Hi Perplexed,
I'm also considering the work/homeschool combo. I'm a single mom, with a job that's demanding but flexible in its hours. My kid is <4, so I'm not there yet (kid is in a play-based preschool), but I think it's doable.
I'm fortunate to live in a town that's rampant with homeschoolers. My pipe-dream is a co-op where each family takes the kids one day a week. (I'm not at all uptight about curriculum, so I wouldn't be worried about what the other families were doing on their days.) More realistically, I'm hoping for informal arrangements with other families that will get the kid off my hands one or two days a week. I'm already cultivating the local homeschooling community and starting to make some friends.
My town also has a couple of independent study programs, which enroll homeschool kids as their school-of-record, and which have one or two on-campus days where there are classes and workshops and cool stuff. These are voluntary, but I would be taking full advantage of them.
With luck, that will leave me with only a day or two per week to cover, and hiring a college student for those days would be doable. The college student could shuttle the kid to activities, as well as working with her at home.
The question I keep asking myself is: would my worst-case, most neglectful homeschooling be worse than public school? The answer, for my particular child, is no. Even if she sat in a treehouse and read books all year long, she'd still come out ahead of where she'd be with public schooling.
I would also love to hear from others who are making it work, or have ideas for making it work. I briefly joined a Yahoo group for single-mom homeschoolers, but almost none of the comments were from actual successful working-parent homeschoolers. I would love to have a dialog with others who are serious about it and ready to get practical.
