Fuel to the Fire

You know, the pull I felt to check into homeschooling has been hanging around waiting patiently until I was really ready to dive in. I didn't want to homeschool out of some misguided notion that my children can learn from nobody but me, or that they will be completely sheltered from the world if I just keep them close to me. I'm a public school fan. There. I said it. I believe that there are lots of public schools with WAY too much on their plates, but that those teacher and administrators do as good a job as is possible under the circumstances. How would YOU teach math when 80% of your class doesn't understand any English? How do you stay focused after you see little Joey show Jose his daddy's gun (that he brought to school). There is just so much stacked again our teachers. Even knowing that, sometimes I just get mad!

My sweet, beautiful, intelligent daughter RAN into our house and collapsed into a ball of sobbs and slobbers immediately. It was the kid of crying where you know there is some serious hurt going on. Samren was nursing a bloody leg.

Come to find out these "big older kids" (okay, they were 3rd graders but they felt big and scary to my kids!); those big scary older kids were walking with Taevy and Samren came up to walk past them, also walking home. They started with the classic, "What ARE you anyways?! Are you a stinkin' Indian? No, you must be them CHINESE people." The you can imagine what follows "ee chow fun choo me she me", All topped off with a quick helping of "chinese eyes."

My kids (especially Taevy) was scared to death. Taevy has got some sort of left over PTSS trigger that tells her if there is anything even slightly off, YOU MIGHT DIE! I mean, she wants to preserve that life, so she takes off! The kids ran all the way home, because the big bullies had acted like they might follow Taevy and Samren just to be jerks. They didn't.

Taevy was just so upset. Sobbing, sobbing. The kind of sobs that her soul was really touched by this one fairly innocent run in with typical school bullies. She started crying about why "THIS" is why she wants to homeschool next year. THIS is what she doesn't want. I took a deep breath and told her that she could encounter discrimination anywhere, throughout her whole life. We talked about the discrimination that Jesus went through, and how he responded (with love(

Taevy came downstairs 2.5 hours after she was supposed to be asleep, crying. Her nose is stopped up. She doesn't feel good. Yada yada yada! I told her she was fine--not to pscych herself up to stay home tomorrow. She's going! Then she started her same pathetic (heartbreaking) sobs again about how she was scared those boys were going to "get her and hurt her". No they won't!

First of all, I'm going to be there in stealth 2004 Honda Pilot! And if they walk buy I'm going to pull the little punks over and very rationally tell him that he better not EVER talk to my daughter in an unkind way again.

As a second line of defence I told taevy where the "sweet spot" on a boy is. Oh yes I did. If that boy ever touches her in an unkind (or too kind) way, he figure out what's for!!!

After all of the lovely drama with bullies, the children had a delightful conversation about who they knew who was gay. HELLO! Evidently this is a word that is regularly through around at school amongst the "big" first and second graders I know I can't protect my kids from knowing what gay is, but I can protect how and when and why they are told.

As you can probably tell, the fire for our home schooling plans has been stoked pretty well in the last day.