“A garden requires patient labor and attention. Plants do not grow merely to satisfy ambitions or to fulfill good intentions. They thrive because someone expended effort on them.” ~Liberty Hyde Bailey~

We began homeschooling almost 4 years ago when The Girl was just starting Kindergarten. My thinking was that I couldn’t really screw up Kindergarten so let’s just try it for a year and go from there. It was an experiment and an immediate success (but not without many tears and frustrations—MANY growing pains). But I can honestly say that we have never looked back. Of course I’m constantly re-evaluating our goals, methods and curriculums (I think that’s always a given for homeschooling families), but we’ve found what works for our family at this time in our lives.

Ever since that first experimental year, I have had the best intentions (ah-hem–see above quote) of chronicling our journey here on the ol’ blog. I think I’ve written one or two posts about it in all these years. (That may be an over-ambitious guess.)

Nice. Certainly not gonna get a thriving garden with those statistics! (Again, see above quote.) In my defense, though, I had noooooo idea how consuming homeschooling (and littles under-foot during school) would become.

(I honestly have no idea how mom bloggers of any kind do it. Seriously. How do you have time to blog your DIY projects or fancy budget-savvy meals and raise your kids??? Don’t even get me started on the awesome ones who choose to homeschool their kids as well!!! It obviously can be done… I just haven’t gotten there quite yet. Ah-hem.)

I teach third grade and preschool at The BallRoom Academy. I’ve figured up that I spend on average 35-40 hours a week in the mind-set of school. I’m either teaching, prepping, planning, or studying. That, my friends, is a full time job.  A full time job, I might add, that has to happen while I’m also caring for a baby, doing 12-15 loads of laundry a week, feeding three kids three meals a day plus anywhere from three to 76,000 snacks a day too, as well as cleaning, running errands, and keeping the household as a whole running smoothly. I am taxi. I am cheerleader. I am pastor. I am doctor. I am confidant. I am the law.

I am exhausted!

And that’s just my secondary role as mother, not to mention my primary role as wife and cheerleader to my husband. Poor guy gets the short end of the stick of my energy more times than I’d like to admit. (Does that sound as inappropriate as I think it does? Yes? No? Nevermind.)

It’s a lot for one person to do, and I only have THREE children!!!! Imagine these awesome moms who have 6, 7, 8 and more kiddos.  Mrs. Duggar, I bow to you!

But the point I’m desperately trying to make of all this blah blah blah is that I still want very much to fit blogging into that mix somewhere without sacrificing anything and more importantly, I want to chronicle our homeschooling journey (before it’s over). The fact that that desire is still so strong on my heart after doing nothing about it for the past four years, leaves me knowing that I need to do something about it. And I need to do something soon.

So this is my first step. I’m putting my desire/goal down in writing. I don’t know what it will look like yet. I’m not committing to anything specific. I’m just putting it out there. I’m not doing it for you, patient reader. No. No. This is just for me; a throw-down to myself, if you will.

So Melis… There you have it. Now go do something!