It’s our second year going to the Great Homeschool Conventions Midwest Convention. It’s held annually in Cincinnati, so it’s an easy trip for us to make. We planned to go even before we sold our house and knew we’d be building our new home during this time frame, so we didn’t want to skip it. It is the one small trip that we were committed to making this year.
We were fortunate to book a room early and get into a hotel that was literally across the street from the Duke Energy Convention Center and had an indoor heated pool. The latter is always very important to Creative Kid and last year we booked so late that we were many blocks away and the hotel did not have a pool.
We arrived at the hotel early and had plenty of time to relax and get together the materials we needed for the day. I bought a cart last year to take to the convention, so we were all set and ready to go. We walked over to the convention center shortly before the registration desk was set to open. Once we got our packet of materials, we went to the kid’s program to see if we could get Creative Kid signed up. We had went back and forth about signing him up for the program and missed the cut off for early registration and we were hoping they still had spots available. Thankfully they did.
We had a snack and waited for the kids program to open. The kids program is supposed to be like a bibleschool program and is put on by Giant Cow Ministries. After dropping Creative Kid off, we headed to our first session of the day. Last year my husband ended up having to deal with Creative Kid a lot and didn’t get to stay in a lot of sessions. It was nice to be able to listen to more sessions together this year thanks to the kids program.
If you are looking for parenting insight and how to foster and grow your children’s strengths as well as their character, I highly recommend listening to or reading books by Kathy Koch from Celebrate Kids, Inc. We listened to her session on motivating kids and instilling hope and got so much out of just a one hour lecture. Her class had handouts and I came away with practical exercises to improve communication and motivation in our child, and even practical advice on how to create more successes in ourselves to help with our own motivation.
Our next class of the day was Teaching Self Government by Nicholeen Peck. We chose our classes separately and then compared notes and found that we both chose a lot of the same classes this year. I think it’s because we recognize the challenges we have been having lately and are looking for parenting tools to steer Creative Kid in the right direction. He is very smart, but also can be stubborn. We’ve gone through a lot of changes in the last 6 months and there will be more changes to come in the next 6 months, so we are looking for healthy ways to fix attitude and concentration problems.
About half way through Nicholeen Peck’s talk, my husband got a text that Creative Kid wanted to see him. With all the changes lately and not having a babysitter right now, it seems CK was worrying that we wouldn’t come back for him. He really hasn’t been away from us much lately and he didn’t know any of these people so he was feeling a little unsure of himself it seemed. My husband missed the last half of the session, but I found the session very beneficial with practical ways to do with attitude corrections and conflicts. I plan to look into buying some of her system that includes age appropriate books to help teach self-government.
We chose not to go to last session of the night and instead headed to the vendor hall to grab dinner and start looking at all the booths. This was our plan from the beginning. Last year I wanted to go to every session and went to as many as possible. By the end of day 2, I was already exhausted and feeling overwhelmed and in the end we bought the entire convention on MP3 because there was so much I didn’t get to hear. This year we went in with the plan to do that, so we only went to sessions we absolutely wanted to hear in person with the knowledge we would get to listen to all the sessions eventually. The cost is not cheap ($175 for all sessions on a thumb drive), but worth it to us.
We had tickets to evening speaker and I had greatly looked forward to it because I respect the man greatly and agree with his beliefs. However, I will say in retrospect had I know it was going to be as heavy and serious of a talk, without humor infused to lighten the mood, I would have bought his talk his talk on CD and skipped it for the night. For one we were pretty tired by the end of the day and for two we had promised Creative Kid that we would swim when we got back to the hotel and it made for a really late night. Live and Learn.
Now for a good night’s sleep and I’m excited for another great day at the convention!
Thanks for reading!
