Something Goes Right

 Something Goes Right

One day, about a week ago, I left the trio with my Mum and walked to the post office to post a parcel to America. It is not far, no more than a 2 mile round trip; I was home within 40 minutes but you know it felt like a holiday. When I arrived back home I felt totally refreshed as if it had been a fortnight package tour to Spain.

This is the hardest thing to convey about home education. The alwaysness, the constantness, the being the adult with responsibility all the time, no ladies that lunch or relaxing coffees with old friends. No "Kiss and Drop" as the car park as a nearby primary school instructs. Even I who has an uber supportive TDO, fabulous grandparents and can afford to pay for extra help here and there can be overwhelmed by the intensity of it all sometimes. My trio don't know about putting your hand up or taking your turn as number 25 in queue for the teacher's attention. I can explain to them that this is what happens out there but they are used to Mummy always there. It is so very different and, as a consequence, so are their expectations.

You see these are the days I'd often think I'd rather not blog and, last year, when I said I wouldn't lots of regular readers contacted me and said my honesty was the main thing they liked about the blog. How I wasn't afraid to say I cried. And that it gave them a realistic impression of what home education can be like.

Well, I haven't cried today, but it hasn't been easy. Mostly because of the day it wasn't. We weren't at the Little Conference where, up until recently, I had thought we might be, we weren't welcoming TDO home from a business trip to America because it was cancelled and I forgot about an LLL Board of Directors Skype call. Caught up in the in the momentness of it all.

Instead, the trap of equating a Sunday at home with relaxing fooled me again and E suffered from any lack of structure or direction in his day (he likes at least a rough idea of what might happen even if it doesn't) and his behaviour, in turn, exhausted the patience of us all. He, as I have written before, is our family barometer, reading the pressure of everyone around and providing them with a read out whether or not they require one.

That said there have been some high highs today. Watching the trio lying down at the park cloud spotting, talking doll house design with S, S discovering it is our 9th wedding anniversary next week and deciding to make us something secret in pottery from DAS, E drawing us his plans for a tree House and doing some great, spontaneous, reading. O playing contentedly with his cars in the garden for an hour, harvesting and preserving a further harvest of soft fruits ready for a winter vitamin dose.

But, as was a theme a year or more ago, it matters little when the car crash millisecond leaves you unable to forgive, forget and move on. Reading back through old blog posts I see I have come a long way, generally ahead of the game, distracting and encouraging, making peace with the fact it is not the youngest of my crew that requires the majority of my attention most of the time. The wonderful thing about building up the blog history is that I can see that. de-briefing and de-schooling has happened and the recovery time is much faster and, most important of all, there is not one single sum that would be improved with school in the equation. Family First.

 E (5) designs a tree house for the garden

 S (7) draws out the doll house she would like to make

 O (3) is really into pop up books at the moment. The great thing about being the youngest of three is that we already have a collection.

 Designing lego minifigures in real life

 and on a new app on the tablet called Cool Legos

This is a beautiful song by a man with a sublime voice but this one was a very close second

Thinking About You

"A Tornado flew around my room..."