Parenting

This week please welcome my husband, Greg Berchelmann, as my guest blogger. Everyone asks me how I am raising 4 (soon to be 5) homeschooled children while working full time as a pediatrician, especially since I wrote “18 Reasons Why Doctors and Lawyers Homeschool Their Children” and “’Are you Done Yet?’ In Defense of Our 5th Child.” I could never do it without my husband Greg and his willingness to make many unconventional life choices, including quitting his well-paid job at a major St. Louis company so that he could be more committed to our family. He’s not alone—according to 2010 census data, 17% of preschool-aged children have dad as their primary caretaker while mom is at work . This is our family story of how we grappled with gender roles and swallowed our pride so that we could spend more time with our children and be the parents we wanted to be.

This week my husband and I announced our big news: we’re expecting our 5th child in September.  “Really?”  is the most common reply.  Here are some of the other zingers we have heard:

“Do you hate money?”

“Are you done now?”

“Are you crazy?”

“Was this planned?”

“Don’t you know there are things you can do to prevent this?”

“Do they all have the same father?”

“You must be Catholic or Mormon.”

I’m going public today with a secret I’ve kept for a year—my husband and I are homeschooling our children. I never dreamed we would become homeschoolers. I wanted my kids integrated and socialized. I wanted their eyes opened to the realities of the world. I wanted the values we taught at home put to the test in the real world. But necessity drove me to consider homeschooling for my 2nd and 4th graders, and so my husband and I timidly attended a home school parent meeting last spring.

When our family arrives at the airport, everyone looks at us.  A few people smile at our kids, ages 1, 3, 6, and 8, but most people start to look nervous once they realize they are about to spend several hours on an airplane with us.  The bolder ones ask me, “Are you done yet?”  My husband usually pulls me away before I can reply, “there’s something special in the air.”