This is what our first day of school looked like

Here are the kids ready to walk out the door, for their first day of school.

Here they are climbing on the bus.

What an odd thing to have at the entrance of a school....wait a minute.  Are they at a school?

They are at school, but it's not the typical brick and mortar one that the big yellow bus takes them to.  Our family has begun a new schooling adventure.  That new adventure is called HOMESCHOOL.  After a lot of prayer, fasting, research, prayer, convincing and prayer, I decided we were going to homeschool our kids.  I say "I decided" because Mike has been wanting this for quite a while.  He slowly and patiently waited for me to join the homeschool bandwagon.  I fought it and I fought it.  It was just something I never wanted to do.  I didn't want to have the "weird family" in the neighborhood.  I didn't want to have all that work and prep to do.  I didn't want to go crazy being around my kids all the time.  Those and more were my reasons not to do it.  That was before.

Now that I've really looked into it, talked to lots of homeschool moms, and prayed (have I mentioned that?), I have learned that homeschool is none of those things.  My kids will be fine socially because there are lots of families that homeschool too.  There isn't crazy amounts of prep work to do because homeschool is not like public school and it's not supposed to be.  In our homeschool, there's no "homework", tests, assigned readings, etc..  The best part is I am crazy about my kids, so I want to be around them all the time.  Mike and I genuinely feel that this is the best choice for our family.  What more reason do we need?

In order to celebrate the start of the new school year and this adventure, we decided to take the kids to the new aquarium near us.  It was really fun for all 6 of us.  The kids took sketch and idea notebooks to record and draw new animals they were interested in.  We had a fun time talking about the things we thought were interesting or gross or scary.  We were able to watch the sharks get fed (we learned that is not as cool as we were anticipating).  The kids even made some new friends:

 I plan on and hope to restart this blog so I can keep a homeschool journal of sorts.  And I also promised some people that I'd blog so they can see where our adventure takes us.  I'm excited to find out where that is!