As a working mom, I knew homeschooling my kids was going to be a huge endeavor. Not that it’s ever easy. I’ve talked with moms with all types of schedules and every single one of them never seems to have enough time in the day. But the pros outweighed the cons, in my opinion, so we went for it.

Our family doesn’t work well with a strict schedule, so I tried compartmentalizing facets of my life: homeschool mom from 8:00 am to noon, working mom from noon to 5:00 p.m., everyday mom the rest of the time. It would’ve been a beautiful day if that worked so seamlessly! But the truth is, when you have five humans living, schooling and working together in such close quarters, boundaries tend to shift.

Parents cannot just turn on and off parts of themselves like that. If I had a meeting in the morning, I’d have to be homeschool mom and working mom simultaneously. Or, with my two other young children, I might have to paint nails, brush hair or play cars, while teaching skip counting to my older child. As my mother-in-law, Laurie, always says, “homeschooling is a lifestyle.” You don’t fit your schedule around it; it sort of bleeds into everyday life.

I didn’t do it alone of course. I owe loads to my mother-in-law, mother, and nanny. They all pitched in with homeschooling my oldest child these past two years. But what made it so much easier with balancing so many balls, was the self-paced history and Bible courses. When my oldest started taking those courses, I felt a sense of relief every night when I prepared the lessons for the next day. It was taken care of. And not just a checkmark off the list, it was taken care of well.

So much research and creativity went into the self-paced History and Bible courses that I feel confident that my kids will learn more from those courses than I could ever teach them alone. All I had to do was come up with fun crafts or field trips to bring it to life (and I didn’t even have to do that). It made passing off homeschool duties to my mom, who never homeschooled before, much easier. My daughter could learn independently, while my mom could focus on reading to the younger ones.

My oldest especially loves the Bible and would complain that there weren’t as many Bible lessons as history lessons. She loved the games and storylines woven throughout the course.

This school year, my middle child is in kindergarten. He’s a different learner than my daughter, so I’m a little nervous to see how the year is going to go. But I know I can count on the self-paced history and Bible courses to take my daughter through New Testament, Greece & Rome with ease, giving me two fewer subjects to worry about.