Best at Home Preschool Curriculum

My desire is for this blog space to be a useful resource for you as a parent, grandparent, or caregiver of young children. Please feel free to comment and communicate what is of value to you. We will visit topics pertinent to your family, subjects of interest to you as a nurturer, provide gems of useful knowledge, share ideas to support you in your often challenging but oh, so delightful role, and offer prompts of simple joys for capturing precious moments through these fleeting, golden days with your child.

Through the blog, I will share my resources of education, life experience and thirty years of motherhood to support you. I also have a keen desire to continue to learn and be enlightened by all things pertaining to children, parenting, children’s literature, and families to give value to the posts.

To enable you to know me better, I would like to give a bit of background of how Golden Days at Home preschool curriculum, an unknowingly lifelong process, came to be. As the eldest of six children, I welcomed the birth order responsibility of looking after my younger siblings. I would often overhear my mom say to her friends how smart she was to have me first as I truly was interested in entertaining, helping my younger brothers and sister along as they got ready for the day, making meals, tidying up after them and jumping into the middle of a sibling squabble to separate combative brothers. Not a problem. When my father chose to leave our family a few weeks after my youngest brother was born, I felt a keener responsibility as the oldest child and took on a self-assigned, weightier role as leader and protector of my little brothers and sister. This experience set a course for my life and when I left for university several years later, it was to pursue a degree involving the health or education of children. A double major in elementary education and special education was my choice.

I met my husband while at school, a big, burly, rugby-playing South African with a heart of gold. We married, finished our undergrad degrees and headed to his homeland for him to begin an MBA with a focus on international business. I settled into this new adventure in Cape Town, South Africa by creating a private tutoring service for special needs and primary school-aged children. I visited my students at home enabling me to immerse myself in the rich and varied culture of this new and foreign land. This first experience of living abroad awakened a new and continued interest in overseas travel and cultures, especially as it relates to children and families. (Actually, I was born in France but my furthest memory is at age 3 seated on the flight leaving France to live in the states, so it doesn’t count.)

After our years in South Africa, my husband, one of seven children, and I moved to the US and started our family. Amidst many overseas work assignments and relocations over the next 12 years, we had five beautiful children born in various hemispheres. I welcomed this new stage called motherhood with open arms and a conscious determination and commitment to be present in and savor the goodness, as well as the challenges I knew, were to come. To help me accomplish this lofty goal, I had learned the importance of keeping myself as a mother, healthy and stimulated. I knew that the strength of a family’s foundation was the strength of a marriage. I also humbly acknowledged I was still learning patience, perspective, perseverance, and more.

Amidst the comfortable chaos and frenetic pace of those childbearing and child-rearing years, the days felt long but weeks flew by in a wink, I could sense a particular urgency to be present and intentional during each child’s early stages. I did my best to meet this prompting but yearned for though never discovered a reliable resource to support and guide me in this goal to savor those precious early childhood years. 

Years later on the event of our youngest child beginning kindergarten, I felt at a crossroads. I suddenly realized my mothering role of the past many years was changing. There was space to add something new. Would it be another degree, a job, a certification of some sort, what? With a lot of thought, discussions with my husband and some prayers as well, the idea of creating a preschool curriculum for families was born. Slowly but surely (this youngest daughter is now 20), the idea of Golden Days at Home early childhood curriculum is now a reality.

Looking back, I recognize a golden thread running through the years, experiences and stages of my life. A common element of natural tendencies and interests, of choices made in response to promptings and touchings of my heartstrings. Children, their happiness and well-being is what has mattered most to me and in turn gifted me the challenge to create a rich and rewarding experience for young children and parents to share. Thank you for your interest, it has been my motivation all along the way.

Again, welcome. I am excited to begin this new blog and look forward with open arms to what is to come.

With love,

Janet Nicole

P.S. I previously kept a 10 year family and friends blog regularly posting about our day to day family life until our youngest graduated from high school. You can find our family blog at: www.goldendaysathome.blogspot.com