An Interview with Carrie Lauth, Homeschooling WAHM

As a new blogger, it is easy to get overwhelmed with all the experts out there. I’ve chosen a few women to read regularly because of their down to earth style and ethics. Carrie is a single homeschool mom of four, host of Natural Moms Talk Tadio and Internet Marketer. I asked her about her lifestyle and how she manages to do it all.

Homeschooling runs in the family so to speak. I did homeschool for 8th-12th grade, and I watched my 4 nephews spend their entire school career at home. I saw and experienced the benefits firsthand. I was also selfish and wanted to keep my kids around me all the time. Seriously, I have strong opinions about educational philosophy and wanted control over what, when and how my kids learned. I love homeschooling!

I use an eclectic style and design my own curriculum. I’m not quite unschooling although I do believe in the life learning philosophy. We do some seatwork/bookwork, but I incorporate a lot of real life stuff into the kid’s day. Once the child learns to read, they’re given a lot of free reign to read, read, read – sometimes if my oldest is reading a new novel, he’ll get out of regular schoolwork for a day or two until he completes the book.

I figure if my kids learn to love reading, they’ll be autodidacts. So far my reasoning has proved true. I can’t count how many times I’ve sat down to research something or teach the kids something and the oldest has already figured it out – and is explaining it to me because he’s read it somewhere!

I involve the kids! We all help chop, cook, clean up, etc. I use my slow cooker, rice cooker and Dutch oven to create a lot of one pot meals. I train my kids from the time they’re old enough to open the fridge door (around 2) that fruit, cheese, flax crackers, etc are appropriate snacks and to take what they need. They don’t have to interrupt me every time they get hungry. I also teach them how to cook.

My 8 year old makes the best scrambled eggs I’ve ever eaten and he is quite particular about it! He loves to cook them. My oldest son started preparing simple meals when the 3 year old was born. He sometimes makes breakfast before I even get out of bed. They also help with cleanup too. But mostly I try to keep things simple. We make easy meals and I always have a plan so we’re not hungry and scrambling for something for dinner.

This is a huge question. I actually addressed much of this on a blog post here and here.

In a nutshell, I’ll say that I say no a lot, don’t do a lot of extracurricular stuff with the kids, I keep things simple. I work like heck when the kids are with their Dad!

Thankfully my business provides a good bit of passive income because of work I did in the last few years since I started marketing online. I also limit how much time I spend on non-income generating activities like email, social media, forums and the like.