a bit about us

My 4 blessings

So, I think my husband and the cat may have got tired of me ranting and raving about my philosophies, thoughts, fears, insecurities, excitments and inpirations about the best way for kids to learn. I mean, it gets pretty monotonous when I tend to go around in circles, flotsam and jetsam all other place.

I also get very passionate on occasion, often manifesting in a long squawly scree on someone's message feed 😳

Oh my, I thought 🤔... time to start a blog!

Here I can freely rant and rave to my hearts content what is going on in my headspace and nobody has to read it! Win win 👌 

This is like my online diary about my homeschooling, unschoooling.... whatever schooling... life with my family. My kids are not 0, 2, 4 and 6 anymore. There's 4 of the gorgeousnesses and they are sort of... older now (I miss those baby days like I miss the sun on a winters day but the difference is the sun comes back and those baby days don't. Its an acceptance stage in progress and I will just leave it at that).

My children were born in 05, 07, 09 and 12. Two girls, then a boy, then another girl. Our homeschooling journey has been long and meandering to say the least. I found unschooling when my eldest daughter was 8, after trying and failing school at home. It was like a light bulb moment when I realised that school is for school and home is for home and never the twain shall meet ⚡🌠.  Boom!💥

Fast forward a few years and my two eldest blessings wanted to try school in Year 5 and year 7. I didn't care for year levels but that's what school uses so for ease of understanding I have written it like that here. I thought well, school is as much of a learning resource as anything else and I didn't see the point in preventing them from experiencing it. They were curious and they wanted to make more friends.

It suited my eldest and she wanted to stay, while my second daughter found it to be an anxiety provoking experience and she pleaded to come home again after a year. She stayed another 1.5 years before I pulled her out.

My third blessing was a different story and this is the least "unschooling" thing we have done, if such a "thing" even exists. We chose to put him into school at the start of year 3. Why? Well, he has 3 sisters and we wanted him to have some boy mates. It was a gut thing, largely. But by mid way through year 4 his school refusal and anxiety hit a peak 😟😬😭 and he came home again.

Our 4th blessing? Well, she has never been to school. She's happy learning at home for the moment. 

That is a brief history minus the complexities and circumstances that were involved across the years that contributed to the choices that were made. That could take pages!

Here I start this online journal from where we are now. I have 3 children  who don't go to school.  They live and learn as if school does not exist. I have one teen who does go to school. She is an extrovert and enjoys being with her friends on a daily basis.  She likes her work being  graded, she likes the structure and knowing what's expected and she wants to graduate from an actual physical school with her friends. Truth be told I think she always would have enjoyed school. However,  I think she has a solid sense of self and a maturity that might be because she had all those years at home to establish these things before the voices of the outside world could get in.  I don't know.  Maybe it's her character. For now we are flowing with what works. For her, school seems to work.

I don't like labels but from the outside looking in I guess we would fit somewhere between an unschooler - who has just as many moments of panic that they're not meeting any standards and not doing what they "should" be doing as moments of rejoicing in their natural learning through any medium including technology - and a homeschooler who has daily challenges of being unable to properly implement any type of schooly anything because they are too busy with their own interests 😳🤔😬

It's a constant see-saw. A conundrum. Its why I need to rant and rave, so I can find my truth.

I plan to record here the things that worked for us in the hope that readers might find inspiration. You should know that I am messy,  have many of the characteristics of adhd, I am plagued daily by self doubt and fears that I am enough or that we are doing enough.

So, my wins are a celebration that I want to share because for every step forward I tend to have two back 😆 and may be that's the learning journey for us all - its never linear, and a constant test of my courage,  faith and self esteem.

I hope maybe you too might find a place to feel heard and understood here as I share my joys and my pains, my fears and my hopes. Only through sharing our vulnerability can we find connection. On a deep level I know I can't possibly be the only one who feels like Robinson Crusoe on his parenting and homeschool journey👭

I would love to hear your story too ☕