Lost in Blogville

Hello Everyone,

  Let me introduce myself. I am a mother of 7 and a grandmother of 3 soon to be 4 adorable grandbabies. I live in the Beautiful Willamette Valley AKA Heaven, Garden of Eden. We (I) love it here. We moved here from Arizona about 1 1/2 years ago. Our children are aged 25, 23,23,21,21,16 and 5. My grandchildren are aged 2, 9m, 1 week and the 4th is due in July.

   I have always had my children in brick and mortar school but I've always had the secret desire to homeschool. A few times with my older children I needed to homeschool during the summer. Using a popular phonics program helped teach them to read. The school always wanted to hold back my now 16yo So I would teach him at home during the summers so he wouldn't need to be. Plus one of my sons would of never graduated 8th grade without me schooling him at home. So I guess my secret wasn't really a secret just a disguise.

 I have a child with MS and has lost the majority of his vision. I fought and fought with his schools to
have him get all the help he needed to succeed. He did graduate high school!!! So for that I'm so proud as he was encouraged by the school to drop out.

  My youngest son is Autistic. He went to B&M preschool. I worked full time as did my husband and I thought I didn't have a choice. Then we moved to Oregon and our life changed forever.

The 1st 6 months we lived here we had no jobs, tons of bills, and lots of hope. Praying to God everyday, trying Feng shui to bring money into the home. Feng shui did not work but praying did.
We got rid of everything. 2 cars were repoed, No cable, internet, no going out for dinners, no traveling, nothing. Stay home, look for work, lots of family outings exploring the great outdoors. We became closer as a family and learned to appreciate the little things.
  After 6 months I found a job. I worked and my husband stayed home. Little man would be starting kindergarten in Sept and he wouldn't talk to anyone but family. He wasn't potty trained and meltdowns were the norm. I stressed about sending him on a bus by his self to a school full of strangers. How would/could he succeed when the whole world was scary. He wouldn't even go into the next room without someone with him.

 Then we heard about K12. Most people don't count this as homeschool and they shouldn't. K12 is a public school you do online at home. But it was perfect for me. It relived the stress of him going to school. We still weren't sure if we could do this. We weren't sure if we could even stay with Oregon. So we set a time limit. If no work for husband by September we would go back to AZ. I started looking for homes for sale there. The last day of our time limit. He heard back from the job he wanted. Yay. We could stay. I could lower my hours to near nonexistent and little man could do K12.

Now we have been with k12 for almost a whole year. Little man flew through kindergarten and started 1st grade in Feb. I'm so thankful for this opportunity to watch him grow and learn. I still 'homeschool' him a lot. I buy curriculum to fortify the concepts and help him along the way with completely out of the box ideas.

I will be sharing a lot of those ideas here in this blog. Hoping that maybe you will get some ideas also or maybe just a little entertainment. This is my first day ever blogging so please feel free to give me some constructive critiscm and hopefully encourage me on this new path. Thanks for reading.