It’s a little past 5 am on April 27th. Jeff and I were supposed to take the girls to our first branding of the year today, but about 5 minutes ago, the text came in that our friends are postponing due to cold rainy weather. I said a prayer this week that the Lord would help me find time to write for my blog, and waaa-laaaa here it is. Let’s see if I can write the majority of this post before my little early riser LuLu comes out to cuddle. We finished our 4th week of homeschool yesterday, here is an honest account of how things started out. There have been ups and downs, tears and laughter, and lots of adjustments, but all in all I am very pleased with where we are and excited to put in another month of schooling before we take our summer break.
My students having fun on the dry erase board.
Today, I’d like to give you a recap of how our first day of homeschool went….and oh what a day it was. Our first official day of home education was on April 1st, 2024. Jeff and I made the decision to pull our 3rd grader, Jojo and our Kindergartner, Ella out after spring break. Jeff thought it would be great to have a couple of months to work on our homeschool routine as a family since this is a somewhat slow time of year for his business, versus me starting them on my own in the Fall when he is traveling in his busiest season. I gratefully agreed to this idea. If you would like to read more about why and how we made the jump to homeschool, scroll down and read my previous post. After spending the week of Spring Break preparing and planning for our first day, I felt confident that I was ready to begin teaching my children.
The night before our first day, I made an ambitious plan not only to make a copycat Starbucks egg bite recipe for breakfast, but that I would quadruple the recipe in order to have egg bites for the entire week. This was my first mistake. While the egg bites turned out delicious, I got a little bogged down in cooking and then cleaning my mess up and had to bark orders from the kitchen for the girls to get dressed and prepared for our first day. We set 9am as our class start time, which meant that before then we needed to have all animal chores done, eat breakfast, be dressed and have our class materials organized and ready to go. Jeff had made a point that starting at the stroke of 9 was a very important thing to implement for our first day, so when we streaked downstairs to the homeschool area at 9:05 he was a little less than impressed.
Ella forgot her very important backpack which held her special school supplies and was dead set on going upstairs to retrieve it before we began. Jeff however was dead set on starting school and not being anymore tardy than we already were and told Ella the backpack would have to wait. There began our first emotional episode of the day with full on crocodile tears from our middle born. Never to fear, I swept in to ensure Ella that we could get the backpack after we did our morning routine and introduction. We seemed to get the tears slowed down and were able to begin the pledges. Pledges? Yes, we have decided to do pledges at homeschool? It may sound silly, but we have decided to do the “Pledge of Allegiance,” “The Bible Pledge” (pictured below that we borrowed from a Homeschool Co-Op group we visited) and a memory verse out loud together to start each day. I will explain more on this in a future post, but however awkward it felt the first few days to be starting homeschool so formally, it is something that gets us into a good mindset to begin our school days.
The Bible pledge we recite each morning.
Okay, back to our story, we begin our first pledge and Ella is kind of mouthing the words and not saying them out loud, so I motion for her to say the words louder, and that is when our second stream of tears burst out and Ella yelled, “I can’t do this!” I kid you not, Ella starts wailing that she HATES homeschool and this isn’t at all what she thought it would be. Oh boy. My calm, cool, teacher lady demeanor begins to weaken. Then I look over to my oldest child, my “go with the flow JoJo”, and notice her eyes are getting cloudy. I crack…. What is happening? We are five minutes in, and 2 out of my 3 pupils are in emotional distress. We take a pause. I ask Jojo what could possibly be the matter? Tears are now streaming out of her eyes as well. She says she misses school…… Help me Lord! This is not at all what I envisioned our first day being like either. Poor Jeff is silent, wondering how we got to this point, and no doubt praying his wife doesn’t start crying like his two oldest daughters are. Bless little 3 year old Lucy, she is still standing proudly with her hand on her heart, wondering what the hold up is.
We take a break, sit down and talk about what is bothering everyone as we try to dry up the tears. Ella didn’t realize homeschool was going to be so serious. She thought it would be playtime and more cuddle time with mama, she didn’t think there would be time restrictions and that I would make us do “serious” school. Next I ask Jojo why she is upset. She explains she had been excited about homeschool and was doing her best to stay positive, but when our first few minutes of homeschool began, she realized this was actually happening and it became clear she wouldn’t be going back to “real” school. So we talked through everything, and said a prayer together. Ella got to run upstairs and grab her backpack, and we began where we left off. I kept my courage up as much as possible and praise the Lord our day began again, this time much smoother, as we talked about how homeschool would look going forward. I’m proud to report, after 4 weeks, we have not had anymore tearful outbursts and the girls have both spontaneously told me they are loving school at home. They still have moments of missing public school and friends, but I think they are starting to see how fun this new journey together can be.
Stay tuned, in my next post I will finish our Homeschool update after we have 1 full month under our belts. Until then, God bless you friends and may his favor shine upon you. —Tatum
Tatumberry.com 
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