Jim and I were both homeschooled. Of course, hindsight being 20/20 we’ve forgiven our parents the cruel cruel torture of not going to public school, and can now laugh at the fact that we were homeschooled in the 80s and 90s. That was back when you had to hide from truant officers and lie to the grocery cashier (kidding not kidding). But when we were newly married and still going through our “We’re not going to do anything like our parents” stage, we were both determined that our son would get to play high school football, and our son would get to have an actual GPA and real transcripts to go to college, and our son would get to take the cheerleader to prom. Hahahah…ahem. Then that son made his debut… early…and lived in the NICU.  Then those NICU days turned into endless appointments with specialists and therapists and those dreams of high school football, turned into dreams of just surviving toddlerhood. I remember talking to a therapist and his early intervention preschool teacher, and they asked if we’d considered homeschooling. The audacity.  They said they thought he’d thrive better with one-on-one attention than he would in the public school system. You’ve never seen such flummoxed parents. We had to give up all that angst and start over from scratch.

How were we going to homeschool? We were from the era of homeschooling where you got to choose between Abeka or Bob Jones, and Saxon was what all the new cool moms were using. We knew how to play in a homeschool band, quote large swaths of the Bible in Old King James, and wear a denim jumper (well that was just me), but we’d never even heard of Charlotte Mason, Classical Conversations, or Unschooling. So glad though, in the end, we wouldn’t trade it for anything. Even four boys and a host of learning challenges later, we’re so grateful for that early intervention preschool teacher for not seeing our child as a cog in the system, but as someone who deserved something different.