Rabbit Trails

 I know what year all of my kids were born, but I'm not sure how old they ARE today, or what year they graduated. I know now that Daniel graduated in 2008. In Texas, a home-school is considered a private school, and you can legally give out your own diplomas.   That's what we did. I taught them. They learned. They graduated.        Funny, time DOES erase things. I'm sure there were days that I wanted to go down the road kicking cans and never come back.... but I never did that. I mainly loved teaching the kids. I say mainly, because I know we had bad days, I just don't remember them.    At first, we had very simple books..... Rod and Staff.... then Olivia was in 1st grade, Caleb in 3rd, Sara in 5th. And at that time, Daniel was a little twerp.   And Kimberly was a baby.    We got most of our books at a home-school book fair in Houston for quite a few years, then ...

We have six kids.  They all went to school for 13 years each.  I had a few that started school a year after a brother or sister graduated......I found myself going a lot of different directions.  Sometimes circles.   I always enjoyed it.  We had bad days, but most were good. We have a conviction, not a preference about how children should be schooled, so there was never a question about whether or not we would home-school. Because of the monstrous amount of time, energy, thought, planning, and work that went into it......I evidently wasn't looking towards the day that they would all be graduated and gone....and maybe just maybe I would like to have ALL their records in ONE notebook to look back on. I am sentimental about some things, I like to look back on SOME things, keep a few reminders  and save a few papers that will take me back to when I couldn't leave sharp things on the cabinet!  Now we can leave scissors, knives, GUM and candles in g...

I have no idea why Kimberly colored a car picture.  We were very stereotyped when it came to color books......... We loved Dover coloring books!!  They were the high-light of each new school year. There are so many to choose from.......each kid had to pretty much narrow it down to ONE each year. I think I first saw Dover coloring books at a museum store.........our oldest daughter collected their nice paper doll sets. I chose a couple books for myself once in a while........ Sometimes we would buy the coloring books at the actual place in their gift store. Now that was fun. The pictures to color are so neat and the paper they use is high-quality and very nice to color on.  Pencils OR crayons. If I had a dime for every horse coloring book............. Some of my favorite were the bird books.............the front inside covers showed you what colors the birds were supposed to be. This wasn't my favorite.......but Lydia sure liked it. sigh. I...

Bunny might think she's a cat sometimes..... Here are some of Lydia's books. I will use a book from the 1930's if I can find a good one! Like the Bible study book. Truth is Truth, right? The DOG book is for art....Lydia is going to sketch dogs. Body By Design is going to be an EXCELLENT book. We started school today.  It was a really quiet morning. I was remembering back to the day when FOUR kids would start school and there were two littles NOT in school. That made for lots of noise. Happy noise. But it was really quiet for this first day. I got the books ready. Lydia got up. Went to the table and did her work. Then she was done. And that was the first day. The last time I had one kid in school.....Sara was in first grade. For years and years I've had kids in every corner of the house.... either doing school, avoiding it, or wishing they could DO school. I have always been a 'better late than never' type of teacher. Why start a kid in school when they...