Homeschool Convention

This weekend I went to my first homeschool convention. About 8 - 10K people come to this thing. The picture to the left is part of one side of the exhibit hall if that gives you any indication of the magnitude of this thing. I have to admit that I was a little skeptical at first. Ian summed up my bias when he said, "hey, count how many pregnant women wearing bonnets and long skirts you see!" Turns out I lost count. But the vast majority of people there were totally normal:) I'm not sure why I even had this thought in my head because all the people I know who homeschool shop at kohls, don't have 42 kids, and are basically your average humans!

This is all beside the point. I LOVED this weekend. I went with two of my girl friends and most of our time was spent in sessions listening to speakers and just hanging out with each other. If you're wondering about the quality of speakers let me just say that Tedd Tripp was there. Yeah, believe it. He was great to hear in person since I wasn't a huge fan of his book. He really laid it down. His sessions and the majority of the ones I went to were about parenting. That's why I think the title of this conference could be a little more open ended, because it was basically a Christian parenting conference, with a fair amount of homeschool stuff thrown in. I was thinking of so many of my friends (homeschooling or not) who would have loved it! I took about 15 pages of notes while I was there and I plan to type them up and process back through everything we heard. It was a lot of info all at once so it will be good to take some time to reflect.

Bottom line: if you are even vaguely considering homeschooling or even if you just want to attend a great conference, you should hit this up next year. They also had a good amount of discount Christian book vendors there so my friend, who is in charge of Equipigration at our church, picked up a few good family devotion books. I'll be reviewing one of those for her so I can post here too if anyone is interested in knowing about this book. That little gem was recommended by Tripp so part of me wonders why even question it???