Mom & Pop Home School

This blog is primarily maintained by “Mom”, but is mostly about our family which includes “Mom” and “Pop” and our beautiful, intelligent, creative, innovative, polite and otherwise marvellous children, “Cricket” and “Sunshine”.

“Mom” is a full-time stay at home wife and mother and enjoys (almost) every minute of it. Mom has a BFA in illustration from the Savannah College of Art and Design, but motherhood has brought some challenges that have needed to take priority over Mom’s artistic career, though she has had a couple of pieces exhibited in a local art museum, and often functions as a “creative consultant” in Pop’s work. Mom loves to read, quilt, garden, cook, and just make home a great place to be for the whole family. (But she is slightly challenged as a housekeeper, and if you didn’t know that already you probably will if you hang around for any length of time.)

“Pop” owns and operates his own business in which he creates custom on-line games and other interactive internet development services. Pop is a Flash GURU! He’s also a fabulous husband and father and all around swell guy. Although most of the home schooling around here is done by mom, she definitely could NOT do it without Pop’s support and assistance.

“Cricket” is nine years old and doing “fourth grade” at home this year. He’s very bright and is particularly fascinated right now by history and science. His passion is for anything creepy or crawly, but especially crickets–house crickets, field crickets, camel crickets, you name it. He likes crickets much more than he likes people. He also enjoys a variety of computer games. Cricket went to public school for kindergarten through third grade, and had a lot of amazing support from the wonderful faculty and staff. Cricket has some neurological differences that make functioning in a classroom environment very stressful and difficult. By the end of third grade the stress was so extreme that we decided to try home school during the summer (2006) to see how well it would work for our family. That way, if it didn’t work out we could just jump back into public school with no time lost. We’ve been so pleased with the experiment that we’ve decided to continue home schooling Cricket this year, and probably at least for several more years (though we’ll play it by ear and try to do whatever is best for him and for the family).

“Sunshine” is four years old. She has always been one of the most cheerful, energetic little souls I’ve ever known, although now that she’s four she’s got a little bit of a Jekyll/Hyde harpy thing going at times. But she’ll always be my sunshine girl, and I’m sure she’ll grow out of this phase (may it be SOON). Sunshine loves ponies and kitties and butterflies…and anything pink or purple. She loves to run and climb and sing and dance and is always good for an adorable sound bite (you’ll probably get to read some of the real gems here). I wasn’t planning on preschool for Sunshine, but Sunshine loves–make that LOVES–to “play school” with us. She gets in on most of our science labs and sits and listens to our reading in all subjects. During math she counts and sorts beads and makes color and shape patterns with them, or puts together her number puzzles. She has her own handwriting book that she gets out when we do our writing assignments. And the rest of the time she colors or draws on the marker board or “helps”. She is definitely Mom’s little helper.

We have been blessed with very supportive family and friends who have encouraged us in this new adventure and have expressed an interest in how things are going for us. We’ve found some supportive new friends to help us learn the ropes amongst the homeschooling community, answer questions and soothe worries. I am not a very consistent correspondent, and I know lots of our friends have not heard from us for quite a while (sorry!). It’s not because we don’t love you, it’s just that there always seems to be some juggling of one kind or another going on around here and I’m just not together enough to do much in the way of letters and phone calls. Hopefully this web site will help remedy that situation at least a little. Come be a fly on the wall at our house, and we’ll chat a little via comments, and at least keep track of one another a little bit. And we may even pick up some new friends along the way! Thanks so much everyone for your patience and support as we muck our way through this thing called life.