Hot Mama Shida: January 2015

29 January 2015

26 January 2015

We are a homeschooling family. Our son will be 7 years old in April and, aside from a few months at the beginning of kindergarten, he's been homeschooled exclusively so far. It was a decision that my husband and I made very naturally and oddly enough, the decision to put him in kindergarten was the hard one. But we're often asked why, why have we chosen to homeschool and what's more, when do we plan to stop and put him in 'real school'. This can be an aggravating question, but it's an understandable one, most people in this country are still learning about the concept of homeschooling, outside of a religious necessity. So, why do we homeschool?

Well, when I got pregnant with our son I was already working from home, writing articles and essays for various websites and maintaining their social media presence. This made the initial decision to stay home with him not really a decision at all, just a progression of what I was already doing. However, in the months following the birth, I experienced several months of post partum depression that made my writing work almost impossible to keep up with, so I quit my writing jobs. One day I pulled myself together just enough to reach out to some very good friends who had also just had a baby. Actually, we had gone through our pregnancies together, even seeing the same midwives, and their baby was born two days before ours in the same hospital. They own a business and were looking for childcare, so I stepped in, having not only done childcare for years before, but it gave me an income and a way to stay home with my baby. This is how it started.

Playtime with friends.

Since I was then working from home again, there was no reason to put our son in daycare. I began 'teaching' him and without really realizing I was teaching him, to me and my husband, we were just making sure he had the resources to learn. The 'play area' where the kids spent most of their time was completely child-friendly and ready to explore, with lots of books, learning toys, and learning videos that they had open access to. I read to the kids all the time, labeled things around the house, and we even got an iPad and began learning about all the apps available to early learners. Initially we didn't do this with homeschooling in mind, just feeding the kids' brains the way we thought we should.

We realized very early that our boy was thoroughly fascinated with the alphabet! He still is! He loved songs, books, toys, videos, ANYTHING dealing with the alphabet, so we fed that love. By age 2 he was trying to write the letters but getting very frustrated that he couldn't do it yet so we got him a Leapfrog Scribble and Write toy and that did the trick for him.

Leapfrog Scribble and Write Tablet

One day, when he was 2 1/2, he brought me a piece of paper with the most delighted look on his face, he had written his name all by himself! I cried! He was so proud of himself!

At this time we still didn't consider what we were doing to be 'homeschooling'. When people asked what daycare program he was in we said we keep him home and that he wasn't ready for preschool yet, even though it looked like it. We often have to explain that he is younger than he looks or acts. This leads me into another pertinent aspect of our lives.


Mommy's Helper Contoured Cushie Step Up

Our son is big for his age. Very big for his age, in fact, and he has been since he was about 1. By the age of 2 he was as tall as the average 4 year old. It presented us with a unique set of challenges than and has his whole life. For example, we (wrongfully) began to potty train him way before he was ready because he had outgrown diapers and training pants are good for 'accidents' but not as a substitute for diapers. But he was already too big for the training potty we got him so it was terribly uncomfortable for him. We eventually got him a folding potty that he could use independently which helped, but emotionally he still wasn't quite ready.

I was so confused and frustrated for months, trying to stretch size 6 diapers to fit on our big boy while forcing potty training. We were saved by Pampers introducing a size 7 diaper! That bought us a good 6 months and time for him to potty train naturally at his own pace.

Now, at age 6, he's typically mistaken for a 9 or 10 year old. Believe it or not, this is a big reason why we homeschool, but I'll elaborate further in a bit.

As I said, at this time we still didn't consider what we were doing to be homeschooling necessarily, we just weren't putting him in daycare and providing a learning environment at home for him and any other kids I happen to be caring for, and after a while there were others. Then when he was 3 we briefly relocated to New Jersey and I attempted to continue my small in-home childcare business there, but our move to NJ very quickly turned into a disaster on so many levels (housing, jobs for my husband, childcare work for me, etc.) so within months our savings was gone and we were forced to move back to Baltimore and spent the next 2 years in chaos, staying with family and friends and trying to settle and rebuild our lives. At one point we lost almost everything we owned except the bags we were carrying with us, including all of our vital documents. We were literally days away from living in our car.

Through all of this, we continued to teach our son in ways that came naturally to us and him. Trips to the grocery store, running errands, or even neighborhood walks gave us a chance to learn counting and money, to play I Spy and find words and numbers, to read signs, to answer questions, anything to keep his brain stimulated. I never thought to put him in preschool since we didn't even know where we were going to live. But he was ALWAYS with us. He never had a babysitter or even spent time away from us with family. This was a very decided choice because my husband and I realized very early that even though we were surrounded by family and friends and thus had a 'support system', much of our support system didn't actually support our parenting methods and were very open about it. Therein lies another reason we've become homeschoolers and quite protective of our son.

Cooking lessons with Daddy.

First of all was our child's diet. We are very lucky that our boy so far has no allergies or medical conditions that require constant care. Aside from the occassional cold he's a very healthy boy. But he's a very energetic boy too, and both my husband's and my families have a history of food related illnesses like diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, etc. So we very strictly limited his sugar and salt intake and gave him a healthy diet. Even while I was breastfeeding (we were considered an extended breastfeeding family, he nursed until close to age 2 when he self-weaned) I maintained a healthy diet. We didn't give him any junk food and cooked almost everything he ate ourselves. Any sweets he got we made ourselves so that we could carefully monitor what was in his food. Our families considered this a 'restrictive' diet and made frequent jokes that if he were left in their care he'd eat like a 'normal' child. I was once told that the reason he had so much energy was because of all that so called healthy food he got and he just needed some regular sugar (what!?!) and once when he was only 18 mos. he was left with a family member for exactly 15 minutes and they went out of their way to give him a prepackaged cookie and told us, "He wanted it and look he likes it anyway!" SERIOUSLY! When he was about 4 the same family member intentionally snuck him more sugary foods, made him eat it, and actually told him not to tell me (I was only in another room then), and my overwhelmingly honest child immediately told me with tears in his eyes because he felt he did something wrong. So we stopped trusting certain family members.

Second, we consider ourselves to be peaceful parents, meaning no spanking or shaming as punishment. Again, our support system didn't support this philosophy. We were surrounded by folks who fell into the typical 'it was good enough for me' mindset and thought we were just spoiling him by not spanking him if he did something wrong. That was a deal-breaker for us, anyone who even indicated that they were spankers were not options for watching our boy.

Third, we have always been selective about what we exposed our son to. He was allowed to watch videos but almost exclusively Sprout and PBS kids shows. Sesame Street, Word World, and Word Girl were his favorites. We only let him watch educational shows (it's the reason we don't have a television now). This, too, was not accepted by our support system. I was once asked to drop him off at a family member's house who was watching some of his cousins that day, and told, "I just give them kids some cookies and SpongeBob videos and they're fine for hours." Absolutely NOT!

For all those reasons, our son stayed in our presence and thus in our learning environment. It was just a product of circumstances.

Two years ago we finally stabilized and rented a home of our own and were able to get back to our version of a normal life. We immediately set up his learning environment and I began my small childcare business again. Because I was still blogging and maintaining friendships through social media, I was amazed to find lots of parents who appreciated how we were raising our son and wanted their children in my care. Many of these parents were low income, so it hasn't necessarily been a prosperous business financially, but we've been able to help a lot of families and our son has made lots of friends of all ages. Last year he asked about school for the first time, he wanted to go to kindergarten. I was not happy about this at all, but after a lot of discussion we decided to give it a shot. He's such a sociable boy, he LOVES making new friends, so we wanted him to have a chance to make some friends.

We intentionally chose a public charter school based on their philosophy of learning through play and arts integration. We wanted him to play and he really enjoys art! I thought he was advanced for kindergarten 'learning' but we just really wanted him to play and make friends. This both worked for him and against him.

He made lots of friends, in his class and in others. A parent and friend once sent me an email about just how social he was, saying that in the mornings when they had community breakfast (parents were welcome to stay and have breakfast with their kids, which we loved) our boy would go from table to table personally saying hi to all the kids he knew by name, no matter what grade they were in, and they all said hi right back! He's always been that type of kid.

What worked against him was he didn't get enough play for his energy level. He was used to us going to the playground for 2 hours at a time daily to run and play, but the time he was given in school for recess and physical education wasn't enough to burn off his energy. He stayed wired most of the day.

Almost 4ft tall at 4 yrs old.

There were other factors working against him. One was his size. It's hard for him to find a peer group sometimes because the kids his age think he older and shy away from him a bit, but the older kids hear him talk and see how he interacts and think he's 'slow' and shy away from him a bit, or worse, try to take advantage of him, push him around, or just don't understand him. This actually happened with a staff member at the school, an incident I still find it hard to talk about. One day in lunch he accidentally spilled part of his food on himself and the floor and he started to cry. A staff member was very harsh with him, told him to stop crying, wouldn't help him clean up, and he didn't get to eat that day. He came home still upset and hurt. I was LIVID. I immediately emailed the principal, the director, and his teacher and told them what happened. They were all very apologetic and the principal even took time the next day to seek him out, sit down with him, and talk about the incident (he told her it was his worse day ever). She told him he could always come to her office to talk to her if he had a problem. She emailed me, amazed at how articulate he was and how clearly he expressed his feelings and I truly appreciated her taking the time to talk to him.

Which leads me to the another thing that worked against him (you see how this all connects?). This is oddly something else I find it difficult to discuss because I think it makes me sound obnoxious or like a braggart and that's not my intention. School worked against our son because he's really, really smart. Really. I mentioned that he first wrote his name by himself when he was 2 1/2. Well he was already beginning to read independently then. By age 3 he was able to read a lot on his own.

By the time he started kindergarten he was fully an independent reader. During our orientation day, he eagerly ran over to the bookshelf in his classroom and was slightly bummed that there were only a handful of books he hadn't already read, and he finished those before the end of that day. The kids in his class were on a typical kindergarten level, which is just fine, but he was already at the stage of being able to look words up in an adult dictionary if he needed to. One of his favorite 'toys' at the time was his digital pocket dictionary. We never forced education on him, just provided a constant learning environment no matter where we were or what we were doing. We never thought this would put him at a disadvantage but in a classroom setting it did. He was bored out of his mind! He began to find other things to focus on and the main thing that caught his attention were the kids in his class who were more disruptive. He came home daily and when I asked what happened in school he told me hour-long stories about how kids were misbehaving. When I asked what he learned he rarely had anything to say. Then his behavior started to change and our otherwise 'obedient' child started exhibiting lots of the behaviors he found amusing in the kids that were more disruptive. And he came home with way too much energy to burn, so the combination made for a very chaotic child.

I couldn't take it, that was the end of his kindergarten adventure. We pulled him out of school and filed the paperwork to register with the homeschool program in the city. There were also countless problems with transportation and our healthy boy all of a sudden being constantly sick, we couldn't even let him have school breakfast or lunch because more often than not it wasn't the type of food we felt comfortable feeding him, so all-in-all it didn't work for my family.

WHEW!!

Practicing his photography skills.

This all brings us to today. Today our soon-to-be 7 year old boy is the size of a healthy 10 year old, he's still only been away from my husband or I a handful of times, we are still very careful about his diet, he still has the energy of a hummingbird, and he's at a third grade math level and a fourth grade reading level. We now have a village of like-minded friends who understand and support our parenting methods so we have a few places he can go safely to play and have friends and they know they can safely send their children to our home for play dates. The only disadvantage to homeschooling has been that I don't have a car and my husband works odd hours so we haven't been able to get him involved in homeschool co-ops or the local homeschool community center, so he's missing having a gang of friends. I intend to remedy this in the immediate future.

Many would consider our actual teaching methods now to be more like unschooling, since we only stick to a curriculum enough to meet Baltimore City requirements, but it's mostly child-led learning. We take lots of photos of our activities, trips, home projects, etc. to document his learning, supplemented with worksheets from books or that I print out from the internet, and with technology like websites and iOS apps (we're an Apple household with Mac computers, an iPad, and iPhones). For a look at some of our photos of our homeschooling adventures, CLICK HERE! Basically, I document everything we do with our son and compile it into a portfolio and twice a year we meet with a Baltimore City homeschool reviewer who examines it all according to a checklist for his grade level to tell us if we're on the right track. So far, so good.

Still we've had people asking us when we'll put him in 'real school', always with the reasoning that we won't be able to teach him calculus or chemistry. I always want to ask how much calculus or chemistry do they remember or use in their lives today, but instead I just ask, "Why not?" Isn't that what teacher's manuals, the library, and the internet are for? Isn't that what co-ops are for? Plus, I know many parents now that aren't scientists or mathematicians who successfully homeschooled their children straight through high school. Basically, I refuse to allow the limitations of others to become ours. I have no doubt that I can fully educate my child and prepare him for college, if he chooses to go, or to start a business, or to become an artist, or to do whatever his dreams entail with success and most importantly, happiness. With his father's help, we got this thing covered.

And now, we have another child on the way and I'm excited to start all over, changing some things and continuing others. Our son has been tracking the entire pregnancy with joy and excitement, learning each week about the baby's progress, going to our midwife apppointments with us, and even learning how the baby came to be. That means yes, I had a very detailed sex talk with a very curious six year old, it was awkward and stilted but truthful and, in the end, pretty funny. My husband and I are very happy about our choice to homeschool and no matter how skeptical or critical our family and friends may be, we wouldn't have it any other way.
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22 January 2015

Healing Can Come from Releasing

Over the past few days I've been having conversations with folks about healing or releasing abusive relationships. There have been some extremely difficult conversations especially with people who have decided that certain relationships, no matter the guilt or assumed obligations that come with that relationship, need to be accepted as they are and then released.

In light of that, I decided to revisit some unpleasant conversations I had with someone whom I consider emotionally abusive to me. I can do this because the relationship eventually became so abusive and precarious that I began recording conversations with them. I honestly wanted to be able to do just this, listen to these conversations at a later date, when I was distanced from the relationship and felt no further obligation. I was told so many times that I was overreacting, or being too emotional, or just that I was wrong.

Emotional Abuse - by marcgosselin - image found on DeviantArt

Even over a recording, even with time and distance between us, even knowing that I am under no obligation to ever see this person again, I felt the same anger, and shame, and hurt, and betrayal, and punishment that I felt in the moment. I felt nauseous and my heart started racing (which consequently sent my BabyBump into a tizzy!) and I could barely make it through one recording. It was horrible. I picked this recording in particular because there were others with me when it was recorded and since then one of those people has completely watered down the conversation in their mind. When we discussed it, I was told it wasn't that bad and they didn't remember harsh words being exchanged. They were so very wrong. I was called names, my family was insulted, it was wretched.

In the end, the lesson for me is to trust my heart, my gut, my instincts. No one but me knows how a person makes me feel and no one but me has to cope with those feelings, so no one but me can decide if that relationship is worth mending or releasing. I'm secure in my decision to release that relationship and I accept that. I feel that releasing this relationship is the only way to heal this relationship and heal myself at the same time. I can't force others to accept it or even understand it, and that's okay as well, because no one else has to live my life but me.