Early Days of Summer

It feels like summer has finally arrived, and as we'll shortly be off to Vienna for summer proper, it feels right to put into a blog post the events of the past few weeks. Since D's birthday in May, we've been up to quite a few things...

Camping

Only this past weekend, we took our way-too-underused campervan to the Gower for a long weekend. Wales being Wales, there were times of wet and windy cold, but we also had some glorious sunshine and fun on the beach.

Hours of rockpooling fun

Local outings

We were also blessed with some stunning days for local days out, dog walks and grandparent visits...

Look what Cody found!

Barefoot trail

National Space Centre

The weather hasn't been all that nice every day; and when I had work near Leicester one Saturday, it was pretty drizzly and horrible. Luckily, Mr. and the kids came along to spend the day at the National Space Centre, which they much enjoyed.

First Holy Communion for D (8)

Last but definitely not least, D had his First Holy Communion! After which, we sadly had to say goodbye to our beloved priest, who was called away from our parish to become Dean of the Cathedral. We had a temporary priest after that for a few weeks, until our new one could come - we'll meet him only once, this Sunday, but then we are off to Vienna. Still, I'm glad our old priest was able to be there for D's First Holy Communion - he's seen us through their baptisms, our marriage convalidation, N's FHC, and now D's. That is beautiful.

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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...

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