About


Over the years, I have had many different blogs, most of which I updated sporadically.

Six or seven years ago, we were unhappy with our girls' experience in public school.  I had taken child development and education classes in college and believe that the public school setting is not the ideal educational setting, but one that is designed to educate the masses.  I had always been interested in homeschooling and had considered homeschooling before my oldest went to pre-school.  I began to read homeschool blogs to learn more about real-life homeschool families, since at the time, I did not actually know any homeschool families.  A year or so into reading homeschool blogs and getting more and more courage up to pull my girls out of school and bring them home to learn, I decided I wanted to interact with the wonderful homeschool mothers who shared so much of themselves and their family on their blogs.  I wanted them to be able to link back to something that would tell about me, and so I started a blog about my family and the process of making the decision to homeschool, this blog was called Our Life in Words.

As time went on and we made the decision to homeschool and I blogged about our homeschool journey, I read more and more blogs and had more and more opportunities open to me.  I decided that I did not want to *just* share about homeschooling, but I wanted to share about our entire family life so that people could see that homeschool families are --or can be--just like any other family.  I wanted to share family stories and anecdotes, the good, the bad and the ugly, recipes and decorating and everything that goes into managing a life.  I really could have kept the title of my blog, but decided that I wanted it to sound like a home address, like my little home on the internet.  And so, I created Magnolia Lane.

When I decided to try - briefly, because I didn't like it - Wordpress and bought a domain, neither magnolialane.com nor magnolialane.net were available, so I changed the name AGAIN to Red Oak Lane.  When I came back to blogger redoaklane.blogspot.com was not available and so I changed AGAIN to Red Oak Road.

These days I blog so that my husband's father and stepmother and aunt, who live on the West Coast and my aunt in Virginia can see what the girls and I are up to.  I also blog to keep in touch with friends who are not on Instagram, but with whom I have become close through this homeschooling blog world.  I thought about changing the name AGAIN, to something that is more reflective of just homeschooling, but I haven't come up with anything yet.


If you are not one of our relatives and you have landed here, I will tell you a bit about us.  We live an hour West of Manhattan, NY.  I work as a reference librarian two days a week and run programs at the library.  My husband is an arborist and an ecologist.  Our oldest daughter is in high school and she loves to read and write stories, she spends her time baking and playing Sims and texting her friends.  Our younger daughter is in middle school and love fashion and shopping and decorating.  She loves things to be neat and tidy and is quite good at organizing things--you should see her closet!  She spends her time playing Sims and FaceTiming her friends.  Honestly, I think they are just like almost any other kid their age, except that they are homeschooled.


I update my Instagram a lot more than my blog, please feel free to follow on there:


Instagram