Skip to main content

2021: our year

This is the yearly roundup post - as I've done almost every year for 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016 seems to be skipped as I got to grips with mothering two little ones, and 2015.

So what's 2021 been like for us? After the enforced slowdown of 2020, Covid is still with us as I write: so much for the initial 2-week duration initially given! Wearing masks has become normal, gatherings are infrequent, and when they do happen we've become used to keeping a bit of a distance. Clapping for carers has given way to a jaded, tired distance kept by most people... I lament that very much, but there's hope for new beginnings this coming Spring even as we seem to be headed for another lockdown just after Christmas, thanks to Omicron.

But, let's look back. We really didn't do much extraordinary stuff in the first half of the year - I stayed busy working mostly when Mr. wasn't working (evenings!) and much of what we used to do with the kids still wasn't on. So we met up with friends outdoors a lot, or just went out by ourselves, or stayed home: which I have become way more comfortable with. I think that's one lasting effect of Covid on our home in particular, my ability and willingness to spend an entire day at home, which I never used to before. 

In May, we bought four chickens rescued from a commercial 'free-range' farm. They came to us half bald and very scared, but within a couple of weeks became very cheeky, happy girls who each laid an egg every day! Sadly, one died after about six weeks, but the rest continued going strong and we decided to get a few more after the summer.



The big thing we looked forward to throughout the first half of 2020 was, of course, the long stay in Vienna (blog posts here). And it was everything we could have hoped for. Escape from the chaos of British Covid (the Austrian response to it seemed so much more organised and rational), an actual summer with heat and lots of swimming (it was so hot - mid-30's - that we spent almost every day by the water!), and the kids picked up so much German! Afterwards, Mr. said that the only way we'll be able to maintain this gain, and for him to become more fluent, is for us to speak German at home as a family.

In the Danube

To be honest, the good intention of that has gradually worn off - it's just hard, with everyone around us speaking English! - but we've made good friends with another home educating family who are German and whenever we meet with them we speak German. There's also a weekly meet-up of German families now. I'm probably most to blame for not maintaining it: I just struggle to have the patience! But, it's certainly another New Year's resolution to get back to speaking German as our family language. Particularly as we've already booked to go to Vienna for six weeks in 2022 as well!

When we got back from Vienna, re-entry really felt like 'back to school': it was September, and all the usual clubs started up again. Now the kids are busy with regular weekly things like the Home Edders Co-operative, Gymnastics, Lego Club, lots of outdoor meetups and walks. Things aren't back to normal, but what is normal anyway? 

Cooking at the Co-operative

I wish all our friends a wonderful, worry-free and well Christmas time. 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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 ...
1 comment
Read more

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...
2 comments
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more