Over the week-end I decided to look through my "special" box. It is the box that I keep everything I find kind of sentimental... Mostly cheep scrap books and letters from retreats, letters from other people, pictures, special certificates, my baby calendar, etc.
As I was looking through it I randomly pulled out an old home school "newspaper" my home school group put together. I read through some of the old articles I wrote when I was fifteen and all the other articles about the activities we did. It brought back some good memories. I remember the countless sports days, the field trips to the zoo and the children's museum, all the art fairs, science fairs, history fairs that we did at St. John's... The book fairs, all-saint's day parties. Family focus nights that we used as another means of getting together to go hang out. The endless games of football and knock-out. Having contests to see who could jump the farthest off the swing. Running races around the gym until everyone was so tired we all just wanted to drop. The annual Easter parties. The Summers with weekly swimming parties where the girls and guys would eventually end up in a "battle" over the large rafts using noodles to fight with. Valentine's Day Parties and getting the usual valentine from everyone, and secretly getting excited about getting one from the boy I had a crush on.... birthday slumber party nights and the annual cook-outs/bonfires each family had where everyone would come and stay until late hours of the night...Too many good memories from those days.
It is funny. There are times when I am grateful to be done with the home school years, but then there are times when I remember how much fun I did have with my home school group. The friendships I made then are very unique. We were all kind of put into this group for socializing and to have people that really knew what it was like to be home schooled and not how people stereotyped it. I am even guilty of stereotyping home schoolers even though I was one.... This group was filled with people who had totally different personalities, and yet, just knowing they knew what I was going through made those differences with everyone to not be any deal at all. It was a relief to be around people who did not ask the expected questions, "How do you make friends?" "Do you get to wear pajamas all day?" "Are you all like super religious?" "How do you stay in touch with fashion and music?" etc..... The kinds of questions I had to answer countless times, and still do when people find out about being home schooled.. As I think about it, I know that if we all were not home schooled we probably would have never even known each other. Lots of us lived in different cities/counties and so there would have been no way we would have really hung out. I am not even sure that if we did all end up going to the same school that we would have all ended up as friends just because of how different our personalities are and how some of us like the opposite of everything else others liked. I bet a few of us would have been friends, but I have a hard time seeing all of us as friends. As it is now I still talk to quite a few of them because I have recently made the effort to get in contact with them. For awhile there hardly any of us talked to each other....
A lot of people like to ask me if I would home school my own children. I have mixed feelings about that. I feel as though if my children did not have a strong support group filled with kids around their age as I did, then I really do not think I would home school them. I feel extremely grateful that my group of home school friends was as large as it was. It was very special, and not always the case in most places. I know that if I did not have as many friends dealing with the things I was then I would have been miserable. Being home schooled is definitely something different and out of the ordinary, and some people would "look down" on them, and if they don't have those people to go to and let out their frustrations then it would not be fair to do that to them. That's just me though.
Those home school days will always have a special place in my memory filled with good times. Those were some good days, that's for sure.
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