A New Era

As you may have noticed, I haven't been blogging regularly for some months now. As those of you who know me in real life know, this is because of a major upheaval in my life. I met and fell in love with someone new and we have both moved heaven and earth, including splitting up our respective marriages, to be together, which we now are. And here begins the new chapter in our lives. This year is going to see some huge changes in our lifestyle and living and working arrangements. We are hoping to be able to buy some land and start some businesses on it, including sustainability workshops for children, managing the woodland, keeping chickens and bees, growing our own food as much as possible, wood-working, maybe charcoal-burning, meditation workshops. We are hoping to gain permission to live on the land in temporary, low-impact dwellings, preferably yurts, and thereby be mortgage-free and needing much less income. So far we are just in the planning stages and much depends on things that we don't know yet, but I'm aiming to keep a record of what happens here, and also to be able to promote our businesses as each gets up and running - hence yesterday's post about my life coaching and my partner's Etsy shop. I hope some of you will be interested in our journey, as the home education of my children also continues, and my partner's 2 children also join in our adventure as and when they are with us. As Imbolc approaches, I can feel the new season starting and the time for new ventures ripening. Watch this space...

Spring Equinox

So, another equinox and this was a good one despite the incessant drizzle. We dyed hard-boiled eggs using wet tissue paper:

We made Marble cake for it's equal darkness and light kind of qualities, plus it was very nice to eat!
And we had an equinox egg hunt, in which the children found these:

Plus of course much thinking of balance and the start of new projects. I had the image of an eagle in my equinox meditation which has given me much food for thought. I hope everyone else had as good a start to the summer!

Another birthday

This time my son's 5th birthday, made all the more piquant by the fact that he finally weaned 3 days before his birthday, making it feel all the more like an end of an era and the start of a new one.

The birthday cake this year was an aeroplane, which was amazingly difficult!



And I made some felt tarts - my son's is the blue one and my daughter's (unbirthday present) is the pink one.


It was a lovely day seeing family and lots of good food, and the inevitable reminisces of the day my son was born, can it really be 5 years ago? My little boy is really growing up - though don't tell him that. He has decided he will not be getting any older than 5 and a quarter, so we'll just have to hope he changes his mind at some point during the coming year.

Birthday

It is my daughter's 7th birthday today. So, firstly, a couple of pictures. Her birthday cake, lovingly hand-crafted by me (it's a butterfly of course, just in case you can't tell!):


And the felt cakes I made for her as part of her birthday present (the one with pink icing) and my son as an 'unbirthday' present (the blue icing):

Birthdays are a strange thing - stressful and exciting and unsettling in equal measures, even when the birthday is not your own. Of course, the birthday of a child brings to mind thoughts of the pregnancy with that child and of the day they were born. It reminds us of time passing and of how much the child has changed and learned and developed into their own person.

It also makes me think of how much I have learned as a parent since my daughter (my eldest child) was born, and makes me wonder if I could do it all better if I were to do it all over again. Which I am not going to.

And then there's all the social pressure associated with children's birthdays. I'm lucky, as my children are home educated there hasn't been any peer pressure on them to request big, expensive parties with every person in there class and junk food, party bags and lots of consuming of plastic tat. Or maybe it's just their personalities anyway. Either way, it's been lovely to have a relaxing but fun day with visits by various grandparents, uncles and aunts throughout the day, a homemade cake with all organic ingredients and no colourings, homemade pizza for tea, and fairly low-key presents, such as books and craft kits.

It's just made me wonder why we have to wait for a birthday or special occasion to gather everyone together. Hmm, one to ponder on. How to get all the family together in a similar relaxed fashion more often?

So, now all there is to do is to pop the wrapping paper into the kids' craft box for re-use in art masterpieces, look forward to my son's 5th birthday in 2.5 weeks, and have an evening in a very weird head-space thinking about birth and pregnancy and fertility and the passage of time and parenting skills.

New Year

And is it a new decade? I don't mean to be pedantic but I'm never sure exactly when a new decade starts - is 2010 the last year of the decade or the first year of a new one? There seemed to be much dissent about when the new millenium started - the end of 1999 or the end of 2000? Was there a year zero and if so, does this make any difference anyway? I'm rather confused. But, presuming it is a new decade, here's a quick resume of my decade, starting in 2000.

The new year of 2000 was memorable because me and my husband both had the worst flu we'd ever had and he had to delay starting a new job because of it. We had fairly recently adopted 2 cats, and I was working at a local FE College. During the year, I changed jobs to working for a charity which dealt with victims of medical accidents. I also started getting more involved with the local Pagan scene and with one specific group in particular.

In 2001 we bought our own flat and moved in in May. Towards the end of the year, I went part-time at work in order to be able to spend more time studying - I was coming to the end of my part-time degree. I started doing website moderating for the Pagan group I was involved with and also became their online agony aunt.

In 2002 I started the final year of my degree - it took me 6 years part-time altogether. I also started a new job for the government quango the Housing Corporation. It was another part-time job. I found out I was pregnant with my daughter within weeks of starting, and what with that and my degree I never really felt I got to grips with what I was supposed to be doing. I took my final exams at the end of the year while 6 months pregnant and stopped working at Christmas.

In February 2003 I gave birth to my eldest child, my daughter. Her planned homebirth went wrong and we ended up being transferred to hospital by ambulance and having an assisted birth which shocked us both with its brutality. Funnily enough, she took up the rest of the year. As planned, I didn't go back to work, and we were pretty much absorbed with her. We lost one of our cats, our beloved boy Sebastian to kidney failure.

In March 2004, we got married in a small, low-key but very enjoyable way and our daughter was the star of the show. At the end of the year, my book Solitary Eclectic Witchcraft was published. By the summer I was pregnant with my son and I spent most of the year being sick.

By the start of 2005 I was sick, shattered and depressed and ending up giving birth 3 weeks early in March. But it was a relatively peaceful homebirth as we had hoped and the rest of the year was spent adjusting to being a family of 4.

By 2006 we really needed to move out of our tiny flat but the process was not smooth and everything that had been planned since the spring of that year fell through just before Christmas, leaving us to start again the following year. I started self-publishing my writing, starting with a novel Towards The Sea, then my home education books Freya and Heath Are Home Educated and The Genie In The Teapot and then the follow-up to my previous book on Paganism, Thoughtful Pagan Living.

In 2007 I had a small article published in Green Parent magazine, then started writing for Hippyshopper, the green website. I also got published in Juno magazine and started the first of a series of articles published in The Mother. We finally managed to move house (and town) in July after a lot of stress. My brother-in-law got married the following weekend! It took me many months to settle into the new house and the new town, and I was still feeling upset and isolated at the end of 2007.

At the start of 2008, my job with Hippyshopper was cut and I started working for 63336 - a text-based question and answer company, where I've been working ever since. I also started meeting up with individual families in the local home education scene, culminating in co-starting a local meet-up in a park. I finished another novel, but have so far failed to get it published and am undecided about publishing it myself. I took over an overgrown allotment plot in May and we got our first crops from it in the autumn.

In the spring of 2009 we decided to formalise the home education group and moved it into a rented hall for weekly sessions in July, setting up our own bank account and getting our first funding shortly afterwards. I also joined a local fledgling Transition Group in the summer, but so far it doesn't really seem to be getting properly started. Our allotment was much more fruitful this year and we had onions for 4 months, potatoes for 6 months, and tons of carrots, swede, peas, and beetroot. We also had tomatoes, courgettes, strawberries, raspberries and French beans from the garden, and I made lots of jam from fruit either picked free locally or cheaply from the nearby Pick-Your-Own farm. I've also started work on a Young Adult novel. And started doing a course to learn to be a life coach.

And so, plans for 2010? My major plan for 2010 is to try and visualise in all areas of my life exactly what I'd like, ideally, and then try to make that happen, no matter how incrementally that might have to be. The dreams have to be as exact and ideal as possible, even if they are not practical or realistic, and only then must I sit down and work out in what ways I can achieve them. The dreaming is important, to give me the goal to aim for. I'm hoping to finish my course and start being a life coach. I'm hoping to finish my Young Adult novel and get it published. I'm hoping to continue working and running the Home Education Group and doing my allotment. I'm hoping to be inspired.

Solstice!

As I write I can see the sun starting to rise above the roof-tops of the houses behind my house, and the sky is changing from an indigo blue to a pale, striped gold and delicate rose-pink. The snow still clinging to the roofs and fences and gardens is a shimmering pale blue in the early morning light and I can feel the world holding its breath for this one day of the sun 'standing still' before the tide turns just after sunset today and the gradual march towards summer begins.

Already I know that this year will be another year of challenges for us as a family: my husband's temporary job comes to end in January, and he also starts teaching his first few classes as a newly-qualified lifelong learning teacher. As a family we will have to learn to re-balance our lives as hopefully he gains more classes to teach, and we also need to find other ways of supplementing that income until it provides enough by itself. The Children, Schools & Families Bill has the potential to change our way of life if it goes through before a general election, and no matter what the outcome of the election, this will also have ramifications for all of us here in the UK. There are personal challenges too, as we both continue with our writing, and the children turn 7 and 5 and continue to develop in their own unique ways.

But for today I am content to stand on the brink of all that and let it wait. Today we'll have a time out of time and celebrate the sun. The children have enjoyed their simple stockings this morning and are happily sorting through the decorations, greeting each strand of tinsel as an old friend and deciding which ones to claim for their own rooms this year. Later we have family coming and we'll share a meal and exchange gifts. Good things to savour.

Happy Solstice everyone!

Reassurance

This article from The Times is an old one, but a friend has just drawn my attention to it and I've found it interesting. I keep meaning to read Margot Sunderland's books on child mental health and her recent research on cortisol levels in babies and the damage this can do, but so far have only got round to reading articles about her views. I kept nodding as I read this one about the value of co-sleeping, and how current UK culture and health policy actually goes *against* much of the available evidence.

Solstice poems

In honour of tomorrow's summer solstice, the children have once again been composing poems. This time, they've both composed and written out (with help with spellings!) their own poems! This is the first time my son has done his own writing, so I'm really proud of him. And here are the masterpieces, first my daughter's:

The Sun Shines So Brightly

As light as a feather it feels today
With the sun blazing down, hooray!
Oh, we enjoy the sun so much
Because it grows our plants
And we can have fun outside.
We like to play in the open air,
Oh yeah!
Hooray, we can go outside and play,
The sun is blazing down today.

And my son's:

Summer Sun

I like blueberries when it's sunny.
I like the summer solstice.
I like sunshine.

So there you have it! Happy solstice to everyone for tomorrow morning.

Conflict and balance

Things are getting so busy. Working, being with the children closely and attentively enough to be able to respond to their expressed needs and interests and follow up their educational interests in a timely manner, attending to the allotment in this, the busiest time of the year. That doesn't leave much extra time, but what little I have is now being taken up with organising the Home Ed Group as we move into our own hall, and writing to MPs and such-like to fight the Badman Report (Badman take note, I have to take time away from educating my children in order to fight your stupid report on whow I'm not educating properly! Grrr). And so now, just when I'm at my busiest, with my husband doing full-time temp work while also doing a college course, a writing class and an on-going role-playing commitment, my town decideds to start up a Transition Town Movement. This is something I'm really interested in and would like to be involved in, but how much more unpaid work can I really justify when every hour I spend on that kind of thing is an hour I could have spent working for actual real money which pays the mortgage and for food? And that isn't even counting the time I spend writing and trying to get stuff published, which I justify to myself by saying that it *could* end up bringing in money for us.
I suppose the essential dilemma is the eternal parental dilemma of how to divide your time: children v paid work v creative self-expressing activities v maintaining adult relationship & friendships v voluntary community work v reading a damn good book... need I go on? Anyone got any insights into creating that essential balance? Is it harder to get that balance when you home educate? Or is it just harder if you have a lot of creative interests and want to get involved in your community?

Rainy Days & Wednesdays

What a day! I'll never understand why the kids are so awful on dull, rainy days. Of course, I am also very much affected by the weather but even as a child I was happy to curl up cosily indoors with a book or my toys on rainy days. This morning we had tears, tantrums, shouting and fighting before 9am, and even on a sunny day we wouldn't have gone out before that anyway, so why should this morning have been any different?
On Wednesdays, my parents come over for the day which the children always look forward too, but it's been awful today - both children are being very demanding, upsettable, tantrum-y, intolerant and over-reactive, and despite the combined and very patient efforts of me and my mum, it's been just awful. After lunch (which usually cheers everyone up!), things deteriorated even more so we went for the fall-back option in dire circumstances - a walk. It was pouring down but this isn't usually a problem, in fact I often try to restrain the kids slightly from going out in the pouring rain. Of course, today, there was a chorus of crying and screaming 'we hate the rain!' and my daughter grumpily insisted on going out with bare legs and sandals. That'll punish me. We dragged them on a favourite walk for 45 minutes, and it does seem to have worked slightly. At least they're bickering more quietly now and the adults now have a cup of tea. My parents will be leaving in about an hour and I think we might actually survive once they've gone now.
I hate these days, they make me doubt everything - my way of parenting, the basic sweetness of my children, our method of education, my decision to be a stay-at-home mum - everything. Let's hope for better weather.

Back from holiday

Holidays are funny things, I always come back in an odd mood. Even before having the children I found holidays a rather 2 edged sword. They're supposed to be the most relaxing and fun thing ever but I've always found them also unsettling and stressful. I'm not a good traveller and the best holidays I've had have been close to home. Adding children to the mix gives them a whole new dimension. My daughter also finds holidays equally as stressful as exciting and managing her moods and needs is a full-time job in itself. However, my mum and dad did sterling work in having the kids in their caravan quite a bit, as well as helping us dig extensive earthworks on the beach, so we did manage some relaxation and couple alone time.
Even on a self-catering holiday there many compromises to make - we were unable to compost any food waste which felt really unnatural and wasteful; the kitchen was fully equipped with expensive coffe machines and smoothie makers but lacked many really basic items such as roasting tins, cake tins, mixing bowls etc which made it impossible to make bread or cakes, or things such as yorkshire puddings and even roast potatoes. This limited our food choices quite drastically and felt quite stressful as I tried to make healthy and ethical choices for meals for us all, and still ended up with chips more often than we'd had in the previous whole month put together. On the other hand, as it was a small village, we were able to shop for fresh food from local greengrocers and bakeries each day.
The weather was changeable but the children enjoyed digging on the beach every day whether it was in swimming costumes or cagoules. I watched as they played endless digging and building games, with my parents also totally absorbed and thought, yes, this is how I want things to be.
And, as always, I've come up with a list of things to change when we got back - some to help preserve that more relaxing holiday mood, and some which getting a bit of distance from our everyday life helped me to see:

• get steel water canteens rather than re-using plastic bottles (already ordered).
• stop feeling I have to rush everywhere.
• look into making my own crackers.
• get veg and fruit from the farmer's market every month.
• properly throw myself into organising our home ed group.
• tend the allotment more often.
• stop stressing about money so much and trust things will work out.
• take the children to stay with my parents more often.
• look into camping weekends.
• stop feeling guilty about everything!
• de-clutter.

Off on holiday!

Eek, I think I've packed the right things. Anyway, ready or not, we're off tomorrow for nice simple bucket-and-spade holiday at the seaside, back in a week. I'll respond to any messages and emails then (especially yours Laura, deserves a good long reply!).

Conflicted

My husband has gone off to work this morning for the first day in a 2 week temp job. It's weird - this should have been good news, we certainly need the money, but we were both fairly miserable about it. It feels so right having him home - having the whole family in one place, in our home, all pulling together to grow things, cook things, educate the children, and have time for our own creative projects. It was working really well with us all here, and now we go back to that old 'one at work' and 'one at home' dichotomy with all the discontent, resentment and misunderstanding that it can bring. 

OK, so it's only for 2 weeks and we may yet find something which fits in better in the long-term, but for some reason I find myself utterly miserable this morning. As if, this is it, we tried and our  experiment failed and the only option now is to go back to wife at home full-time, husband at work full-time complete conventionality. Part of me wants to run off to live in a yurt just as reaction to the idea. Which isn't a very reasoned 

and logical response.

I guess maybe some small part of me was hoping that the universe would provide an opportunity - one of those lucky breaks that inspires you to believe you're on the right path and someone somewhere is smoothing the way for you (not that we've ever experienced much of that, now I come to think of it!). Or maybe we're not on the right path after all? 

I suppose we just have to keep on trying, try again harder. But I am weary this morning, watching the rain pouring down on a Monday morning, and after such a lovely week last week too.

Oh well, here's a lovely picture of the green opposite our house last week before the council mowed it all down. Make a good jigsaw puzzle, I thought!

What is work?

I've been wondering what work is recently? The definition, I mean, of paid work and its meaning for us all, individually and as part of society. Bear with me, this might be a bit of a ramble as I try to sort my thoughts out.
Like many people of a thoughtful disposition, I've found working for a living stressful quite often, and I know this to be because I've never found paid work which really fits with my personality, skills, and values. So, that's what I'm trying to do now. I need to work for money (sadly) and so I want o find work which fits as much as possible with my values and skills, so that I find it more fulfilling and less stressful.
A book I've been reading recently differentiates between a 'job', 'occupation', 'career', and 'vocation' with job being what you do to pay the rent, occupations something you are slightly more invested in, a career something you put more of yourself into and get more out of, and a vocation being something you'd do anyway, even if you weren't being paid for it.
So, should we all be holding out for 'vocation'-type paid work? Is this realistic? If it isn't, why isn't it and could it ever be realistic?
It's not that I'm a work-shy layabout. I work very hard all day every day - I home educate my children and nurture them with love, food, rest and everything else I think they need. I create a home, I put a lot into my relationship with my husband and our families and friends. I cook, clean, grow food and look after the cat. Does this count as work? I do it for love not money.
I also write - I do this often, whether I'm paid for it or not although I'd love to be paid for it. So is this work? Or is it only work if I'm paid? I can't really think that the definition of work has to include payment, and yet that is what it seems to be in the general society definition. I can't help but think that this is part of the problem - work and paid-work have become two separate things, quite often two opposing things, pulling in opposite directions. It's all part of that whole work/family split that is the norm now but never was in the past until the advent of the Industrial Revolution.
I feel as if I'm pulling against my instincts so much of the time just trying to make our life work in the framework that the 21st century imposes on it, and I don't think I'm quite brave enough to drop out entirely from that framework. I don't think I even want to drop out entirely from our society - I want to be part of a community and I want to live among other people. I'm just feeling this clash every day and it sets my teeth on edge all the time, so there's this background stress that I can't filter out and it makes it harder to make every other decision as my true instincts get lost in all this white noise.

Spring Equinox

We've been out to a birthday party this morning and played in the sunshine which is a perfect way of celebrating, but yesterday we finished off our spring daffodils. We also made the vases to stand them in and they are now cheering up the children's bedrooms. These are my daughter's daffodils:


And these are my son's:


And I learned a lesson in how limited my thinking still is. For some crazy reason, I assumed we'd make yellow daffodils. After all, if you do this activity in school or nursery you'd put out yellow paper and yellow paint and everyone would do yellow daffodils. But of course, my children wanted to do their own kind of daffodils, which for my son meant red, blue and green daffodils and for my daughter meant mainly yellow, orange, red and pink. And it worked really well. And I felt really silly for literally not thinking of any colour except yellow! It does make me wonder if I'm missing something equally totally obvious in our everyday life because I'm just so used to thinking of things a certain way that I'm not seeing a different way.

Equinox crafts

With the Spring Equinox coming up in the early morning of 20 March, the children and I have been starting our Equinox crafts.

So here is my daughter's Equinox bunnies:


And my son's:


And their sun pictures - my daughter's is at the bottom and is a 'great big summer sun', my son's it at the top and is, according to the artist 'the middle of the sun, swirling with hot gas'!


We have also been making daffodils out of egg boxes (of course!) but they're not finished yet, and we went to the Children's Farm this morning and saw the tiny lambs and little kids (goats, not children) as well as baby rabbits. It was great and lovely weather too.

On another note, am I the only person who regularly has cereal in the cupboard merely in its waxed plastic inner bag as the outer box has ben removed due to urgent craft need?

4th birthday!

So, it was my son's 4th birthday today which went as well as could be expected. He got loads of great presents, nothing hideous, and saw lots of family. It all got too much for him and my daughter once each during the course of the day, which was pretty much as expected, and he's asleep now, exhausted from the day, while Daddy's putting our daughter to bed. Then we can relax!
As promised, a picture of the train cake, made this time by my own fair hands, based on a design from a Jane Asher cake book:

It is very difficult to get the balance right with a birthday cake. We don't usually go overboard on sugar and they never have sweets, but for a one-off I didn't want to be a spoilsport. I left out the food colouring completely (the original Jane Asher cake was green!) as I didn't think that added anything to the enjoyment factor, and toned down the use of sweets to decorate quite considerably. It is tricky to make fun-shaped cakes without colouring and decoration though.
And so I'm musing on my son's birth and how different it was to my daughter's. One of the things which sticks in my mind the most is how lovely it was to be in bed half an hour after he was born, with him in the crook of one arm, feeding, while eating beans on toast with the other hand. It was the first meal I had actually enjoyed for 9 months and the first time I hadn't felt nauseous in that same time and it was heavenly! I can recommend a homebirth wholeheartedly.

Hearts, fairies and birthdays

Mysterious adverts appeared all around our house last week (see below) for an upcoming Fairy Dance Event. It was all very serious - the costume, adverts, choreography, music, confetti (for the audience to sprinkle at a pre-arranged moment), and tickets were all organised and created by my daughter. We all enjoyed it very much.


And, after a particularly enjoyable family day, these hearts appeared on the wall by the back door. How sweet.


And my son is having mixed feelings about his upcoming 4th birthday. On the one hand, a special day and presents. On the other, being older, and being the centre of attention for a whole day (he's not too keen on this). We have currently come to an agreement. He agrees to turning 4, but he doesn't want to get any older than that - and certainly not grow up. I've agreed he can turn 4 and see how it goes for a year, and then we'll see how he feels about turning 5.
And in the meantime, I've got a train-shaped cake to make - eek!

Pancake Day!

Well, the pancakes went down well today with the children who assured me that they *love* pancakes, despite me remembering only too clearly that last year they wouldn't touch them, which is why we haven't had them again till today. Oh well, good to know that they like them now.

What didn't go quite so well was explaining *why* it was Pancake Day and what that meant. OK, so it's the last day before Lent. OK, so the son of the Christian God spent 6 weeks in the desert being tempted by a devil. What's a devil? Um, a not nice person who tries to make you do wrong things. OK. So, what did the devil try and make Jesus do? Um, he tried to make him a king rather than go and be executed. Huh? So what was wrong with that? Moving swiftly on, Jesus was excecuted on a cross and Christians believe that saved them from their sins. So, a bit like the Aztecs throwing people down their pyramids to get the sun to come back? Erm, guess so... And then Jesus came back from the dead on Easter Sunday. Looks of pitying scorn. Mummy, people don't come back from the dead.

OK, so the religion lesson didn't go so well then...

Half term

Now, tell me why it is that half term should have so much impact on us when we home educate? Well, because we can barely go anywhere during half terms due to huge crowds of (often badly behaved) children and their (often equally badly behaved) parents - over-excited, rushed about, exasperated (and that's just the parents!).
At the beginning of each half term I tick off all the things NOT to do during the week - playgrounds in the afternoon, swimming at any time, any children's attraction such as farms, soft play, the library. And definitely never go into the town centre.
I feel so sad for all these children who seem quite bwelidered to be out and about during the day, and also for their parents who don't seem to know what to do with them or how to interact with them.
However, mostly I feel sorry for us as we have a week in which we can't do any of our usual things and it's dull. Roll on the start of school next week!