Homeschooling Magazines

Are there homeschool magazines anymore? I’m assuming there probably are. If I wanted to receive such a thing, I would certainly rather have it in paper form than on my phone or something. Today, though, it seems like there are enough homeschooling moms out there with blogs on homeschooling advice that homeschooling magazines wouldn’t make a lot of money.

 

I remember homeschool magazines. We received one or two as I was growing up. I remember flipping through them, reading some of the articles. Not because I needed advice on how to homeschool my kids but because I read anything that had words on it.  I don’t remember anything particular about their content, but I do remember their covers. Perfect little homeschool families, some with only a few kids and others with a baseball team of them. All well dressed, all in perfectly clean houses, and all sitting at tables or desks working hard on their assignments or helping their moms in the kitchen. And I remember wondering how those moms kept such clean homes with kids who happily sat down to work on their math and rejoiced in helping in the kitchen. The epitome of homeschooling. And one my family never reached.

 

To be honest, I preferred my own home. The one that wasn’t always clean, even though mom had rules about keeping things cleaned. The one where we didn’t always work on our assignments without complaining and grumbling at our lot in life or the amount of sentences we had to diagram. The home where we did try to get out of chores, and we did whine when something seemed unfair about what we got compared to what X sibling got. It’s true my parents had high standards on our behavior. And it’s true my dad could come down hard on us for crossed lines. But at least, in the end, they didn’t expect us to be perfect. At least not all the time.

 

As I entered high school, we started a curriculum that put us in the midst of those homeschooling magazine families. At least, that’s what you had to make your family sound like. When you talked with your peers, you didn’t mention that sometimes you read a “romance” novel, or you didn’t get up at five in the morning to read your Bible, or you played basketball in shorts.You didn’t mention the reality of your family – only the part you would want printed in a magazine if you achieved such a status. It was awful. No one was really your friend. No one was real. And, in the end, no one cared unless your “perfect” family matched up to their “perfect” family. No wonder twenty years later so many of our families have ended up just about as imperfect as you can imagine.

 

So, as I have started on my own homeschooling journey, I have kept the perfectionism part as far away as I can. Our house is not perfectly neat. Emry and Ethan do gripe and complain about completing their assignments. And I do have to nag them about chores. Nor are they so far advanced in their educational endeavors that Ivy League colleges are already knocking on our door. Emry struggles with reading. Ethan struggles with a pair of scissors and writing many of his letters. And Ellyson wanders in and out of the school room either making a mess of all sorts of things or wanting to be right in the middle of it all. Some days I want to pull the hair out of my head and figure if I can just send them out into the world knowing how to read and do basic math before I die of frustration, I have conquered the mountain. 

 

Thankfully, the other homeschool moms I’m friends with have the same struggles. Well, not necessarily the same, but we do all have messy houses full of griping kids who frustrate us when, at times, they can’t seem to understand the very basics of word pronunciations. However, the other day as I stood in Emry’s room where Emry and Ethan work on their assignments every morning, I couldn’t help snapping this very rarephoto. In fact, I don’t think our makeshift school room as ever looked like this…or will ever look like this again. And since it lasted all of thirty second before Ellyson was off to pull Emry’s dolls out of the bucket, Emry was off to join her, and Ethan was left to complain about his math…the fact that I had that moment to snap this photo is pretty impressive:

 

 

As one friend said: “That should be on the cover of a homeschooling magazine!”