rambling about unschooling

I felt led to be an AP mom. While PG, I decided I was not going back to work. Nothing I could do to earn (at best) $10/hr would be anywhere near as important as being with my child. I have been very blessed that my husband agrees and we are able to get by on one income. He has also allowed me to do the research on education and allowed me to start us down this lesser-traveled path. I know not everyone has the luxury of being as free as we are, and I am greatful for it. Unschooling, for us, has been a natural progression of AP and positive discipline. The central theme of trust and respect work for us. I'm trying to model for my son how to get along with others, how to be a good "housemate". How to love others and share our blessings. How to appreciate how blessed we are.

I have come to see the fact that we only have one child as a blessing in itself. Although I know families with many children who very successfully unschool, I do not know if *I* would have been able to give Gregory what he needed if I had had another little one needing me as well. As you all know, I love babies. My heart almost always sinks just a bit when I hear that someone is pregnant. It's as though I hear "Myrtle is pregnant and you aren't!" But as I've gotten older (I listen for the bio-clock, but I just don't hear it!) it's gotten easier. I think there still may be babies in my future - babies put in my arms but not in my womb. So if I had written the script of my life, I would not be 40 years old with only one child. But in hindsight, I do see all of the blessings the situation has brought us and I am happy with where I am right now.

Watching Gregory learn on his own has been amazing. I'm not even sure I can put it into words. For me, there is faith at work. Faith that he was created as a whole being. He is not mine to "train" or to "civilize". He is only mine to guide. He learns best when I stay out of his way. I am here to help him find his God given passion and to help him develop that passion. I am not here to convince him to be a doctor or a lawyer or even (as Dad is) an engineer. I don't really have worldly goals for him. What I want for him is to be a happy, healthy, productive person. Those are the things I am to model for him. He taught himself to read and reads very well. Math skills have flourished with time-telling and cash-spending/saving. He is better at budgetting his money than I am, and he often has more cash than I do! When interested, he approaches new things head on. He examines new things in their totality and figures out how they work. He'll then take it apart (literally or figuratively) and examine and absorb each detail. His thirst for knowledge is still fresh. And I love the light bulb moment expression I often see on his face. But I also know when he's not interested in something, and I know that if he's not interested no amount of talking or showing can change that. And that's okay - because of it, I am fairly aware of what he does not know. Well, maybe that's a stretch. I *think* I know what he doesn't know. He'll often suprise me by spouting off something that I had no idea he knew.

All of this is a long way of saying that examining where you are on your journey is a good thing. Finding your own way is a good thing. Questioning what you trust is a good thing. And they are all good things to be modeling for your children. They are seeing that even as an adult we are growing and learning. Very little is in stone.

And I could go on a rant about hating the term unschooling. Our life should not be described by a term with "school" in it at all. We have nothing to do with it at all. It's like calling breastfeeding moms "unbottlers".