About Me

Hehe...That's the first thing that my husband got asked when we first met. Had he met a nice little pagan girl to settle down with. I grew up in a very pagan Irish family. Not Wiccans mind you (which my husband is), but close enough for his taste. We've been married ten years (almost 11 now) and it's been an interesting trip. The first few years of our marriage my sister came to live with us due to some health problems my mom was having. My sister had been homeschooling at http://www.internethomeschool.com and going to private horsback riding lessons for PE as well as guitar lessons at a local music shop. When she came to live with us we continued her education pretty much the way she'd been doing it since 4th grade (due to mono...nasty disease). I didn't know about a lot of the stuff that I now wish I had. Maybe it wasn't even available then. It's possible. Homeschool support has been growing by leaps and bounds. She ended up going back to public highschool for the last couple of years of her education by her choice. She wanted to learn to sing and the best way in our area was the public school. Also, the schools in the area we were living in at the time were good ones and suited her. I'm very proud of her. She's now studying for a degree in music education, newly married (with a brand new house)and a very strong minded and strong willed individual.

So I'm familiar with homeschooling a middle schooler and highschooler as well as what's needed to get a child back into public school if needed. Now we skip ahead a few years. My son decided that the perfect time to come into this world would be winter solstice. He had some problems at the outset and none of us will forget the many visits to the NICU and the heart surgery at only 2 weeks old. Our decision to homeschool him has at least 3 parts to it. The first reason is that he would probably be out of a "regular" school due to surgeries as he gets older. They don't happen often, but I know they are likely to happen at least 1-2 more times. We also recently discovered that some of the other problems he was born with may have affected him more than we first realized so he may need to go to therapy several times a month/week. The second is the school system here is the pits. I even know of a public school teacher who homeschooled her own children because of it. And last we live far out in the countryside. It's possible to get a bus to come out, but my son would be out waiting for it at 5AM and wouldn't be coming back until about 5PM. So we've started homeschooling. Currently we use Goddess Moon Circles Academy for the main structure it gives and because there are times when it's easier to know there's a structured schedule that we need to follow. I believe in being able to supplement the lessons with trips,crafts projects and other things of our own devices. That's partly where all of the links came from on this site. It's also where I started to come up with the curriculum I've been working on in my spare time (what little of it there is).

As for my own background, I have worked mostly in retail, banking and audit. I hate math so this didn't seem to make sense to me. I'm taking a break from college right now as I recently added twin boys to our family. My husband is also a student currently as well as working ful time. He's worked as a chef at Texas A&M and at a local hotel and restaurant as the night chef and head baker at Grandy's several years ago. He helps as he can with the schooling and gives a different perspective on things than I would which I think is all to the better.

Currently I manage to make ends meet by taking surveys online and selling various gift items. I'm working on setting up an online store. So far I have something set up at http://www.cafepress.com/outofthemists  A curriculum for pre-k is available as well as other gift items and hopefully a kindergarten curriculum will be up soon. Every so often I like the chance to indulge myself by going to http://www.mypoints.com where I can either buy stuff I need online (like textbooks) or reading the spam mail they send and earning points. I can then redeem the points for some really cool stuff. Usually it's gift cards to places like Olive Garden, Suncoast Video, or Barnes and Noble for me.

We live on 26 acres about an hour or so north of Houston with a slew of cats. For anyone who may have seen this before our dogs were all older and passed away due to age over the summer. As one of those dogs was almost 19 we are not surprised but do wish them well on thier journeys. We are eventually planning to build a solar energy strawbale home in place of the doublewide we're currently in(wanna check out the plans? Go here.) I drive my poor husband nuts with finding a project and researching it to death so if you have any questions on either of these, just email me and ask.LOL!