The Old Schoolhouse Magazine

Homeschooling When It’s Harder Than You Bargained For

When we begin home- schooling, we can’t al- ways foresee that inevita- bly there will be months, perhaps even years, that threaten to sink us. We start with a plan, whether it’s a preorganized and carefully controlled curriculum or an eclectic mix we’ve pieced together ourselves with our children’s strengths and weaknesses in mind.

We design our days to give us the most bang for our buck, stacking schoolwork together in the morning to get it all done and to leave us room for the non-nego-tiables such as laundry and meal prep or the fun stuff like dance lessons and sports teams. Once we get in a groove, our school days can run like a well-oiled machine.

And then life unfolds.

I had been officially homeschooling for
one year when I became pregnant with
our fourth child and the sixteen weeks of
unrelenting morning sickness kicked in.
I would fill big Tupperware bowls with
Cheerios and leave them on the floor of
my bedroom so my kids could feed them-
selves breakfast while watching Sesame
Street. I couldn’t muster the strength to
get out of bed, day after day, week after
week. Still, school had to happen. Life was
progressing with or without me, no mat-
ter how many times per day I found my-
self crouched over the toilet.

In the toughest, most
trying times, when we
feel we cannot possibly
do what God is calling
us to do, He refashions,
remakes, rewrites,
and redeems.

A child who screamed for the first fifteen months of her life. A coyote attack on our chicken coop. A baby in a coma. An accident involving our twelve-pas-senger van and a 5-year-old. A ruptured appendix and three weeks in the hospital. I’m not waxing poetic or pulling examples out of my imagination; these are the events that have marked the fourteen years of our homeschooling. These are the real experiences that occurred when