Vienna, day 16: playgroup and a catch-up

This day I have looked forward to ever since I booked the flight to Vienna: catching up with the couple who loved me into Jesus. Well, actually one of them was in England today so it was just one friend, but it was wonderful catching up with her. And my kids played with her kids and we ate chocolate cake and we just felt at home so easily.

These guys loved me at a time when I didn't even know how to receive love, let alone do it. They accepted me as I was, and they put the first cracks into the walls I had built around myself. They'll forever have a very special place in my heart.

And it's both fun and humbling to go back to see them whenever I can, because they are among the very few people who've witnessed the changes in me. I'm not the person I was, my entire personality and who I am is totally unrecognisable if you knew me at age 20! They understand what kind of miracle it is that I have a healthy and loving marriage, that I have kids and am loving it... none of this would have been remotely possible if Jesus hadn't completely turned my life around. And it was this couple who showed me what love could be like.

I didn't take a photo. Too busy talking! Just this gem of the kids while they were playing in the basement.

The rest of the day was pretty much routine, we attended the usual Monday playgroup - it was fun going there in the snow but it turned out N's shoes were leaking, so we decided it was time for new shoes for her as well.

Comments

Back to meat after 20 years vegan - 4 years on

Back in 2020, I briefly mentioned in another blog post that we were no longer vegan. I said that shift deserved its own blog post, but here we are at the end of 2024 and I never wrote that. Not that I intended to leave it this long, but it really did take me this long to truly digest the change (pardon the pun) and get enough distance from my previous world view that I could write about it. Paradigm shifts like that don't come quickly, or easily. I've had a few major paradigm shifts in my life - from atheist to Christian , and later to Catholicism - and it's a disorienting thing every time. It starts with the proverbial 'pebble in the shoe' (something niggling that gets harder and harder to ignore) and takes time to even go from subconscious to conscious mind, to a time of discovery and 'why didn't I see this before??', and finally a bewildering sense how I could possibly have thought the old way because I'm now wearing all-new lenses on life. The ...

Thrown into to a new reality, then back to the old

Towards the end of August this year, Mr. and I suddenly faced a very different future to the one we had envisioned: at 42 years old - and he's 55 - I found myself pregnant again. Camping after our summer trip - and I've just found out I'm pregnant As it's been seven years since D(7) was born, we really didn't expect that. We would have loved more kids soon after D, but I just never got pregnant. Seven years on, we were pretty convinced that this was our lot. Two beautiful children, we really can't complain! So we needed a bit of time to digest that. A new baby, with siblings 8 and nearly 10 years older! And Mr. would be 75 when that child was 20... the maths was mind boggling. But hey - if that was our new reality, we were going to run with it! The kids certainly were excited about it, they're old enough to understand and yes, we told them; this is a family matter. I knew there was a chance this pregnancy wouldn't work out, but we felt they had a right t...

Home Ed Questions: what about socialisation?

Last week, a reporter and cameraman from the BBC visited our house to do a feature about home education. It was great fun, a real adventure for the kids to be interviewed! The team spent 90 minutes at our house, but of course they had to condense that down to a couple of minutes for the feature, and sadly the kids' interviews didn't make the cut. (A transcript article of the feature is here ) I had put my hand up for doing this because the reporter had every intention to make this a positive piece on home education, and so it was; the premise was to try and answer why there had been such an uptick in home education in the past few years. They interviewed two mothers, probably strategically chosen: me as the one who always wanted to home educate, and the other mum as someone who felt she had to due to her son's needs. They interviewed me at length, and of course only a few seconds of that made it to the screen, but inevitably it was the part to do with social skills that th...

Will Dig Life

Search This Blog