About Odyssey

Many people have asked me what led me to this unexpected journey. The simple answer is that God called, but we know that life is never quite that simple. Gio has always struggled with school. He has always fought against going and told me that he wanted me to teach him at home, long before he had ever heard of homeschooling. I didn’t understand why at the time, but found out later that even in preschool, he had been being bullied by some other children. Unfortunately, we were already in the third year of school before the director and that year’s teacher realized what was happening. With his energy, the previous teachers had just assumed that he was the one causing trouble because they would see him acting out. They somehow didn’t catch that it was in response to actions that other children were taking. By the third year, he was miserable and defensive.

Then to complicate it more, we found that he is a very kinesthetic learner. While he is very smart, and catches onto things quickly in the right environment, he cannot do it when he is sitting still in a vibrant classroom. There are just too many distractions, and not enough work. His last teacher in preschool figured this out about him and helped him to have a wonderful year, but it set him up for even more problems when we moved. He went from a class size of 10 with a teacher and aide, to a class of 27, many of whom had never been in any school setting before. The teacher was very sweet, but very overwhelmed with the class size. With so many children not even knowing the basics, it was easier to give him a worksheet of something that he did know, then expect him to sit quietly while she worked with the some of the other students. In his loving spirit, he did the same thing that his mommy always used to do when she finished work early, he tried to help the other students and the teacher. She responded about the same way that my teachers always did, constant complaints about disrupting the class, talking, too much activity. After about two weeks of this, we knew that it wasn’t going to lead to a lifelong love of learning if we didn’t step in quickly.

During this time, and for a couple of months prior to this, God had really been working on my heart that I needed to teach my own children. My initial understanding of it, probably because I didn’t want to hear anything else, was that I needed to be teaching my children about God at home instead of putting them in a Christian school. This made sense to me since finances were really tight with the move, and the closest Christian school was about 30 minutes away. We felt that the boys needed to be involved locally if they were going to ever be a witness to their neighbors, and that they needed friendships nearby instead of a couple of towns away.

But God had other things in mind. It started with soccer. We thought it would be a great outlet for them to get some energy out and possibly meet some of the friends that they would be going to school with, but it changed our world. One of the boys on Gio’s soccer team was home schooled, and his mom and I were able to talk quite a bit about her experience. When we saw that public school was not going to work, she was the first source that we turned to.

I know that this journey is still going to be a long one, but we are looking forward to seeing how God blesses us as we raise our children to honor Him, and teach them in the way that He designed them to learn.