Seven of our 10 children have capped off their homeschooling careers by beginning classes at the local community college when they were around 16 and then graduating with an Associate's degree at approximately the same time their peers graduated with high school diplomas. And it has worked out very well for us and for them. I am a huge advocate for early college for high schoolers. But we are about to abandon or at least seriously change up what we have thus far done when it comes to the last three of our offspring. What?!!! I know right? That is what I keep thinking too.
It is definitely a little scary. I know how the early college thing works. I have effectively been the adviser to each of my older seven. I talk to them about their future goals and possible majors, I check and re check the graduation requirements, I make class recommendations, help them plan schedules each semester and teach them how to register for classes. When we started out, I had no idea what I was doing, but I've got this now. So, we've decided to challenge ourselves and try something new.
When we first started to explore the idea of early college we wanted to try it out because: 1) we both went to high school, and firmly believed then and now that at least the senior year and probably the junior year was a total waste of time and 2) if our kids could get into the community college as high school students, they could go for free and thus cut the ultimate cost of college degrees by however many years they could get in. I still think these are valid points. However, I don't think it is necessarily urgent that kids start and finish college early. I don't believe there is a deadline on learning. So, just like I don't believe in lists that purport to encompass what my first-grader must know (unless that list is: that she is loved, that she is smart, that she is important), I also do not believe that the value of a college degree grows in inverse relation to the age at which it is obtained. There is value in all learning and we can continue to learn all our lives.
So, for our last three kids, we are embracing an opportunity for them to do some learning in a different way than their siblings did. School for my sixteen year old will probably look a lot like school for his two younger siblings, and that is: math every day, read stuff, write stuff, and learn what you want to learn. His entrance to a four year university will probably rely more on his college entrance exam scores than it has for his older siblings who were able to transfer with full associates degrees, so I am already encouraging him that a good portion of the "Learn what you want to learn" part, should probably be test prep. The rest of 'school' will be traveling to new places and meeting new people, an opportunity that was not an option with my older kids and which we think is worth trading the benefits of early college for.
Tuesday, April 11, 2017
Monday, April 10, 2017
The Beginning....
Our first full week in our first temporary home and our first week back to our normal lives. So we are living in a new house in a new neighborhood, but still doing the same things we were before. The boys all have seminary every day, two of them have college classes, Kris has work, we all have school. We are living in a sort of limbo between our old life and our new and while some things are different, like having NO backyard (!) and needing extra time to drive to places we have been driving to for years, much is just the same too.
After a couple days of being trapped mostly inside by weather, and then one unsuccessful and frankly discouraging walk along a heavily trafficked road to a depressingly boring and fairly dirty cemetery, Kris and I discovered that if we walk in the opposite direction, there is a marvelous walking path hidden behind the neighborhoods and traveling along a creek bed that honestly beats the path we walked on in our previous neighborhood.
We are still working on discovering all the various offshoots and where they go. Or don't go, as we have actually followed it in one direction until the sidewalk literally just stops and in another until it sort of dwindles slowly away from sidewalk, to asphalt, to dirt path, to unofficial junkyard (complete with a "no dumping" sign poised just above an old abandoned and cushion-less couch). And though the lack of a backyard besides a small balcony IS a little sad, we have found 3 nearby parks to play at. Some of them even still have basketball hoops attached to the backboards!
Some things about this rental are definitely sub-par. The silverware supply includes 0 spoons and only 2 drinking glasses (mismatched, and different sizes). But we still have much of our own kitchen supplies so that was an easy enough challenge to overcome. There are exactly 4 towels in the whole house and enough bedding for two of the five beds. Again, we are using much of our own stuff still. The house overlooks a busy road and we hear traffic all day and night, but it also has a spectacular view of the mountains and we can see the sun set over Pikes Peak every night. We are just considering all of it, the good and the not so good, as the beginning of our adventures. Right now our adventures just include figuring out how to cook a full meal in a tiny kitchen with limited supplies and how to find the exact right position to turn off the shower without going past that perfect spot and turning it on again!
But this view never fails to make me smile.
We are still working on discovering all the various offshoots and where they go. Or don't go, as we have actually followed it in one direction until the sidewalk literally just stops and in another until it sort of dwindles slowly away from sidewalk, to asphalt, to dirt path, to unofficial junkyard (complete with a "no dumping" sign poised just above an old abandoned and cushion-less couch). And though the lack of a backyard besides a small balcony IS a little sad, we have found 3 nearby parks to play at. Some of them even still have basketball hoops attached to the backboards!
Some things about this rental are definitely sub-par. The silverware supply includes 0 spoons and only 2 drinking glasses (mismatched, and different sizes). But we still have much of our own kitchen supplies so that was an easy enough challenge to overcome. There are exactly 4 towels in the whole house and enough bedding for two of the five beds. Again, we are using much of our own stuff still. The house overlooks a busy road and we hear traffic all day and night, but it also has a spectacular view of the mountains and we can see the sun set over Pikes Peak every night. We are just considering all of it, the good and the not so good, as the beginning of our adventures. Right now our adventures just include figuring out how to cook a full meal in a tiny kitchen with limited supplies and how to find the exact right position to turn off the shower without going past that perfect spot and turning it on again!
Monday, April 3, 2017
Moving Out
We have officially moved out of the house that was our home for the past ten years. Ten! It was the first home that we moved into as a complete family. Fionnula was just past her first birthday, Erin wasn't yet sixteen. The kids' bedrooms were packed, boys three to a room, girls two to a room. There was almost always something crazy going on somewhere in that house, some of which the kids are only admitting to now and some of which I will probably never know. Walking through it for the last time on Tuesday morning I was remembering some of our adventures there.
Like the time little Ronan stuck the backyard hose in a basement window well, turned it on, and left it there to be discovered later by me when I found water cascading down the basement bathroom wall, across the floor and under the door into the playroom.
Kris and Kegan and Rhys replaced all the windows, over the years different children took turns helping us replace all the floors, we put in new interior and exterior doors and new trim pretty much everywhere. Completely remodeled the kitchen and added a front porch (mostly because I wanted a porch swing). Eventually the insurance settlement on a terrific hailstorm allowed us to repaint it and for a few months we had a big, blue house.
The kids frequently built extensive railroads that encircled the living room and went under and around furniture and stayed put for days. They set up elaborate scenes with the dollhouse that involved dolls falling off the roof and stuck under the porch and furniture hanging from roofs and balconies that infuriated Fionnula and probably worried some visitors, but which amused me. More than once there were Rube Goldberg designs involving match box race track, dominoes and wooden blocks that wound around the main floor and then headed down the stairs to continue in the basement.
Several children were at one time or another, locked in bathrooms with faulty doorknobs. One time, Fionnula sobbed on her side of the door while Kris worked on the knob and Liam sent his handheld video game under the door to distract her. Most recently, Ronan got locked in the basement bathroom just last Sunday while we prepared to go to church. He ended up crawling out through the window well and we dealt with the lock after church, but Liam thought it would be fun to just leave a note for the new owners asking them to "please feed our brother, he's locked in the bathroom."
The younger kids all learned to ride a bicycle on the walking path a block from the house and all of us walked, ran and rode that path frequently, enjoying the company of a herd of deer and the many, many rabbits that inhabit "Bunny Hill."
Once we had a brand new baby fawn in the yard, much to the amusement of the neighborhood cat who often lived on our porch.
Prior to the neighborhood cat making her appearance, we used to get mice in the garage each fall. One memorable Thanksgiving day, the stench in the garage had become excruciating and a group of kids were sent to investigate. They found a rotting mouse carcass under the outside fridge and spent their Thanksgiving morning extracting it from the fridge coils.
Fionnula became our first child to ever wear a cast when she landed weird on the trampoline and broke her wrist.
We spent snowy Saturdays in long Warcraft marathons, had some very crazy games of pictionary and charades and party quirks (hopefully someday Noah will go pro with his chameleon imitation).
We sent off 6 missionaries from this home, and welcomed home 3 of them. The others will come 'home' to temporary homes somewhere.
As the older kids started leaving for college, this was the house they came back to visit, more than once showing up a day before they were expected and walking in the door to screams of excitement from little siblings, or else sneaking in super late only to be discovered the next morning sleeping on couches and floors.
We met our first daughter-in-law and first son-in-law in this house.
Lately though our home had been feeling too big and empty for our ever shrinking at-home-family. And about 6 months ago, we realized that the future we sometimes speculated dreamily about, a future where we could travel extensively, could come true now, if we were just willing to sell the house. So we talked with the kids, especially those who would be most directly affected by this change, and we started to make plans. The kids reacted with everything from sincere anxiety (Fionnula) to sheer exhilaration (Liam). On Monday, we took our first big step and moved out of our home and into a rental that is only a few miles away from that house. We will remain here until the college semester and then seminary finish, continuing in our usual routines, but in a different home.
On Tuesday, we returned to visit what was still our house for a few more hours, walked though the empty rooms (with Fionn saying goodbye to each room and closet). The kids all jumped on the trampoline one more time. We took pics of the big empty house, and the cement on the back porch where everyone carved their names years ago. But somehow, this house that we had loved and filled our lives with for a whole decade, didn't really seem like our home anymore.
Like the time little Ronan stuck the backyard hose in a basement window well, turned it on, and left it there to be discovered later by me when I found water cascading down the basement bathroom wall, across the floor and under the door into the playroom.
Kris and Kegan and Rhys replaced all the windows, over the years different children took turns helping us replace all the floors, we put in new interior and exterior doors and new trim pretty much everywhere. Completely remodeled the kitchen and added a front porch (mostly because I wanted a porch swing). Eventually the insurance settlement on a terrific hailstorm allowed us to repaint it and for a few months we had a big, blue house.
The kids frequently built extensive railroads that encircled the living room and went under and around furniture and stayed put for days. They set up elaborate scenes with the dollhouse that involved dolls falling off the roof and stuck under the porch and furniture hanging from roofs and balconies that infuriated Fionnula and probably worried some visitors, but which amused me. More than once there were Rube Goldberg designs involving match box race track, dominoes and wooden blocks that wound around the main floor and then headed down the stairs to continue in the basement.
Several children were at one time or another, locked in bathrooms with faulty doorknobs. One time, Fionnula sobbed on her side of the door while Kris worked on the knob and Liam sent his handheld video game under the door to distract her. Most recently, Ronan got locked in the basement bathroom just last Sunday while we prepared to go to church. He ended up crawling out through the window well and we dealt with the lock after church, but Liam thought it would be fun to just leave a note for the new owners asking them to "please feed our brother, he's locked in the bathroom."
The younger kids all learned to ride a bicycle on the walking path a block from the house and all of us walked, ran and rode that path frequently, enjoying the company of a herd of deer and the many, many rabbits that inhabit "Bunny Hill."
Once we had a brand new baby fawn in the yard, much to the amusement of the neighborhood cat who often lived on our porch.
Prior to the neighborhood cat making her appearance, we used to get mice in the garage each fall. One memorable Thanksgiving day, the stench in the garage had become excruciating and a group of kids were sent to investigate. They found a rotting mouse carcass under the outside fridge and spent their Thanksgiving morning extracting it from the fridge coils.
Fionnula became our first child to ever wear a cast when she landed weird on the trampoline and broke her wrist.
We spent snowy Saturdays in long Warcraft marathons, had some very crazy games of pictionary and charades and party quirks (hopefully someday Noah will go pro with his chameleon imitation).
We sent off 6 missionaries from this home, and welcomed home 3 of them. The others will come 'home' to temporary homes somewhere.
As the older kids started leaving for college, this was the house they came back to visit, more than once showing up a day before they were expected and walking in the door to screams of excitement from little siblings, or else sneaking in super late only to be discovered the next morning sleeping on couches and floors.
We met our first daughter-in-law and first son-in-law in this house.
Lately though our home had been feeling too big and empty for our ever shrinking at-home-family. And about 6 months ago, we realized that the future we sometimes speculated dreamily about, a future where we could travel extensively, could come true now, if we were just willing to sell the house. So we talked with the kids, especially those who would be most directly affected by this change, and we started to make plans. The kids reacted with everything from sincere anxiety (Fionnula) to sheer exhilaration (Liam). On Monday, we took our first big step and moved out of our home and into a rental that is only a few miles away from that house. We will remain here until the college semester and then seminary finish, continuing in our usual routines, but in a different home.
On Tuesday, we returned to visit what was still our house for a few more hours, walked though the empty rooms (with Fionn saying goodbye to each room and closet). The kids all jumped on the trampoline one more time. We took pics of the big empty house, and the cement on the back porch where everyone carved their names years ago. But somehow, this house that we had loved and filled our lives with for a whole decade, didn't really seem like our home anymore.
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