Our Story

After all of these years of home schooling my kids and now they are grown, I still get the same ol’ questions. Why?  How did you get started? How did you know you could teach them? And the list goes on!

This is our story…..

I have three children, at the time Brianne (our oldest and only daughter) was in public school and Joey was just a toddler.  I was pregnant with our youngest, Keenan. Brianne had an amazing teacher and she was a Christian lady and was an exception to the rule of most public school teachers.  Before you bash me for saying that, I have taught in the public school system too!

I was a very involved mother, I did all the “right” things.  I planned the parties, helped with the reading groups, also tutored the math kids that were struggling.  I was always involved in all of her things and knew all of her friends and loved watching her grow.

I am going to sound like a typical proud mother here, but the fact is, Brianne is not your average kid when it came to school.  Her teachers always told me she was 2 grades ahead of her class.  Learning just came easy to Brianne.  She would rather have her nose in a book then play Barbies or do anything outside.  I would force her to go outside and she would take her book and climb a tree and read.  See, I told you, she wasn’t your average kid.

There were several occasions when Brianne would bring home questions about things she had learned in her text books etc.  One night, we were sitting around the dinner table talking about our day and when asked what she learned in school today she proceeded to say ” we learned about all kinds of families”. Kraig and I looked at each other and asked what kind of families did you learn about.  She told us that her Social Studies book had all kinds of examples of how families should be in it, “you know, ones with two mommies and two daddies and some live with their grandparents when mommies and daddies are gone, and some even just live with one mommy or one daddy.”   We were so shocked!  She was in the third grade and they were teaching them about being gay????

The following day I asked Brianne to bring her text book home so I could see it.  When she came off the bus with no book I asked her if she forgot to bring it home and she said, “no, the school won’t let me bring my books home”.  This prompted a meeting with the teacher. The teacher was apologetic and informed Kraig and I that the school policy was to keep their learning materials at the school.  One must ask why?  Didn’t our tax dollars purchase those materials for our children?  We were able to browse the text books while in her classroom and found that the Social Studies textbook promoted gay life styles, and things we found to be something we should be teaching in our homes not in public school systems.  This was our first “ping” that things needed to change.

As we continued through the year, we noticed different things we weren’t in agreement with in her curriculum. I continued to stay connected with her teacher and her class activities but something inside Kraig and I kept saying we needed to do something differently.  With the last day of school approaching, we decided we would research all of our options during the summer and figure it out before the next school year. I had talked in great lengths with her teacher about some of the options she had and that was the first time I had heard of homeschooling.

Then the last day of school arrived.  I overslept and Brianne missed the bus.  She was devastated! I couldn’t understand why she was so upset about not riding the bus. You see,  she rode the bus with another school in the county.  It was called Jefferson County Open School.  It is a school for kids who can’t “make it” in public school.  These kids were mostly older but some were as young as nine or ten. So the morning that Brianne was so upset she proceeded to tell me that Ashley was bringing her baby to show them.   Silly me, I assumed Ashley might be the bus driver!  I rushed Brianne to school so we could meet the school bus and she could go see Ashley’s baby.  The bottom fell out of my stomach when a 10 or 11 yr  old girl was on the bus showing her baby to entire busload of little elementary kids.

I approached the bus driver and asked if that was her baby and she said no, it’s Ashley’s.  She whispered , “I’m pretty sure Ashley had a baby as a result of incest”.  The nail was in the coffin.  The straw had broke the camels back!  My eight year old daughter did not need to be exposed to such things at her age.  How do you explain incest to a 3rd grader????  And why does a 3rd grader need to know about gay parents? And, why were not encouraged to see what our children were learning?  Oh Lordy!

Thanks to the encouragement of her teacher, and alot of praying and soul searching on how we wanted to raise our family, Kraig woke up one day and said “we need to home school our kids!”   Our journey began ….