Not Sure You Can Do It? Do a Summer Homeschool first

Nope, I didn't breastfeed my kids. I'm not built to and, I don't want to.  In fact, until I watched a particular Family Guy episode, the thought never crossed my mind.  However, I do want to home school my kids and the question is, can I?  Can I serve as a perpetual intellectual lactation machine?

I'm not worried about if I can teach them.  What I'm worried about is being with my kids all day long, every day, providing providing providing.  I love my girls, but operating in this role, ensuring the nectar of education is flowing is definitely a sustenance providing role that has to come from some place very deep within.  Even with self-driven kids, which I have, every single day helping them along all day long may prove too much.  If you believe the commonly male/female role accepted history, it is the woman who stays with the kids while the man goes out to hunt down the food.... so maybe like breast feeding, I'm simply not wired for this stuff.

So, how did I test the waters? Glad you asked, because that's what this post is about: how to try out homeschooling before jumping in

I had learned from a different major family lifestyle shift that it is best you sample the new scenario for a prolonged period before you go for it (another story for another post, but it involves living on a sailboat!).  For homeschooling, what I decided to do was do school for an entire summer with them.  That is, put them in Daddy Home Summer school.  I wanted to see if I could handle their education for the entire period, 11 weeks.

I looked at it this way, worst case scenario is that it totally sucks and we were miserable.  If that happened, we could just stop and they would go into regular summer mode, knowing that they would be back to their traditional school with no interruptions.... no harm no foul.  Any case better than that, then at least the girls would have a good start on the next years school material. All this, and I got time with my kids.

In June of 2016, as soon as the school year ended for my kids at their public charter school, they entered Daddy Home Summer school.  This would be a trial run for all of us.  We knew that they would be going back to their regular public charter school in September (see The Middle Way post), but for the summer it would be daddy school all the way.

I had work packets ready, ideas for field trips, proposed daily schedules, cool projects, evaluation criteria, and more.  We would be attacking material from every area of study that they would face when they returned to their public charter school the next school year, 3rd and 5th grade stuff.

Over did a dune buggy engine once,
making long distance driving not feasible.

This test summer run provided a tremendous amount of actual feedback and, like the time I designed an engine for my dune buggy, I found that not everything worked as my mind had planned.  Some things better, some things worse, but that it was all about balance.

Doing the Daddy Home Summer school before going Full Monty tested the waters in a number of areas, allowing me to refine my operating model.  However, the most important learning and the main reason I even did this trial run was to ensure that I could, in fact, do this week after week after week.

So, nope ... I can't breastfeed, and I really don't want to.  I can, however, homeschool for weeks on end, and totally enjoy it and myself.  Wahoo!!