Klara is in the “but, Mama!” stage.
“I don’t want to be a butt Mama,” I tell her. “Can I at least be a knee Mama? Or an elbow Mama?”
She thought about it and came up with “head Mama” which makes me feel like I’m the head wife in a polygamous cult. I’m hoping to persuade her to go with ankle Mama.
OT: Dunno if you’ve seen it yet, but the CDC just voted 15-0 to add the cooties19 shots to the childhood vax schedule.
Actual policy on that stuff gets decided and enforced at the state level, but most states unquestioningly adopt the CDC’s recommendations, and that becomes required in order for kids to attend school.
FL has already said they will not comply.
We are bracing for the next wave of internal migration to FL, plus another doubling of the homeschool numbers. I guess HSLDA will be hiring again…
If you’re not planning to get these shots for your kid, now’s the time to be researching whether your state requires it for private schools, whether your private school requires it, if/how to get a religious/medical exemption, or (I’m not recommending it, but I know it’s happening) where in your area you can hand someone a wad of bills and get a (wink wink nudge nudge) “shot” with requisite paperwork etc. It’s coming.
Can you afford a nanny, and simply do “school” in your off-hours? AFAIK, there’s no rule that says you have to keep the same hours/days as the school system. It’s awkward, but there are working parents who manage it. In some states you have to approximate the number of hours/days that the school system uses, but most states don’t require that, and we find we can do all the formal educating we need in 2-3 hours a day, maybe 4 days a week. Still works out to a lot, because any time you go to a museum or a park, or on a hike, or out biking or swimming… or even have a robust discussion about how lungs work, or read a historical marker, or listen to an audiobook: BAM! Education! Put it down in the logbook as art/history/P.E./literacy/foreign language skills! Same goes for any activities your kid is signed up for– music, dance, sports… It doesn’t have to look like school to be education.
Might be a good time to poke around and familiarize yourself with the basic legal requirements in your state, maybe find your local homeschool FB group and ask questions there– they’re the experts. HSLDA has a pretty good overview of regulations by state:
Thank you for the link! I am not too worried about doing the school off-hours, it is the babysitting/nanny part that is the hard one for various reasons…
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Yeah, we certainly couldn’t get a nanny, but if we were in that situation and could afford it– heck yeah we’d do that!
A lot depends on the age of your kids. For various reasons I was homeschooled in 8th grade, with two parents working full-time. What we actually did was, my parents made some basic curriculum choices, and when they’d leave for work in the morning, I’d walk down to our neighbors’ house (they were homeschooling their two younger-than-me children), and spend the day with them, their mom would supervise my mostly-self-study work, I’d participate in whatever field trips or science projects they were working on (we dissected a pregnant shark!), I’d meet up for a literature discussion with a few other teenage homeschoolers one afternoon a week at the library, and in the evenings I’d discuss my history readings with Dad.
So… try to think creatively about your resources, in terms of friends, family, neighbors, what and who are available to you. Who knows? You might be able to come up with something and still be able to work.
IKR? The only reason we put in so many hours is because I’m not using the public schools’ standards. I need my kids up to MY standards, and THEIR standards, which are much more demanding.
Right now, my 10yo is doing Algebra I because he demanded it this year (“but Maaaaama, Singapore Math 6 is just doing BABY algebra! I wanna do REAL algebra…” well, okay kid, if you insist…) and reading flight manuals in his spare time. He wants to be a pilot. In another two years it’ll be some other obsession, most likely, but that’s fine. He’s learning a lot of incidental physics from the flight enthusiasm. I think we’ll be OK 😉
Obviously, before you take such a drastic step, you should check with your kid’s school and see what they say about it.
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I know they’ll resist to the last. It’s a private Christian school. But it helps me psychologically to accept the baseline scenario. I get very anxious about anything that concerns my kid’s health. It helps with the anxiety to know I’m in control of the situation.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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