Our Home Sweet School

This the story of how I became “The Happy Housewife.” You might want to start at the beginning.

Unlike many families who have researched homeschooling for years before they actually started on the journey, I had researched homeschooling for about two weeks.

My friend who earlier in the year had come over to talk to Amy about homeschooling, lent us her first grade Bob Jones curriculum so I only needed to purchase a few workbooks to get started.

Homeschooling our six year-old was a breeze. She loved to do her schoolwork and we were always finished with school before noon. I wasn’t sure if you were supposed to be finished by noon, but even when I gave her extra assignments she flew through the work.

The biggest challenge to homeschooling was getting my four year-old back in forth to preschool every morning. It was only a block from our house, but once I didn’t have to get dressed (and bundle the baby up) to take our six year-old to school it was much harder to get our four year-old to school.

We managed and I thought it was good for our son to spend some time away from me twice a week. His sickly early years had made him extremely clingy and unwilling to go with anyone else other than me (and sometimes Sailor). He cried every single time I dropped him off at preschool.

I talked to his teacher numerous times about it and she said he was a “sad child” in class but otherwise on target for his age. I wondered how I was going to homeschool this child who didn’t seem to care one bit about holding a pencil, cutting paper, coloring, or looking at books.

My second biggest challenge homeschooling was the cold. That year natural gases prices increased drastically. Our old and drafty house would not stay warm. The first month it was cold we kept the heat at 60 degrees and our gas bill alone was over $300 for a month. We couldn’t afford to pay any more for gas.

Sailor would come home from work with stories of co-workers who had $900 gas bills and were in danger of their heat being turned off by the gas company.

I didn’t know how we were going to survive the winter with out going deeper into debt.

We tried using the fireplace, but it was broken and there was no way for the smoke to escape via the chimney. The first time we had a fire the entire house filled with smoke and we ended up having to open every window and door in the house to air it out. This made our house even colder and explained all the black soot on the windows I cleaned off when we first moved in.

After a few weeks of wearing heavy coats, hats and scarves in our living room to stay warm we decided to buy two electric space heaters. We put one in the kids’ room and one in our bedroom. I let happy baby sleep with me since I was worried he would get too cold in the nursery.

When we woke up in the morning we would take the heaters downstairs and use them in the dining room (school room) and living room. While our electric bills went up, it kept our gas bill under $300.

One cold afternoon I headed down to the basement to start some laundry.

Ever since the flood I hated doing laundry ( I mean I never really liked it before, but…). When we lived in Panama our washer and dryer were outside under our stilt house and in Florida our washer and dryer were in an un-airconditioned space that you had to go out of the house and then into a little room to use. In this house the washer and dryer were in the stinky, wet basement. I remember joking with Sailor that I would know I had “arrived” when my washer and dryer were actually IN the house.

Our washer and dry sat on cinder blocks to keep them from rusting during the flooding. That day I noticed a little gray sock peaking out from under the washer. Since missing socks is one of my pet peeves I grabbed the gray sock to throw it in the laundry.

As soon as I touched the sock I realized it wasn’t a sock at all. It was as shriveled up, flattened dead mouse!

I screamed and ran upstairs. I announced to anyone that could hear me that I would not be doing laundry again until we moved out of this house!

Our lease was due to renew in a month but we really couldn’t afford to move. I didn’t want to stay one extra day in the mouse house, but moving seemed impossible.

Then one day Amy stopped by. While her house wasn’t full of mice, it did have its share of old house issues. She told me they had been offered a house on base. I was devastated! Living next to Amy made our mouse house tolerable. If she moved on base I would be all alone.

I was also surprised she was offered a house on base. Base housing was only for 0-5 and above and her husband was an 0-4. I asked her why they were offered a house and she explained that they couldn’t fill the housing with the higher ranking officers so they were offering it to the lower ranks.

I had an idea. What if we could get a house on base? If we were offered a house on base the Navy would pay to move us (since there was no housing available when we relocated to Norfolk) and utilities would be included so we could stop freezing!

I shared my plan with Sailor and while he thought it was a long shot he agreed to go to the housing office and find out what the real story was.

Meanwhile I spent the afternoon driving down the streets of housing and was surprised to see several houses with junior officers living in them. (They posted the name and rank above the garage)

Sailor came home from the housing office with bad news. Because he was so junior they wouldn’t let us have a house, even though there were several available. I was so upset. I really believed that God was giving us a way out of the mouse house so I couldn’t understand why this wasn’t going to work!

A few days later I was taking our son to preschool and I ran into another Navy wife that lived in our neighborhood. She told me they were offered a house on base. Her husband was only one rank above mine so I knew the housing office hadn’t been honest with Sailor.

I raced home and woke Sailor up (from his 3rd shift) and told him he had to go back to the housing office get the truth. I knew my friend from preschool wasn’t going to accept the house, so couldn’t we just have it?

My husband headed back to the housing office to see if there was any chance we could move on base.