The Old Schoolhouse Magazine

grandparents, and to continue to learn the subject.

TOS: How did your business grow?

Nancy: I started contacting different companies, because at the time, companies didn’t have lapbooks that went with their curriculum. With Geography Matters, we ended up doing all of their products. We continued to step out in boldness and contacted Apologia and TruthQuest History. Michelle Miller from TruthQuest really helped promote us. And that first year, we headed out to Dallas and did our first homeschool convention. Before we knew it, we’d grown into a fulltime, full-blown business.

TOS: Did you face many struggles?

Nancy: When we started, I was homeschooling four children, and Paula was homeschooling two, and my daughter Candace was blind. About eighteen months into our business, we would learn that Candace had a terminal brain disease.

From 2006 to 2009, we weren’t sure what would happen with our business. I spent about three hundred days in three years at the hospital. And we went from about thirty products to about four hundred in that three years. My daughter passed away in 2009 from Battens disease.

Most everything you see from A Journey Through Learning was written in the hospital. That was my sanity. I always say that God gave us A Journey Through Learning as a joke, but He knew that it was really going to be my journey. The name was just amazing in the end. So even through that trial, we continued the business and traveled, and it’s been amazing.

TOS: Tell me about your family.

Nancy: I have two biological children. Lindsey is in medical school, and Lauren attends ETBU, a Christian college in Texas.

We adopted my son Cameron—who’s now
sixteen—from Guatemala when he was nine
months old. And a year later, we packed up
three kids, traveled to China, and adopted a
blind six year old. The whole story is mira-
culous. I wrote about it in The Candace Kate
Story, More Than a Memory. God brought
her into our lives. We wanted no more
children. But every day I’d check the web-
site, All God’s Children, where we adop-
ted Cameron, as part of my prayer time. I
saw Candace’s picture on the website but
never mentioned it to my husband. About
three days later, we were pulling out of the
driveway, and he said, “There’s a little girl
in China that’s blind, and we’re going to get
her.” He received an email at work from All
God’s Children—he’d never received one
before and has never received one since—
and Candace was in the newsletter. It was
God from the beginning.
When she passed away,
we weren’t sure our busi-
ness would survive. I had
never experienced depres-
sion before, and I went
into a three-year slump.
It was all I could do to get
out of bed and get my kids
to school so I could crawl
right back into bed. I hid it
well. And I wish, in hind-
sight, I would’ve asked for
help. It hurt my kids and
my husband and me. We
need to not be ashamed
of depression. We need
to reach out. I never even
reached out to Paula. But
luckily, A Journey Through
Learning survived. And now we create for
about twelve businesses, including Classi-
cal Conversations and Apologia. For the
first time, we didn’t do conventions this past
year. I was diagnosed with an autoimmune
disease three years ago, and it got the best
of me this last year. But, we’re hoping to get
back on the road this year.

TOS: Any advice for homeschoolers?

Nancy: My poor oldest child is so structured and organized. I was scared of her not succeeding. We didn’t have fun and do crazy things. By the time my son started school, I’d been homeschooling twelve years. He was jumping off the pool table in his underwear doing math problems, and swimming a lap for every spelling word. There are so many ways to do school other than sitting at a desk, which is the reason we homeschool.