I found this old blog that I naively started with a bit of trepidation and lots of enthusiasm and a bit of good faith and true to form it lasted a week and then was forgotten about forever.
Reading it all back feels like an actual life time ago and I can’t even begin to comprehend how much life we’ve fitted in since then.
Bohan is now 7. He’s a fierce reader, is absolutely convinced he’s going to be a ninja when he grows up and is a massive softie under his boyish roughness.
Romy is 5. She is the boss of the family by a country mile. She walks to the beat of her own drum. She’s so wonderfully chatty and friends without any judgement and when she grows up she wants to be a dog.
And we’ve had another little one join the ranks. Soren. He’s 14 months old and nurses and sleeps like the other two did which means I’ve seen every hour of every day for 14 months! His personality is something else and I think he’s definitely our joy maker over here. He’s super funny and we can usually find him throwing shapes by the Alexa!
Jamie and I also got married!!! Which was a huge thing and made us such a strong unit. I’m so happy he’s my husband. It feels wonderful that we’re all Forrest’s now!
*there was also possibly a global pandemic in the middle of all this and while I might scribble about it one day I’m kind of done on it.*
We’ve turned our attention from wonderfully whimsical countryside semi-structured home ed to feral fly by the seat of your pants Worldschooling – and I’m pleased as punch. It’s a whole different outlook but honestly, since Bohan turned 4 and Romy in turn became “of age” – our education has chopped and changed and morphed so many times.
Whenever anyone asks me to label our education I always say tidal (which is a phrase I heard in a home ed Facebook group) Our ethos ebbs and flows with the tides. Mine and Bohan’s need for structure is also our Achilles heel so we have to figure out the happy medium (which we’re pretty incapable of doing) so we start out very structured. All the plans. And then very soon it’s obvious that it doesn’t serve us so we start moving away from that slowly, we spend a good week or 4 in the sweet spot and then start spiralling into child-led/unschool/whatever happens happens education. I see so many merits in all the different styles but sticking to one rigidly is impossible for me and for the children. This constant flow of changing things around actually works (they’re both learning and they’re engaged and I’m proud of them) and as long as we don’t edge too far one way or another then it’s fine. If that does happen I have a very reliable gut that doesn’t let me settle when something isn’t working for us.
So right now I’m writing this from Bansko, Bulgaria where we’ve been for 10 weeks or so. Snuggled next to the youngest Forrest trying to sit with the naggy gut that’s telling me it’s time for a bit more structure. (We’ve been travelling around the last week and the children have learned so much and I am hoping to write about what they have been doing – but the structure has gone out of the window and it’s making me uneasy.)
So that’s a big update from the last time I lay in a bed with a baby attached to me and wrote some stuff. It was a joy to read about those first days of fully home educating and not only seeing how far we’ve come and how much has changed but also remembering how passionate and excited I was for this journey. I’m going to take some of that old Emma and inject her into tomorrow. We probably won’t be foraging for fresh fruits to make baked goods (we don’t have an oven in our apartment here.) but who knows, maybe we’ll sing a Waldorf verse and have some read aloud time.
