Why?

We are a family of 5: my husband Omar, myself, and my 3 kids.  William is 4; Joy is 2; and Elijah is 10 months.  We live in Orange County, California, in a nice 2 bedroom townhome a block from the lake.  Omar teaches pre-K at a private Christian preschool; all 3 of our kids attend for free.  I work fulltime for a home health agency as a coder/tech support, and do chart audits part time in the evenings from home for an outsource auditing company.  We belong to a wonderful Southern Baptist church.

I guess on the outside, our life looks great.  So why the big changes?  How do I even start to explain? If we try to break it down to the two simplest/biggest reasons, it would be finances and homeschooling.

Financially, we have fallen into a hole.  We've had some life circumstances that have made things difficult, but I also have to be honest and admit we have not always made the wisest choices with our money.  Sometimes, there is so much going on now, that we forget to plan for the later.  At the moment, we are getting by...but just barely.  And we'd like to do more than just get by.  We'd like to pull ourselves together, get ourselves out of debt, and on the road to a more secure financial future.  With the cost of living in California, it's almost impossible.  Omar's parents live in Texas.  They've offered us a 3 bedroom house to rent for almost half of what we are paying for our 2 bedroom townhome.  Tempting? Very.  But it's been offered before, and we've declined.  Now, we've reached a new point of desperation in our financial situation, plus, bringing us to our second big reason, we have arrived at the decision to homeschool.

Homeschooling, to me, is a very simplified way of saying, "I want to be in my kids' lives, in a big way."  I want to be more than coming home in the evening to see my kids for a couple of hours:  "Hi, how was your day?  What did you learn?  Have some dinner.  I love you.  Good night."  Drastically oversimplified, I know, but some nights, that's exactly what it feels like.  We could go into how I am terrified of the direction our public school system is heading, and how I do not want my kids in public school and can't afford private school.  It's a big part of our decision, it's true, but it's really just a side note to the fact that I am still only just realizing the full meaning of how God has blessed me with these children, entrusted them to my care, and called me to raise them, and I can't do that when I only see them 3 hours a day.

I have spent the last 4 years making excuses.  I don't have the temperament to be a stay at home mom: while this may be true on the surface, I believe that God has called me for this, and He has the power to change me. I believe I will find more challenge and reward in this than I ever have at my desk job.  I love my job: while I believe that God has used these last 4 years to give me the experience and knowledge that is helping me make this transition now (by enabling me to gain a work from home job), I also believe He is telling me this time in my life is over. I don't love my job anymore; the days are tedious, and I miss my kids.  At least the kids are with Dad at daycare; it's almost like a stay at home parent: I can't believe I even tried to use this argument. We can't afford it: this has always been my trump card.  Most arguments for a parent staying home ride on the theory that you save money on childcare; my kids have been attending daycare for free, so this argument has been invalid.  We would just be losing income. Also, if I quit my full time job, we lose our health insurance (this is a big, scary thing for me; I've done private individual health insurance before; it was a horrible, bad experience.).  But it has become important enough to us now to make the effort and stir us out of our comfort zone and do what we have to do to make this happen.

We got started on a slippery slope, and once we gained momentum, we couldn't stop.  When William was born, I was working part time.  Soon I started picking up more hours until finally switching to full time (health insurance played a big factor in the decision).  Then I started getting promoted and taking on more job responsibilities that even included after hour and weekend on call.  As money started getting tight, I picked up a second job.  Now I work at least 10 hours most weekdays, plus some on the weekend.  My husband has felt trapped in a job he no longer loves because we depend on the free childcare.  If we cut back on work hours, we can't pay the bills.  But working so many hours, we don't have time for anything else.

On a typical weekday, the alarm goes off around 5:30.  We probably didn't go to bed until midnight, and at least one of us was probably up at least once with at least one of the children sometime during the night, so the snooze button gets hit.  A lot.  By the time we all get up and start getting ready, we are already late.  We rush around and snap at the kids, and I feel very accomplished if I just get everyone out the door without forgetting anything and without yelling (too much).  Then it's work/daycare from 8am to 5pm.  Every now and then, my husband and I manage to coordinate our lunch breaks and spend a half hour together. Lately, I've been trying to get out of work as early as possible to take the kids to the park or walk around the lake. Usually, we all get home at 5pm or later.  If it's a good week, I've planned dinner and all goes fairly smoothly.  On a bad week, I have no idea what's for dinner, and the evenings look a lot like the morning as we all scramble around to try to find something to eat and still get the kids to bed at a decent hour.  The kids go to bed around 8, and then I sit at my computer for 2-3 (sometimes 4) hours doing chart audits, while my husband cleans the kitchen and tries to keep some kind of an orderly home.  We try to watch a show or have a late snack or something together before going to bed, which is usually sometime between 11pm and midnight.  Then we do it all over again.  The weekends aren't much better; we're usually just trying to catch up on all the chores that didn't get done during the week and get ready for the next week.  We manage to throw in family activities here and there, but there's almost a desperation to it: one more thing we need to fit into our lives.

This is not the life God has called us to live, and it's time to change.

We've tried making small changes, baby steps.  We can make this work; it's going to be ok. But it's not.  We are drowning.  Sometimes, I manage to slow down and stop for a few minutes. I focus on my kids, read a book with them or play superheroes for 5 minutes; I glimpse what I'm missing before I take off running again, and it makes me hungry for more. The only thing left to do is to pull everything up by the roots and start over. This hasn't been an easy decision.  We've talked about it.  We've prayed about.  We've talked about it some more.  Just me and Omar.  We probably haven't talked so much in a long time.  Last Saturday, my parents took the kids to the zoo, and we spent the whole day talking (except for the 2 hours we spent watching Iron Man 3!).  And we've prayed as hard as we could.  We have agonized over the decision, but once we made it, it felt right.  I believe that God has laid this path before us, and clearly told us to walk it, and I am finding so much peace in this as we begin to work out the details.

Omar has quit his job as a pre-K teacher.  He'll finish out the school year; his last day is June 30.  I've applied to drop from full time to part time status; I don't know yet if they will grant that.  If not, that's ok, because it'll hopefully be just a couple more months before I quit (don't tell my boss yet!).  We are moving to Texas.  If we can break our lease without too much expense (any one want a roomy 2 bedroom townhome in RSM?), we'll move this summer.  If we have to, we'll finish our lease and move in January.  I'm keeping my contract job, working from home doing chart audits.  That can move with us and help keep us going as we are in transition; I can work as much or as little as I need to and work around whatever else is going on in our lives.  Omar will find a job, maybe in IT, maybe something else for a while, hopefully something with benefits, and will be working on getting some IT certifications and get into that line of work.  I'm going to be a stay at home, full time mom and homeschool the kids.  There are still a lot of details to work out. I am so excited, and so scared!

It's time to re-design our lives.  It's time for our season of change.