Classical Conversations with Liz

Hi, this is Sheri from ourlifehomeschooling.com. I have another fantastic mom interview to share with you today. This is my friend Liz, but before I do, we've had some exciting events happen here in our home. I was due with a little girl in April and she was delivered on May 2nd. Her name is Collin Joy, eight pounds, eight ounces, and she is a real sweetheart. So I've taken time off my blog. We've taken time off as a family to just stay home a lot, do as little as possible and just hold her, enjoy her, just get to know and celebrate this new member of the family. So this interview that I am sharing with you was actually reported over a month ago, but because of just the end of pregnancy and life events, I had to put it on hold and wait to be able to publish it. But I hope to be able to do a post sharing pictures of Collin and the family and bringing her home and talk a little bit about homeschooling with an infant because I've done that several times. But let me introduce to you my friend Liz. This is Liz. She is a close personal friend as well as a cousin by marriage. She's been homeschooling for five years and I love how down to earth she is. I love how simple she is. I love her kids. If you are someone who is thinking about homeschooling next year, maybe you've seen a lot of homeschoolers the past year. I know that we've had quite a few that have joined our co-op and had a long waiting list. A lot of people have stepped out and tried it and maybe you are one that is still thinking about doing that. But you are afraid, maybe a failure or afraid that you won't know how to do it or won't do it right or whatever your challenges may be. I think you will find this interview with Liz to be really encouraging. She offers advice for new moms. She talks about how she was afraid to step out and start but she just jumped out in faith and she has been enjoying it ever since. She talks about some of the challenges that she's faced and how she's overcome them and also how she found a good fit last year in Classical Conversations and she talks a little bit about that and how that's affected her family. So, I hope you'll enjoy this interview. Hi, Liz. How are you doing? I'm good. How are you? Good. Enjoying this nice weather outside. It's such a beautiful day. Yes, gorgeous. Yeah, spring's coming and it just seems to make everything happier. Yeah. Well, I like to start off just telling how I know the person that I'm interviewing and we are married to our husbands, our cousins. So, that's how we know each other and we met, oh boy, how many years ago? Lucy is, yeah, Lucy's 10 and Brinley, yeah, Brinley's 10 and you were married for a couple years. 12, 13 years, something like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, well, I'll let you introduce yourself. Okay, my name is Liz. My husband is Aaron, like you said. We have five children. Lucy, who's 10, Galen, who's eight, Jesse, who's six, Millie, who's four, and then Gus, who is one and a half. We've been married for 12 years and we started homeschooling since the beginning when Lucy was five. So, we've been homeschooling for five years. So, not too long, but I feel way more comfortable than I did in that first year. I was terrified, completely terrified to homeschool. So, now we do, we did a couple of curriculums to start out and then now we do classical conversations and this is our first year with CC. So, it's been great. I have heard nothing but good from people that have tried classical conversation or been with it for a long time. Yeah, everyone. Yeah, yeah. So, you said you've been homeschooling from the beginning. What, what made you come to that decision or you said you're terrified too. So, what made you convinced that this is something that you wanted to try? So, I was gonna, so okay, how do I, I think, I think we've talked about this before that fear played a big role in the beginning and sometimes it still does, but I looked at my five-year-old Lucy who was five and all I could think about was how am I gonna let her go to complete strangers all day to be taught I don't know what. Do you know what I mean like that? Just all those questions and not that it's bad. Public school isn't bad. Private school isn't bad. Anything, but I just saw this little five-year-old and I was thinking how can I, how can I keep her with me longer? So, that was my first thought and then my second thought was I have a really sweet friend. Her name is Christy and she homeschools with her children and I think at the time she had, she has six children now. At the time, I think she just had three maybe four and I just saw how her children were, how they behaved, how they loved each other, how they were in public, all these different things and I was just thinking I want that. I want to be able to spend the time with my kids. I don't want to have to say goodbye and I want to learn how they can be obedient like that. I was like a new mom. I was trying to figure it all out and so that was, that was one of the biggest reasons to jump into homeschooling for us is I saw other people around me specifically her family, your family and I just, I wanted that. Yeah, you know, I haven't really thought about this in a while but I think that was probably a big reason that we started too was that I ran into some homeschooling moms or families and I just, I liked what I saw. I liked the close relationships they had. I liked the freedom they had. I just always was impressed by the kids just I don't know of anything in particular maybe just their curiosity or their love for learning. Yeah, I think that just kind of stood out and yeah those relationships really are attractive when you see and you know someone else makes you think maybe I should try it. If someone does do it, maybe I should try it. Yeah, definitely, yeah. Yeah, so but you've been doing it for five years which I think is a lot of time to be, you know, you know the ins and outs of it and you have had hard days. You've been through especially that first year where almost everybody quit and it's so intimidating and so especially I think it's special to to talk to moms that are in the thick of it who like we were just saying before we started recording who spend 90% of their time in the kitchen where you're still just like working with the kids one-on-one and yeah so what experience would you have for a new mom? I think there are even though you know COVID started last year and a lot of people were forced into homeschooling and schools are starting to open up. I've been into so many moms just recently that still are just really interested in asking questions, wanting to know more about it. Do you have, what advice would you give to a new mom or a questioning mom? Yeah I have a few, a couple things. The first one is don't give up like you said. I've had my days where I see the school bus go by and I'm just thinking I'm gonna put them on there the next day like it's just been a frustrating day and just we all have bad attitudes all around but to not give up, to say tomorrow's a new day and we will start over, that's been a big thing. Someone, a friend of mine had told me take it semester by semester. She said not even year by year, take it semester by semester because sometimes homeschooling isn't for everyone but I think it could be for everyone and if you're struggling with this math curriculum that is just really really challenging then switch to a different one. You know what I mean? So that was always a comforting thought to me that I don't have to commit to this for the whole year. If BC didn't work out for us, if classical conversations didn't work out I knew that we had many other curriculum that we could fall back on. So just to not not give up, take it semester by semester. Another thing that I wanted to say was simplicity. Work with what you have. One of the things, I have some resources that you were going to ask for I think in a little while but one thing was Pinterest. Like you can find so many things on Pinterest but it can also be so overwhelming because you see all these perfect homeschool rooms and these all these fantastic ideas and we live in a very small home that we love but we do everything at the kitchen table or everything outside or everything on the couch and so I think that's what I would just encourage anyone that if you feel like you don't have the space create the space. You know what I mean? And it makes it fun. Yeah I agree with that. About a year ago we moved to a bigger house and we have a lot more space right now which has been a huge blessing for 10 years. I don't know how many years. A long time we lived in a very small house, at least a small living space and by the time we left we had eight kids in a fairly small house. We were feeling it but it's definitely doable and we have great memories there. I mean there's lots of great memories. It's special and you spend a lot of time in close proximity. You have a lot of difficult times and a lot of times the kids are fighting and driving crazy but you also have just a lot of good memories and that's how I feel about that place. It's kind of special because you know it was our beginning. What would you say is your biggest challenge? My biggest challenge, let's see I have a couple of those too. I think sometimes I just feel very overwhelmed. We're homeschooling Lucy, Galen, Jesse and then Millie's doing like a preschool like pre-k thing and I just let myself I get carried away with oh I'm not doing enough for this person or oh well Lucy was reading way earlier than Millie was like what am I doing wrong and someone the other day I heard someone say like everyone has their own timeline and I thought that was so helpful to think of just visualizing that Millie might be later with reading and that's okay but instilling that love for learning and that love for reading and not having it be stressful for her is so important. So I think that would be probably my biggest thing that I get that I get challenged with and then I what I said before about you're not stuck here in this spot forever like it's constantly changing. There's new resources all the time and just keeping up with prayer to help to ask the Lord for help you know because it can be overwhelming but there was like oh go ahead notice that but your kids are changing so I've noticed like what seems like a really hard spot at one stage then in a year or two is nothing of course then you have another hard spot to replace it yeah yeah yeah you um it does it changes the kids change and they grow through you know they get better at certain areas and yeah it's you know something that seemed like a huge deal in second grade yeah in fourth grade you've forgotten about yeah yeah definitely yeah well tell me a little bit about your community with classical conversations because I know you said this is your first year but you absolutely love it and um we do to just be a great support yeah um so just to briefly describe classical conversations because I had no idea what it was before we um joined um I actually took a couple of years to kind of gear myself up because I just wasn't ready to jump in I thought it was going to be really stressful and something that I couldn't handle um but it's kind of like a three-tiered program where you have foundations which is like the foundational aspect of it which is the younger kids and then you have essentials and then you have challenge um and right now we are in um foundations and then lucy is the only one that's an essential so far and we really hope that we can keep up with it um as we continue um but we we meet uh once a week um and it's called community day uh and we are kind of introduced to the material for the week that we'll be studying um and it is just so nice to fellowship with like-minded moms and dads who love their kids um and it's a different kind of a different way of learning like a lot of memorization um but it's super super helpful um there's like songs and things to help you with memorizing and we took a trip to um Williamsburg Virginia uh this past semester and we had so much fun and it lined up perfectly with what we were studying with these yeah yeah so the kids are like singing all the songs that we know and they're seeing like plaques with that person's name on and it's just coming to life so it was it was really neat but just the support that they they have and that they offer and I think that's the biggest thing is having support if you don't have support find it do you know what I mean yeah I think it's a make or break if you have support we've been in our co-op our club's not a classical conversation co-op but we've been in our co-op for 12 years and they are some of my closest friends and yeah you just you've been places together literally you go a lot of places together like you said you went uh over the summer every Thursday we're at some natural um a park or we're out creek stomping or whatever and um they're just my people they're our people yeah and yeah like you can do it when you're around them you feel like you're not alone I think that's yes not alone and your kids you know great friends and I felt the same thing I feel like it is the make or break like you may not make it if you don't have support yeah and if you don't have support right away don't lose heart because the lord will provide he always does and he always will and and that might come in different shapes and sizes so yeah I think it just takes it can take a little while and just hold tight because it'll it'll be there yeah I can say that too even for other things there have been times along the way where um we've hit some part like maybe one child was having a hard time making friends or just just different excuse me different difficulties and I remember just feeling like I just have control over it and just bring it to the lord and yeah I think about how many of those prayers were answered and um that you know at this point I can look back and be so thankful for being having been able to homeschool them and how everything has worked out and yeah and we do just love it yeah you know it's really hard yeah yeah well I can see my light is going out here I had a pretty trouble yes so um yeah is there anything else that you had that you wanted to add um I think I just had a couple notes that I had written down um I think I had a scripture verse written down for Thessalonians 5 11 encourage one another and one another and build each other up just as in fact you are doing um and as I was like thinking about this and just preparing it for it and everything like that we have a song that we sing um to that verse and um that just came to my mind and I was thinking I think that's what makes homeschooling so special is that we can encourage our children they can encourage each other each other and us and just build us all up and within our community we can too um so yeah I mean whoever whoever sees this if anyone has questions or needs anything I think you or I would be happy to if I don't know the answer I'll put them in the right direction you know that is the biggest encouragement is um talking to someone else who's just normal in the same boat you know getting up every morning and feeding the kids and getting started and just doing it again and you know it's there's it seems so ordinary but that's what's most encouraging when you see and talk to people like that that are still doing it and you know maybe getting some rough spots along the way but they've stuck at it for a long time yeah and they love it yeah yeah I've I've heard of some people just um friends recently just saying like oh I could never do that and I'm like no you can like have have faith like you can because it's there's like you said there's hard days but there's wonderful rewarding days the kids were we went to the library before this and they were all reading out on the trampoline and I looked out and I was like Aaron are they all reading out there and he was like yeah and I was thinking this is this is what it is you know that little reward yeah yeah well that's great yeah thanks so much Liz I really appreciate you sharing your story your life your family and um it's encouraging to me so I know it will be encouraging to a lot of people well you are very encouraging to me and you've helped me through more than you'll ever know well thank you yeah all right well have a good night yes you too thanks all right bye