Back to routine (but not school)

-

There are lots of 'back-to-school' photos floating around Facebook at the moment, and of course we have no such pictures to share. 

I'm excited to get back to a routine, though - since July, we've been in summer mode (Vienna for six weeks, then Norway) and it was awesome again, but I've definitely arrived at a point where settling back in my own house, doing largely the same things week-to-week, sounds very very attractive! 

So, as I look ahead into the just-starting 'school year': what are our plans?

Well, we kicked things off with the annual Home Edders camp: a rather wet one this time, but the kids weren't deterred - one night they even created a mud slide and came back absolutely soaking, mud covered, and glowing with joy! And everyone deepened old friendships and found new ones too. A few pictures...

Marshmallow 'stache!

Lots of dogs at camp this year

Marshmallow toasting

In the camper

But, now we're back home, it's all systems go for the year ahead. Among our regular activities, we'll have....

  • The home ed co-operative we've been part of for a few years now
  • N(9) continues with guitar, D(8) begins learning the piano
  • N continues playing football
  • D continues with St John's Badgers
  • And new this year, they'll attend a home ed 'setting' (not a school, but a focused weekly group of home educated children) - it's such a blessing that there are so many home ed children in our city, so there's a corresponding wealth of activities on offer!

I'll be working at university this year, supporting a PhD student, two days a week. One of those days the kids will spend with the grandparents, and the second day is when they'll be at the setting. How they like that remains to be seen, and if we need to change things around I'm sure we'll find a way; my philosophy is always to offer many different experiences, encouraging them to stick with it for a reasonable enough time to see if they grow to like it... but if they don't, we will adjust. That's what we did with Karate, which D sadly never warmed to despite months of trying.

This year I will also focus more again on living liturgically, marking seasons and special days, walking in the rhythm of the Church. We have a new priest at our parish, and look forward to seeing what he brings; one thing I'm very excited about is the possibility of having an 'All Saints Party' at the end of October, where all the kids will dress up as their favourite Saint!

So as the days draw in, nights grow longer, we've put proper duvets on the beds again, and life returns to a rhythmic routine - that is where lives are shaped, in the everyday. And I'm here for it.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Home Ed Questions: what about socialisation?

-
Image
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
Read more

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

-
Image
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
Read more

2023: Our Year

-
Image
This is the yearly roundup post - as I've done almost every year for 2022 ,  2021 ,  2020 ,  2019 ,  2018 ,  2017 , 2016 seems to be skipped as I got to grips with mothering two little ones, and  2015 . 2023 was, for us, a year of highlights and milestones as well as getting on with life and growing.  Milestones This year, Mr. and I were married for the third (!) time, almost exactly ten years after we first tied the knot. Some of the background (and lots more pictures) about this is here  - in short, our three weddings were firstly the Register Office legal wedding that only Mr.'s parents attended as witnesses; secondly the church wedding at City Church where we invited everyone, also in 2013; and now, finally, following the annulment of Mr's previous marriages, we made our marriage sacramental by having it convalidated in the Catholic Church. 2023 was also the year that saw N(9)'s First Holy Communion. A beautiful celebration of her now being old enough to understand
Read more