Hi, I’m Emily. When people find out that I have five kids and homeschool, they usually say, “Oh! You must be super mom!” Nope, I’m a normal person. You don’t have to be a superhero to teach your kids. You don’t have to be perfectly patient, and you don’t have to have a PhD. You don’t have to wear special clothes, you don’t have to have an immaculate house, and you don’t have to have fit any special demographic. Normal moms and dads can educate their children!

I know this because I was homeschooled myself, back in the 90s, by an awesome but very normal mom. After volunteering in a public school classroom through college, teaching in a private school classroom after college, and teaching online homeschool tutorials after that, I started homeschooling our own kids. We’ve moved all over the country and have made lots of different homeschooling friends along the way, so we know for a fact that there’s not one right way to homeschool or one right type of homeschool family. Now in our thirteenth year of homeschooling, I’m still confident that homeschooling has been one of the best things we’ve done for our family.

Since the 2020 pandemic played havoc with our educational systems as well as everything else, I’ve been getting a lot of questions about how we manage to be so normal and educate our kids at the same time. This is a place for me to compile my advice to new homeschooling parents!

I am a member of the Amazon Affiliates Program. I’m not charging anything for any of the advice here on the blog, because I know normal people don’t have tons of extra money to spend on homeschool mentoring. But I have provided Amazon links to many products throughout my posts, and if you click and purchase through them, it will help me recoup the cost of hosting this website.