Changes in Thinking

One of the funny things about kids is that they completely change your "original" idea of life. My "Plan" for life was I was going to have 2 kids, a boy and a girl, and be done by the time I was 28. 28 because I wanted to still have energy to run after my kids, and I wanted to allow my children to have a good relationship with their grandparents, so I needed to start the family earlier.

Well, this year I will be turing 31 (yuck! making horrible face that you can't see) and I am blessed to have Clark, but he obviously didn't want to leave heaven to come to Earth on the same time frame I had in mind. And neither are any sister or brothers that we would like to join us, hopefully more then just one more.





Very clearly the Lord has a plan for me and my family, and now looking back, if we'd had Clark at the beginning of Vet school or before Clint had started, it would have forced us to make tough decisions about me working or staying at home and the consequences of either of those decisions.

Clark has also brought about SEVERAL changes in my views of life. I never thought of myself as the stay at home mom type. I always thought I would have a career and a family and life would be wonderful. Well, once Clark was at home with us and I had to return to work, I went back kicking and screaming. I kept myself from crying, because despite how often I do tend to cry, I HATE crying, but was sucessful in not crying on my first day back to work. Although, I did call G.G. (Clint's grandma) several times that day to make sure all was well. As it was! :)

Clark made me realize that being a stay at home mom is AWESOME! I have been having so much fun watching him grow every day and I feel I have a wonderful connection with him because I am always there. Once I decided that the staying at home mom gig was the future I wanted, I imagined me playing at the park and hanging out with other moms during the day.



This changed a littel because after I had quit working, we moved back to Orange County. Although I grew up here, many of my friends live in San Diego and I didn't have any friends here. So I had to make new friends.


After we bought our house, we were blessed to have great neighbors that have a 2 year old son and not only did a friendship start for Clark, but us mom's have become good friends. We walk together almost every morning and take the boys to the park. Our new ward has also introduced us to other new moms and so Tavi, my neighbor, and I go and meet other moms at the park and we're slowly making a network of friends to hang out with, just like I had imagined.






I guess the biggest change that Clark has brought to my way of thinking is education. As a teacher, I haven't necessarily thought that public eduation was a bad thing, especially being a public school teacher, but I do feel that it's VERY flawed and needs LOTS of revisions.

Part of watching Clark grow has also allowed me to see the individual he is developing into to. He picks up on skills quickly and maybe it's my mommy goggles, but I feel that he's an intellegent kid. This I see as a problem and worries me as a teacher/parent. Since I am a teacher at heart, I am already doing things to teach him letter, numbers, and so on. Reading is most important on my list. I see Clark going to school and getting bored and becoming a behavior kids because he already knows the material. Let's face it, it's not a common situation for a public school to have small class sizes, ESPECIALLY in California. (This is something else I could write an entier blog about in itself). For at least the next few years the Army owns us and we're subject to going where they want us to go. And as thinking about our making the Army a career, I worry about gaps in his education becoming an issue due to moving around with the Army.





This has lead me to thinking about home schooling. My experience with homeschooled kids was that they were freaks. They were socially awkward, and miss fits. I did have the advantage of working with a girl who was homeschooled and was nothing like my previous experience. She said that her mom networked with other homeschooling kids. To me she was "normal" and I was very surprised that she was homeschooled.

As I've talked to parents that homeschool and done research I've noticed that homeschooling has drastically changed over the course of the years. I started thinking about it because my friend Jeanette had brought up some valid points on her blog and that later got me thinking. Also just the thought that, "Hey, I'm a certified teacher, and I can do just as good job, if not way better, because I won't have a bazillion kids in my class to teach."

So to keep this from being the longest blog post ever, I'm going to stop here, because I really just wanted to write out my thoughts on homeschoooling because it has been the biggest change to my thinking, so far, that Clark has done for me.