Shifts

I think Covid has caused many people to pause and think, and change things - and not just people, but organisations too! Mr's work for example, previously insisting that all employees work at the office, has now changed permanently to allow them to choose only two days in the week to be physically there. That was always technologically possible, but only after Covid has there been the willingness to allow it.

So too for us as a family, a lot of things have shifted during the Covid months... many of them had nothing to do with Covid and it's just been how things fell in time, but others were definitely prompted by the extended time we've had to be together and to think.

Some things stay the same, but momentous changes are happening too!

I think many of these are worth a blog post of their own, but here are the main changes that have happened with us during/after the Covid months....

• We have become Catholic as a family. The kids were baptised in October 2020, and Mr. is currently attending RCIA (the course that adults go through to become Catholic) as well as having his previous marriages considered for possible annulment, so that our marriage can become convalidated. This is huge, and for me has been a long process - I had practically decided to return to Catholicism just before I met Mr. but when we got together, and he wasn't a Christian yet, I knew he would find an Alpha course much more accessible than RCIA. So when he decided to follow Jesus after the Alpha Course, I put Catholicism to one side and decided to just stay where we were... but at the end of 2019, I finally sat Mr. down and told him I could no longer carry on with any integrity. We had a long conversation, and only several months later Mr was ready to come along. In August we told our leaders at church and moved to become part of the local Catholic church: where of course due to Covid there wasn't opportunity to fellowship, and in moving away from our old church we lost our friendships there. So there's been a real sense of grief and loss.
• Coming back from Vienna this past week, Mr announced that the only way he could possibly improve his German was if we spoke German at home instead of English. That is huge!! The kids are now much more confident in German than they were before the summer, and Mr will pick up more of it in no time as we do this. It's a big change for all of us, and a challenge, but we are all very excited about it!
• We are no longer vegan. That, too, needs a blog post of its own! I was vegan for 22 years, more than half my life, so this also is a huge shift. The long and short of it is that when N (then 5) had six of her baby teeth taken out last summer due to decay, I began to question our eating habits. In the process of my reading I came across, for the first time really, criticisms of the type of dietary advice I had always taken as true... so when sometime last year, we heard about the opportunity to buy eggs from actually well treated hens (a local cooperative), we began buying and eating them. In October of last year I also started using fats, which I had been led to believe was wholesale detrimental to health. Well: since then I lost quite a bit of weight I could never shift (20kg!) without exercising, I don't feel as hungry, and I feel actually satisfied after a meal as opposed to just stuffed full. I feel good in my body for perhaps the first time ever. And that experience is in direct contrast to everything I had been led to believe was true in the research! I'm learning how to plan and prepare nourishing, wholesome food for the family. It's a huge learning curve, but like all the other changes, absolutely the right thing to do.
• At one point during the lockdown, Mr said to me, let's talk about where we want to be in five years' time. He had just lost out on a great voluntary redundancy offer at his job because he was too young to take it, and that prompted his thinking - once he can stop working, what do we do? We thought long and hard; leaving the country was our first thought, now with Brexit chaos just about to bite, but we can't leave his parents who aren't willing to consider an international move (and he is their only child, so responsibility is clearly ours). Home education in the UK is another reason for staying, the freedom we have here is simply unmatched! But, his parents live half an hour's drive on the motorway away: too far for us to be of much use to them spontaneously or on a daily basis, should the need arise. So we decided to look at moving us all, including my in-laws, to south Wales, just across the Channel from here. House prices are lower there and there's also a great home ed community. This isn't set in stone but it's loosely what we're aiming for in the next five years or so.

So there you have it. Long blog posts are in order for some of these shifts in our lives, but I need time to sit down and write those out! But as we go into the new "school year" (not-school year!) living what feels like a totally different lifestyle, it seemed right to put it all out there now. After all, this blog is primarily a record for my children to look back onto, so here it is, this is what we did and when we did it and why. Though more on the whys is yet to be written, of course.