Home Education Week: April Fool’s!

Today we continue to celebrate Home Education Week with Dana of Principled Discovery who asks:

And we have likely all felt the fool in one way or another. Share your greatest challenge. Or one of those terrible, horrible no good, very bad days where the only thing there is to do seems to involve moving to Australia.

I don’t have any big humorous situations or stories to tell though we have had a few embarrassing ones. We have several challenges specific to our family that have made things interesting and leant to some terrible, horrible, no good, very bad days.

The only embarrassing story that comes to mind was one day when we were waiting for our car to be fixed on a school day and a random stranger started asking way too many questions of myself and the kids about our school day. Keep in mind I have dysgraphia and dyscalculia and my oldest has dyslexia and dysgraphia. This random stranger started asking her all sorts of math questions of the sort that she has to see to get (and I have to see them to understand them as well.) Plus this was a random stranger and we were already having a very rough day since we were supposed to be visiting my grandmother and the car had broken down on the way. So add nervousness and general unhappiness to the mix and neither of us could answer any of his questions and boy was he persistent–in a way that he would never be with someone who was public schooled. It was horrible and awkward and I hated that we left this random person with such a horrible view of homeschooling. Yuck.

In general however our worst days are when Rachel has a bad day. She struggles with several neurological disorders and severe food allergies and some days are just really, really rough for her which means they are rough for us. She takes Omega 3 and magnesium which help a lot and the days she forgets are probably the very worst. Constant temper tantrums make those days a struggle and put everyone out of alignment.