Holy Spirit, continued...

To recap: I, a former public schoolteacher and defender, am meeting all of these homeschoolers. None of them seem isolationist and their kids seem normal, even more polite and self-motivated than I'd seen as a teacher. They were all involved in a variety of activities and not a one was moving to a mountain cabin in Montana without plumbing or electricity.

Madeleine started preschool in my old district, primarily because it's familiar. We decided she would go to my former elementary school after that, as we hoped to move into that district. The matter was resolved.
In Advent, I started going to daily Mass after dropping Madeleine off at preschool. I noticed a family of eight on a regular basis; given the time of Mass (9AM), I figured they must be homeschoolers. I wondered what they did to their preschool age daughter to have her so quiet. At least the baby made some noise, which helped.
So, we happened to be at Mass on Paczki Day (everyone's Irish on St. Patrick's; in metro Detroit, everyone's Polish on Paczki Day) and I was talking to (yet another) homeschooling friend. We were discussing parish CCD programs. I admitted I was unsure about having my kids go through the program and was thinking about teaching it myself. She said, "Yep. If your kids don't learn their times tables, they'll never be an engineer. So what. If they don't learn their Faith, that's something you'll have to explain to your Maker."
That was some serious food for thought. We still did the public school kindergarten prep with the parents' orientation and all, but the trickle through the dam was becoming a flow.
I kept worrying at it, like a loose tooth. I thought about drive times, subjects covered, books read, pedophile teachers. I thought about bus rides, cruel classmates, science labs, peer pressure. Finally at the end of March I said it out loud, on a Wednesday afternoon phone call to my husband.
"Honey... I need to tell you something and I don't want you to freak out."
"Heather, that's a lousy way to keep me calm."
"I'm really starting to think about homeschooling."
Remarkably, he didn't freak out. He made supportive, nonjudgemental statements about discernment and researching options, and we hung up. That evening, though, he came in with information about Kimberly Hahn's book. I mentioned asking the Neighbor at her son's birthday party that weekend, and he gave his endorsement.
So that Saturday, I asked her. "What got you started in homeschooling?" I asked when the party was starting to wind down. It was her first son and the problems they'd had in Kentucky. "Why?" she asked pointedly. Shelly's many things--stupid ain't on the list.
I explained all my reservations and even ran home to get my stack of workbooks I'd ordered from Madeleine's book orders. She laughed at me. "You're not thinking about homeschooling; you're in denial," she said through her chuckles. The stack I already had was taller than her six-year-old's whole curriculum.
I asked the mother of the homeschooling family from church if they used the same program as Lucy. "We use Colby," she managed rather breathlessly; she was wrestling the baby-turning-toddler.
Colby? I wondered. Then I looked online, and realized it wasn't Colby, but Kolbe. Wow. This was the education I wish I'd had. Sigh...
Then we got the "results" from Madeleine's kindergarten readiness test. I had been looking for some kind of sign short of a burning bush, and this was it. I told my mother and she maintains that the school screwed up with that. When I said, "Shelly thinks we should homeschool," she made her "I've heard crazier ideas" face. Yippee! I got out my books, my plans, started talking curriculum choices...
With my husband's okay, we decided to try it on. I settled on reading, writing, arithmetic, and religion for our curriculum, and just used off-the-shelf books. I made four-day plans and tried to run with it. And it worked.
Dale wasn't sold yet, though. We went to the conference in June, where we ran into Andrea. We'd met at the Latin Mass and had briefly discussed homeschooling; it was back in the day when I thought they were all nuts. She was thrilled to see us and was brimful of advice and enthusiasm and we talked for an hour about getting started, teaching reading, self-designed curriculum...

The conference did it for Dale, which left us with another batch of questions. Which curriculum, or do-it-ourselves? Enroll or not? Where? And the most important: how do we tell my mother-in-law, who had worked for the public schools for years and had seen the bad side of homeschooling?