Home school math OR Have I really been doing this almost forever?

I have been thinking about milestones frequently over the last several months.  We're now days away from our daughter's convocation, and she turns 25 this year, both of which seem momentous.  Our older son had his convocation in April; our younger son turned 20 in the winter, and our youngest entered the double digits with her 10th birthday in April.  I could start feeling old if I think about all of this long enough.

A random comment overheard at the cardiology clinic made me add up my years of home education.  The doctor taking a case history behind the privacy curtain (honestly, the things you get to listen to in a hospital setting are quite amazing) told a patient that his pack and a half a day for 20 years smoking history was "thirty pack-years of tobacco consumption."  Doesn't that sound like so much more than the way the patient had said it?

Well, I added up my child/grade/years of home education:  3 children finished at 12 grades each, and four grades done for the youngest.  That's 40 child-years of home education.  I'd be all the way across the wilderness if I were a Hebrew following Moses!

40 years of experience, plus two finished degrees, and the third accepted into Engineering feels like success.  We began this journey thinking we'd try home education for a while and see how it went.  It wasn't until about the fifth year that I felt confident enough to say that this was the path for our family.  And the past five years, as we've launched our adult children have been sweetly rewarding.  I'm still trying not to think much about the fact that I'm committed to eight more years of this, for a total of 48 child /years, and twenty eight calendar years.   I got here by doing this daily and I'll get to the end of it one day at a time as well.  And they are good days.