Life Update: Transcripts, ACTs, and thoughts on homeschooling all the way through
Whenever I have a senior graduating, it seems the last few months are devoted entirely to getting them situated for college. Transcripts, ACTs, admissions paperwork, financial wrangling and the like dominate our end of the school year. Though it’s exciting, I always find myself looking at my “little” student and wondering where the time went. And I always thank God that I had the time with that child.
Our fourth child, Holly, was accepted into Bob Jones University this past week, and it’s always exciting to talk and prepare for the next major step in a child’s life. (This girl has her priorities straight. She already has a Keurig for her dorm room.)
I’ve been feeling a bit emotional, you guys, because I can’t believe that we’ve graduated yet another child.
If you’ve read here at all, you know that I never planned to homeschool my kids and that we stumbled into home education quite by accident. I had no idea what I was doing and I had to thoroughly educate myself entirely to proceed.
I totally know that I am deficient as a homeschooling teacher.
I read and prayed and cried in frustration because I couldn’t figure out how to do it all. I always felt my own deficiencies. I desperately needed to give myself some grace as a person and as a teacher in those early years.
I recently told a friend that I’m so thankful that God directs our steps and equips us for the jobs that He has called us to do, because I wouldn’t have chosen homeschooling on my own–let alone homeschooling a large family! But I can honestly say that I’m so very thankful that God directed us on the path He did, even when it was hard and frustrating and even when I was kicking and screaming.
I’m so thankful for the life we shared as a homeschooling family. We had time together, and time allowed us connection, and connection established a close relationship that enabled us to pass along a vision for life that was bigger than ourselves and laced with love and tradition and so much fun. That is huge. No matter my deficiencies, these outcomes for my kids are what I always wanted.
Homeschooling mammas, when you are in the trenches and don’t feel like you know what you are doing, it can be difficult to believe that you could oversee the education of your child all the way through high school. Oh, believe me, I know and hear this all the time from my homeschooling friends.
But I’ve learned that when you don’t think you can do another day, you wake up and pick up the pencils and show up, deficiencies and all.
You read and pray and research a lot but you mostly just do the work. Some days you limp along and fail, and some days you soar and succeed, but most days you just plod along establishing habits, adding virtue and knowledge, bit by bit, precept upon precept.
And by God’s grace, 12 years later, here we are again, a testament of God’s faithfulness that supplied what we needed, and changed us in the process.
And somehow our goal of “graduating” a child seems so minuscule compared to the immense privilege of loving and investing in this wholehearted, kind, musical, intuitive, fun, random, lovely young woman I am proud to call my daughter.
Beautiful!❤