Brittany Dondlinger

Brittany Dondlinger grew up in Union but it could have been Waldoboro.  It was a rural childhood, a lot like the one in Waldoboro that she is trying to give to her two daughters. Back then, homeschooling may have been the exception.  But Brittany’s mother tried it.  It wasn’t successful.  But back then, there also weren’t the resources there are now. So, Brittany returned to school and went to Medomak Valley High School – which she didn’t much like but did okay, and then on to community college to study business administration and finance. Concurrently, she got a job at Bangor Savings Bank where she worked in mortgages.  Studying remotely allowed her to push through and complete her certificate.  That led to Brittany’s old boss inviting her to join Fairway Independent Mortgage, a new mortgage company.  And Brittany still works there, now from home, processing loans from application to closing. During this period, she married her Andrew whom she’d known from high school.  He’d had a similar rural childhood like hers.  They began a family.  They have two daughters, Addilyn, who is six, and Brooklyn, who is two, and family is the center of their lives.

Like everything we seem to do in our family, we don’t know what we’re doing when we start something.  But we try to follow what we really believe in.  We feel really strongly in that.

I had a very, very good childhood.  It was a simple childhood: we just went outside and played.  Like, we had a driveway on a hill, and when it rained, I would go out and make rivers with a stick in the mud.  It was one of my favorite things to do.  Everything we wanted to do, we found at home.   

Now that I have my own children, I think back, and I try to bring the same thing to their childhood.  But the world has changed, and it is busy.  So, we may be home and doing all the things I did back then, but we are still busy.

Sometimes, when we’ve been going, going, going, we all just take a day off.  Like yesterday when we stayed home and never got out of our pajamas.  We just cleaned the house a little, rested a little and cooked.  And we did tons of arts and crafts. 

We homeschool.  But it wasn’t something we’d imagined when we first had children.  But when we took our oldest in for an 18-month doctor’s appointment, we learned she had a speech delay.  And that shook us.  When you’re a parent, you want the best for your children.

So, we did some therapy at PennBay, and then in Covid, the therapist came to us.  Right soon after, Addilyn tested out.  But we kept on with the exercises, put her in pre-school, and it all worked out.  

Still, something had shifted in our minds.  With kindergarten, we worried that without personal attention, she might fall behind.  That’s why we decided to homeschool.  And for socializing, she goes to Miller for music and art classes, and gym. 

But homeschooling kindergarten was a real challenge.  I didn’t know what I was doing, and I probably made it harder for myself because I didn’t buy a curriculum.  But I didn’t know that then.

Luckily, we live in a time when there are lots of resources.  I already worked from home full-time, so I read and read and read — books, blogs, and papers online.  And the Library offered even more.  I researched everything.  I took a lot of notes. 

In the end, I threw up my hands up and said, “I’m just going to do it myself.”  I settled on what I thought would work for our family, and I printed everything out. 

I started by asking Addilyn, “What did your teacher Miss Jane do in pre-school that you absolutely loved?”  I wanted her to be comfortable.  I wanted her to participate because she is a big part of our decisions. 

She told me she loved Circle Time, so I bought an ABC mat.  We did letters and spelling.  We sung good morning songs.  We had a letter of the week which was also something she’d done in pre-school. 

There are books all over the house now, but at the start of kindergarten, she was “Un-uhn,” about reading.  It didn’t matter if it was her reading or me reading to her.  She had no interest in it whatsoever. 

It was in the early weeks of kindergarten when we first went to the Library.  I didn’t have a card, and neither did she.  We made it into an event, getting our cards.  Then, we went to the children’s section, spent time there, and she picked five books to take home. 

When we got home, she didn’t want to read the books.  She wanted to look, at the tags inside the back cover, you know, where they put the date, and who took out the book last.  She wasn’t reading the book, but she had to do arithmetic to see if it was returned it in time.  And then eventually she started opening and reading them. 

Addilyn loves animals.  So now, if she wants to read about something seahorses, she goes to the front desk all by herself to ask where she could find that.  She’d have never have done that before.   We even have a silly book about losing your first tooth – something Addilyn is scared of, and the book helps her. 

But we have hard days.  We have days where she cries.  I cry.  You never know how you’re going to wake up.  Until you go start something.  Some things were hard for her, and we probably pushed her too much.  I learned that if we push through it, she shuts down.  And it made me wonder: “Her worksheet might be completed, but in the end, did she really learn something?” 

Now we pivot.  We cook, which is something that she really, really loves.  Or we do crafts.  Or we just take a break – we go out and have a picnic.  We do a ton of picnics.  I bring the library books out and we’ll do our story time, because it’s easy to go out with a blanket, books and a snack or lunch, and eat and read.

We’ve loved it.  I’m not saying we’ll do it forever.  We’ll do it until it stops working for either one of us.

What I love about homeschooling is how much I learn with Addilyn.  I’m 36 years old, and now I know how fast a cheetah can run.