A Place to Call Home / Schooling Decisions

This morning I woke up and realized that, for the first time since we moved out of our house and into the Crowsons’ back in April, I was waking up in my own home.  Not my “own” in terms of home ownership, mind you, but not some hotel or someone else’s place.  We’ve been living out of suitcases for over three months, and it is great to be able to start to unpack.  We are in an apartment complex called the “Arboretum” (I still don’t know whether the accent goes on the “bor” or the “e”) in Vestavia Hills.  I just discovered that I can access the office’s wireless internet connection from our patio, hence this post.  We are not so hard up that we can’t afford a phone line or cable, but I don’t want to bother with six-month minimum contracts when I don’t expect to be here that long.  I’m actually praying that we are not here very long, but for the time being, it’s great to have a place to call home.

Folks here in Birmingham have been very generous in giving and loaning us furniture to use while most of our things are still in storage in Texas.  The one thing we have bought was a sofa that we found at a great price at the Lay-Z-Boy clearance sale.  My brother-in-law predicted that I would regret not paying the $80 delivery charge.  He, my nephews, and I, brought it to the apartment yesterday in his pickup truck.  We had quite a time getting it up the bank that leads from the parking lot to our ground-floor apartment, then through the breezeway, and around through the patio door.  There were moments that I did regret not having it delivered.  But, to tell the truth, now that it’s done, I’m glad the $80 is still in my pocket.

Help us out with a decision that needs to be made quickly.  We have been planning to homeschool Jeremy at least for this fall.  The main reason is that we hope to have a long-term job soon, which will mean moving, and we didn’t want to disrupt his life even further by getting him into a school and then transferring out and into another one in a short period of time.  We also have some traveling we still need to do this fall, and want to do as a family, so we can have more flexibility.  Another minor complication is that we only have one car so I would have to arrange my daily schedule around his school hours.  Unless we could work out a ride, it would be out of the question for me to take the car out of town during a school week, since there is no local school bus.

However, we have discovered that our apartment is in one of the best public school districts in Alabama and there is a wonderful K-3 school near us.  Jeremy is very social and will do better in academics if he is around other kids.  Also, neither Maureen or I have education experience, though home school material is pretty well laid out.  And what do we do with Jonathan while Jeremy is in school?

Here’s your chance to weigh in on our schooling dilemma.  Do we stick with the homeschool plan, or find a way to make the public schooling work?  What do you think?

Oh, I lost my wireless connection, but now, a few hours later after writing the above, it appears to be back.