Ramblings...

I was reading the other day over at Finding the Fantastic in Everyday Learning about making a homeschooling crest. I thought to myself for a minute should I do it…and then before I knew it my mind was racing with ideas. So of course I did it. First I had to decide on a mascot. What would best fit our family? I figured it would be pointless to ask the boys to make this decision since, they will one day realize that Spongebob and Anpanman really aren’t as cool as they are to them now. So what would stick with us as a mascot? Well I decided on dragons. My husband has collected dragon statues/figurines for years. They fill our bedroom, and a lot of the items we purchase if there is a dragon option we are going to get that one.

So it made sense for our homeschooling crest to have them, since if we had the money *and the space* they would be EVERYWHERE in *and outside* our home. The boys love them as well, so it was a win/win situation. After deciding which mascot we would have, I plugged in “dragon crest”, found a template, and set off altering it to fit our needs. I left the dragons red from the template, since they looked cool, and worked well with what was floating around in my head. Then I made the black background, the blue oval which got rid of a lot of extra little details from the template that didn’t work with my wanted end result.

Then there was the shield to fill in, after tweaking the colors, making sure the basic outline and colors worked I added an Earth to the center of the shield since the world is literally our classroom. Afterwards I added our school name: Holmes Schooling *it’s on everything we have that is school related because back when I was thinking of a school name I thought how clever our name is close to homeschooling…and we are homeschooling*. Corny? Perhaps, but it was the only thing I could think of, and it’s pretty simple, self explanatory; and most importantly we like it.

After all that I had to find our motto…it was pretty easy to come up with “It’s not the destination that matters, it’s the journey” I think that sums up our life in more ways than one. I picked Japanese as the language for our motto, because we reached the decision to homeschool once we got to this country. I had been thinking about homeschooling before we left, but The Spouse wasn’t for it. It wasn’t until we got here that he came on board and we officially started our homeschooling journey. So this country is very important to us, on so many levels as well.

Finally, I thought the shield needed a little something else, so I added the Latin words for Live, Laugh, Love. That put the final touches on our homeschooling crest. It symbolizes us to the fullest, at the top is our family name, the name that shows we are a unit. Our name is flanked by the mythical creatures we enjoy, whose power we find alluring and mysterious. We balance our nomadic world traveling lifestyle with laughter and lots of love. And lastly we embrace the journey that we are on, because it is what will continue to shape us for the rest of our lives.

Like our crest? Want one of your own? Well head over to Finding the Fantastic in Everyday Learning to find out the how-to’s on homeschooling crest! Once you have your crest made then you can head over to CafePress and upload your image. From there you can have it put on t-shits, coffee mugs, thermal cups, tote bags, you name it and you can put it there!