just another morning here

Especially for Joyce

Yesterday actually turned out to be really nice. The journalist was lovely, and I get the impression that the feature will be very positive. Having said that, I did think that she maybe should have informed herself a bit better on the legal position on home education before trying to conduct an interview, because it was marginally annoying to have to explain it, and to explain why the Children’s Bill has implications for home educators, that sort of thing. That was before we got on to the topic of LEA involvement. I hope I handled it all well enough.

Why did we do it? I guess I agree to do these things simply because I’d rather someone relatively normal did an interview than they had to scrabble around and end up finding someone way out who might not be very good at communicating the whys and wherefores of home ed, or who was doing it for such a particular reason that it might give a skewed impression of home education. If I didn’t do it, someone else would. It’s interesting, I like meeting people, I like thinking through what we do, why we do it, the advantages and disadvantages of it, and while being able to communicate those to the rest of the world isn’t vitally important to me, if an opportunity comes my way I don’t mind agreeing to it. I don’t think there’s anything in it for us, really, either – I don’t particularly like that sort of publicity, but then again I don’t dislike it enough to not do these things in the first place! I sincerely hope that it will be okay, I’m expecting it to be good, but we’ll have to wait and see.

Anyway, the kids also enjoyed being part of things – first thing in the morning we had a look at this website and discussed the platonic solids and why they are a special group of solids, then they set about constructing them from Geomags. Anna made little labels for a display, and by the end of it they were happily counting vertices (balls), edges (rods), and faces (panels), and using that language correctly. They also got the hama beads out, and games like Connect 4 and Downfall, which are both strategic and therefore very educational, imo! I was really proud of Anna having an interview, too, and being articulate about home education – for once she didn’t say that she’d rather be at school! Instead she said that sometimes she feels like going back to school but that most of the time she likes being home educated. This is progress, and I’m pleased about it – because while we’re happy that we’ve made the right choice for our family at the moment, I’ve always kind of wanted her to agree with us! It’s taken two years to get to that! She was really proud to show off her Different Life video, too.

We took the reporter with us in the afternoon to our HE dance session, so she was able to interview some other parents there, as well as observing us socialising, and then she left from there. We carried on to Anna’s cello lesson, shopping at Sainsbury’s, then home for a quick tea before dashing out to Miscarriage Support Group in the evening.

Sorry everyone, I just got a bit bored of blogging the ‘we did this, then we did that,’ type thing. It seems so introspective sometimes, and irrelevant to the bigger picture!

We have been busy with friends round, and the Miscarriage Support group was on Tuesday night, plus I’ve fielded a couple of calls from people who’ve had miscarriages, which leaves me feeling so useless and unable to say anything that I’d rather not say anything at all. When I think I’m over my miscarriages I just have to hear the pain in other people’s voices when they call me and it all comes flooding back, you remember it like it was yesterday. And you wish you could take it away, make it all better, and make people’s experiences of hospital better, but you just can’t. They ring and they’ve been treated so badly by health professionals it makes me absolutely livid, so not blogging was for everyone’s sanity.

Also, I got particularly CROSS yesterday with the FF people. I wanted to blog it but thought I’d probably get done for libel so had to restrain myself from blogging anything at all!

Part of me is really struggling with the whole home education thing at the moment, too. I would always have to conclude that educationally and for the children as people it’s absolutely the best thing, but I’m just not sure whether it is for me. Then that sounds selfish – while I’m really happy to be at home with the children, and most of me loves it most of the time, and I do think it’s the best thing for them, there is part of me that would also really like to go and work with Steve a bit more. One of the reasons we started home educating was so that Steve and I could manage the business together, but as it’s turned out with getting a premises and an employee, it hasn’t worked out like that. Most of the time I like being different, and doing things differently, Steve working at the weekends and us being flexible in the week, and then sometimes I just think life would be so much simpler if we did the Mon – Fri, 9-5 thing like the rest of the world. To be honest, I think that feeling like this is all tied up with what we’re trying to achieve in terms of church/faith as well … which I still haven’t really managed to explain to myself, let alone blog about!

Basically we felt God challenging us about doing things differently with regard to church. The outworking of this has been to make a decision to stop going on a Sunday morning – while still having a very central faith, and being part of the group of people that we call our church family, we’re trying to strip away the religious add-ons that our church culture has added on! There are other reasons to stopping going on Sundays too – well, Steve was always at work anyway so it was hardly a whole-family activity, as I think it should be …

The picture of home education has been a really helpful one to us in it, and I know that here I might be able to use that to explain what I mean – when I try and talk about it to anyone else I get very stuck, because generally they completely don’t understand what I’m talking about. If you equate faith with education, and the religiosity of established church with school, I hope you can get the picture. We want the faith, but we want it grounded in our everyday life rather than boxed into a Sunday morning. It’s as much a challenge to work out what that means for us as a family as it is to live the challenge of what we believe about home education! And it’s equally hard to go against the flow with it, because people just don’t understand. The socialisation question, as with home ed, is the one that persistently rears its head – and is difficult to answer, as people have such a set idea about what being part of a church means, in the same way as people think that school provides socialisation!

Anyway, we are very pleased that actually the leadership of our church have given us some space to try and work things out, and are supporting us in it. Having said that, it feels like a mountain has been made out of a molehill – what is actually a simple concept has been given so much discussion and questioning in the church recently that it feels a lot more complex than it actually needs to be! We have one of the leaders of the stream of churches that we’re part of coming round this evening so I guess I’m thinking about it all even more, because I know he’ll ask us what we’ve been doing and although I don’t feel I have to justify anything, I wish I could have a few more answers. I’m not sure I’ve explained anything very well at all here, but there we go. I’ll go back to the usual tone of blog now

Other than having booked Centerparcs on Tuesday there really is nothing exciting going on here. The projector is Steve’s latest toy, and as it just means that he’s rearranged the lounge to fit it in and is getting rid of excess junk (all his guitar amps, which he never uses in the house anyway) to make space, I don’t mind too much. It’s only going to be used on special occasions, we have a Kill Bill evening planned sometime soon so that will be its first public performance

The girls have been working quite hard this week, we’ve done some workbooky stuff most days. Maths has been general number bond stuff for Abbie, and Anna’s done some basic stuff on right angles. Anna did some work on verbs in an English book too.

As well as practically memorising the Groovy Greeks audio CD which we’ve had on in the car recently (must get more of those, they are quite amusing, they remind me of Blackadder!), they’ve watched the whole of the BBC ZigZag Ancient Greece series, and today Steve’s Aunty Jacky is coming for her first official ‘Ancient Greeks’ session with them. I bought the first volume of Story of the World plus the activity book to go with it and there are some lovely resources in there – not sure if I’ll get round to reading it with them, but having the activity book will really help I think. And having seen it I expect as we go on to other periods of history I will invest in the rest of the SOTW series, as history is my weakest point, and if nothing else, *I* can read the books myself!

The other thing that I ordered which arrived this week is the Draw Write Now set, which went down really well here. The girls absolutely love the format, and were really keen to try it straight away. I like the fact that the writing is just four lines of text, so it’s a really manageable amount when it comes to handwriting practice. Thanks very much for the recommendation!

Few photos to add from today – the girls doing covers for the Ancient Greeks notebooks, and a geomag flower that apparently had to be photographed!

Anna’s had a couple of cello lessons this week and she is coming along quite nicely with it. I’ve agreed to practise with her and that’s been good when we’ve done it, too.

Josiah’s gone off to Start Right again this morning so the girls and I will probably do some more of all of the above. And here’s a blog. Hope it’s enough to count for a couple more days

Instant Messaging one another across the bedroom!

The girls’ computers are now networked, and they are very happy about it. We’re very happy with the screens (especially the headphone sockets!).

It’s been a lazy day here, we’ve seen lots of friends, Anna had a cello lesson, Abbie has read some more of her book, Joe’s played with his trains and with the Geomags … Steve put up some child-height coat hooks and sorted the computers. I played Zoombinis for a while, made soup and rolls, now my friend and I are about to pop over to a neighbour’s house for some sort of Christmas gifty party thing … all very pleasant.