Our days at the table and often beyond it are full of messy projects, books stacked high, and those lightbulb moments that make it all worth it. This is where I share what’s working, what’s not, and how we’re making learning joyful and meaningful together.
Meandering down the winding driveway, neighboring oak trees crowding in on all sides, I settle my vehicle up close to the stucco-sided schoolhouse, and I am simply amazed. A symphony of cicadas harmonizes somewhere within the boughs of a nearby sycamore, and the laughter of other people’s children drifts over the roofline and is lost within the canopy of trees. The immense beauty of this place never ceases to amaze me. I am utterly lost for words.
We get to do this with them and for all of them. We, as in my business partner and I. No way was this dreamed into completion all on my own.
Having always dreamt of becoming a school teacher, sharing the love of learning with countless children was the sugar-coated dream of my childhood. Kitten heels and Expo-markered encouragements on student desks were the easy expectations of adult life, and my excellence within this predictable reality was measured in impressive Scantron scores, appointments to grade-level chair, and nominations for teacher of the year. I was living my dream, and everything was right on schedule.
And then, I became a mother.
Motherhood has a very disruptive way of transforming old dreams into something completely unrecognizable, and that is exactly what happened to my childhood wishes of chalkboards and little desks, into something wildly bigger than myself, stretching my capacity and imagination beyond my own natural ability.
Motherhood was always part of the plan, of course. I envisioned packing Lisa Frank vintage bento boxes and stealing sticky kisses and handholds in the hallway as my tiny offspring were ushered off down the hall in straight, silent lines toward one direction while I did the same with my own 7- to 8-year-old wards down the other. Not only would this be enough, it was the shiniest of goals.
In my final year of teaching within a traditional classroom and in my very first year as a mother, my happy-teacher façade surprisingly began to slip. The way of life I craved for my home and the love of learning I desperately desired for my students began to war against what actually was. A ban on crayons as wasted time, a demand for written responses to every activity, and a mother-led political campaign for recess, which was at the time not allowed locally for elementary students beyond kindergarten (this campaign was successful in the end, praise God).
Trying to picture my then-newborn someday seated within this stagnant school environment was unsettling. I did not want him stifled alongside his one-day peers and became uncomfortable with this impending future, wondering what I might do to avoid it altogether.
While trading in one school for another was not the idea (yet), I became curious about homeschooling. After inviting a handful of parents whose students struggled within my classroom that final year to get curious alongside me, we began to build something unexpected together.
WonderHere is about educational freedom, flexibility, and family-centered learning. It’s about giving back to the children and their families what traditional schools take.
Time.
Childhood.
Rest.
The freedom to self-pace, even slow down.
And of course, wonder.
At WonderHere we provide personalized paths of connection for families, from co-op to curriculum to classes of just a few hours to full all-day, everyday programs. The family gets to choose what works best for their family within each season, and that includes my own.
Now, it is a tricky thing when the thing you want for your career feels imbalanced with the thing you want for your home. And it has taken years to disentangle my person from the place I poured so much of myself into. From starting and spending every open hour there to today stepping into a less visible role within a building but supporting multiple locations, leaders, and related projects, I have found a much-longed-for space within my bandwidth, and right there is where my family has continued to expand in priority.
WonderHere has grown, and now our primary campus is seated on the most beautiful property and serving the most amazing families, but the heart of the home and the heartbeat of homeschooling are still central to what we do every day. I love getting to bring my family to campus, and I love sharing that farm campus with so many of you. But do you know what truly fills my cup? Our “stay-at-home days,” as my kids so sweetly call them.
To protect these sacred days at home, I stack my workdays onto two days a week when my children attend classes at WonderHere and reserve the rest of our time for simply staying at home. On the days we remain at home, the mornings are slow. No one is rushing about searching for socks. I am not angrily announcing the time every five minutes until we are finally loaded up. And we have time to actually make a hot morning meal together rather than microwave oatmeal or guzzle squeeze-tube yogurt on the way out the door (no shade on quick meals, as we are frequent consumers of these). We light a candle and put on the kettle. Piano hymns are the wake-up call my children rise to, not the “hurry, let’s go, quick quick” cadence of a life always on the go.
I absolutely love our little school on a farm, but I love our days at home best. Not because I am convinced my lessons are superior to the ones provided through WonderHere classrooms (because our instructors are simply the best), but because there are lessons that only the home can teach.
While I am sitting on the chair that is more like a bed in our living room (see my “shop faves” home section to get a load of this beauty) with a reading lesson, my oldest is playing kitchen with his little sister. Between math and French are spontaneous basketball skills training sessions where my sons bond over dribbling drills. Though rest time is supposed to be an independent quiet two hours where I get to catch up on household things, my trio somehow finds themselves gravitating back toward one another again and again, building pillow forts and playing the kind of silly, made-up games only siblings share.
If we were off to school, we would have missed it—all of this unadulterated time well spent together. And I am selfish with this time, knowing it will not always be so easily within my grasp.
My husband works from home, and on the days I select to do the same, our kids are sprawled between us with some cardboard contraption that they are constructing, and I could not be more proud of the life we are living, with our kids smack dab in the middle of it and not at the bookends of our day between hurry and home.
I value the beautiful thing we have built, and my children find high value in the hours they spend learning from our amazing WonderHere instructors, playing with the most delightful friends, and stretching their skills of socialization out at our farm school. I am oh so grateful that we do not have to choose between home and school but can balance our time between them, ensuring that home receives its greater dose.
I used to feel embarrassed about sharing that we homeschool more days than our kids attend WonderHere classes, feeling as though I was being disloyal in some way to myself. But I am reminded that we built this different way of doing school, not because I needed a new school for my kids (who I always intended to homeschool), but because the world did.
I am so happy to be a part of putting something beautiful and necessary out into the world. And I am so, so happy that it does not subtract from the beautiful and more necessary work of my home. Everyone schools differently. Every child and family needs and wants different things out of school. WonderHere ebbs and flows to gift each of these families those different things as best it can, and WonderHere has released me from the trappings of traditional school and gifted me the flexibility to homeschool.
So yes, I am a homeschooling school founder, but that is not weird. Whether or not you school within your home or allow your home culture to lead your school-related decisions, always lead with first things first at heart: home and then school. Our WonderHere tagline is “your school away from homeschool,” because home has always been the most necessary, precious part of any type of school.
