(: Hello friends :)

We’re the Sheahan family and what a journey it has been getting to this point! As a family of 5 with 3 kiddos ranging from 7-12 years old, well actually 6 if you count our dog who thinks he’s a real boy, we’ve been homeschooling for a little over 5 years now. We’ve tried a little bit of everything and would probably be in the mixed/eclectic homeschool bucket these days. A little bit of wholesome curriculum with a dash of passion projects here and there and a dab of unstructured, letting life just happen kind of flow about sums up what we do these days. We also love to travel and we’re usually enjoying our many adventures in homeschooling - it just depends on the day right? Hah! Anyway, now that we’ve covered the basics, let’s get to the good stuff.

Like many of you out there, our family started out using the modern day medical system and followed all the recommendations for raising children in today’s world, including all the public school options - daycare, preschool and full-time school. After navigating a variety of health issues that didn’t fit into the medical system’s boxes and checking out the first couple years of public school, something didn’t seem to fit quite right though.

We only saw our children for a few hours a day which was spent bussing them around, throwing together a lot of prepackaged dinners, and doing homework they didn’t want to do - but let’s be honest, they didn’t need to do homework at those ages either. Then there was having nightly disputes about when bedtime should be since they didn’t get to do anything but school, food, homework and whatever else someone planned for them. All of that to get up too early, throw down some quick breakfast and repeat the process all over again. Even worse, as time went on, the kids wanted to go to school less and less and began to despise learning altogether! It was as if we were just going through the motions. Most of all though, we really missed them and everything felt wrong.

Our conclusion after going back and forth with what to do about all of it was that what my husband and I grew up with is not the same environment our kids face today. The current recommended public offerings for how to raise and prepare them for their future are so broken and flawed today and they haven’t changed in ways that work for us yet. With knowing deep down that God gave us the responsibility and privilege to raise and guide our children into all the potential they possessed, it was time to find a new way.

With that, we decided to take a leap into the unknown world of homeschooling, at least unknown to us anyway. Both mine and my husband’s families have never homeschooled before so we really were unprepared and absolutely conflicted as to what homeschooling was going to look like for our family, but we were motivated to learn and grow ourselves too.

Thankfully, there are a lot of great resources out there if you know where to look! We didn’t at first though, so we fumbled around for a while. A long while actually :/ Eventually, we discovered the importance of de-schooling and began to experience many of the homeschool styles out there. Fast forwarding through all the trials, errors, re-dos and practicing to today, our understanding of what medicine and learning truly looks like along with our approach to both have been deeply challenged and redefined so many times over the years! It’s still happening actually and I think that’s the point - to live, experience, grow, adapt and create :)

After 5 years of leaping, fumbling, experiencing and creating, we now fit right where we belong - learning and growing with our children, experiencing life as it was intended and full of passion and curiosity for what comes next!

Thank you for joining us on our journey towards finding new ways and rediscovering old ways to learn and grow as individuals and as a family. We are excited to see what is created when we join with others to build something new!