This is us.

Jon is a composer and pianist who produces pedagogy books and teaches lessons on the side. He's all about music and technology, which is good because I'm not. I studied biology, but I'm fond of cooking and gardening, I love to read and to run, and, like everyone else these days, I dabble in photography. Calvin is four (will be five in June 2011), and is a sensitive but happy little boy who loves his blankets, his stuffed animals and his Legos, and is an avid train fan.

We are a quiet family of three, not counting the pets, living in a quiet village in Michigan. We became a family of three in June of 2006 when our son, Calvin, was born. He is named after my uncle, my grandfather, and my great-grandfather but there are those who are sure he was named either for the comic book character, or the historical one. Like all (most?) parents we began this new stage in life by thinking—thinking about how to raise our son, how to engage him in life, how to keep him from falling off the changing table while we reached for clean diapers. Unlike most parents, but like an ever growing number, we decided that the way to best raise our son was to do it ourselves. That means we are now embarking on the homeschooling journey.

We are relative newcomers to the homeschooling scene. Though we decided that this would be our journey before Calvin had even reached two years of age, we still feel like we are fumbling around in darkness sometimes. Maybe that is a part of the process. Sometimes I think the whole point is that we are fumbling together, all three of us, taking whatever paths seem right at the time. My plan was to be an unschooler, but the purists of that movement would decry my efforts—I decry my efforts—and it seems that we've become eclectic schoolers. That would make perfect sense, since I am eclectic in all other areas of life. We follow Calvin's interests, but I plant a lot of research seeds that look suspiciously like unit studies, we've experimented with Five in a Row, which lies somewhere between unit studies and classical education (right?), and I like to keep records of things we do so there are a number of lapbook looking things floating around here (not lapbooks in the traditional sense, if there is such a thing, but lapbooks our way). I can't help myself, I used to be a scrapbooker.

We read a lot, we review books, we write stories, we try out art—we immerse ourselves in subjects together. I like Jean Jacques Rousseau. Calvin and I are both learning the piano. I fear the dumbing down of America. We get most of our information from traditional books, or from contemporary online sources, and we always check our work. I believe learning is natural and occurs at all times in all places if only we approach it that way—that's the unschooler in me—so we don't have specific hours of learning, or even specific goals for a day, we just learn whatever comes our way. I have found great joy, and relief, in discovering the richness of the homeschooling community on the internet. It is good to be among friends.