WOW GUESS WHO DIDN’T REALIZE THIS WAS THE FIVE HUNDREDTH STRIP UNTIL IT WAS DONE AND BEING SAVED AS 500-HOMESCHOOLING-2.PSD !!!!!

!!!!!!! five hundred!!!!! wow! okay!! I need to take a minute to appreciate that! we! did it! Five hundred strips! Can you believe!! I can’t! I’m gonna do an art to celebrate! Just not today, because it’s Thanksgiving!

…holy crap, I’m Thankful I’ve done five hundred of these things and that it’s totally changed my life!! I’m thankful for patrons! Wow! Thank you for being here with me!

WHEW. Okay! Now for the ACTUAL commentary I intended for the strip. So! 2020’s been wild, right, but I could not have imagined that it’d be the year I became a vegan-shopping, homeschooling, crunchy SAHM?!

We finally bit the bullet and committed to homeschooling Momo during the pandemic, as our district continues to not offer remote learning options. It’s been… a lot of agony and stress. I didn’t think that it’d be possible to balance working almost full-time on Exocolonist, doing two comics, the regular domestic workload, AND homeschooling on top of it – which is a full-time job in itself! Full respect to homeschooling parents, wow!! But, alas, the story of parenthood is learning how to take on more than you ever think you could, isn’t it?

During the onboarding phonecall with the district’s assisted homeschool program, I basically told the truth: no, it’s not the best choice for our family. But, it’s the best of the choices available to us. Between IXL, Epic! Books, Duolingo, and Outschool, we’ve cobbled together a pretty decent digital curriculum, I think? I hope.

(Not an ad!!! but!! if you’re in the same boat and you’re looking at courses on Outschool, you can use my referral link and get us both credit maybe?)

So, we’ve turned the dining room into a classroom, and my walls are covered with stuff like this now, and things are calming down as we get used to the – ugh – new normal, and I settle in for a year of being someone I never expected to be.