ALL ABOUT
WESTS' WAY HOME

Hey, ya’ll!  My name is Kayla. I am a Jesus-loving, rookie homeschool mama. My sweet husband, Mack, is the love of my life. He used to hold my hand on the school bus. We have two beautiful children. Isn’t life a dream? Well, yes and no. We are rich in joy because our faith allows us to be. But much of our “charmed” life was hard-won through lots of heartache and trauma. We are not perfect; things are not always easy or pretty. I may or may not have just yelled at my kids to stop interrupting me so I can write about how much I love my family. Yikes! My husband and I grew up in a very small, very rural town in Arkansas where most of our family still lives. Now we live wherever the Air Force tells us to. 

I am a speech-language pathologist by trade and have spent nearly 30 years of my life in the school system - from public school to state university then back to public school as a speech therapist. All of which made homeschooling a more difficult transition for me. Yes, I mean that my graduate degree and years working in the school system made it more difficult for me to transition into educating my own children at home. It did not in any way make me more qualified, much to my surprise. 

Our teen daughter is our oldest. Our studious little worker bee is happy to be turned loose with a stack of books to do her learning thing. She is my ever-flowing fountain of facts and enjoys writing. She does, however, require explicit instruction in more abstract concepts. Right now she wants to be a linguist (fellow word-nerd) who works on translating the Bible into obscure foreign languages until she has a family. Then she wants to be a homeschool mom who works from home part-time.  

Our tween son is her polar opposite with the exception of the fact-fountain piece. He easily picks up on the abstract and is an avid reader. Give him a workbook and he will complete it in record time… then will be forced to do it six times over before he decides it might be easier to take the time to do the work correctly the first time. Showing what he has learned on paper is not his jam. Right now his dream is to be a husband, father of eleven children, pastor, missionary, police officer, and builder. All his interests and passions scream Jesus, family, and engineering. Heaven knows. 

The rookie homeschool mom that I am, is just now figuring many of these things out and learning that I need to educate my kids differently. The fact that it took me two years to begin to grasp these concepts did no irreparable damage to my kids. If you know them, don’t make hasty judgments about the irreparable damage - they were weird before we started homeschooling. We like them that way. It helps them fit in at our house. 

All that to say, I am in no way a professional. I am sharing information that I have obtained from various sources with various levels of authority or have come up with from my own experiences and opinions. I will never intentionally say anything that is misleading or harmful. Everything I share is with a heart to help.