homeschooling

I have officially decided to homeschool augustine for preschool. yesterday i ran to a teaching store in dublin and bought some materials and we did a lesson or two just to see how he liked it and he was really excited. he seems so bored all the time and i hate it. though today's comic from hathor the cowgoddess made me feel more peace about such boredom. sometimes i feel such pressure to be everything to everybody esp my kids. food and milk maker, diaper changer, picker upper afterer, teacher, comforter, listener, and certainly entertainer. it is many hats to wear and that is just one slice of my life. it doesn't feel overwhelming but there needs to be balance to this area of my life and i struggle with that balance. such as, at what point do i just say "do it yourself" and release them to their own imagination instead of taking such an active role in keeping them (mostly him) busy? i think he just needs more structure than olive who would be happy just wandering the house exploring everything, something augustine never was interested in at any age. i dont have any real plans to attach the idea that "i am a homeschooling mother" to myself. financially it is not practical for us to send augustine to a formal preschool so that is part of it, but also i just don't feel either of us is ready to send him away for so long, so often, and not to mention i feel he is too young to be mentored by someone else for so long and so often. we'll see how this develops. i have no expectations of where things will go after preschool as far as where and how he continues his education. i don't consider myself particularly creative nor patient, so i feel like i've got some strikes against me as far as signing up for homeschooling my children goes. but then again i'm wary of traditional education. the methods seem much too oriented towards a person repeating and not necessarily learning and too much authority is assigned to the teacher, thus putting the child in too much of a subservient role. that and i feel children are generally zapped of their creativity and sense of personal identities when they are put into such a herd. so back to my original thought: time will tell but i am attaching no formal plan to where the future will lead us.