The Beginning
I began this blog in 2008 when my oldest was only a year old. It began as a family blog chronicling our adventures as a young family in Seattle. We decided early on that we wanted to homeschool our two sons. Honestly, now, I don't remember why we decided to do that, but we did it nevertheless. We began teaching our children as soon as they could walk and talk. We made many mistakes along the way and so learned to follow the lead of our children in what they were interested in. We focused on delight-directed learning with a lot of outings and fun things to do. When things got rough, we learned to adapt and switch things out.
Moving To Thailand
In 2015, our family moved to Thailand. We started another blog for our time there, but alas it was not a good fit for us. We had intended to work with migrants and refugees on the Thai/Burma border, but it didn't work out the way we had hoped. What did stay consistent, however, was our homeschooling endeavors. Living in a remote town, we didn't have access to schools, so I continued to homeschool our sons while also teaching a homeschool co-op with other English-speaking kids that lived there. That co-op was the best part of our time in Thailand. We focused our learning using unit studies about different countries, and I documented those country units in this blog as well.
Moving to Olympia
We moved back to Washington in late-2016, and this blog went silent for a number of years. We tried to live in the Seattle-area when we first moved back, but eventually found ourselves moving to Olympia due to cost of living. Because we were new to the area, I wanted the boys to make friends as quickly as possible from our neighborhood so I enrolled them in the public school in January 2018. They were 3rd/4th grade by then.
A LOT of things happened then. We discovered almost immediately that the boys were considered highly-capable in both reading and math and were designated to go to the hi-cap classroom the following year. I dreadfully missed teaching however, so I decided to pursue my Masters in Teaching Elementary Education. I also wasn't feeling well, but I chalked it up to all the stress that we had been dealing with both in Thailand and all the transitions we had been going through. Then, in early 2020, I was diagnosed with a rare disease called, Cushing's Disease. Basically, I had a tumor on my pituitary gland that was causing my cortisol levels to go crazy. I have some fantastic medical care at the University of Washington and they planned to perform brain surgery in March 2020. But then, COVID-19 hit. Surgery was delayed, and my symptoms got so intense that I couldn't get off the couch for more than a couple of minutes at a stretch. The boys were both home again doing virtual school since the schools shut down for the pandemic. I was able to get my brain surgery in April 2020 while on break from my MA studies.
I completed my student teaching in a virtual teaching environment while recovering from my surgery in the Fall of 2020 and got my degree and teaching certificate in December. I never thought that I would homeschool again since the boys were now older, and I was planning on becoming a full-time teacher. I got my first job as an on-site roving substitute for the remainder of the 2021 school year. I thought that my medical issues were behind me, but then the follow-up MRI showed that some of my tumor was still there. I had a second brain surgery in July 2021 while looking for long-term teaching positions for the fall. Because I knew I'd probably need to still be doing some recovery, I took a virtual teaching position. This position was a horrible fit, and I regretfully had to leave it within the first three months. I went back to the school that I had worked at in the Spring of 2021 as a long-term replacement substitute in a 3rd grade classroom.
Homeschooling Again... This Time for High School
That Spring, I had a lot of things become very apparent to me. First of all, I realized that being a classroom teacher might not be the best environment for me. I had absolutely loved homeschooling. I loved being able to tailor my lesson planning to my kids' interests and abilities while making things rigorous and just the right amount of challenge. This seemed impossible with a class of 24 students all of which had different needs. Second, I realized that the public school system had reached its limit in what it could provide for my own two sons. Their giftedness was getting in the way. For one of them, this looked like frustration with a teacher who couldn't understand him and continued to give work that wasn't meaningful to him. For the other, it was boredom, especially in math. I knew that even though I didn't feel qualified to teach high school, I knew that I could coach and create opportunities that would be purposeful to them. So, I pulled them out of their middle school at the end of the Fall semester in 2022 just as I began to substitute teach full-time.
Now, it is summer of 2022. I have been hired as a pull-out highly-capable teaching in a school district about 30 minutes from our home for only two days a week. Our family is homeschooling full-time. Both boys will be doing mostly 9th grade work although their needs require some variation in rigor. This blog will detail what we are doing with our homeschool throughout these next 4-5 years and how we plan to meet the needs of our two highly-capable (albeit very different) sons.
I hope you will join me!
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