So I took the kids to the library today, in the middle of the day. None of the schools around here are on break, but the library was full of school-age kids. Ah, I think with a smile, homeschoolers. This makes me happy, because, let's face it, it's always nice to feel that you are not alone.

But then (as I'm chasing Ethan through the stacks) I overhear three of the children's librarians talking. It isn't hard, because the woman doing most of the talking is kind of loud. She's talking about homeschoolers. She's saying how isn't awful that their moms do laundry and cook dinner in the same room as the kids who are doing their work. She's saying how won't they be at a disadvantage when they go to work, because at work you aren't able to go off somewhere (like to your room to play with your Star Wars figures) if you don't want to do your work, and how at your work you'll have a dedicated workspace and probably an officemate to keep you "on track." But at home (apparently) chaos reigns. "Those homeschooled kids don't have all the opportunities other kids do, either," she says.

And I am wondering what planet this woman is from. Since when do officemates keep you "on track" when you're supposed to be working? (Was that what these three women were doing, having a forty-five minute conversation about homeschooling in the middle of the day?) Since when is it easier to work in a cube or a cubby? Why do so many telecommuters get more done when they work from home than when they go into the office? (I know I did, back when I used to have a "real" job as a technical writer. In two hours I could get more done than I got done in some eight hour days. There were no meetings, no loud conversations the next cube over about baseball or hockey, nobody coming in and out to talk to my officemate... This was pre-kids, of course, but still.)

So, obviously, there are a few problems with that kind of reasoning as a justification for jettisoning kids out of their homes and into the institutions we call school. And as far as opportunities...

My kids have variously participated in ballet, gymnastics, drama, Scouts, soccer, baseball, violin, and a regular playgroup with other homeschooled kids. We have been able to go to the Science Center and spend as long as we want looking only at the dinosaurs without a pack of other kids pulling us away. We have gone to the zoo, the Butterfly House, to plays, to the library, to the park, to vote, to the history museum, to the botanical gardens, to Grandma's house for long periods of time (for fossil hunting, trips to the Aquarium, hikes in the woods, petting the horses and goats that live next door)... They help me cook, and they know what it takes to keep a house running on a daily basis (which I didn't, even though I did have chores to do on Saturdays).

This morning I read most of a long, illustrated version of A Christmas Carol to my 2nd grader and my kindergartener, while the nineteen month old played around us. While I eavesdropped on the librarians' anti-homeschooling conversation (it was impossible not to), my kids were eagerly pulling down and sorting through piles of dinosaur books, which we checked out and brought home to actually read. No one is going to stop them from reading these books. Nobody is going to tell my five year old daughter that the books she has chosen are too hard, and that for science she should be looking outside to see what the weather is, or planting a bean seed in a cup instead of goggling at the dinosaur bone ( a real sliver of fossilized bone!) that came in the mail today. Nobody is going to tell her that her turn for touching the bone is over, and will she please go back to her seat now. She's just spent the past two hours looking at it, touching it, dreaming about what it might be.

I suppose, however, that because there are three baskets full of laundry in an otherwise picked up and vacuumed living room right now, she will be scarred for life.

Unfortunately, this library is the library with all the good children's books, or I would boycott it. This isn't the first problem I have had with the librarians there. Some of the other librarians seem to be of the opinion that books are like ceramic figurines: to be admired, but not to be handled, checked out in large stacks (there's a 250 book limit, and I intend to press it), and carted home to be used.

I suppose, as an alternative, that I will have to order a couple of homeschooling bumper stickers and slap them across our canvas book bags. Maybe they'd at least learn to talk more quietly.

Isn't that how you're supposed to behave in a library anyway?