I had to count the years twice. Verification complete, it seems to be true. This is our 10th year schooling at home. It seems only yesterday that we’d drop our oldest off at the village kindergarten for the morning, then spend the afternoons learning our letters in English, reading stories and poetry and looking at the globe. When we decided that the time and money of doing both was no longer worth it, it was so freeing to have them home all day, eating pancakes for breakfast whenever we wanted. When it was time for child #3 (and this year, #4) to start kindergarten and he was just….there, with us, all the time–no crying, no early starts–just naturally transitioning into lessons, it was with praise and worship. We had been through enough trauma as a family. To see him alive, thriving, playing and learning was health and life.

While I love the little years, getting to cozy up on the couch with Winnie-the-Pooh and Thornton Burgess, there is something particularly delightful about upper middle and high school. We are intellectual equals now and on a journey together. Their thoughts and ideas and observations are so worth hearing and talking about. Their love of learning is inspiring; the determination with which they schedule and attack their stacks so rewarding. It feels like we are beginning to reap a little of the fruit from those long elementary years and it is a feeling of quiet gladness, of deep gratitude. Suddenly the end doesn’t seem so far away, suddenly the value and choices of every day, every book feel exponentially greater, of far deeper import than even just a couple years ago.

In so many ways, I still I don’t know what I am doing. I am terrible at math, I’m not great at explaining and preparing tests is definitely not my thing. I never homeschooled my kids because I love teaching or “felt called to homeschool” or have an obsession or identity with homeschooling. Note: I rarely even talk about this huge part of our lives on this blog. We homeschooled out of necessity and the Lord has so kindly blessed through that less than worthy motive. And while there are many aspects I struggle through, there is one thing that I do love…sharing wonderful and beautiful books with my children. Now that I could do all day–and I do. We fight through a half an hour of math every day to get to the good stuff.

Because while having measurable skills is important (law of necessity: you must memorize the multiplication tables) having minds capable of deep and reflective and worthy thought is even more so. I don’t want to produce human calculators. Geniuses. Child prodigies. I want delightful, human children. Children, who with all their failings and shortcomings, love to grow and learn, humans deeply connected with the natural world around them, who love their fellow man, who worship at the throne of their sovereign Creator through every subject they study every day of their lives. That’s the goal. After all, their chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever. And if by the providential grace of God that is fulfilled, then I will be humbly satisfied.