It’s Babywise Friendly Blogging Network week and we are all writing about personalities!

As a mother, it is fun to see the personalities of my children develop over time. My oldest daughter is a spit-fire, extremely outgoing type. My younger daughter is the exact opposite: quiet, reserved and takes a while to warm up to things. My son, at just 6 months old, seems to be a laid-back, go-with-the-flow little fellow.

As most of my readers know, the adoption of our 6 month old happened extremely quickly, and within two weeks life as we knew it with our two daughters totally changed when we left in the middle of the night to travel to our son’s birth city. We left not really knowing what to expect when we arrived because the circumstances concerning his adoption were ever-changing, but we ended up coming home a month later with a newborn baby who required around the clock care due to his medical conditions upon entering this world.

Talk about throwing our family for a loop. It was complete chaos. Excited chaos, but chaos. To top it off, literally the week of his birth we had started our first official year of homeschooling!

We found ourselves trying to juggle homeschool for the Kindergartener, a preschooler and a newborn baby that required constant care. I felt like we were running a 3-ring circus trying to juggle all the acts (children).

My mom basically moved in with us for the first month, which was a God-send. In desperation, I enrolled our 3 year old in preschool three days a week. The preschool was at a church located just outside our neighborhood and it is where we sent our oldest daughter for preschool at age 3. I felt very comfortable with the environment there.

While having only two children to care for three mornings of the week did help to calm down the dynamics of the house, my plan of desperation didn’t last for long because I didn’t take into account the personalities of my children!

About two months into our new life with three children, I realized what I had done. We were basically home-bound with the baby. Taking him out just wasn’t an option due to his medical conditions.

Our oldest daughter is extremely social. There is not one single fiber of introvert in her body. She bounces through the house daily from the moment she gets up until the moment her head hits the pillow at night. Quiet does not exist in her world. She is constantly talking, interacting and socializing with anything –living or non-living. And suddenly, she was stuck at home and she literally became like a ping-pong ball going throughout the house trying to fill up her socialization tank.

Meanwhile, her reserved little sister was heading off to school three mornings a week. If I had to take her to school there were always tears. I knew she was having fun there because I would ask her teacher and ask her when she came home. The answer was always the same: she was having fun. But did she love going to school? No. Given a choice, I know she would have rather been home with Mommy.

We basically had one child who felt like a prisoner in her own home and another child being sent away from home three times a week who would have loved to just stay home. We had everything backwards.

As much as I wanted to homeschool my oldest daughter, I had to look at the Big Picture and realize that the season for homeschooling would come; now just wasn’t our season due to all the challenges our family was up against in trying to nurse this sweet baby boy to health.

One night when my husband and I were talking about what we needed to do to help our family get through this season, we both brought up a school in our city that partners with homeschool families. The children go to school three days a week and are homeschooled the other two days of the week.

When we learned there happen to be a space available in the Kindergarten class (which is very rare we are told), we decided to enroll our daughter there for the remainder of the school year so she would have an outlet during this difficult season. We pulled our younger daughter out of her preschool class.

This has been the best decision we could have possibly made for our family during this time. It was a very hard decision for us to make because of our strong conviction and calling we feel from the Lord to homeschool. However, you have to deal with life as it comes. God orchestrated the events for us to be able to adopt our son and He made provisions for our family to get through the first challenging year with him.

If our daughter wasn’t such a Social Butterfly, we may not have had to go to these drastic measures to give her an outlet during this time! She is the biggest Social Butterfly on the planet and I am thankful that we were able to find something to meet the needs of our entire family. When making decisions concerning your children, it is important to be in tune to the differing personality types in your nest!

- Elaine