So You Want To Be A Homeschooling Dad

Or, rather, your stay-at-home wife has decided to homeschool the children, and expects you to go along with her decision.
Well, here are some things you need to know about how your life will be:

• You will continue going to your job where you will work your ass off to buy the best car you can afford, but will never drive it. You will hand it to your wife and kids, where they will promptly destroy it. This video accurately describes the process. The only time you will actually get to drive this vehicle is when you are all going to your in-laws, or on a family vacation. When the car is too rundown or small (those homeschoolers breed like rabbits!) for your wife's taste, you will buy her another one, and what is now the old crappy car will become your own. Lucky you!

• If you and your wife are fundie homeschoolers, you will continue to get up at 4am and pray as a family, right before the children have piano practice. However, if your wife is an unschooler, god help you. Your wife and children will stay up long into the night, reading and pursuing their various interests, living on Homeschooler Time (HT), forcing you to live in the same house, but in a different time zone. (A handy way of determining HT in your area is to count three time zones to the West, and you'll have it about right. For us, Pacific Time [PT] is a near approximation of HT). You will be heading to bed at 10 or 11pm, and they'll be just finishing dinner and getting warmed-up. I strongly suggest earplugs for those nights when you are trying to go to sleep with a hilarious game of Apples to Apples going on in the next room. And though you will make several announcements that the family needs to 'respect your sleep', they probably won't hear you because the youtube videos will be too loud. The good news is that when you get up at 6am, you will have the entire house blissfully to yourself, as no decent unschoolers worth their salt would be up before 9am. Enjoy this time and keep it sacred.

• You think homeschooling happens at home? Silly man! It happens in three counties, four days a week. Don't worry- you won't have to do all that driving; your wife will prematurely age that new car by putting thousands of miles on it each week, driving the kids to all their homeschooling activities. Your job, when she complains about all the driving, is to tell her how much you appreciate the efforts she goes through to educate your children. And maybe schedule those oil changes a little more frequently.

• Your children will begin randomly quoting Monty Python movies, Futurama episodes, and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

• Your sons may become obsessed with dragons and begin making large, padded weapons from pvc pipe, foam, and duct tape. This is normal, and will pass as soon as they discover girls.

• At some point, your wife will ask you to help with the homeschooling by teaching one of the subjects to the children. Warning! The only reason she's asking you to do this is because, a) the subject is very boring and difficult to teach, and/or b) the children whine and complain when she tries to teach it, and she's tired of their crap. If you really would enjoy teaching the children all about how an internal combustion engine works, go for it. Otherwise, suggest to your wife that she and the other homeschooler families get together and take apart someone's lawn mower. Even if it is your lawn mower they dismantle, it will still be less of a headache to replace it than to try to get the kids to sit quietly at the kitchen table, looking at diagrams.

• Occasionally, even after the lawn mower activity, your wife will delegate you to attend a homeschooling event alone with the children. Unfortunately, the activity will never be something fun such as going out to a field in the middle of nowhere and blowing stuff up. Nope- you will soon find yourself putting on a shirt without a stain so you can sit through An Evening of Shakespeare. And it probably won't even be one of the good ones. Your job will be to keep a three-year-old entertained through five acts of Hamlet.

• One or more of your favorite shirts will be lost in a freak tie-dying accident.

• Even if you live in the city, the subject of owning goats or chickens will come up. My advice- save the money you'd spend on goats and chickens and buy another computer, or high-speed internet. Your wife and kids can always go visit the goats and chickens of the families who didn't take my advice.

• Your wife will likely begin to drink more alcohol than usual. If she never drank before, she will now. This is normal, and the support group is already in place. Oh, she won't drink less, but she won't be drinking alone, either.

• You will be forced to become friends with the other weird homeschoooler dads. At first, it will appear that you have nothing in common with these other dads, except that all your wives are insane. You will quickly form your own little club off in the corner as soon as you realize that none of your families respect your sleep, you all drive crappy old minivans to work, you all had to replace your lawn mower recently, and most of you are wearing at least one article of clothing that was lovingly made from duct tape, or crocheted or tie-dyed by whatever child is currently going through that stage, and you couldn't bring yourself to break their heart by not wearing it.

• Your dining table will never see the light of day again. It will be covered in library books, science experiments, wilted home-picked floral arrangements, National Geographic, Newsweek, and Consumer Reports magazines, cd's, a sketchbook, a drying finger-painting, empty cereal boxes, a pringles can, and aluminum foil. Do not ever attempt to clear this table, lest you hear wails of, "I was saving that special!!" And... no, there really isn't a better place to store all these things. Get over it.

My dining table at this very moment.