Dust Bunnies And Books

Wow, it's been so long since I blogged. Four years of high school homeschooling have passed since I last posted!!! Where did the years go?  I always meant to get back into blogging here, just to record the memories. Guess I've always been like that....never could keep a diary up to date either. 

Last Saturday, we graduated our older daughter from homeschool.  Despite the fact that I'm still waiting on a few final essays and chapters of math!  LOL. Gotta love homeschooling!  I'm such a mean teacher!  :)

DD18 is headed off to Ireland this fall for her first semester of college, which suspiciously sounds like homeschooling on the college level!  In January 2017, she'll return to her Christian college to begin "real" college. :)  She plans on majoring in Professional Writing and hopes to become a novelist.  Over the past three years, she has really begun to develop her writing skills.  She has two novels written, along with ideas for the final book in the trilogy....not to mention a few other tales running around in her head and demanding to be put down on paper.  She reads anything and everything written by JRR Tolkien and loves stories of the Arthurian legends.  Along the way, she's also come to love Pride & Prejudice and Jane Eyre.  When she's not reading and writing, she grows carnivorous plants, volunteers at church, is involved in our church's puppet and stick (dowel rod) ministry, and rides her horse.  She is in her third year of the United States Pony Club and has varsity lettered for two years as an Equestrian Athlete.  She is headed to Pony Club championships this summer!

I am still homeschooling our younger daughter.  She has two more years after this one.  Over the past few years, she has moved from wanting to be a missionary in the Honduras to being a different kind of missionary: an early childhood teacher.  She has been working with the young ones in our Junior Church since she was in 6th grade.  When she's not doing schoolwork, she is reading, reading, reading!  She too is involved in our church's puppet ministry and volunteers at church. 

Both girls have discovered Goodreads and Pintrest this year, but they don't do Facebook. :)  Both set up blogs yesterday to begin their venture into the blogging world.  (Which is what prompted my return here!)

When I last blogged here, I was probably fretting about how to homeschool high school.  I found an old computer file recently with old high school plans in it for our older daughter....evidence of my fretting!  It had all four years marked out, albeit with lots of question marks.  Funny, there were so many ideas that we never did.  While it is nice to have some rough ideas for the 4 years, I ended up changing things each year to allow for interests and our schedules and reality.  Yeah, there's a lot I wish we had done, but we still did a lot of great stuff and it all worked out.  Just think....four years ago, our older daughter had no clue she would desire to become a novelist. 

Last year, we added NaNoWriMo and GoTeenWriters to our school year, and we were able to foster her love of writing.  Back when I originally wrote out plans for the upcoming high school years, I had ever even heard of those sites.  But, as she sought out good advice for a budding novelist, she found these two sites, and they have made a huge impact on her and her writing.  So they became part of our curriculum.  The flexibility of homeschooling is awesome that way!

I've still got two more years.  And, yes, I've got them all planned out in a computer file.....with lots of questions marks. Some things don't change, but I bet what we actually do in these next two years will change from the ideas I've got written today. :)  And I'm OK with that.