Not the Easiest Week

I apologize in advance. This will probably be a very random post and will, unfortunately, be influenced by the type of week that I've had. On Tuesday morning I woke up with pink eye. It's really sucky when that happens because I'm allergic to the OTC and prescription drops for it, so I always have to just ride it out. Then shortly after lunch my husband called to let me know that starting at the end of November, his office would be switching to 4 day work weeks. I immediately had to decide how to deal with losing 20% of our income. Believe me, I am beyond grateful that in our current economy my husband still has a good job. However, it was still a big stress and I immediately had to go to my problem solving head-space.

Just a couple of hours later, we got the oh so personal robocall that our kids no longer had an accredited school authority due to the immediate cancellation of accreditation of their board. As I've stated on Facebook, I have no desire to have an opinion on the allegations, but my kids were just left out to drown. So I moved on to the next major issue that required the use of my problem solving head-space.

We sent their registrations in to a new board yesterday and I am hope that their paperwork will be processed and that they will be officially accepted early next week.

With all of the news about our previous board becoming very public this week, I've heard a few things that have really upset me. One of the things I heard yesterday was the opinion that taxpayer dollars shouldn't be "wasted" on private schools . Our previous board was a private board. Our anticipated new board is a separate (Catholic) board. So I got information directly from Alberta Education and did the math last night. This year I saved the government (and taxpayers) a minimum of $13,969.57 by home educating my kids. That amount does not include the fact that one of my kids was expected to be coded this year, which would have cost even more. I saved them 73.6%. The only thing that I can logically conclude is that I am helping taxpayers, not wasting their money. Furthermore, we are taxpayers in this house as well. If you feel that your money shouldn't pay for the education of my kids, then why should my money help pay for the education of your's?

I also was told that alternatives to the public system shouldn't be funded when there are "fine public schools already". If you know my family at all, you know that we tried very hard for 4.5 years to make the public system work for us. We even had some very phenomenal teachers in there working very closely with us. It just did not work properly for my kids. Why should we be punished if the public system didn't work for them? How is that fair?

The last comment that really frustrated me was that someone didn't agree with home schooling because they'd seen it go so far wrong. Let's be real here. Both home education and public education have been known to go so far wrong and have also been known to go very well. I don't ever say that I don't agree with public school, let alone for the reason that I have seen (far more often) that it has gone so far wrong in some cases. I simply say that it didn't fit the needs of my kids and that home education works much better for them.

Again, I apologize for the negative tone of this post. I just wanted it to be real and to also get some things off of my chest so that they didn't keep festering there. So I'll end the post on a happier note now.

The boys finished their swimming lessons yesterday. Although Brettley didn't pass his class, he made great progress and didn't have much that he wasn't able to pass off. Caleb and Tyrell both passed their classes and are looking forward to their next levels in the new year. They loved swimming and all made a lot of progress. We have really learned to be better supports for one another this week and it has helped us to grow closer as a family, which is always a wonderful thing.