Kathleen Desmarais

What is this blog about? Who is it for?

Great questions! This blog is intended for the following audiences:

1. Home schoolers - Kathleen (a 9-year homeschool veteran who is still learning the ropes) will share daily experiences with home schooling her four children. Favorite products will be shared, organization and scheduling tips, tips on handling different ages and abilities, dealing with a dyslexic child, home schooling with a baby in the house, raising responsible adults, and much more.
2. Home-based business owners - Information on how to balance family and work when they occupy the same space (your home) and general “how to” small business information.
3. Families who combine home business and home school - This group will get the most out of this site. Many posts will deal with this unique combination. Kathleen will share her own adventures running a home business while home schooling, and this site will contain many tips and tricks to make it all easier.
4. Pandia Press customers - Loads of information will be available here regarding the day by day events in Kathleen’s little publishing world. Learn product updates, product failures, revisions, frustrations, and successes. Basically, visitors will find an insider’s look into the life of a publisher and the process of bringing a product to market. Also, visitors will have opportunities to contribute, assist Kathleen in hard decisions, and help shape products and the future of Pandia Press. What could be better than that?

And if you meet all four of these criteria, then just go ahead and bookmark this site now because it’s all relevant!

Welcome to my blog! Here I will be commenting on the daily (or weekly as the case may be) ins and outs of being a Mom and home schooling four kids and operating a home-based business. My business is Pandia Press, a publishing that company that, at the moment, focuses on history and science courses. I have decided to combine these two aspects of my life and not separate them into two blogs like I did with our house building project (see blogroll for the link) because they are so intertwined and smooshed together, in a good peanut butter and jelly sandwich kind of way, that to separate them would be impossible and foolish (and messy). So if it drives you insane listening to me go on about my kids when all you really want to know is when is the next HO3 course coming out, I sympathize. But this blog is my outlet, probably my therapy as I have no time or money to pay for the real thing. And you will hopefully get something out of reading about my crazy life. Speaking of that, I would like to set some ground rules with those who will post comments. (And I truly hope you will post comments and that I am not just here by myself, taking out into space, because then I would just be a crazy person who talks to herself.) So here they are:

1. Please don’t correct my grammar (unless you are my mother). I know, I know, I’m a publisher of educational materials for goodness sake! Grammar mistakes are unforgivable. Yet I still make them, and this is not a term paper, it’s a diary. (And I like ending my sentences with prepositions!) But I think it is rude to correct people’s grammar (unless it is your child’s) and it should be against the law or at the very least, socially unacceptable. And if you do correct my grammar, I will think of nothing else all day because I am perfectionist at heart, although I am working on that.
2. Don’t quote me off this blog. This is a no-holds-bar blog in which I will be sharing my sometimes very opinionated thoughts on child rearing, politics, business, home education, religion, etc. . I will say things here that you will disagree with. (Heck, I may even say things that two weeks later I disagree with. In which case I will gently correct myself.) I am risking that you will no longer use Pandia Press materials because of something I say on this blog (”She said this about that, I won’t touch her stuff again!”) But those of you who are familiar with my philosophy of education know that my personal thoughts and agendas never (never, ever) show up in the products I publish. I think most of you know the difference and will not hold what I say against me. (If you cannot stop yourself from quoting me, then at least preface it with this paragraph so people understand you are breaking the rules.)
3. (That’s it for now. I am sure I will add another one later.)

Thanks for tuning in and please comment if you have something to say.