In the Beginning

I am a homeschooling mother of four.  I have three sons and a daughter.  I have been homeschooling for eleven years and I have eight to go.  I have two children in college, one in high school and one in upper elementary.  I have a bunch of thoughts running around in my mind and so I thought I would start to write them down and maybe they would help someone else.  Some days I wish I had somewhere to turn or someone to talk to that doesn't make me feel guilty.  It seems everyone does it better or has some great idea that seems so far out there that there is no way I can do that.  I would love to have children who love learning more than anything else, but I have four wonderful "real" kids.  They are marvelous and I wouldn't trade them for anything, but I often feel like a failure as a homeschool mom.  There are always lessons that don't get taught or experiments that don't get done.  I have a hard time teaching music history and poetry and some days it is all I can do to teach the basics.  It gets frustrating.  When I started  homeschooling, I had all these dreams about all the things I could teach my kids and all the wonderful things we could do together and the reality is that days are busy and food has to be prepared and laundry done and my dreams started to fizzle as I struggled to get it all done.  As my children started to leave home I thought I would have more time to add those wonderful things back in, but I am still struggling with the same things.  Children that need more time just to do the basics and the reality that mastery takes time.  So I want to write about what real life homeschooling looks like in a home with "real" kids and a very "real" mom.