Unschooling for lazy moms - part 2

Yesterday was all about my son and his unschooling experiences. Obviously he did more than play DiabloII during this time although I am trying to think what else there was....

My husband used to travel a lot for work back during the home school days. What was great about his travel was that having the family tag along was pretty inexpensive. His airfare was paid for as was the rental car and hotel room. If I played my cards right, the hotel breakfast turned into lunch with the help of zip-lock bags and creative use of breakfast items. Many times I would call ahead to be sure we could have a small refrigerator and sometimes we had a nice suite with kitchenette. Frozen dinners were the dinner dejour many nights but we made sure to eat out to sample the local fare at least a few times. My kids have been all over North America and have seen things most people will never see in a lifetime. They were 10 and 13 when we started. Do you think they learned anything watching right whales from a lobster boat in the Bay of Fundy? Maybe they saw some new stuff while living in a condo on the beach on Vancouver Island, in the winter. (remember, these are Florida kids) Sigh. They have no idea just how lucky they were to have these experiences. We could write a book about our travels and some of the interesting things we saw!

Unschooling. That's right, the lazy way to home school. My daughter was 13 when we pulled her out of Catholic school and it was just in time! I could see that she was turning away from us, being more secretive and less open. What's funny though is that SHE asked US to home school! It was June and we had missed a trip to Newfoundland a month or two earlier when my husband had to go. Why didn't we go? The school threatened parents who wanted to take kids out of school for a trip. How nice. And we paid tuition. I am so glad we did get to go the following September! My daughter was a bright child who always seemed older than she was. I guess maybe she is an old soul.

Once home, we pretty much de-schooled for a while to get school out of their systems. Did they watch a lot of TV? You betcha! Did they get tired of it after a while? They sure did! During that first summer my daughter heard about the new boy band (at that time) called N'Sync and simply went crazy for them. I joke that we did the all N'Sync curriculum for a few years. Living in Orlando, we had the opportunity to see the band fairly often and I actually made her cry when I told her I saw one of the band members in Petco with his new puppy. Poor girl. We were always on the "find an N'Sync member" mission and our hairdresser actually had some of them come into the salon quite often. Pretty intense stuff when you are 13 and really into a band. I saw more N'Sync concerts than I want to admit to and we did a "meet and greet" one day where we got to shake hands with the band members. Heady stuff!

Now you ask, when was she learning anything? Luckily she learned about "fan fiction" writing and a fan fiction website where you can read and post your fiction. This girl spent HOURS and HOURS writing about N'Sync. I did not pry and I did not make her show me her writing. I knew she was editing it herself and doing rewrites. One day she asked me if I wanted to read one of them. Of course I said "yes!" I was stunned to find that the writing was not only good, but near-perfect technically and extremely well thought-out. Was her time going crazy over N'Sync a waste of time? HELL NO! Some of her best memories have to do with that time and the memories have me in them as well! We were together in our N'Sync sightings and concerts. I never made her feel that going band crazy was anything other than exciting.

I forgot to mention all the reading my kids did as well as DiabloII and N'Sync. They always had a book and they STILL are always in the midst of reading a book.

Reading, traveling, doing stuff you love. What else is there?