Homeschool Mom Spotlight #4

Meet Maggie Annie

Photo by Stephanie Harvey on Unsplash

We’re starting something new here at Patterns for Life: every month we will be highlighting an individual homeschool mom through a written interview in order to encourage and inspire our readers. We know it can be helpful to meet — whether virtually or in real life — other mothers who are in the trenches with us here and now, and can relate to our daily struggles and joys.

We are very pleased to introduce Maggie Annie, homeschooling mom of 4. We hope you enjoy getting to know her a bit!

1. Tell us about yourself and your family.

I am Maggie Annie and my family lives in the Pacific North West. My husband and I moved here from the Utah-Idaho border, five years into our marriage, seeking a change after being told we would not be able to have children. We now have four children and have been married 28 years! It must be the coastal forest air. We live in a bit of a ramshackle house with a neighborhood in the front and a farmer’s fields in the back. We have an overgrown, often mist-shrouded, garden that the birds and voles love and a collection of large moss and fungi-covered stumps that we drag home whenever we see trees felled. We are not pet people as I am allergic to everything, and we seem to have a collective aversion to overhead lighting so we have a prodigious plant collection and our house is always a cozy colorful mixed up jumble of art work in progress, handicraft projects, notebooks, games, twinkle lights, library books, bouquets, bad puns, and so many beeswax candles. Because of shift work there is always something cooking or baking and endless cups of tea and coffee and milk delivered from the farm down the road.

Our oldest two children are now graduated, one is a hospital phlebotomist and the other is currently pursuing a theology degree. Both still fill their days with reading, keeping notebooks and passionate discourse. The younger two are in their 10^th and 12^th grade years. Our senior is planning on joining the “family business” and starts an education degree in the fall and our youngest mostly practices being snarky but is exploring apprenticeship options with local craftsmen so time will tell! My husband is a bit older than I am and is winding down his career as a librarian just as I am facing an empty nest with 15 years left until I am ready to retire. I was however just accepted into university to finish the degree I started 25 years ago so I will have plenty to do! I also participate in several local Charlotte Mason home school groups and arrange quarterly mom meet ups at a local coffee-shop in addition to some online home-school volunteer work. It sounds like a lot but really I spend a lot of time napping in the hammock.

We love soup and hiking in the woods and a really good rainy day but nothing is quite as wonderful as just being at home curled up with blankets and books. We never mind a visit, just don’t look in the laundry room and take care not to trip on the pile of muddy shoes.

2. How long have you been homeschooling and what motivated you to start in the first place?

Is there a magical dividing line between birth and school age? 20ish years? We have always had everyone learning at home. I was raised by special educators and I worked as para-educator in a variety of disability support positions before coming home to raise my kids. Because of this the extended family has a strong ethos of active parent/teacher cooperation to make education accessible for everyone. We just took that cooperation to a new level! Both my husband and I were “smart but struggling” kids in different ways and while homeschooling was not on our radar initially, making sure any children we had were served well by their education was important to us.

The family pushed us initially to enroll our oldest in preschool at three but our second child had just come along...seeing that precious early bonding between them we knew we could not disrupt it. When it was time for first grade we had already had a couple of years of home learning and confidently saying “no” to relatives under our belts and another new baby to boot. When one of our children developed some major health problems we were told we should not risk bringing home the inevitable classroom germs and committed to homeschooling in earnest. We never looked back. (okay, okay one year in early January after a really bad autumn I was tired and sick and reconsidered it but the moment passed after a good snack of leftover Christmas cookies and a hot mocha. My best advice is when in doubt eat a sandwich...it works for melting down teens too!)

3. Describe a typical homeschool day in your home.

It has drastically changed over 20 years! Our first few years we joked that we “waiting room-schooled.” We dragged a big bag of books and armfuls of babies, three to five days a week to 8:00 A.M. appointments and read in the waiting room, spending the afternoons in the park or woods. We had a wonderful occupational therapist that also worked at the local Waldorf school who introduced us to the idea of homeschooling. We used a therapeutic Waldorf homeschool curriculum for several years slowly moving into a holistic Charlotte Mason/Classical Christian approach as the kids grew older and I delved deeper into educational philosophy.

Working around medical challenges for as many years as we did we learned to homeschool “backwards” from the way many people do. The core of our days initially were overflowing with the riches many consider extra or secondary and sure we sometimes forgot the math or spelling but we filled our hard days with beauty, comfort, and joy. Song (very off key), prayer, painting, oral narrating, copy work when physically possible, balls of wool, nature study, sculpting, poetry, beeswax crayons and candles, cooking, storytelling, classical music, seasonal outdoor play, handwork, so many books, and colorful hand drawn chalkboards to wake up to made each day bright and safe. Having this comforting healing foundation made the transition to the more vigorous academic days to come more fruitful, giving us a strong well of beautiful ideas to draw from and a soft landing space when faced with future academic and health challenges.

Each kid has had strong gifts and some challenging seasons and we have striven, however imperfectly, to always to both support the struggles and encourage the strengths, addressing our children as whole persons not merely as problem solvers or problems to be solved. This necessitated not only extreme flexibility in our days and approach but also a strong stance of personal responsibility and fortitude. A few years in we were on the receiving end of the incredible gift of a hand me down collection of Ambleside Online and Memoria Press books and between those and the perks of being married to a librarian who can deliver on demand to the door we had many rich years of reading and learning. I have always worked along side my children in my own nature notebooks, commonplaces, and art journals while they are at lessons. Modeling that learning and struggling with new things is not merely a child’ s work was central to my approach in teaching. I save my reading for the early mornings though to avoid being too distracted or too distracting.

Now with only two older teens to teach things are much quieter and yet still filled with the low hum of activity. Our days are shifted to accommodate early birds and late risers. My groggy teen is helped by cups of tea and encouragement to start the day, while my chirpy teen has often gotten up, made coffee and started working before I wake. If I am really lucky both are working by ten. My senior is mostly independent, to the point of making her own lesson plans and schedule for each term after choosing books with me, only checking in after lessons for narration or sharing work. She also has a little cottage shop, making tiny prayer candles and seasonal cloth napkins so most of our lesson work is still punctuated with the scent of beeswax drifting from melting pots. My sophomore needs more direction so works side by side with me. There are still daily riches and the three of us share part of each day during our “morning symposium” (which is closer to 1:00 these days) where we study logic, patristics, and virtue together. Many days there are long discussions into the night well past when I need to sleep but with teens sometimes the nights are longer than with newborns. When all four kids are in the house it gets loud with (mostly polite) discourse and debate and commonplace books and novels are strewn everywhere and I could not be happier...especially when I can find my noise canceling headphones!

4. What is your favorite part of homeschooling?

Have I mentioned beeswax yet? Honestly simply being a family. Being creative together and growing together. Knowing here at the end of it all that we have and can weather all the storms of life and still be a family that loves, and learns, snarks, and works together. That and umm… the wax.

5. Does homeschooling affect the way you parent? If so, how?

I had to think about this one. For us homeschooling flowed from and was a continuation of our parenting rather than ever a truly separate experience. Learning and life have never been discrete actions in our home. So I suppose that homeschooling integrated patterns of learning into our daily lives and parenting in a holistic manner rather than keeping the two artificially separated as they may be in other settings.

6. What is your least favorite part of homeschooling?

Can I just say math? Someone may throw tomatoes if I do but it is our family’s “white whale.” There are several challenges that make it difficult and it has just never been easy or without tears. We keep striving but I will be gleeful when I can pass on the massive tote of math materials to someone else.

And sometimes, in a small house, it is just so very loud...that is when you know it is time to go into the woods.

7. What have you found to be the most humbling aspect of parenting/homeschooling?

I give new moms two main pieces of advice:

#1. You can not do it all...I do not care what the modern world says. Depending on your life that ‘all’ may include parenting, learning, teaching, working, cooking, gardening, keeping a perfect house, healing, having strong relationships, hobbies etc...you are human and can only stretch so far. We get really good at stretching as mothers, but do we have limits. So you have to pick and choose which direction to stretch. Some of us have different priorities, some things are harder than others to release. Outside work was easier for me to let slide...a perfect house was harder...it really was. But I had to choose something because I needed to sleep and heal and still support my family in sleeping and healing and learning...so that is what I did. It isn’t easy but remembering that it is a season helps...I clean more, make more art, garden more and work more than I did 20 years ago...but I gave myself grace and continue to do so.

#2. You can only parent/homeschool from a posture of repentance. You have to be able to recognize when you have erred. You have to be able to model repentance. You have to tell your children. “I am sorry, I was wrong, I know better, I will do better, I will do this…” then do better. You cannot raise a virtuous, loving, patient, child to adulthood in the best way you can, unless you can repent and teach them by example. I have massively erred more than once in 23 years of parenting...I had to be humble or we never would be able to grow and move on as a family.

Parents are not perfect and so the entire experience of homeschooling and parenting should be humbling.

8. Looking back to the beginning of your homeschool journey, what are some things you wish you had known? What would you tell your younger self as she was just starting out?

Even in the chaos, a schedule and planner will not kill you. Because of the chaos, a schedule and planner will actually help you. Your schedule and home school does not have to look like anyone else’s.

It is alright if the grandparents think it is weird not having a couch, a treadmill, and hammock in the living room really is what you need right now and check the rugs for thumbtacks twice before bringing out the exercise balls.

Budget much more for household needs...when you are home 20+ hours a day instead of 8 everything wears out faster...chairs, beds, carpets, patience etc.

Good hiking shoes and raincoats are worth their weight in gold.

9. How does your faith affect your homeschooling?

Like the parenting/homeschooling question it is not really a disparate experience. We are Orthodox Christians, so we live, as a family, an Orthodox Christian life. We live liturgically and seasonally with our physical home, food, activity, and prayer reflecting that seasonality. We pray together, we work together, we attend as many services as we can together, we try to love each other...it just so happens that much of our work these last years has been academic and will continue to be academic. So while we do not go out of our way to make every book, word problem, essay topic, or art piece explicitly Christian in content, our faith permeates our home and learning. It is imperfect and beautiful. Glory to God.

10. What are some of your favorite home-school resources?

The library of course, I know that it can be hit or miss depending on where you live but it has been wonderful for us. And of course the parks system! The county, state, national parks, forests, rivers...there are so many gems that are tucked away just waiting to be explored. We are still finding new parks all the time. Really engage with the local community in general, get to know your farmers, your neighbors, small craftsman, small shop owners etc. You probably have shoemakers, spoon carvers, dairy farmers, book binders, vegetable farmers, folk dancers, painters, storytellers, doctors, chandlers, and cheese-makers and who knows who else all around you so go seek them out. They have a lot of passion to learn from.

11. What do you consider to be the most rewarding aspect of homeschooling?

The most rewarding aspect is also the one that takes the most time and patience to see the fruit of. It is seeing your children grown, navigating the world, having strong relationships and still choosing the Good, and the True and the Beautiful. Not long after my oldest graduated from her medical program I suffered a head injury. She put everything in her life on hold to help homeschool her younger siblings. She choose to walk away from working and young adult independence and that is not a choice every young person would make. It took me 3 years to fully recover my reading skills and I was so grateful to have her help teaching during that first year of healing. Having grown and almost grown children, life seems so much the same as it was when they were little, it is just ever flowing wider. We still have towering stacks of books, endless need for new art supplies and blank note books, deeper and deeper conversations that last hours, days, months, and seeing the fruit of all those years of work lead to young adults who love deeply, are generous, and still always wanting to grow and learn. The reward is actually seeing for yourself the truth that learning really is a life long journey and that our children are dedicated pilgrims on the path.

12. Anything else you'd like to add?

Worry less, cuddle more, rest more...

We sacrifice everything for our families, just try not to forget that you are also part of your family. Feed yourself, teach yourself, let yourself rest. Give yourself time to heal when you need to heal. Give yourself the same grace, forgiveness, and kindness you offer your kids. They will thank you because they love you too.

Stay the course friends, it is a beautiful journey.

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Beautiful indeed! Thank you Maggie Annie for sharing your journey and your wisdom.

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