After the high from my smashing new haircut wore off, I found myself wandering around the house aimlessly, feeling sort of dejected and down and bored. Seriously, like “let’s dig our own graves” kind of bored. Wallowing around on the couch feeling pitiful kind of bored.

Suddenly, it hit me. I wasn’t actually bored. I was just incredibly, exceptionally boring.

The family joke is that I cut off all my hair when I’m about to break up with someone. My hairdresser knew I was getting divorced before my first husband did (thought he’s Charlie Sheen crazy, so it probably would have taken him by surprise no matter what). I think my hair gets the whack when I want to change something in my life. I don’t actually want to break up with Officer Daddyman, I’m sure you’ll be relieved to know, but the haircut is definitely related to my feeling of being boring. Deeply, broadly boring.

I realized that my hip, exciting, very-different-from-my-regular new haircut was the most interesting thing about me, at least from my perspective (I’m sure there’s a certain voyeuristic charm to watching my life from the outside, but y’all don’t have to live it).

Look at my day. My breakfast is almost always one of two things (oatmeal or yogurt), my lunch is variations on a theme (something on a salad), my dinner is something from my repertoire of about a dozen dishes. Coffee with breakfast, coffee again at 3. Homeschooling is challenging and even exciting in the big picture, but the day to day can get tedious, especially come this time of year. All day, every day, is filled with children and the million little things they require of me. Then it’s bedtime for the kids. Then I take a bath, have a glass of wine, and read a book. This could be any given day of the week. You can’t even tell if it’s a Monday or a Wednesday when you look at it. I love my family. I love my children. I love homeschooling and being a SAHM. I just feel like I, as an individual, am sort of boring myself to death with myself.

The sad thing is, it isn’t that the day is boring. It’s that I am boring. This is the routine that I have created. This is my handiwork, my boring, boring handiwork. Left to their own devices, my children would probably each come up with a completely different routine, all of which would likely conflict with each other, but which would at least be more colorful. Maybe those “let your kids do whatever they want” people have it right. Maybe I should give consensual living a chance simply because kids with fuzzy green teeth who stayed up until 4am might be different.

I worry that this comes across as a plea for validation. It isn’t. I get that I come across as at least minimally amusing on my blog. I’m a writer and if I cannot entertain you, then I obviously wasted my three years of graduate school (during which, I might add, I did not maintain a 4.0 GPA whilst pregnant and working like some other mom bloggers; I only managed a 3.8 while doing all those things) , since my blog is currently the only place I do any consistent writing (again, because I am boring, and cannot muster up enough creativity to really tackle my own creative projects). I’m not worried that I am perceived as boring; I’m worried that I am boring, in ways that y’all will never see, because I mask the truth of my boringness with my ability to tell a good story and poke fun at my own failings as a mother, homeschooler, and person.

Maybe it’s like body dysmorphia. Maybe I have a skewed perception of my personality, just like I’m sure I have a somewhat skewed perception of what my butt looks like. Maybe my really great and interesting personality and life are hiding underneath one of the cheeks of my ginormous backside. I guess I’m not the only one who feels this way. Do any of you sometimes feel hopelessly, helplessly boring, too? on’t try to validate me. You can commiserate with me, however, and let me know if I am like the cheese and stand alone (in my boring boringness) or if this is just part and parcel of being a homeschooler or a mom or just a person.

Are you boring, too?

No, really. I’ve found myself feeling almost unreasonably happy lately. Happy and content and like everything is going to be ok. This is a big deal for me!

Here’s a little something about me that you might not know: I spend a great deal of my time feeling anxious and worried and waiting for the other shoe to drop. I’ve experienced postpartum anxiety after each of my children was born, with increasing degree of severity with each child, and it tends to last for quite a while after the fact, to the point where it might even be safe to call it “generalized anxiety” by this point. It tends to spike under certain conditions (long drives on the highway as a passenger, especially in traffic or at night, for instance) and at specific times of the month (PMS and mid-cycle). I’m not on a maintenance medication, but I do have a prescription for a “rescue dose” of Xanax to prevent anxiety attacks in situations where I know they’re likely to happen or control them when they do. I take approximately 12 pills a year and the pills are 10-25mg.

My baseline is probably a lot closer to what most people experiences as near-panic. Most of the time, I have a running mental monologue about all the bad things that might happen, could be happening right now if I’m not paying enough attention, will happen if I don’t stay in a heightened state of alert at all times. Sometimes I go through stints of having to almost compulsively check on the children at night to make sure they’re breathing, especially Babypie. I call it “bothering the baby,” because if I don’t see her chest moving, I have to touch her and put my hand on her chest until I feel her moving. Sometimes I experience anxiety as an overwhelming wall of sensory input: too much noise, too much light, too much movement. Relaxing has been…difficult. Anxiety goes along with itchiness for me, too, and I’ll often start breaking out in hives on my face or neck/chest when I’m building up to an anxiety attack. Sometimes I can nip it in the bud by taking a well-timed antihistamine; sometimes not so much. I don’t spend every minute of my day in full-blown anxiety, but I’ve spent a lot of time with it lingering underneath the surface.

Officer Daddyman has been very supportive and understanding, especially this go-’round, as he’s done a lot more reading about anxiety in general and postpartum anxiety/depression specifically. I know it’s not fun for him when I’m worrying unreasonably over something. I know how stressful it is for him when I’m shrieking and/or clinging to the door while he’s driving.

I feel like PPA has had a lot of control over my life, both because I have had to take it into account when I did things like travel or let my children do things that are even remotely risk-taking (I get really anxious about them on roller coasters, for example) and because it has played a big part in our decision making process about family size. My anxiety has gotten worse with each subsequent birth and I have a lot of fear about how much worse it could get if we had another child. I hate that it has that kind of power over our lives, but you’ve gotta do what you’ve gotta do. If we ever did decide to have a fourth child, I’d take several extra measures to help prevent or quickly address the anxiety, but just thinking about the possibility of starting over from scratch with a fresh new bout of worry makes me, well, worry.

There are many other ways in which PPA does not control me, though. My friends and family are in the loop and know my stressors. I don’t feel ashamed of being worried about things, even ridiculous things. I can say, “This is unreasonable. I know it’s unreasonable. I can’t make myself stop feeling it, but I’m aware what I’m feeling is disproportionate or unnecessary.” I’ve developed the ability to tell people things like, “I might yelp while you’re drive. Please don’t take it personally. It’s not your driving. It’s my reaction to being a passenger.” I have tried to keep the vocalized worry to a minimum, to keep my kids from picking up on it. I do thinks that cause me stress anyway, because I refuse to stop doing things. I brought my Xanax with me to Disney World (crowds? rides? lots of going to and fro? Yikes!) and barely needed it, because I decided I was going to enjoy myself and anxiety be damned. I delegate the things that are hardest for me, too, like with the recent event Patchfire and I put on (with other friends) — I’m great at planning, then tend to freak out on event day, so I took all the pre-event tasks and then let everyone else handle the day-of-event activities.

Getting enough sleep, getting exercise, having time for myself — these all help a little, but nothing really makes a significant impact until my hormones start to settle down, which seems to happen at around 18 months postpartum. Babypie is now 19 months and change, and I’m finally starting to feel a little closer to my particular brand of normal. I often feel that, if it weren’t for the amazingly huge stressor of Officer Daddyman’s job, I might actually be somewhere closer to actual normal. The job is hard for me, because it gives me a sense of justification and rationality about my anxiety. Police work isn’t the safest thing ever and any time a police officer is killed in the line of duty, I can’t help but take it incredibly personally. When the Lakewood officers were ambushed and murdered, I was particularly grateful for those last few Xanax.

The upshot of all of this, however, is that I am finally doing so much better. I finally feel like I’m starting to climb out of the hole of constant and exhausting worry. I’m seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. I feel more stable, calm, and genuinely happy than I have in a while. PPA isn’t a permanent state, nor is it something I can just decide not to have, nor is it something to be embarrassed about. When I experienced it after Tank, I was very secretive about it. I didn’t like talking about my mental state not being exactly right. Now, though, I realize that it’s nothing that I’ve done wrong. It’s just the way my body and brain react to having babies. It may even be hereditary; apparently my paternal grandmother used to have anxiety issues (after at least one of her kids was born), often coupled with stress-related hives. I’m not a freak or even that unusual. Many women experience postpartum anxiety and/or depression. I just happen to be one of them.

A few highlights from our week:

Captain Science is finally making progress in math again. He finished pgs 101-104 in Life of Fred: Beginning Algebra/pg 49, Lesson 32 in Fred’s Home Companion. He did the cities of Advance, El Campo, and Gadsden. He attended a Math Olympiad meeting and worked on problems there in preparation for the upcoming tournament. He also watched the lesson from Khan Academy on the distributive property, worked problems sets from that, and did additional problems with Officer Daddyman. As much as I hate to admit it, I think we’re encountering a little of that “not developmentally read for Algebra” thing you hear about on the WTM forums. He has all the skills necessary to do the work. He can work through it each time if reminded of the need to use the distributive property. There’s something conceptual he’s struggling with. I think we may have cracked it this week, but only Monday’s lesson will tell.

In language arts, Captain Science only spent two days working in Essay Voyage, and covered the Correct Sentence and Punctuation lessons in Chapter 3 (Unity). He read a section in World of Poetry, but didn’t write any poems this week. He read the first 30 sections of Beowulf. I don’t remember if I assigned any Caesar’s English II or not. My head is spacey.

He did some more reading on the middle ages in History: The Definitive Visual Guide. This week, he read about Medieval Europe, the Black Plague, and about William the Conqueror/Battle of Hastings (1066!). We’re doing an overview of medieval history and he is then choosing the topics he’d like to study in depth. I have so many resources that I thought it would be fun for him to just go crazy-go-nuts amongst my books.

Science-wise, Captain Science completed the last of the stuff on rocks and soil and moved on to the water cycle. He did the rock mastery test, along with a review of parts of the lesson, then completed the water cycle unit, the application, and the worksheet packet. I need to snag An Inconvenient Truth from Patchfire so that he can read that. He’s doing supplemental reading from Science: TDVG as well.

Tank did some letter matching this week, worked on Halloween pictures, and played some games.

Babypie discovered My Little Ponies.

Oh, and we also watched The Black Stallion together. That’s enough, right? We did enough?

I always prided myself on not being one of those parents.

I wasn’t one of those parents throughout Captain Science’s rocky pre-homeschooling educational career. When educators brought problems (or “problems”) to my attention, I didn’t immediately jump to the assumption that my child had done nothing wrong. In fact, I tended to err on the side of it probably being something he was doing that wasn’t quite right or, at least, not quite what they were looking for. When we had that horrible last year in public school, the third grade year of misery, I thought that perhaps, just perhaps, there might be a little something wrong with Captain Science. After all, if both his teacher and the gifted teacher thought something wasn’t right, it had to be him, right?

I was determined to not be one of those parents, brushing off concerns about possible developmental or behavioral problems simply because it was something I didn’t want to hear. Even though my gut told me that there was nothing “wrong” with Captain Science (even if he were different, different =/= “wrong”), I tried to listen with my brain instead. As a result, I not only jumped through hoops, but I made my child jump through hoops. He was assessed by a speech therapist. We asked my PT sister-in-law (who specializes in children with developmental/neurological disorders) take a look at him. We had my SLP brother-in-law and my PhD in early childhood education mother-in-law quietly assess him. We took him to a counselor to ascertain if he was “on the spectrum” as his teacher implied (“He reminds me so much of a boy I had in here last year who had Asperger’s.” “Having a label isn’t a bad thing! Everyone had a label these days!”) or if he had some deep-seated emotional problem that was causing his school problems.

After we’d jumped through the hoops, we discovered that the answer was that Captain Science was a quirky, incredibly bright boy with one glaringly big problem: the very school system that had insisted we had to jump through hoops to begin with.

At about that point, it hit me: maybe, just maybe, being one of those parents didn’t necessarily mean being blind to my child’s faults. Maybe it meant being my child’s advocate and supporter first, speaking up for him first, taking his side and believing his rightness first, instead of assuming that the adults were right and my child was probably wrong. Instead of presuming him guilty and allowing his accusers or detractors determine the means through which he would be cleared or condemned, perhaps I needed to presume him innocent until they could come up with some compelling evidence as to why I should believe he was anything otherwise.

Last night, I had a golden opportunity to be one of those parents when Captain Science’s soccer coach’s mother called to complain about his behavior at soccer practice (Captain Science is apparently one of “three or four” miscreants on the team). Instead of immediately becoming angry at Captain Science and assuming he had, indeed, cut up, I asked for some concrete examples. The coach’s mother could give me none, but said her son (the teenage coach) would. The coach had a difficult time articulating any specific examples, or articulating much of anything at all, other than one claim that Captain S had told another coach “you can’t make me” — something the coach I spoke to didn’t experience first hand, but only heard about after the fact. The only direct complaint the coach could give me was prompted by his mother, whom I could hear carrying on in the background: Captain Science had taken off his shirt during practice and hadn’t immediately put it back on when asked. This apparently greatly distressed both the coach and his mother, but is hardly an infraction I feel necessitated calling home.

I decided to be one of those parents. I know Captain Science pretty well. If he were being consistently criticized, fussed at, told he was doing something wrong, he would be complaining about how much he dislikes soccer when I got him at the end of practice. Instead, he’s bouncing off the field each day, full of joy, telling me how much he loves it. That doesn’t tell me my child is misbehaving and being corrected, so either he’s not the cut up he’s being accused of being or his coach lacks the authority to command respect and discipline the lack thereof. Neither of those makes me feel I need to “handle [this situation] at home,” as the coach’s mommy thought I should. In fact, that female coach Captain S had supposedly sassed? He brought up, unprompted, the brand new coach he’d had that day and how tough she was. He said she threatened to make them run laps, do pushups, etc. if they didn’t follow her instructions, and, Captain Science added, “I believed her!”

So, being one of those parents and assuming my child was NOT in the wrong lead me to investigate this further, without getting upset at him or about the situation, and discover that the source of the coach’s (and his mommy’s) dismay was probably the shirtlessness (their hangup, not mine), not the sass. Sure, I’ll keep an eye on him at the remaining practice and a half to make sure he’s not being rude to his coaches, but I’m not disciplining him for something I don’t remotely believe he did. I don’t doubt that the coach may feel disrespected, but after speaking to the kid, I think that any issues of respect problem lies in him and not in his players.

Yes, I know that this isn’t exactly the same as thinking my kid can’t ever do any wrong. It’s certainly more of a middle ground. It did, however, require a little bit of a paradigm shift away from thinking adults are right, children are wrong. More importantly, it involved a shift to thinking in favor of my child. Nothing wrong with a default of “I know my kid and he’s not a bad kid.” Nothing wrong with that at all.

If that means I might be one of those parents, even just a little bit, I’m ok with that.

As homeschoolers, we are each our child(ren)’s teacher…excepting those unschoolers who eschew the word “teach,” of course. I’d like to take a moment to tell you teachers-in-your-own home how much I appreciate you.

Homeschooling isn’t easy. You do it anyway.

Your day isn’t done at 3 o’clock or even 6 o’clock — it’s not done until your children are all tucked in bed, and even then, you often stay up for hours going on plans for the following day or preparing for the weeks and months ahead. You don’t get summer vacation. You don’t get a two-week break at Christmas. You can’t draw a line between your job and your personal life. You can’t walk away from the work and the children when the day is done. You do it anyway.

You don’t get paid to do this. You don’t draw a salary and you don’t get a pension at the end. Your “salary” is intellectual growth of your children. Your “pension” is the well-adjusted, well-educated adults you have raised. Your “benefits” aren’t in the form of health insurance and paid leave, but in the amount of quality you spend with your child. The nest egg you’re building for the future isn’t financial. You do it anyway.

You don’t have a union. You have to scrap out the support where you can find it, through online forums or local homeschool groups. You have to be your own advocate, figure things out on your own, or ask for help from others like you. It can be an uphill battle the whole way. You do it anyway.

You don’t have a mandate from the State. You may even be at great odds with your state by choosing to homeschool. You fill out forms, jump through hoops, and then fill out more forms about jumping through hoops. You may have to put your family and your life up for scrutiny for someone else’s determination of whether you’re fit to homeschool. You do it anyway.

You don’t have someone developing an approved curriculum for you, setting academic standards for you, or giving you the exact information your children should learn. You don’t have it that easy. You have to figure it out on your own. You can’t just teach to the test, satisfied that the test scores will be the end to justify your means. You have to determine what you can use, what you can afford, what standards you will set for your children. You have to find a way to teach them everything they need to know for college and for life. You’ll probably miss a few things, and you agonize over which things you’ll miss. You do it anyway.

You don’t do it “their” way. Your job isn’t always respected. You don’t get special license plates. When someone asks you, “What do you do for a living?” your answer often isn’t what they want to hear. You’re subjected to a rigorous line of questioning about what you do and what you teach and why. Your motives are suspect. Your methods are scrutinized. Your rigor is challenged. You do it anyway.

Day in and day out, you do it anyway. You continue to educate your children, despite others’ misgiving, despite criticism and unwanted commentary. You invest time, money, and energy that you may not actually have in making sure your children have a thorough, meaningful education. You reach out to others like you and offer them help, advice, materials, support. You raise your children with character and creativity.

You’re homeschoolers. You don’t give up. You do it anyway.

Happy Teacher Appreciate Day, to my community of wonderful home-teachers. You’re loved. You’re appreciated.

Then there was Patchfire, and she was good. She placed The Well Trained Mind into Smrt Mama’s hand. She walked Smrt Mama and Officer Daddyman through curricula and scheduling. She gave Smrt Mama books on the philosophical workings of homeschooling. She gave Smrt Mama curricula to get started. She answered questions with infinite patience and she agreed to teach science classes to Captain Science.

One day, Patchfire fell in love with a house. The house was beautiful, had many bedrooms, had a completely finished basement with full second kitchen, and, miracle of miracles, was in the neighborhood right behind Smrt Mama’s. The children could walk to each other’s houses. Smrt Mama and Patchfire could co-op chickens (at Smrt Mama’s, on her half-acre) and vegetables (at Patchfire’s, in her flat, sunny, already-garden-plotted backyard) together. The house was perfect in every way, and Patchfire and Smrt Mama rejoiced.

Now there is but once catch: Patchfire’s old house must sell so that she and all the Mitnens (that’s what we call them, since Tank says “Mitnen” for Mister and Missus, and they’re Mitnen Ham and Mitnen Tash) can move into The House of All Things Good.

Here is what Smrt Mama needs from you: She needs you to pray, light candles, vibrate on a higher frequency, send positive thoughts out into the universe, or just plain old think good thoughts for Patchfire and the rest of the Mitnens to sell their house quickly and easily, so that they can move into the house that’s just through the woods from my house.

I love Patchfire. I (in a very platonic way) love her husband. I adore her children. My children adore her children. My husband likes them all is his stolith* manly cop way. She must be within walking distance of me. This is absolutely imperative. Please send the Great Universal/Divine Love her way.

*My awesome Japanese friend Ai made up this word. We think it means a cross between stoic and stolid. She says, “The Japanese are so stolith. They don’t know how to have any fun.”

Today, at Olan Mills photography, the photographer argued with me over comma placement in the title on a photograph collage. The main picture was of all three of my beautiful, talented, and delightful children (whose behavior while Nana and I looked at photo proofs was such that they are lucky I did not devour them on the spot like a disgruntled hamster), with one small photo of Tank and Captain Science and one small photo of Babypie below. The collage was captioned “Captain Science, Tank & Babypie.”

I protested the lack of Oxford comma between “Tank” and “&” (the “&” was necessary in lieu of “and,” due to the length of Tank’s real name), only to have the photographer tell me, “No, that’s right. I thought it was supposed to be the way you’re saying it, but an English teacher was in here the other day and said this is the right way.”

I responded, “Well, I have a master’s degree in writing and editing. I can assure you that it’s supposed to have a comma,” then said to my mother, “This is why I homeschool!”

While it turned out to be a non-issue, as an additional comma wouldn’t fit on the line, I will not accept the dropping of the Oxford (or “serial”) comma simply because some English teacher says so. Dropping that comma may be acceptable in AP style, which is designed to minimize space, but dropping the serial comma is not otherwise acceptable to me. Unless the final two items are together (“peanut butter & jelly,” for instance, or even “Captain Science and Tank,” since they were in the same photograph, while Babypie was in her own), that comma belongs in that list.

But me no buts* about how this is acceptable in non-academic American written grammar, because Americans say and do many things that are an abject butchery of proper grammar and usage. American writers have become lazy, American grammarians have lost their spine, and American teachers are failing to impart a respect for proper punctuation in their students. If it’s good enough for Strunk and White, the MLA Style Manual and The Chicago Manual of Style, it’s good enough for me, and it should be good enough for you, dammit.

Yes, when Lynne Truss (author of Eats, Shoots & Leaves) talks about not getting between those on opposing sides of the Oxford comma issue when drink is involved, she is, in fact, talking about me.

Considering that most public schools use MLA writing guidelines, which advocate the use of the Oxford comma, the idea of a public school English teacher telling a photographer that the comma isn’t necessary incites me to a new level of grammatically righteous anger. I’ve tolerated too many notes (both from Captain Science’s old public school and Tank’s private preschool) that pluralized with an apostrophe or misused “to” and “too” (No! You do not have “to many volunteers!”). While I often have a playful relationship with English, I will not give up my commas without a fight!

*Neither Officer Daddyman nor Patchfire have heard the phrase “but me no buts.” They both thought it was a typo. I promise that it is not. Here is a nice article about the “X me no X’s” model.

Ok, I understand why it works for them. They can ditch their older children on the public school system and now want to use that time to do their various mommy activities. Unfortunately, they don’t seem to understand that those times are really not the best for their homeschooling friends–or if they understand it in theory, they either don’t understand it in practice or don’t particularly care–and either get miffy about our expressions of scheduling dismay, start the process of subtle exclusion from that social group, or both.

I’d love to attend some local parenting group activities. I really would. I’d love to be more involved in local birth and breastfeeding advocacy organizations. I’d love to go to cloth diapering workshops, play dates for toddlers at various parks, and moms-only coffee at the local coffee shop. Unfortunately, I do not have someone else available to educate my kids for me.

Believe it or not, the flexibility of homeschooling doesn’t mean I can go to some adult- or toddler-geared activity multiple days a week. I know you’re all shocked, but Captain Science has to do his schooling at some point, and that point needs to not be dinner time. Even if we were one of the “done by noon” homeschooling families, we still couldn’t make all these 10am activities for small children, because Captain S is still there. He doesn’t magically disappear during school hours. He can’t stay here alone while I cart Babypie and Tank off to play dates. He can’t go to music time or story time without being the inappropriately old, freakishly tall boy at whom the other parents look askance when he smiles at or talks to their toddlers, and frankly, I don’t want some stranger-danger fearing mama mentally profiling my sweet and innocent 9-year-old son as someone who might in some way be a threat to her baby, simply because he’s friendly and doesn’t have anywhere else to go.

As much as I joke about doing something and “counting” it as a lesson (example: “Going to Costco involves a lot of walking. Totally counting that as P.E. for today!”), we are not a homeschooling family whose educational philosophy is based primarily on getting out of the house and doing stuff. We aren’t unschoolers; We have quite a lot of formal curricula to work through in a week. We also have other lessons and classes, scheduled for, amazingly enough, school hours, and no school bus is going to come to take Captain Science to and fro.

In a perfect world, the “crunchy” mama set would realize that many of their number homeschool, but this world is far from perfect. I’m watching homeschooling slowly, ever so slowly, result in a gradual exclusion from many of my former social groups. Part of it might be natural growth, as our children are taking different paths, but I think that much of it just has to do with the fact that my “free” time is now decidedly less expansive, my entourage size doesn’t change based on school hours (it’s always Smrt Mama + 3), and I can’t meet up with most of my non-homeschooling friends/groups with enough frequency to maintain the friendships/sense of membership.

I feel like I spend so much time talking about exclusion — from the homeschooling world as a whole, due to secularity, from secular homeschooling, due to rigorous classical curricula. This is just one more facet of that. The inconvenience of the rigorous homeschooling schedule can be a stumbling block in maintaining pre-homeschooling friendships and activities.

When I had to get up at 6:15 to get Captain Science off to school in a timely fashion and received a backpack full of reminder notes every day, life was quite different for us than it is now. More predictability. More routine. That’s not to say that we don’t have a routine now, but it’s different each day of the week, as we have co-op on Tuesdays, science at Patchfire’s house on Thursday, piano lessons two days, things here and things there. It’s not 7:45 to 2:15 every Monday through Friday. It’s not on someone else’s time.

This sort of nonreliance on the schedule of others is wonderful in almost every aspect, save one…we’re totally, completely responsible for keeping track of stuff for ourselves! That means that, sometimes, things just don’t get done. We don’t think about them. We don’t remember them. Here are some examples:

1. Picture Day. There is no official homeschool picture day. As a result, Captain Science is almost through with his 4th grade year and has not had formal pictures made. We keep saying we’re going to get them done, but that just hasn’t happened.

2. Hair cuts. Without planned picture days and school field trips, for which I didn’t want my child to look like he was being raised by stewbums, hair cuts tend to fall by the wayside. I wasn’t the best about scheduling them regularly as it was, but at least three times a school year (for first day of school, fall pictures, and spring pictures), Captain Science got a really nice hair cut. Once we got that “picture day is coming” notice, we’d schedule the hair cut. Now, it’s more like Officer Daddyman spends weeks complaining about Captain Science and Tank’s ever-growing hair, I swear I’ll make an appointment to have it done, Daddyman gets frustrated and just takes the boys to his barber, at which point I complain about their hair being too short. OH THE JOYS OF HOMESCHOOLING!

3. Watching what we say. If the boys were in full time public school, I think I’d watch my mouth a little more carefully. Since they’re home so much, I have developed an unfortunate tendency to just say the things I’d normally have saved for times I wasn’t in their presence. My worst offense is, “So’s your face,” which my brother says is the appropriate response to absolutely everything (and the response to “So’s your face” is “Your mom”). Captain Science will announce, “Mama, I’m done with math,” and I’ll say, “Oh yeah? Well, so’s your face!” Captain Science will say, “So’s your mom,” and Tank, who is the classiest among us, yells, “So’s your BUTT.” I know I should correct it, simply because it’s not socially acceptable for my kids to say that, but it’s not like they’re going off to school and saying it to their teachers, right?

4. All that important non-curriculum stuff that kids still need to learn. Did you know that you were supposed to make sure your kids memorized their address? I know I totally didn’t think about it until Patchfire told me Eclectic Girl was six before they realized that she didn’t know her address. Oops! Public schooled kids get it drilled into them in kindergarten, but our homeschooled children are going to grow up with no clue as to where they live. Someone needs to put together a checklist of non-curriculum stuff that our kids need to learn. That list will also include how to spell their last name, their parents’ names, and their phone number.

5. Cops and firemen. Unless you’re luck enough to have an Officer Daddyman in the house, your kids may be missing out on the awesome public school experience of fire fighters and law enforcement officers coming out to the school to teach your kids about safety and how to dial 911 while mama and daddy are sleeping late (they say that’s not what they’re doing, but you KNOW that’s what they’re doing). There’s always the option of trying to get your co-op in to the fire station, I suppose.

6. Fire drills. You should be having these for your family anyway, but I bet you don’t. I know I don’t. At school, your kids would be having fire drills. They’d learn to “stay low and go” and to “stop, drop, and roll.” Maybe when you plan that visit to the fire station that you aren’t actually going to plan, you can make sure the firemen address those topics.

What things do you think that you’re missing as a homeschooler? What critical gaps in your child’s education (academic or social), appearance, or experience are you completely overlooking?

The search terms may be completely straightforward:

smrt lernins
smrt lernins blog
smrt mama
smrt learnings
patchfire eclectic girl (who was looking for you and got me instead, Patchfire?)

Sometimes the search terms are curricula-centered:

mct grammar
can abeka be secular?
building poems m clay
ellen mchenry “the brain” homeschool
compare just write and writing strands
life of fred math overly christian
jesus in math class/jesus mathematics/jesus math/bible verses on mathematics (four separate searches)

Sometimes, the searcher clearly has…let’s just call them “strong feelings” on certain topics:

unschooling failure (well, yes, I do give some examples of that here)
are there unschoolers that are not hippies (yes, but the other unschoolers killed and ate them)
being unschooled did not prepare me (Am I the only one who is terribly curious for what this searcher was unprepared?)
are home schooled children to sheltered (My answer: No, but they are able to distinguish between “to” and “too”)
homeschooler sheltered (also “sheltered homeschooler”)
pitfalls of unschooling (better than “pit traps of unschooling”)
unschooling idiocy (this works on a few levels, so please feel free to insert your own joke here)

And finally, the downright bizarre:

“a lot of pee” (their quotes!)
captain underpants valuable lessons learned (lesson learned: Don’t read Captain Underpants)
lern sex (No! Learn spelling!)
distilling urine (Ok, fair enough. I do have a post tagged with this)
etymology of sexy (I’m pretty sure it derives from the word “sex”)
in the event of this tough situation (break glass, remove homeschooler)
seculat thrusday (yes, I know this is just a matter of typos, but what a glorious combination of typos!)
why is math hard for pretty girls (because God doesn’t give with both hands)

Then there’s the one search that really tugs at my heart strings, because I could have been the one who searched for it about a year ago:

homeschooling parents who feel panic and anxiety (You aren’t the only one out there! I’m here! You aren’t alone!)

If you found my site through a search engine, how did you get here? If you were searching for my site, what do you think you’d search for?