Our First Home-School
Ray and I got home last night from a ten-day, nine-state trip with Mary Evelyn and her family. Our destination was Mount Rushmore. When Ray and I set out on an adventure, I like to take you along. Sometimes I go ahead and do it anyway, but sometimes I feel a little uneasy about announcing to cyberspace that we are out of town! The past few days have been one of those “uneasy about announcing to cyberspace” times, so I’m taking you along a week and a half late, okay? First I’ll explain why we chose Mount Rushmore as our destination.
Once a Decade
In 1986 I suggested to Ray that we take our first real family vacation. We had moved to “the north” the summer before from Mississippi. “Let’s see some things while we are up here,” I said. “We don’t know how long we will be here.” Ray agreed, and we decided on Mount Rushmore. We certainly couldn’t afford hotels, so we bought a tent and a car top carrier, packed up our Plymouth Reliant sedan, and headed west to Mount Rushmore. Ray was 34, I was 32, John was 7, Bethany 5, and Mary Evelyn almost 3.
We visited the monument, saw a herd of buffalo in Custer State Park, rode in a stagecoach in Keystone, and visited Storybook Island and Dinosaur Park in Rapid City and Flintstone Bedrock City in Custer.
We didn’t plan on making this a once-a-decade event, but here’s what happened. In 1996 we had an opportunity to visit Mount Rushmore for a second time. That time we added visits to places where Laura Ingalls Wilder had lived. By 2006 my father had died, and Ray and I decided to take my mother to Mount Rushmore.
So, for months Ray and I have been talking about the fact that it’s 2016 and wondering if we’d like to keep our pattern (that we never intended to start) going. When Mary Evelyn and her family said they would come along, we decided to go again! We combined a little business with our vacation, which I plan to tell you about in the next few days; but first I’d like to tell you about one of our important firsts.
Beginnings
Our first destination was Urbana, Illinois, where we visited the front yard of the home where we started homeschooling in 1990. Because Mary Evelyn has written a semi-autobiographical book about her early childhood called Katy, she wanted to show her children where “Katy” used to live.
Though it might have been fun to go inside if the current owners had been at home, we contented ourselves with standing in the front yard, looking up into the maple tree Mary Evelyn and John used to climb, seeing how it has grown, . . .
. . . looking for ways things have changed and how they’ve stayed the same, walking down the street to where Mary Evelyn and Bethany gathered acorns and met the “acorn lady,” and reminiscing in other ways about those precious days.
It was in the basement den of this house that we hung a bulletin board for our “classroom,” displayed an American flag for the Pledge of Allegiance, and assembled our big stack of textbooks to start homeschooling.
We had so much to learn about how to emphasize the home and de-emphasize the school of our homeschool. But it was here that we made some baby steps, and the memories are so, so sweet.
I encourage you to remember your first so, so sweet days of homeschooling, too. Remember especially your why.
Whatever you do,
do your work heartily,
as for the Lord rather than for men,
knowing that from the Lord
you will receive
the reward of the inheritance.
It is the Lord Christ whom you serve.
Colossians 3:23-24
P.S. We also drove by other Urbana sites that are important to our family and took the grandchildren to a park we used to visit with our kids. That’s where the little boy offered me his jacket.
P.S.S. Guess where we hope to go in 2026!