My family.

I put some pics of my boys to the left. Nathan will be 11 years old on Jan 21st...he is very excited!! Kaleb will be five in June of this year. Gabriel will be 3 in May (so hard to imagine!!), and Drake will celebrate his first birthday in March!

My husband's name is Bo. He is the electrical superintendent for a local construction company. He also will be starting his new role at the company as job super shortly...he is very excited about this!!

We started homeschooling last July. I have always wanted to homeschool my children since Nathan started kindergarten, but just never had the "nerve." Nathan has adhd/odd. He was just diagnosed in October 2007. I have suspected since he was in preschool, but the teachers every year told me he just "needed to learn how to behave" and I needed "to be more strict with him." After some trouble with the unwilling-to-help-or-understand principal, I decided to pull Nathan out of school the following year. We actually ended up selling our house (something we never thought would happen!!) and moved to a smaller school district. I became pregnant and very, very sick.

After just a few weeks of homeschooling, I panicked because we weren't getting much done with me so sick all day long. I put him in the smaller school district with hopes that they would be more understanding. He was diagnose that October and we started meds (something we truly regret now). In the year that followed, Nathan did wonderfully in school. He was like a new kid!! However he has lost a total of 20 pounds since starting the meds. We changed to a different kind mid-year to see if we could control the weight loss. That med didn't work for us at all. His behavior and attention span worsened again. After a little begging on my part, the doctor put him back on the original meds. I knew already that we would definitely be homeschooling after the school year ended, but I had to get him through that last part of public school first. His teacher was horrible to him because of the changes in behavior and attention...something that she couldn't understand was not his fault! His doctor and I were the ones messing with his meds, not him!

Anyway we took him off those meds as soon as summer started and began yet another different type of medication. After only one month, I took him off and we haven't medicated since. He was doing well with attention and behavior, great actually, but he became very depressed. It was very similiar to postpartum depression and I hated seeing him like that. The doctor's only suggestion was to give him yet another drug, an antidepressant...at the age of 10!!

He has been unmedicated for a few months now. We are doing a very neat treatment that I hope works for him called NAET. We are hoping to see some good results from that soon.

So! Here we are. Most of our curriculum comes from Seton. We belong to a small homeschool group, but I am in the process of finding another with more activities...narrowed down to two right now. After a long Christmas break, we are very excited to get back to schooling and our regular schedule.

I hope to meet many other homeschool moms and share stories!!

Blessings,
Christie