The Homeschooling Journey That Inspired A Movement—And A Family Of 12

Last night’s fire is now a pile of dust and blackened sticks.

I’m back. Alone this time. All the other teens who roasted marshmallows and hotdogs over my fire are at school today. Lucky me. 

I guess you could say I am at school too, as evidenced by the stack of library books carelessly balanced on the marshmallow-streaked log.

I gather more wood—damp with the morning dew. A chill lingers in the air. Daffodils are wilting, tulips poke through the earth, dogwood flowers are caught by the wind, sprinkling the trail below my feet. I take in the beauty of the petals on the wind as I regret, for a moment, my choice to go barefoot—motivated to quickly build my little fire.

How is it even possible that I am here and not there? I had begged my parents to let me homeschool, and they eventually gave in. 

Now, here I am, creating a schoolhouse in the woods with no walls, no ceiling, no bullies, no boredom.

I make myself cozy on the lambskin rug I brought with me, wrapped in a crocheted blanket. I stretch my toes closer to the flames. Contentment.

A stack of books awaits my attention. I ignore them and lose myself in a sketchbook, making far better use of my Number 2 pencil than I ever did at school. I lose consciousness of time and space—I am busy drawing and imagining my future.

I envision a home, like a castle with seven wings, each wing representing a different continent. In my mind, I travel the world, gathering treasures from all over to fill my home with art and furnishings from across the seven seas. I have a boat—it looks like a pirate ship. My daughters are with me, seven girls in their teens and early twenties, all touring the world with me, adventuring.

I draw my daughters. They look like me, but taller, prettier—long hair, full lips, eyes reflecting the color of the ocean. The most beautiful young women to ever grace the earth. I imagine what their father must look like to make children this beautiful. I pause my vision of ships, shopping, and art collecting to grab my notebook and make a list of qualities I need to look for in the father of my future children.

Hours pass as morning turns to noon. My fire burns out as the sun now warms me on this mid-spring day. I look at my list of non-negotiables, and my eyes fall on my big, ugly feet. How do I know I have ugly feet? My older sisters told me so, and I believe them. No one will want to marry a girl with such ugly feet. My sisters also told me I have a terrible singing voice, dreadful freckles, and knock-knees. Definitely not princess material.

I crumple up my list and toss the paper ball into the embers of my dying fire. It bursts into flames. The thought that no one will ever want me echoes in my mind.

My mind goes blank.

Reset.

New plan.

I’ll adopt.

No need for a husband. 

Obviously, I’m silly for even imagining that someone as amazing as the man on my checklist could exist—let alone fall in love with a girl like me.

Seven continents, seven adopted daughters, seven seas, seven cats, seven wings in my castle. A life of adventure, travel, beauty, wonder, and abundance awaits.

And I fill my sketchbook with designs for beautiful dresses that I would sew for my daughters. I try to be content with the idea of being a single mom, and give in to the idea of falling in love, all over again. Are my feet really that ugly? 

I’ll wear shoes. 

I’ll hide my knees. 

I’ll never sing in public. 

I’ll wear makeup. 

Problem solved. 

Come back to reality. 

This is school. 

My library books have fallen off the log. I gather them. 

I chose these books myself. When my dad said we didn’t have money for curriculum, I reminded him of the library a few blocks away. “Don’t they have enough books for me to get an education?” I reasoned.

My parents had never dreamed of homeschooling, but they ended up homeschooling my little sister because of her health problems. A magazine started arriving in the mail, landing on the coffee table—Homeschooling Today. I picked it up. I flipped through its pages. I embraced the headlines. A promise:

“Anyone can homeschool.”

Really? I’m in.

Now I had to convince my parents.

Now, here I am. I need to make them feel like they made the right choice. I need to be a good student so they won’t send me back to school.

I organize my books. I need to make it look like I’m “doing school.”

My mother found comfort in watching me carry a huge stack of books out the back door this morning. I had no intention of opening most of them, but I wanted her to feel like I had a grand plan that didn’t require any of her attention. My plan worked. I am left alone.

Thankfully I’m allowed to study whatever I want! All because my parents didn’t have money for actual eighth-grade textbooks and workbooks. I'm so glad they were broke! 

My parents give me a lot of freedom, so at this point they have given me only one assignment so far: to memorize the preamble of the U.S. Constitution. I must comply. 

I copy the words over and over into my notebook—We the People… Rather than allow a moment of monotony, I lose myself in the romance of exaggeratedly romantic cursive handwriting. I turn the words into a song, then pause to reflect on words like posterity, realizing that I am the posterity this document was created to protect. My mind fast-forwards to my seven daughters. My soul swells with patriotism.

My thoughts are interrupted by a flashback to the portraits of soldiers hanging in my grandmother’s hallway. While my sisters and I argued over which soldier was the most handsome, my grandmother joined us in the hallway to explain which ones gave their lives for our freedom. Great Uncle Leroy was forever remembered in our young hearts as both the most handsome and the greatest hero, who paid the highest price.

A squirrel creeps close. I am still. I toss him a few cracker crumbs. He runs away.

I turn the page past the preamble. Reading the entire Constitution was not included in my assignment, but here it is, in my hands. I have all the time in the world, and I am curious. I read until my curiosity is overcome by hunger.

I brought a sweet potato with me. I had planned to wrap it in foil and cook it in my fire. Not happening. Good thing I also brought an apple.

I take a break from the Constitution. 

I flip through my sketchbook. All my dreams are here. I’m always losing myself in my ideas for the future, but what I want in life must stay secret. I’ve tried to explain my dreams a time or two. People scoff at my desire to have seven daughters, to be a world-traveling artist, to have a castle, a farm, and a museum of my own. 

Wait, there’s more.

Homeschooling is now a thing. 

I’m not sending my girls to school.

I’m creating a school. 

And like my clearing in the woods, there will be no walls or ceilings. Why learn about the world through books when we could learn about the world by exploring the actual planet? Why learn about animals and habitats while sitting at a desk when we could be snorkeling?

We could open a petting farm. We could raise Maine Coons. We could have an animal shelter. I couldn’t imagine anything more boring than subjecting my daughters to learning in a schoolroom. What was the whole point of school anyway? I questioned the end goal, the method, the reasoning.

I would teach my daughters from an entirely different paradigm.

Who needs schools when we have libraries?

Who needs classrooms when we have state parks, museums, and oceans?

I fill my journals with notes, but mostly art as I illustrate my thirty-year plan. 

Nothing in this mid-spring world interrupts my thoughts, my art, or my imagination. No one tells me what to do, what to learn, or what I’m capable of.

I rise to my feet in the clearing I had created in the woods, hearing the distant sounds of my future calling to me, mixed with the song of the birds above my head. This morning’s fire is now a pile of dust and blackened sticks.

I gather my heavy stack of books and journals as I toss my apple core and raw sweet potato into the ring of stones that surround the warm embers. As I head back home for dinner with my family, I am imagining a family of raccoons gathering around my fire pit for a midnight meal. 

I was thirteen years old when I first stepped into the clearing in the woods, where my schoolbooks were replaced by sketchpads, my lessons were shaped by my passions, and my education became an adventure. It was the moment when homeschooling stopped being just an alternative to public school, and became an awakening. 

My parents, uncertain but willing to trust, gave me space to de-school—to unlearn the limits of the system and rediscover the limitless possibilities of learning.

My mother later told me she had seen how school had dimmed the twinkle in my eyes, how it had dulled my love for learning. When I begged to homeschool, they had one goal: to reignite that love. And so, they quietly followed my lead.

In those first months, there were no workbooks or standardized tests. Instead, there were library books, hands-on projects, and conversations that stretched long into the evening.

My dad saw my frustration with math and redefined it, turning numbers into blueprints, budgets, and business plans. When he introduced me to real-world applications, math stopped being a burden and became a tool. I started a jewelry-making business, and from my profits, we built a tiny cottage in the woods. Suddenly, fractions, measurements, and pricing strategies weren’t subjects—they were stepping stones to my dreams.

Project-based learning became my method of choice, and my education expanded beyond anything a classroom could have contained. I designed vintage-inspired clothing, studied genetics by selectively breeding pet mice, and spent hours buried in history, science, and art books that fed my curiosity. My love for learning exploded.

My mother’s art studio became my university of focus and creativity. Watching her paint wasn’t just inspiring—it was a lesson in turning passion into a livelihood. My father’s towering bookshelves were my classroom, filled with knowledge that was mine for the taking. And our home, filled with laughter, purpose, and faith, was a constant invitation to learn, create, and grow. 

My little sister’s structured homeschool curriculum was nothing like mine. Her goal was to finish her work as quickly as possible. I had no desire to do the same. Thankfully, a tight budget made curriculum an afterthought, and when I suggested building my education with library books, my mom agreed. I later realized she had been reading about unit studies in homeschooling magazines. What felt like my idea had, in some ways, been quietly supported all along.

By the end of that first year, I felt like a cheater. I had spent months immersed in the things I loved, and nothing felt like school. Yet, I was learning more than ever before. I had fallen in love with research—minutes turned into hours as I dug deep into one topic after another. I read books about extraordinary people who defied the odds, and I started to believe I could build a life just as beautiful.

School had left me feeling bored, bullied, and small. It had defined me by my weaknesses. Homeschooling set me free. It gave me permission to grow in my strengths and cultivate the things that made me come alive. It wasn’t about passing tests or earning grades—it was about becoming who I was meant to be.

By the time I was 15, I knew exactly what I wanted in life. And that’s when I met him—the boy who embodied everything I had once written on my crumpled checklist in the woods. A few years later, we decided to build a life together.

By the time we each said “I do,” he was a skilled musician, pilot, IT specialist, and entrepreneur. I was already a world traveler, a professional artist, and a newspaper reporter and photographer. We were just 20 and 21, but our lives had been shaped by curiosity, independence, and the courage to carve our own paths.

When our first baby arrived ten months after our honeymoon, we knew we would homeschool. But we doubted we would ever truly stay “home.” The world would be our classroom, and real-life adventures would be our curriculum. 

We filled our home with art, music, games, books, science tools, and the freedom to learn through experience. There were goats and chickens in the backyard, children learning to garden, cook from scratch, and start businesses as early as six years old.

It wasn’t long before I realized that my children—some of whom struggled with dyslexia—needed a different approach to learning. I experimented with creative methods, designing games, books, puzzles and activities that helped them engage with reading and writing in a way that worked for their minds. I ended up creating a series of activity books packed with logic puzzles and reading games for kids with Dyslexia. The income from my project began to fun our family’s world travels, and enabled us to move to Italy. 

Before long, my kids and I were creating homeschooling journals together, focusing on their passions. What started as a personal experiment turned into something bigger—The Fun-Schooling Movement. My unique method of structuring homeschooling around each child’s passion became a way of learning that would one day be embraced by families around the world.

The joy we created in our home made it easy to welcome one baby after another. And when my seventh daughter arrived one December night while our family was living in Italy, I felt the full weight of a dream realized. By the time my husband and I were forty, we were a family of twelve, with a dream to bring five precious kids home from the orphanage we were volunteering at in Ukraine. 

Now, with our fifteen children ranging from ages 10 to 25, I look around and see the life we built—a life that, by some fantastic series of miracles, looks a lot like the one I envisioned when I was just a girl sketching castles and dreams in the woods.