You should marry one of those Cate girls!

I had a fun conversation today with a mother who is very interested in homeschooling. I love to talk about homeschooling.  We are beginning our 15th year of homeschooling and I have acquired quite a few fun experiences along the way which I love to share.

Some of these you can read about here.

Since we have been at this so long, sometimes I forget what it felt like at the beginning to step out of the mainstream educational system into the great unknown.  I think many parents are not happy with the public educational system, but they choose the devil they know over the unfamiliar world of homeschooling.

Many times I think parents are absurdly concerned with grades and miss the more important things like actual mastering of useful skills.  For example, will their children be able to balance a checkbook, live on a budget, hold a job, express themselves coherently and read through the lines of a deceptive political flier that will show up in their mail box one day?


These days I am feeling pretty secure in our choice to homeschool because our children are turning out so well.  Our older daughters did very well in college academics and are otherwise successful in life.  Our younger children are on the same path and doing well.  (I was going to list their accomplishments but decided that would be bragging.)   But I will share something that happened last year which gives me great satisfaction as a parent and homeschooler.

I had hired a friend's mother-in-law to babysit while Henry and I went out for the evening.  We hired her because we had a very challenging foster child at the time and we didn't want to place all the responsibility on our teenagers while we were gone.  The babysitter left us a beautiful note describing how our girls had really handled everything, that in her years as a teacher she had not seen better child management skills and that she felt bad taking our money.  While this made me feel like a successful parent, it was what happened next which I found the greater compliment.

After returning home, our babysitter sat down with her grandson and very earnestly told him, "You should marry one of those Cate girls."



I'm prouder of that than their college (3.95 and 4.0) GPAs.