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Written by Kara S. Anderson.

During the summer, my daughter came to me and told me that she wanted to buy a computer.

She’s a writer and poet, and she wanted a laptop.

And she wanted to buy it herself.

My kids have always wanted jobs. They’ve asked to do lemonade stands, and they’ve asked to do dog walking, which was a little outside of my comfort zone because I don’t let them go beyond our block.

A child becoming a dog walker basically meant I was becoming a dog walker supervisor, and I already have a job that I love, thankyouverymuch.

But this time, my daughter had another, bigger idea.

She wanted to start a candle company.

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Written by Kara S. Anderson

Join me in an experiment:

While reading this post, I want you to open up Instagram. And I want you to scroll …

I want you to think about how you feel as you see the images go past. Are you jealous? Are you sad you didn’t do that thing, whatever it is, when your kids were younger?

Do you feel less-than?

How often are you able to be genuinely happy for the people you see in your feed without adding something to your mental to-do list, or feeling bad?

Now, I want you to look around your home. I want you to think about your kids, and your circumstances.

Because today I want to talk about what I think is one of the keys to successful homeschooling – living your actual reality.

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Written by Kara Anderson

Sometimes I get kind of crazy ideas, and then later freak out about those ideas.

In the first episode of this season, I shared how we were doing a camping/survival/outdoors unit study – it seemed like such a good idea because my kids were so into it.

But then one night I woke up around 4 a.m. thinking to myself that camping is not school, and maybe I needed to scrap the whole thing and buy some math textbooks and finally learn the Timeline Song.

Luckily, what I’ve learned about kid-related -4 a.m.-panic-wake-ups is that the next day, my kids usually do something great that reminds me that we’re OK; and that probably my kids will not end up as Baby Drivers.

That happened – and so I decided to double-down and we booked a cabin for our first-ever Anderson Family Camping Expedition.

We didn’t get crazy – there was a gas station 2 minutes away from the campground, and our cabin had an air conditioner.

BUT, it was the perfect start for us and guess what – it showed me that kids (and adults, ahem … ) really can learn a lot from camping.

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This post may contain affiliate links. Please read our disclosure statement for more information.

Written by Kara S. Anderson.

Cait and I post sometimes over at a place called Simple Homeschool. We both love it over there – we love the community Jamie has created, and the mission behind Simple Homeschool.

Still, sometimes I make homeschooling more complicated than it needs to be. I’ll see something another homeschooling family is doing, and think we need to do that too. I will forget about our particular strengths and weaknesses, and try to do something that isn’t our thing.

Or I’ll just try to do too much. I’ll set my expectations really high, and then get frustrated when we inevitably crash and burn.

And so recently, I picked up my worn copy of Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown, and I decided to read it specifically as a homeschooling mom.

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Written by Kara S. Anderson

I’m lucky to Iive in a pretty terrible school district. Lucky, as in – people don’t really question our decision to homeschool.

“Oh,” they say nodding, “of course. The schools here …”

And sometimes, for the sake of peace and quiet, I don’t tell them that my son went to a small church preschool that was adorable, and then we tried a private Montessori-based school that was amazing, but that it was also expensive and would have changed our lives entirely if we had decided to send him there full-time.

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This post may contain affiliate links. Please read our disclosure statement for more information.

Written by Kara S. Anderson.

When I was in second grade, I was in a split classroom with third graders.

Our school did this sometimes, and I try to imagine now how the teacher handled it. But at the time, I just knew that it allowed me to make friends with the coolest girl in school. Her name was Emily, she was 9, and she had blonde, curly hair that fell in waves down her back.

And she had her ears pierced.

She would wear tiny ice cream cone earrings, or dainty hoops; tiny gold stars, or fluorescent dots, and man – did I ever want to be just like her.

I asked my parents again and again if I could pierce my ears, and they told me “not until you’re older,” and “later,” and so I waited and while I should have been memorizing multiplication tables, I instead memorized the shape of Emily’s earlobes and her collection of tiny animal and rhinestone stud earrings, and I wondered if part of the reason Emily was so cool was because her parents clearly let her do whatever she wanted.

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