My homeschooling Journey intro =) and my first "QUEENS" shout out =)

     I have been homeschooling now for 11 years (good grief!  That makes me feel VERY old) and have been around the block in my homeschool approach, style and curriculum choices.  It took many years to figure out what my "bent" was and what curriculum really fit that bent.  There is sooooo very much I want to share about homeschooling but this particular post will just be a glimpse, a platform if you will, to build off of.

     A little (very little) about where I started and where I landed.  Short story: I started off very Classical Education. You know, "The Well Trained Mind", Latin, Saxon Math, etc.. Then this thing happened where it wasn't working.... at all... But I soldiered on.  Then there were the "muddled years" where everything just kinda blended into moving and babies and an obstinate first child... and more moving and more babies.  And for some reason the whole  Classical approach was still not working.  So I jumped (desperately tried to survive) into "box curriculum" (you know the kind that is easy to use and comes in a box.... boring) and it limped us along through the "muddled years" as I switched on and off between  using the box stuff  and the Classical Approach to procure superior minded children (HA!).
    Then this amazing thing... (okay- so have I ever told a "short story"?  moving on...)... yes this AH-MAZE-ING thing happened at a homeschool conference.  I saw this!!!

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     This one language arts book change my life.  I mean,  CHAH-ANGED, people.  It introduced me to Queens Homeschool. This in turn introduced me to Charlotte Mason Style teaching.  Oh mylanta (Thanks Tammy for getting that phrase in my head), and all of a sudden we were schooling, AND!!!!! we were liking it, AND!!!!! it was easy to use, AND!!!!! it was working, AND!!!!!! it continues to work to this day!

     One day I will write more specifically on how our first day went because it was a pretty comical day and it showed me just how stressed out my older kids were on our "Classical Muddled" education.

    Since finding Queens, I have only strayed for one year when I decided to try something else, it was fine but we came back to using mostly all Queens.  I don't want to name that "strayed year curric" yet because its actually a fantastic curric and I plan on talking about it one day.  I do not want anyone ruined from accepting its own awesomeness just because I only did it for one year.

  Also when I first started out with Queens they did not have math or history so I found other things that worked for us that still kept with the style of teaching I had landed on.  As Queens has grown I have tried their history but not their math...maybe one day.  Math is entirely a different post altogether as well.  We shall barely speak of it here.

     My "short story" has turned quite lengthy (was anyone really shocked?) and I still have an incredible amount of stuff I want to say about Queens and my homeschooling journey in general but for now this "little" intro should wet your pallet and hopefully you want to hear more.