Trust your instinct!

I feel like hiding in a cave somewhere with my tail between my legs. I am rather embarrassed to be posting this...to have gotten so worked up that I caused my entire household additional stress.

I am speaking about my decision to switch my curriculum to GVA. First let me explain what I think happened. Well, actually there are many little reasons some of which include that I was stressed and worried about my husbands lack of employment, my extra hours, the fact that when I looked at GVA there was only 3 days left to sign-up. Essentially though, I think I was just lost for a moment. I did not trust my instinct. I became so sure that we were behind...why did I think that?

Here is what has happened within the last week and half. We received the supplies, boxes and boxes of books. Attended a live teacher class (online), and dove into the curriculum. Guess what? My kids are not behind! In fact, Matthew is quite a bit ahead in most subjects and Austin while not ahead is on-level.

Back to what we discovered. I knew this morning that I was not happy with it. To be honest I knew last week but kept telling myself we needed it. Anyway, after this morning I broke down to Daddy saying, "I am so confused, help me". At first I did not get much response other than "pray". Well, I went to co-op and came back and we talked (I guess God told him to talk about it?). He helped me to look at what we liked about GVA and what we didn't - what we liked about our regular homeschool and what we didn't. Then we brought the boys in and had them give us their opinions. We are all in agreement...we want our "regular" homeschool back.

I will share what I did like about GVA; I loved their spelling program. It worked great! I also loved the scheduling aspect, all automated. I will not go into the cons, just suffice to say...lesson learned, not a fit for our family. I think one of the most embarrassing things about this for me is that I am not new to homeschooling. I normally have moments 3/4 of the way in the year where I may stray some, but I should have known better. Especially to rush into it, and rush is what I did.

Maybe this blog will be good for something...the next time I think of doing something like this I will come back and read. :-) Meanwhile, we missed a week and half of our "regular" schoolwork, time to catch up. Oh, guess I better start boxing those books back up.