... for your family on military, and anything else you think would be pertinent to today's episode before I ask you the first question.

Yes.

Thanks so much, Chrissy.

I'm excited to be here for our episode four.

And so a little background about me.

We are a retired military family.

My husband served as a Navy chaplain.

Okay.

And my first question for you, Natalie, is what should homeschool parents know about maybe using community college during the high school years? It's controversial.

Yeah, it's a little controversial.

Right.

Exactly.

I've been noticing, though, an increase in more homeschooling families choosing community colleges for a variety of reasons.

Right.

So they can be a wonderful resource sometimes.

Yes, they are.

[laughs]

And I'm thinking when I found out, I'm like, "Oh, how does she know? She's like seven," right? She showed us that she actually knew, and she continued to express that, but not only just by saying, "Oh, I wanna do this," she actually showed up on the soccer field.

It became something she was amazing at.

And we started with rec soccer.

We started with recreational soccer on military installations, and then we also segued when we moved to Virginia Beach to homeschool soccer leagues, homeschool sports leagues, which were amazing.

So I shout out the Denney's family who is in Virginia Beach, who Coach Denney was the one who said, "You know, she needs to go to travel to club level.

You know, she's done great here, but she needs to move on." And thank you, Coach Denney.

Yes

Mm-hmm.

Okay.

Then the next child is our middle son, Noah, who graduated college two years ago, just now this past May finished his master's in urban and regional planning, so he's excited about that.

He's phenomenal.

Then the oldest son graduated from American University's School of International Service in 2019.

He's now his own entrepreneur, business owner, doing well.

And then the oldest are two girls.

Yeah

that they needed and that you saw as a service that you could deliver to them that they just weren't getting?

Well, over the years, I kind of started to see that, like I said, there are organizations that support military families and specifically even military children that have amazing products and services.

And I just was becoming aware of them, but I didn't hear of other military homeschooling families who seemed to speak about those services and products, nor did they respond.

nor did I think that many of them were aware.

And I said, wow, how can we get this information to our military homeschool families who are busy homeschooling, right? We're not able to often attend some of the spouses events that are held during the day.

But as I got more seasoned and we, We downsized a bit as we graduated kids to college.

We, you know, and then we had the last two in high school and then one went on off to college and then we were down to the last one.

So along those lines with advocacy, what do you see is really a primary goal there? What's the issue that you're trying to address that our listeners may be able to help with reaching out to congressional representatives or something? Is there an issue that needs to be addressed for the military homeschooling community?