Friday, December 23, 2011

Chris Sanders, and Zoe, and family

Zoe (14) and I (Chris 47) will be taking the Amtrak along with our friends Theresa and Megan, to attend the ALL Unschooling Symposium. We're both excited to try this new (to us) mode of transportation! We'll sadly be leaving behind Rick (47) and Zach (20) at home in West Des Moines, Iowa to tend to their many other commitments.

Old Photo

Our family has always homeschooled and we gradually moved from using an eclectic approach to full-on radical unschooling by the time Zach was 12 years old. Now, Zach is a junior in college, a history major, and he will begin attending the University of Iowa next month. He enjoys reading, writing, history, listening to classical music, spending time with his girlfriend and world travel. Over Thanksgiving 2010 Zach and his girlfriend visited Florence, Italy and then during the Spring 2011 semester, Zach studied abroad in London, UK. He is the first, and so far only member of our immediate family to travel to Europe!

Seeing Zach off to London

Zoe loves playing World of Warcraft (WoW), drawing Manga, singing, dancing and reading fantasy novels. She's busy most weeks with art class, several dance classes, skypeing and playing WoW with her friends scattered across the continent. She also provides much entertainment for her dad and I with her wit and perceptive observations about the world. She's looking forward to getting her driving learner's permit soon and she hopes someday to travel to Thailand and Japan!


I have many irons in the fire at any given time. I work part-time for Pearson VUE as a test administrator. I also have provided freelance bookkeeping services to small corporations for the last 20 years. In addition, as a licensed teacher, I help other homeschoolers in Iowa by serving as their supervising teacher. I enjoy reading and doing all things on the internet—keeping up with technology, current events, politics and social networking.

We are fortunate that Rick's commercial photography business can be operated out of our home so that between the two of us, there is almost always a parent home and available to play, talk, drive, prepare food and host social events. We're a stay-at-home team! Rick also enjoys bicycle touring (his goal is to ride border-to-border across each state—Montana is next!) playing volleyball, watching football and spending time with his large family of origin.

We have attended two Live and Learn Conferences (St. Louis & Albuquerque) Sandra's 2009 Santa Fe Symposium as well as the 2010 Life is Good Conference in Vancouver, WA. We enjoy these gatherings for stoking our unschooling fires and for the comradeship of unschoolers. Zoe and I are looking forward to introducing our good friends to the great voices of unschooling and to meeting new friends while on our great 2011 Train Ride Adventure to Albuquerque!

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