christian homeschooler's group, alone, there are at least 140 families as members. In fact, we have a nice Christian family just about a block away from us who are welcoming Penny to come over and work on her homework while I'm at work.


One thing I can say for sure, it sure is nice to know that Penny is starting to relax more and sleep better. Public high school was turning out to be way too stressful for her. And when your child is feeling distraught it can really make parents upset, as well. Having never been a part of the large public high school, myself, it was quite a major culture shock for me, too. I like the teacher to student ratio much better now. If only we could always have those ratios at preschool! Hope you all had very Happy Holidays! And we'll check in when we can now that we've launched our new "Happy Homeschool"