Introduction to our family!

I wanted to introduce ourselves in our first post.


I'm Tara, the mom.  Some say that I have a "full plate".  I am a SAHM (Stay At Home Mom) to two great children, a full-time college student (double majoring in Legal Studies and Criminal Justice), a wife to a wonderful man with a dangerous job, and a caretaker to a child on kidney dialysis.


My husband is Thomas.  He works a dangerous job (sorry, for security reasons I can't disclose his job) and helps me with the care of our two kids and will be helping us with this next step of homeschooling.


Our daughter, Eryn, will be 11 in July.  She has been in kidney failure since she was 15 months old (October 2001).  She started with a disease called Nephrotic Syndrome that progressed to a disease called FSGS (Focal Segmental Glomerulosclerosis).  She received a kidney transplant in October of 2007.  Unfortunately, the FSGS reoccurred in her transplanted kidney within 24 hours of transplantation.  She was doing well until March of 2010, when she had complications of a kidney biopsy and ended up losing some function of her transplanted kidney.  She was on dialysis until June 24, 2010, when she received another gift of life. Unfortunately, the disease reoccurred in this kidney as well and we are starting down the road to dealing with the side effects.


Our son, Riley, is 4 1/2 years old.  He is the child that drive me up a wall on a daily basis, says things that NO child should ever say, does things even AFTER you tell him NOT to, and is just an all around normal BOY.  It's been a very different experience raising a child that is healthy, let alone a BOY.  He's kept everyone on their toes and keeps us going every day.  We will be enrolling him a year early (according to local district rules) in Kindergarten in the fall.  He's very smart for his age and we don't find a need to delay anything if it's not needed!


We were a previous online public school family until Eryn was diagnosed with dyslexia, dyscalculia and dysgraphia in February, 2011.  At that time, we were told that the district's online school would no longer be an option for us.  We would have to make a very LARGE decision... We could switch to hospital/homebound in which she would only receive teaching from a teacher for a few hours a week or we could fully "unenroll" her and dive head first into homeschooling.  Without any other options, we took her out of the district and began homeschooling.


We decided to have a bit of help in our homeschooling endeavor.  We are fully enrolled in Seton Home Study School, a Catholic private school located in Virginia that does "correspondence courses".  They are fully accredited (through both the church and through SACS), so essentially we just pulled her out and placed her in a private school.  Since the state of Florida does not recognize schools located outside of the state, she is a regular homeschooler.  We just have the benefits of accreditation and special services for her learning differences in case we ever decide to head back to the public schools.  We've dealt with IEP meetings, difficult meetings and "pushy teachers".  That's why we are where we are now and we are LOVING every minute of it!!


We'd love to hear from other homeschooling families out there...  We'd love some pen pals (both email and snail mail)!!  And please feel free to link us to your blog... we'd love to hear some stories from others as well and see your experiences!!


WELCOME TO OUR VERSION OF HOMESCHOOLING!