This post is dedicated to all the parents who either tried to home-school their children, or at least considered it before deciding that they would go insane:  I feel ya.

As the rest of Oklahoma City families woke up this morning, donned freshly ironed uniforms, stuffed PB&J sandwiches and Capri Suns into Captain America lunch-boxes, and lugged backpacks full of sharp, new crayons and cute binders to the car for the first day of school, I could be found still fast asleep until 8:30.  Eisley was still sleeping, and Taytem was in the next room reading Madeleine & The Gypsies for the 27th time, as per her custom upon waking.  Our favorite breakfast (consisting of oatmeal with bits of bacon crumbled up into it) didn’t get started until 10 a.m., and took longer than expected when I burned the bacon (I can only imagine how offensive the smell must have been to our student-renter who is a Muslim, especially since today was Day 2 out of 30 for Ramadan – their fasting holiday.  The poor kid can’t eat, then there’s the wonderful smell of bacon filling the house, except that pork is forbidden for Muslims, and then it’s burned and the stench of bacon-smoke fills the house.  I contemplated how perfectly the scenario would fit into a certain Alanis Morissette song as I tossed thick, charred pieces of bacon into the trash – “It’s like ba -a-con during Ra-ma-dan…”).  By 11:30, “breakfast” was over, and clearly, we wouldn’t be doing school this day.

The truth is, I haven’t decided when to start school, and I haven’t decided when to start school because I’m just not “feelin’ it.”  Oh sure, I’m feelin’ it when there are tons of exciting educational toys on display at the home-school convention, or when the bookstore features home-schooling curriculum on sale, or when all the back-to-school classroom decorations are looking so adorable with their cute, turquoise owl themes.  For some women, their weakness is shoes – for me, it’s jars of “sorting bears” and books on the lives of the classical composers.

I’ve been singing the praises of home-schooling since I broke out of public high school, and even more so once I met my hot, home-schooled/rock-star husband.  I was lining up curriculums and researching different methods years before we were even pregnant.  I’d converted several friends to home-schooling and even started this blog with the intention of exchanging all sorts of fun and creative ideas for home-schooling moms.

And yet I woke up this morning fantasizing about how much fun it would be to send Taytem off to her first day of school.  I’m sure every home-schooling mom hits a wall and starts daydreaming about dropping the kids off at a fairy tale-ish classroom, then heading off for yoga class, a grocery shopping trip unencumbered by kids, and folding the laundry while getting to watch a Tivo-ed episode of Design Star without interruptions for “more juice” or “but the toilet brush is my pirate sword!”  Yessiree, that day sounds mighty fine to me.

When I recently told Lukus about my fantasy of sending Taytem to school, his response was, “We will sell the house, I will quit my job and stay home and teach her myself before I ever send her off to school.”  Yeah, he’s got some pretty strong feelings about it – being sent to public school was his dad’s threat to him and his brothers whenever they started acting up and giving their mom a hard time with their schoolwork.  Plus, he’s heard my own public school horror stories, so I can’t really blame him.

But the other day, we were sitting in church and our pastor was talking about Mary & Martha.  If you don’t know the story, you can read it here, but basically, Martha had made her own plans and had her own projects going and was pretty much telling God to get on board with her plans.  It’s not particularly the brightest thing to do to tell God what to do.  I realized then that I had never once asked God whether or not I should home-school.  I had made up my own mind.  I had set my course without Him and was pretty much expecting Him to give me the patience, inspiration and creativity to do it all for the next, oh, 16 years or so.  I assumed God was cool with my plans.

And maybe He is – I dunno, I’m currently asking.  Even if He does want me to home-school, I’ve at least realized that I can’t do this on my own, I can’t do it off of my own motivation because my motivation dies very quickly.  And I certainly can’t do it out of my own patience because that’s pretty much non-existent.

And I’ve been humbled.  As much as I hope that I haven’t judged others for choosing public school over home-schooling, I know that there’s always been a part of me that has secretly felt superior about it.  To all you public school parents out there:  I sincerely apologize.  Yeah, I know, I’ve got issues.  But I now know that home-schooling is not for everyone – it’s a calling, not a better one, just a different one, and I hope I’ll be finding out soon which category I fall into.

In any case, Happy First Day of Public/Home/Un-/School, or just Happy Monday to everyone.

…Yet.  But I want one really, really bad.  I know I tend to play the “raised in San Diego, in love with the ocean” card most of the time, but the truth is, my early roots are in Texas and I’m a farmer’s granddaughter.

That’s me on my Mama and Papa’s property lookin’ for horny toads in the vegetable garden.

Yes, I love my books, but I also like the feel of a solid shovel driving into the soil.  I like to have my eye make-up “just so”, but I’m proud when I have callouses on my hands.  I believe a day at the art museum is good for the soul, but even better is a day in the sun, spent with earthworms and tomato plants.

Why am I lauding the virtues of the simple farm life today?  Because today, I met her:

Isn’t she lovely?  Look at those luscious eyelashes adorning those warm espresso eyes.  And that downy chestnut hair is even softer than it looks.  And those slender, though charmingly clumsy legs catapult her to beauty queen heights as far as I’m concerned.  They said I could take her home for a mere $200.  She’d pay for herself after just 40 gallons, which would only take about 5 months at our milk-drinking rate!  Hmm, I think I’d name her Au Lait.  Get it? “Au Lait”?  French for “with milk”?  And she’s a french dairy heifer?  Can you believe this funny stuff just comes to me!.

Okaaaaaay……..anyway……

Apparently, my daughter found her as equally adorable as herself.  That’s some quality homeschooling happening right there.

A group of my fellow moms and our kids visited a working dairy farm today, and in spite of my air-headed decision to wear my fabric TOMS shoes to a dairy farm, the day was quite lovely.  We toured the milking facility, chased some chickens, filled our own gallons of fresh milk to take home, fed the two-week old calves and we moms had ourselves a little picnic while the kiddos played on this:

Well, not all the kids.  Some of the kids ate dirt.  Okay, my kid ate dirt, and I’m pretty sure a little bit of cow poo too.

Ah well, that’s life on a farm.

Knowing Lukus, it will never happen.  He’s city-boy through and through (i.e. not a fan of cow crap, or cows even.  He doesn’t like their “herd mentality”).  But I can dream about my own farm someday.  My own farm overlooking the ocean.  My own farm overlooking the ocean at the epicenter of a major city.  My own farm overlooking the ocean at the epicenter of a major city with art museums and thriving historic districts.  Oh, and with mountains in the distance.  Yeah, that’s the life.  Though it doesn’t appeal to my husband, or the high and mighty city-zoning czars (disgustedly rolling my eyes at government restrictions on private property rights).

Well, I’d better quit daydreaming and go throw my TOMS in the washer.  And start planning the lay-out for my vegetable garden for the side yard.  I gotta start somewhere.  Maybe next year, my little Au Lait!

It’s the most frequent of concerns I hear about homeschooling:  ”Aren’t you concerned about your child’s lack of socialization?”  We homeschool moms are always prepared for this one to make sure we don’t immediately blurt out, “Well, for one, it’s none of your business how I choose to raise my child, and two, I wouldn’t want my kid socializing with your disrespectful brat all day long anyway!”  No, not an effective (or polite) response to this well-meaning, but misguided question.

My short answer to that question is, no, quite frankly, I’m not the least bit concerned.  But if I had the time and an open-minded listener, I’d much prefer to respond with the explanation of how I’m giving my child the Gift of Being Alone.

Being alone has become synonymous in our culture with being lonely.  Of course, everyone knows that one can be lonely in a crowd or even in a relationship, and subsequently assume that if one is lonely under those circumstances, how much more so would they be lonely if they were actually alone?

But they are not the same, as evidenced today by my four-year-old, my very social four-year-old.  Today, I was busy blustering around the house trying to make preparations for our homeschool co-op’s Christmas party tomorrow.  I peeked into Taytem’s room to discover her quite contentedly playing with play-dough while singing a stream-of-consciousness song to herself.  Books were strewn across the floor that she had already read, a water-color creation was drying on her desk, and she was dressed up like a fairy.  I knew that, come tomorrow with 12 other kids in our house, that Taytem would be running around giggling, and playing, and trouble-making, and tattling, and sharing, and all of the other typical activities of a four-year-old with her friends.  But for now, she was content.  And she was alone.

I was very proud in that moment, and I realized that being alone is a greatly undervalued quality in our society.  We don’t think about how William Wordsworth, Marie Curie, Claude Monet and Mark Twain probably greatly valued their time alone.  It seems pretty likely that their greatest accomplishments were achieved in the quiet imaginings of their own minds rather than at a large dinner party.

We effectively value the ability to make friends and create conversations over the ability to make music or create treatments for cancer – abilities that would be honed in solitude.  We assume that self-esteem is gauged by how comfortable one feels around others and neglect how one feels around herself.  We overestimate the amount of time that is necessary to be properly “socialized” as well as the community school’s ability to instill the socializing skills.

In no way do I mean to undermine the great importance of having friends and good social skills, because those are essential to a full life.  But what if we redefined the way we think about social skills?  What if we gave children time to discover the things they like without undue influence from others?  What if we allowed them to commune first with their own imaginative little souls, with paints and paper, with rocks, twigs, flowers and squirrels, with books and dolls?  To give them a chance to like themselves before trying to figure out if others like them?  What if we allowed children the opportunity to befriend their family members?  To enjoy the company of their siblings, their lifelong companions, instead of wanting them out of the way to make room for visiting kids?  To value the wisdom-coated stories of their grandparents and great-grand-parents?  What if we decided that “social skills” meant a little less about having lots of friends at school and tons of activities constantly going on, and meant something a little more simple, like good manners toward the grocery store clerk, the ability to politely order dinner at a restaurant, sending a thank you card for a birthday gift?  I’ve waited tables for groups of teenagers out with all their friends, but who treated me like dirt and were obnoxious toward other customers.  Is that a reflection of good social skills just because they have a lot of names in their cell phones?

So no, I’m not remotely concerned about Taytem’s social skills, and if you were to see her at tomorrow’s Christmas party, or in the grocery store, or at the park, you wouldn’t be either.  If Taytem somehow instantly morphed into an intimidated wall-flower, I would be the first to take action.  But right now, I value my responsibility as her mommy to instill in her the joy of hearing God’s voice in the silence, the wonder inside of her mind, and the pleasure of her own company.