Join us for a great interview with Dachelle McVey as we talk about building a business from what you love.
Hello moms and moms entrepreneurs. So I’m excited to bring you another segment of inspiring moms with Life Unboxed. For this segment, I just invite moms and momtrepreneurs to come on the show and share their stories with us. Today we are talking about building a business from what inspires you. This transcript give you a good idea of the topics covered. If you want the full interview listen to the podcast or watch it on YouTube.
They share different ways of how they homeschool, how they built their business, and the advice they would give to other mompreneurs. I really want you as a momtrepreneur to be inspired and encouraged by other moms.
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Intro: Building a Business from What You Love
For this show, I sat down with Dachelle McVey from hide the chocolate and literary adventures for kids. We just talked about being inspired by what you do, and then we got into some practical things. When it comes to how to balance running a business and homeschooling your kids.
Dachelle is a homeschooling mom of three and creator of hide the chocolate and literary adventures for kids. She has retired from many careers, and we get into some of those. Some of those careers included accounting, math teacher, baker, and cupcake shop owner. So definitely a wide range of careers.
Her latest career is homeschool mom, blogger and curriculum creator. So we’re gonna get into the interview now. And I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did.
Interview with Dachelle McVey from Hide the Chocolate and Literary Adventures for Kids
Jodie the Mom: Welcome to the show. I’m so glad to have you here, if you could introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what you do.
Dachelle: Okay, thank you. I’m so excited to be here. So my name is Dachelle McVey, and I blog over at hidethechocolate.com where I talk about a relaxed Charlotte Mason homeschool and just kind of share the things we do. There are a lot of hands on activities.
I also own literary adventures for kids, which is a full language arts curriculum for preschool through high school. We’re a little bit different. We are really unique in that we base all of our language arts on specific novels. So it’s a different concept, but we like to have fun, and we think kids should enjoy language arts.
Test drive some of the literary curriculum for free!
Jodie the Mom: That is awesome. Okay. So I want to unpack just that statement real quick. So but first, let’s start with how many kids do you have?
Dachelle: Okay, I have three, but they’re not all homeschooling anymore. One of them has graduated. And he’s graduating from college and living in another town. I’m so old. I feel so old. My middle daughter is a senior, and then the other one is just starting high school this year. So a lot of hormones in this home.
Jodie the Mom: So you homeschooled your college-age student? Did you homeschool him all the way through?
Dachelle: No, no, he didn’t start until high school. The youngest was homeschooled the whole way through. But he was our experiment, I guess.
Jodie the Mom: The first one always is.
Dachelle: And I do not encourage people to pull their kids out of high school to homeschool unless they’re totally on board with it. Because it can be a little bit of a struggle.
Jodie the Mom: Yeah. So you homeschooled him through high school. And now he’s about to graduate college?
Dachelle: Yes, he is.
Can Homeschoolers do Well in College?
Jodie the Mom: This might be a rabbit trail from what we’re going to talk about. But I know a lot of parents have this question. So how well did he do in college?
Dachelle: So for him, I think that he would have done better had he homeschooled the whole time. When he was in the traditional school system, he’s in marketing by the way, so this kind of plays into it. He’s very good at talking to people. I felt like he became a favorite of the teachers. And so he would get by with the minimum of what he needed to do to make an A. And that was, his goal. I want to make this grade this A or whatever, I want to do this, whatever the thing he wants to do. And so he would do the minimum of what he needed to do. And in college that was a big eye opener for him that he couldn’t convince all the teachers to give him the grades you want.
Jodie the Mom: He couldn’t get by on his charm and good looks. I have one like that.
Dachelle: Yeah, he still does. It’s amazing the things he gets by with. I would have never gotten away with that. But yeah, so I think he would have done better had he homeschooled the whole way through because he wouldn’t have been able to do that to his mother.
So I think the other two probably will have a bit of a head start. All that to say though, I I’m finding because I’m having the spectrum of just one in high school homeschooling to one that has been homeschooled all the way through. I really have discovered that it’s really about your kids. And they’re going to do as well as in college. Is doesn’t matter if they were in the traditional school system in the homeschool system. It depends on their personality and what they want to do and what their ambition is.
I guess, you know, because I used to be one of those people that was like, everybody’s gonna go to college. That’s the whole plan. We’re all going to college and I actually was a senior advisor, and I was like, go to college, we’re all going to college.
Through the years, I’ve realized that’s not always the best plan. And it’s definitely not the best use of your money, if you’re not going to those specific careers that actually have to have a college degree. So it’s just not the best use of your money.
But I will say it doesn’t matter for homeschool or for your traditional school, college, I don’t think it’s any harder for a homeschool kid. And I worried about that a lot. But I really don’t think it is. I’ve seen how many kids went to college, and a lot of them go for that year and then drop out. Because I think they all feel like they need to go. It is what they are supposed to do.
I just always like to tell parents, if you’re homeschooling high school, it seems stressful. You freak out because you think, “Oh my gosh, how will I ever do this? And if they fail, I’ve destroyed my child’s life.” You haven’t. It’ll be fine. They’ll be fine.
Jodie the Mom: That’s our job as parents to always stress out about ruining our kids.
Dachelle: That’s our whole job is to freak out.
Building a Business from What Inspires You—The Beginning
Jodie the Mom: Okay, you’ve had a lot of career paths. I want to talk about all your different career paths. And then how you got to the point of being an entrepreneur. You are running two businesses between hide the chocolate and your literary adventures. Then add homeschooling, you know that little thing, just homeschooling on top of it all.
So let’s start with your career paths. Just you just share with us all your careers.
Dachelle: My husband likes to joke that I’ve retired more than anybody he knows.
So I went to school to be, this is going to seem really weird, because this is not what my career is now, to be a CPA. And actually, I went to college to become a doctor or an engineer. Those were the two things I was told by my guidance counselors I needed to do because they would make money, and I would be successful. I literally detest science. So for them to send me there to be a doctor or to be an engineer was quite hilarious. But I got there, and I didn’t like it.
The things that I was good at were math and accounting. They come really easy to me, but they’re not things that inspire me. I could sit down and do your taxes. Or I could sit down and do the business accounting. And it’s going to come easy. And I’m going to just do it quickly. But I don’t feel excited about it.
I always wanted to go into language arts. But it was like no, you can’t make any money, and you can’t be successful. I was still buying into that, you know what it takes to be successful. I knew I had a lot of creativity in me that I wanted to get out.
Through the years, I’ve done so many crazy things. But probably the craziest thing was I did own a bakery at one point. I was a cake artist for a while. That was really fun until I started having people pay for their things. Then they got all grumpy about paying, and then they didn’t appreciate my lovely artistry for the hundreds of dollars. They’re like, “No, we’re not gonna pay that kind of money.” And I’m like, but I spent three days.
So I finally got back to my passion, which was language arts. I didn’t realize that until we started homeschooling, and I started getting back into writing. I realized how much I loved writing on the blog. Then realized that there’s so much more to telling your story, then the grammar, the five part essay, and the burger paragraph and all that stuff. That’s really boring and a horrible way to teach children language arts. So I started teaching my kids in a different way.
We did book clubs. We would read and we would go on rabbit trails. We would do all sorts of hands on activities, and then we meet with our friends. That was great when they started getting in middle school and really wanted that socialization.
Then a friend of mine, a fellow blogger, looked at me one day, she goes, “You know, you can do this for a living.”
And I’m like, “No, anybody can do this. Why would anybody pay me for that?”
She’s like, “No, not anybody can do this. You really need to look into see if you could do this for a living.”
So that’s how literary adventures for kids was born. To make language arts fun. So when you’re kids start to lose that and they will. You give them exciting ways to want to read and give them a fun way to do grammar where they don’t even really realize they’re doing grammar, that kind of thing.
So I think that education should be inspiring. It should be tactile in a lot of ways. And be fun for the kids. Because as adults, when we want to do learn something, we don’t learn it because we have to, I mean, sometimes we do. But in general, if you want to go out and learn something new, like you want to learn a foreign language, that’s because you’re excited about it, you want to do it. And that’s the way education should be in my opinion.
Appreciating the Hard Places When You Build Your Business
Jodie the Mom: So how would you say that all of your different careers have played into literary adventures? So how have they done that, because I don’t think we always appreciate being in those boring jobs, or, you know, we don’t always appreciate what we’ve learned when we’re in those hard places.
Dachelle: It’s true. I mean, really, don’t you need a bad job to appreciate a good job. Because my husband runs his own business. And he’ll get these kids that have just out of school coming in to work for him. And they’ll be like complaining. Like, they don’t even realize how good they’ve got it, and they’ll leave and come back and say, “We’re so sorry.”
You have to have the bad jobs. You have to have the jobs that are uninspiring.
You know, it’s really sad. I was watching TikTok this morning on my walk. I only allow myself to watch while I’m exercising. That’s my way to exercise. This guy was saying you don’t have to have a job you love. Stop telling yourself that, you just need a job you can tolerate.
I thought, wow, that’s terribly depressing. I understand that some people do that. They just need the job. But I want a job that I love. I want a job that I’m excited about doing. One that inspires me and makes me feel like it’s mine. It’s something that I can be proud of.
Through all the different careers I’ve had, that was what I was getting to is the things I love, the things I enjoyed.
Then I realized with language arts, I could change the way people think. Or the way they think about thinking. But one of the things we do is we really make a big deal about kids learning to think critically, and to think on their own. You may get a book that you absolutely detest or hate. But did it make you think.
Literary Adventures for Kids
Jodie the Mom: So how long have you been doing literary adventures? You have quite a few book clubs. You have quite a few things on the website, so I know that takes a lot of time.
Dachelle: We have over 100 course. Probably about 150. I really don’t know honestly. I used to have those numbers. We’ve been doing it for five years. Now, I’ve been doing the book clubs a lot longer than that.
I do have a friend of mine who writes a lot of the high school courses. So there’s two of us that are doing him. But we probably put out between 12 and 20 a year. We were slowing down a little bit because we are getting a little tired. But we do everything with our kids. So it’s all inspired by our kids. What are our children doing? And we work it out with them before we publish it. They’re
Jodie the Mom: your guinea pigs.
Dachelle: That’s exactly right.
Conclusion: Building a Business from What You Love
This was a great conversation and this is just part of what we talked about. Listen to the episode as we talk about balancing the parent-intensive Charlotte Mason homeschool style with building a business. Dachelle’s best advice to get it all done. As well as the advice she give a mom who’s maybe still stuck in a job that’s uninspiring and wants to start moving into the entrepreneur side of things so that she can be home with her kids and homeschool her kids. What advice would you give to make the transition?
Listen or watch the rest of the interview.
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