Laurie comes from a long line of public educators. A large portion of her extended family are teachers, professors or superintendents. She attended public school herself and viewed homeschoolers as a little weird…perhaps out of touch with reality. During high school, she held a job at a Christian dayschool, working with the elementary students after school. By the time she entered college, she was teaching preschool classes. Everything seemed in place for her to become a public school teacher. She married her best friend in 1994 at the age of 20 and moved to a new town. He mentioned while they were dating that he’d like his wife to homeschool the children. Laurie had a very negative image pop into her mind of a frantic mom in PJs and curlers holding a baby and pointing to a worksheet on the sticky-from-breakfast table and a child, tears running down his face, in stubborn determination against her. She clung to the fact that he followed his statement up with, “Of course, it’ll ultimately be up to her since it would be her doing the actual teaching.” Laurie had to look for new work and found that her computer hobby had paid off when she landed a job at a large mortgage company. Hoping to start a family soon, she was slowly disheartened when she still was childless by 1997. Her computer skills growing, she found a job much better suited to her – help desk support for a major company. After many infertility tests, drugs, prayers and more drugs and prayers, she finally gave birth to her first child in 2000. Motherhood turned her life upside down. Her son, Matthew, was a high needs child who forced her into an attachment parenting style of mothering. She initially resisted but says, in hind sight, it was the best thing for her. As her second baby came along, Laurie started to think about school options. Suddenly, sending this child off who needed her so very much just seemed wrong. God gave this child to *her* to raise, not the school system, not another teacher…but her. She stumbled across a web page about unschooling. This wasn’t her image of homeschooling at all! But could it work? Attempting to test the waters, Laurie decided to homeschool her son for preschool. After all, she thought, she had been a preschool teacher and knew what he needed to learn. She announced it to family and friends, who probably thought she was going through a phase. But it worked…and it worked well. At three, he had an extreme interest in the human body. Laurie read every body book she could get her hands on to him that year. When they ran out of toddler and easy reader books and he still asked for more, she moved into illustrated body encyclopedias, meant for teens. By the time he was a young four year old, Matthew was independently reading and Laurie found herself wishing she had been able to explore and learn the way her children had. Each new piece of knowledge that they grasped only served to encourage their unschooling ways further. Today, Laurie’s family is complete with four children, all about 2 years apart, who are unschooling. The oldest two are independently reading and the three year old is well on her way as well. Laurie has also embraced the unschooling life for herself and is currently exploring geography. Today, she is in charge of publicity for her local MOPS group, involved in local homeschooling groups and has a blog about their unschooling adventures at http://www.learninglifethroughunschooling.blogspot.com