Homeschool fun

A friend sent this to me yesterday (thanks, Kim! And hi!). I've seen it before and I'm sure you have to, but it just gets funnier the older the kids get, so I thought I'd share it. She found it here, but it's been around a while, so I'm not sure who to credit it to. Just know that I didn't come up with it.

You Know You're A Homeschool Mom When...

• You get to change more than diapers, you get to change their minds.
• When a child busts a lip, and after seeing she's okay, you round up some scotch tape to capture some blood and look at it under the microscope!
• You find dead animals and actually consider saving them to dissect later.
• Your children never ever leave the "why?" stage.
• When your teenager decides to take one community college course, and comes home and asks you why the teacher wrote "At" on his paper. (A+)
• You ask for, and get, a copier instead of a diamond tennis bracelet for your wedding anniversary.
• Your kids think reading history is best accomplished while lying on the floor with their head resting on the side of their patient dog.
• Your husband can walk in at the end of a long day and tell how the science experiment went just by looking at the house.
• You never have to drive your child's forgotten lunch to school.
• Your child will never suffer the embarrassment of group showers after PE.
• The only debate about the school lunch program is whose turn it is to cook.
• You never have to face the dilemma of whether to take your child's side or the teacher's side in a dispute at school.
• If your child gets drugs at school, it's probably Tylenol.
• Your neighbors think you are insane.
• Your kids learn new vocabulary from their extensive collection of "Calvin & Hobbes" books.
• Your formal dining room now has a computer, copy machine, and many book shelves and there are educational posters and maps all over the walls.
• You have meal worms growing in a container....on purpose.
• If you get caught talking to yourself, you can claim you're having a PTA meeting.
• Talking out loud to yourself is a parent/teacher conference.
• You take off for a teacher in-service day because the principal needs clean underwear.
• You can't make it through a movie without pointing out the historical inaccuracies.
• You step on math manipulative on your pre-dawn stumble to the bathroom.
• The teacher gets to kiss the principal in the faculty lounge and no one gossips.
• Your honor student can actually read the bumper sticker that you have put on your car.
• If your child claims that the dog ate his homework, you can ask the dog.
• Some day your children will consider you to be a miracle-working expert and will turn to you for advice.
• Your kids refer to the neighbor kids as "government school inmates."
• You can't make it through the grocery produce department without asking your preschooler the name and color of every vegetable.
• You can't put your produce in your cart without asking your older student to estimate it's weight and verify accuracy.
• You live in a one-house schoolroom.

• Your favorite Christmas gift was a gift certificate to a book store.

• The principal can give the teacher a pat on the behind and it's not harassment.

• Your kids will actually talk to grown ups at a family gathering and are actually patient with kids half their age.

• You can take the time to look at a tiny spider on a log.

• You can listen to your child's favorite hilarious passage from Hank the Cowdog 47 times.

• Your daughter, who is practically a vegetarian, is begging her dad to shoot some starlings so she can pluck them and clean them up to make a "blackbird" pie just like the Ingalls family.

• You're almost afraid to put your hand in your purse because you not sure if your 6yo has put something that's alive (or possibly not alive, but once was) to take home to view under the microscope.

• You have a line item in your budget for overdue book fines.

• You have to add the words: "homeschool, homeschooler, and homeschooling" to your computer's spell checker so it will stop marking them as wrong.

• Your house in on the Parade of Homes List - for educational merchandisers.

• When visiting a strange town you see a parking lot full of mini-vans and station wagons and wonder if it's a homeschooling conference.

• Your friends don't want to help you move because you have so many books.

• Your school clothes have more holes in the knees than your play clothes.

I love the ones about pointing out the historical inaccuracies in movies and referring to the neighbor kids as "government school inmates". I literally laughed out loud at those. Although, neither my kids or I have actually called other kids inmates (but it has crossed my mind a few times). And I hate that the spell check thinks homeschool (and homeschooler, and homeschooling) aren't words.

And I have to share a couple of things that I've done in the last few weeks that made me realize that I really am a homeschool mom:

A couple weeks ago, Marc-Adam found a dead cricket in our laundry room. He went and got Stephen to pick it up (obviously I wasn't taking care of it fast enough, but I was right in the middle of switching a couple loads). Stephen picked it up, and instead of throwing it in the trash or flushing it, studied it for a while, carried it around for a while, and then asked for a jar. So I gave him one. And he carried around the dead cricket in a jar. And I let him. After my mom threw it away, I realized how strange it was. But I still wouldn't have thrown it away.

Then we went to a wedding where one of the favors was actually a little toy (you've seen them, it's like a paddle with two balls or beads attached to string on each side and when you spin it, the beads hit the paddle so that it makes a noise). I kept mine, and asked other people for theirs, so that I could take them home and show the kids the power of centrifugal force.

*And I'm sure you noticed that the font has gone all weird on this post and I spent 30 minutes trying to fix it, but now I'm mad at it and I'm done. Sorry. Hopefully things will be back to normal next post.*