Sometimes homeschooling can feel like an endurance race, a marathon of epic proportions, and there may be days, weeks, months…even years…when you feel like you’re never going to make it to the finish line. Where does the strength come from to keep going? How can we “mount up with wings like eagles” when we feel [...]

I had originally planned to write about something else for this month’s “Roots and Wings”, but this weekend another one of our birds left the nest, so it seemed more appropriate to write about that. It is the stated theme of this column, after all. Our number three son, Jon, graduated from the University of [...]

When you’ve homeschooled as long as we have, it’s inevitable that you’re going to run into the occasional glitch, the odd, unplanned disaster, the once-in-a-lifetime occurrence. When life comes at you a little bit too fast, how do you hold on? How do you keep going? How do you homeschool through the hard times? To [...]

You would think that after nearly three decades of homeschooling five kids, I would have run out of new things to try. At the very least, you would assume that something as ubiquitous as the homeschool coop would not BE one of those new things. But–true confession time–I have always homeschooled on my own. The [...]

Well, the dominos have started to fall. On Wednesday, December 12th, my #3 son joined his oldest brother in the ranks of college graduates. Within the next six months, my #2 son and my only daughter will follow suit. Then, a year later, my youngest will graduate from high school. And for the first time [...]

In the Pacific Northwest, November is a cold, grey, dreary month–the wettest month of the year, or so they say. It’s a good month for soup and bread, for hot cocoa and a good movie, for a fire in the hearth and a favorite book to read aloud. It’s also the month in which we, [...]

I know for many of you, summer ended weeks ago. But with college students in the house who didn’t start class until this week–and with living in a part of the country where summer reluctantly begins sometime around the middle of July–it just made more sense to me to let our summer vacation linger on [...]

I didn’t plan to homeschool. I had a plan–a good one–but homeschooling certainly wasn’t it. Oh, I’d heard of homeschooling back in the late seventies and early eighties, but it was something I assumed only missionaries in remote, isolated villages did–and maybe a few hippies living in mountain communes. But certainly not normal folk! And [...]

The birds came home to roost this week. The son from Oregon with his bride of almost four years, the son from California with his wife and their two foster (hopefully someday to be adopted) children, and the only daughter home from college in Bellingham, Washington, joined the two sons who still live at home [...]