All About Me...

"This week, we want to hear about YOU. The author behind the words. The Momma behind all the homeschooling kiddos. Just write up something about you, your family, and your home. How long you’ve been homeschooling and why you decided to homeschool."

This is the first weekly theme from Homeschool Blog Awards. I've decided to participate in this meme, mostly because it will give me an incentive to update my Blog more than once every 9 or 10 months! I've wanted to post more regularly, but I've just not made time for it. Now, I've got a goal, and a motivator - thank you Homeschool Blog Awards!

Ok, about me... I'm a 42 year old, child of God, stay-at-home, homeschooling mom. I also handle the office end of my hubby's contracting business and am active in our church. I have been married to my Jr. High Sweetheart for over 24 years! We have four wonderful, beautiful children, two of which are already adults. We did not homeschool them... by the time I'd considered homeschooling, they were in upper Middle School and High School and they were WAY smarter than me, so I just let them finish out their Advanced Placement and Honors classes in the public school system and they turned out just fine... both are in college and working and terrific people.

My hubby and I met the summer before I started 9th grade and we've been together ever since. We married a month after I graduated High School. We lived in Michigan. Right after we married, my parents retired to Florida. We stayed in Michigan about another 2 1/2 years and then decided to move down to Florida, too. I've always been very close to my parents, and couldn't live 1200 miles away from them any longer! We ended up just a mile away from them, and we've been so blessed because of it.

We lived in a mobile home when we first moved down here, that my dad had arranged for us to buy, sight unseen. It was very, very old, and pretty small, and in an All-Adult park of about 10 trailers. It was cheap enough that we could afford it no matter what jobs we were able to get. About 6 months after we moved in, it was destroyed by a tornado and we had to find a new place to live. God's grace was upon us, even though we weren't aware of it, even back then. We found a new trailer to buy, with the insurance money from the old one, and continued making small monthly payments to the owner of the first trailer - which he had agreed to, for us. Right after moving into that new trailer, we found out we were pregnant with our first child. Amazingly, God had already gotten us out of that "Adult-Only" trailer park, which was a huge blessing, since we would have never been able to sell that old trailer and get into something else, somewhere else.

Anyway, we got pregnant with our second child about 8 months after the first one was born and I knew we wouldn't be comfortable raising two children in a tiny mobile home, so we started looking for a home to buy. We found one getting ready to be forclosed on (which back then, the realtor couldn't tell us, he just advised us to "bid low"). We bought our home, moved in before baby number 2 was born and we are still living here 19 years later! We have added on to our home so many times that we've actually doubled the square footage of it.

We were both working full time and raising our children when my hubby decided he wanted to try starting a business of his own. He'd been in construction since he was 17 years old, so we took a leap of faith and he began his own drywall contracting business. After about 3 years of him being in business, I was finally able to quit working and stay at home.

At this time, our third child was about 1 1/2 years old. I did preschool with her when she was 4 and she just shined! We both really enjoyed that year! When it was time to put her in Kindergarten, our local school's principal (who had been the elementary principal when my two oldest went to that school) decided to take a new job at a charter school and about 17 of the teachers from our elementary went with him. I panicked! It was summer and all I could think was that we were going to have nothing but substitute teachers teaching and with my daughter being so smart and so social, she would be nothing but trouble to those inexperienced teachers. (I have to edit this to add I don't think all substitute teachers are inexperienced...but in our county, they only have to have graduated High School or obtained their G.E.D. and pass a test to be a sutstitute - the test is at about an 8th grader's level - they'll let anyone basically be a substitute here and we have many, many subs who have never gone to school to be teachers.) I checked out Christian schools in our area, but they were so expensive, and she knew almost everything that they would be teaching her in Kindergarten already, except how to tie her shoes!, I didn't want to pay $300+ a month for that! Two of my good friends (who had both gone to school to become teachers and actually had teaching degrees!) talked me into trying homeschooling, as that's what they were going to do with their children who were also ready to start school. I resigned to homeschool "just kindergarten" as it was easy... she knew almost everything anyway, and I couldn't mess it up, much. We jumped in, loved it, and we've been going strong for 6 years now. Our fourth child was born in 2000 and I began Kindergarten with him when he was just 4 years old. We've had a two student classroom for four years now (three students if you count me, as I am learning a lot right along with them!)

Well, I'm sure I've typed and told way more than anyone wanted to read, and I'm sorry if I've bored you. If you're still reading this far in, thank you for your patience! I'm hoping to get to know some more Homeschooling mom's through this meme! I'd love to hear any comments you have about my post.

Until next time... I hope you have a Blessed Day in your homeschool!

Lisa