A Few Introductions

My wife and I began blogging some four-and-a-half years ago under the names of Darwin and MrsDarwin, at a blog called DarwinCatholic. How all of this came about is really a rather long story, but in a sense it doesn't matter at this point. Names grow on one after a while, and after this many years it seems odd to be anything other than "the Darwins" in the online world.

We had pretty much decided, even before we had children, that we would homeschool them. This was to a great extent the result of our own experiences with homeschooling. I was homeschooled from 6th through 12th grades, and my wife was homeschooled in 5th grade and from 7th through 12th. Homeschooling was certainly not unheard of in the early through mid '90s, but it was somewhat less prevalent than now, and the homeschooling groups that I remember frequenting were much more heavily populated with younger children than older. So while I'm sure we're not alone in being homeschooling parents who were in their time homeschooled, we do seem to be in the minority among homeschooling parents in this respect.

Now we have five children: Eleanor (7), Julia (6), Isabel (3) and Jack (1) plus one on the way. For those who keep track of grades in order to know how their kids should be doing (something we do almost obsessively) Eleanor is doing 2nd grade work and Julia is doing 1st grade work, while Isabel is learning her letters and numbers.

We've written about homeschooling a number of times over the years. However, we decided to split off and start a separate homeschooling blog at this juncture because blogging has become such a mental habit for us that a good way to devote more thought and energy to planning and following through on homeschooling seemed to be to start a blog that we'd feel obligated to keep up with.


The crew "at work" in the dining room/school room.