Genuine Kids

My kids have an unsquashed love to feel and explore the world. It can be exhausting.

My kids are intense. Explosively colorful. I sometimes describe them as super high bouncy balls in a room full of sunken golf balls. My brain usually gets painfully tangled up as it tries to wrap itself around what exactly is going on inside them. Not to mention, I'm physically tired.

Enter homeschooling, which works out pretty well for us, in that they can explore that intensity. That excitement. That emotion. That need to know. The millions of questions. Etc. Etc. And on and on.

Then again, there is that whole issue of being out in public and relating with the world. For instance, the poor checkout girl, who very recently engaged my children in conversation (and soon after, wondered what she was thinking) and got an earful from Iggy and Ooky about everything from homeschooling ("except that we don't really do school like most kids do school, ya know.") to beverage choice ("we love to drink coffee. Mostly only big people drink coffee, but we really like it so we drink it too.") to extracurricular activities ("oh today? today we're going to a cemetery. we visit them a lot to look for really old graves. we try to figure out why they died...") All in the time it takes to pay for gas and a couple treats.

Breathe.

Another time (last week) we were at a canine festival and stumbled upon some kid games that my lil' darlings wanted to play. They were a quarter a piece and you won a prize. Perfect. So Iggy, who is six, is so gosh darn excited to play this game, and he's making it pretty apparent to everyone around how excited he is. Not necessarily loud and obnoxious, just excited. To play a bean bag game. The boy scout (9? 10 years old?) is looking at Iggy like he's got six heads. I clearly saw him thinking Seriously. Its a bean bag game. You are weird. But Iggy didn't care. He just went on being Iggy.

Anti-homeschooling folk might say in the first example that my kids were talking the checkout ladies ear off because they are absoultely starved for social contact. And then I would counter that, no, they aren't starved for the opportunity to talk, its that they aren't afraid to talk to anyone...and you should be careful engaging them in conversation. Because they aren't afraid to take you on.

In the second example, Iggy was genuinely excited. Anti-homeschooling folk might say its because he's so sheltered that an otherwise lame bean bag game would entertain him. I counter with, nope. He just likes it. And he's not afraid to show it. Sorry.

I don't usually post anything outright anti-public school, because I'm really a live and let live kind of gal. But I will say that I often wonder if they gone to public school, would this kind of thirst for everything that's out there, and the intensity that comes along with it, still exist? Or would it have been squashed out of them? Would they have just smiled at the checkout girl? Would they have passed by the bean bag game because it was babyish? Or would they have still been genuinely Iggy and Ooky?

Hmmm. It makes me wonder.