"The basic right of all human beings is the right to choose what to learn and think." ~John Holt



Friday, April 9, 2010

First post...revised a million times! :)

   Almost four years ago my daughter Chloe started breathing rapidly.  Since Chloe had been diagnosed earlier that year with asthma I thought she needed a breathing treatment. I was very wrong. When her breathing became worse, my husband Donald and I decided to drive Chloe to the hospital. After reaching our local hospital, Chloe was then put into another ambulance. She was driven to The Childrens Hospital in New Orleans. Chloe was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes, a diagnosis that we never expected, but were able to digest. We would all need to learn about the disease and how to take care of Chloe in a entirely different way.

   Donald and I started thinking about homeschooling both the girls after the diagnosis but we had so many concerns. Could we possibly provide our children with a proper education at home? What about the laws on homeschooling?  Cost? What would family members say?  Looking back now it all seems so silly.

   While all of the drama with Chloe was unraveling,our daughter Autumn sat patiently.  Autumn hated school even though she was a straight A student and had tons of friends. Autumn felt that if Chloe were going to have the choice to homeschool then she wanted that right too!   

The most difficult challenge for our family when we started homeschooling was the bullying of the outside families.  


We started home schooling the girls in August of 2006.


"The basic right of all human beings is the right to choose what to learn and think." ~John Holt

3 comments:

Cam said...

The world stops spinning when your bebeh is sick, doesn't it, Mama? I've been there myself!!

So glad to see you here, and can't wait to learn more about your family!! I've added you to my links to other unschoolers, if you want to check it out, I might have some you haven't seen yet! Once I had a site just for our unschooling, and it had over thirty unschooling families listed there!! I wish I'd written them down before I deleted the old blog! We are part of such an awesome community here!

:)

Unknown said...

Hi, Kimberly. I recognize you from Facebook. :-)

We had homeschooling friends whose daughter was diagnosed with type 1 at age 10, and she almost died before they discovered what the problem was. They were already homeschooling, but I can imagine how difficult it would be to send one's child to school and trust that she would be well cared for.

Thanks for the blog follow!

~Cheryl

~Kimberly said...

Hey Cheryl,

After Chloe's diagnosis we tried to let her go back to school. We really did. We didn't want her to feel like she was different then her friends because of her diagnosis. We were so ignorant to the homeschooling world. We actually told the outside family(and its huge) that we were just going to try it out for six months so they would all lay off from telling us how wrong we were for homeschooling. That was four years ago this August. The girls are so happy,love learning and I myself have never learned so much! I have my 16 year old daughter proof read my blog, needless to say I am a horrible speller, sentence composer and all around scatter brain!! Thank goodness I'm unschooling myself! ;)