Memories to Treasure

As we enter a New Year ready to be filled with memories, I, like so many bloggers, have been looking back at the past year.  I sometimes write A peek into my day posts, I thought it would be fun to use similar prompts to look back at last year. 

Outside my window

I am so blessed to live in a beautiful place, I will never tire of the view from my window.  Each and every time I open my curtains to greet the outside world, I never know what I am going to see.  A grey dull day with low cloud obscuring my view, a cold and icy winter morning which is slowly waking up, the moon still shining brightly catching the first rays of winter sun, the green haze of spring or the beautiful colour palette of autumn.  Every single one catches your breath with its beauty.

We finally got new neighbours, they moved in a year, almost to the day, since our previous neighbour died.  We were a little baffled as to why it took so long for renovation work to start as we had thought the house had been sold back in February.  It turns out the sellers never sorted probate, to transfer the house to their names, after their mother died three years ago.  It seems they were selling a house that did not actually legally belong to them.  By mid August it was all sorted and renovation work started in earnest, for two months there was a lot of noise and bustle but all is quiet now.  It is bittersweet to have different neighbours, we are glad someone is living in the house, but it is tinged with sadness as a reminder that our beloved neighbour is no longer with us.  We really noticed last Winter that the heating was off, our house was noticeably cooler the heat drifting into the unheated space next door, our house is the middle of a terrace

It felt like we had four proper distinct seasons last year.  Sometimes spring, summer and autumn can all feel the same as the temperatures don't rise enough to distinguish summer from the seasons either side, the extra hours of daylight the only differentiation.  The warm and sunny summer meant that my garden produced plenty of vegetables for us, we don't have enough space to be self sufficient, but there is nothing like a home grown salad freshly picked and eaten immediately.  We found a CD with photos of the garden when we moved in, I had been searching for those pictures earlier in the year and finally found them when we were decluttering last week.  A computer died on us about sixteen years ago and took two years worth of photos with it, luckily we had shared many photos with family members so we got them back but had clearly not got round to putting them back on our current PC.  It made me realise, seeing those old photos, how much work we have put into our garden .

The dramatic rise in energy bills has galvanised us into increasing the number of solar PV panels we have in an attempt to reduce our bills slightly.  We already have solar water heating panels on the roof of our house which fill it front and back so we are making use of the garage and workshop roof for solar PV panels.  We already had a few up there which have been using to provide electricity for the garage and workshop, but we are in the middle of installing an array of 24 panels to give us a greater supply.  We have a friend who is an electrician who is going to wire them into our mains feed so that we can supplement the supply we pay for. It may also be time to find a suitable place for a small wind turbine which we have talked about for years.

I am thankful

I have had so many things to be thankful for this past year, I am sure I could write a post entirely about that.  We had a wonderful family gathering in March, our first in years.  It was lovely to spend a few days with my niece, all my nephews, siblings and parents, I very much hope we can find a time to do it again this year.

I continued to embrace rest and pausing during the year, making more space for it in my life.  I started off taking afternoon naps, something I shall continue this winter, it felt good to have this as part of my hibernation.  Even when lift got crazy busy in the summer there was still time for pausing, a different kind of rest to that which I was taking in the Winter but a rest none the less.  This is a legacy of lockdowns that I want to continue with for years to come.

I have some wonderful friends in my life, their friendship has carried me through many a time this past year, when I needed a listening ear there was always one available.  Those tough moments in our life are always so much more bearable when we have someone to help us through.

In my kitchen

I started making sourdough again, creating a starter and keeping it going.  I watched a lovely series on the internet which gave me a new found confidence and improved my loaves no end.  

In those weeks when I have a little more time to plan our menus I have made sure to get out recipe books that I have not used for a while to search for old favourites that I have forgotten about.  What that reminded me is that I am making recipes from those books.  When I cook something often enough I can then cook it from memory so those books which I don't think I am cooking from are getting used all the time, from my head. 

The slow cooker has become my new oven and gets used far more, a bonus as it is so much cheaper than turning the oven on.  I have had a couple of fails but in the main I have managed to wing it to adapt oven based recipes to great success.  What that means is that I have to be highly organised on the rare days that I do use the oven to make bread and cakes neither of which I have tried in the slow cooker as I am not sure if that is possible.  Perhaps that is something I should look into for this year.

I have created

Almost all the creating this year has felt like it was for fundraising, with the exception of several pairs of socks, I have knitted one hat, a pair of mittens and two jumpers which is a very short list of finished projects for me.  I did not do much fundraising knitting just a mountain of dish cloths, it is a little slow to be a good use of time in relation to the funds you can raise.  Small items tend to sell better, we have found, even small knitted items take time.

It is the same with sewing, I completed one project, a basket, which was a present for a friend, I started but have not finished a picnic blanket, and Alice and I have started making her a rucksack.  Fundraising sewing was making needle cases out of old felted jumpers and scraps of fabric from my stash.  

We were lucky enough to invited to join some home educating families on a few day courses to make jewellery, willow baskets and a stained glass hanging it was lovely to be able to have a go at these things, guided by a professional, without having to buy in all the equipment ourselves.  I have long realised that are a lots of things I would love to do but simply don't have the time to devote to them all, so attending a day course is a great compromise.

We made a mountain of clay Christmas decorations most of which sold, they were a great return for the time and cost of making them, a three pound block of clay made over a 100 which we sold for 50p - £1 depending on the size.  We have also made some daisy chains which did not sell at Christmas markets but hopefully will sell at stalls in the coming months.

We also did a lot of needle felting, this is another creative project that does not take a lot of time and has a good return for the cost of making them.  We felted numerous hearts which we made into garlands changing the colours with the seasons as we went through the year.  For the Christmas markets we made small star garlands.  We have sold about 30 heart garlands (that was 90 hearts in total) and ten star (that was 50 stars in total).

I have been

I haven't travelled a great distance this year despite driving many miles a week, it is all close to home.  We travelled in March to our family gathering that I mentioned above, we accompanied Cameron on his D of E expedition in a neighbouring county and returned there a few months later to assess another group both of which were a lovely few days of exploring the area with Alice.  We visited my mother in law twice once in the summer and a second visit that ended up being squished between Christmas Day and a commitment on the 29th.  The arrangements for both of these visits were less than ideal, I am not sure where the communication is breaking down but I have realised I need to be more on it with making sure that they are nailed down water tight at the earliest opportunity.  When you get invited for Christmas and then get told in December that that does not include Christmas Day as other arrangements have been made, as they also have on the 29th, a one full day visit is a rather short and expensive, for a 600 mile return journey.  

We had a wonderful family holiday a few miles from home, I realise that my intention to blog about that did not happen, lost in the busyness of the summer months.  We have become very last minute about organising husbands time of work, usually shoe horning it at the last minute between other commitments.  I am thinking that it would be better if we got some dates in the diary now and then other plans can be made round them, family life needs to come first.

I am remembering

My beloved Great Aunt who died earlier this year at the age of 104 and a half.  She lived a seven hour drive from me, not a journey I managed to make that often.  Our annual visits for the last thirteen years have been an important part of our year.  I have missed making that trip this year.  She was the most wonderful story teller remembering times in her life from so very many years ago.  Her memory never faded, my memories of her will never fade, she is our link to an earlier very different time.  I am blessed to have a photo of her as a toddler with my granny and their mother, my great grandmother, taken in 1920, it used to sit at the top of the stairs in her house so is also a memory of my time spent with her.

I had been blogging for ten years this year an anniversary that passed me by in February,  I have had several long pauses in that time so I may only have about five years worth of posts.  This is post number 906.  I love reading back over old posts, not just to see what we were up to but so that I can see how much my writing has changed over that time.

I have read

I am not one for keeping lists of the books I have read, I have no idea how many books I have actually read this year.  Looking at the books in the house I was not quite sure what I have finished reading this year and what I might have actually read last year.  I did not visited a library in 2022 so I know that if I have read a book it will be in the house somewhere.  What I can say with confidence is that I did not read a single work of fiction this year.  Highlights for me were Hand Wash Cold: Care Instructions for an Ordinary Life by Karen Maezen Miller, Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard, Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake and Mothers of Invention by Katherine Marcel.

Around the house

We have done very little work inside the house this year, a couple of new shelves and other tweaks.  I wanted to do more decluttering in 2022 and boy did I manage that.  I went round the house slowly room by room, removing things that we had not touched for years.  Cupboards and other spaces were emptied out and sometimes completely reutilised as the entire contents were no longer needed.  There were many spaces that were not touched or need revisiting this year too.  Decluttering is an ongoing job and one which I am loving doing.

Along side the decluttering I am still using the same method for keeping the house clean that I started at the beginning of 2020.  I often take breaks when the whole family is home but as I know I will be picking it back up again when the holidays are over it matters not that the house is ignored for a few days or weeks.  The premise of this method is that you have daily jobs, thirty minutes a day on one room a day for four days of the week and then one day a week when you focus on a deeper clean on one of your rooms on rotation.  My days of the week and the jobs I do are very different from the inspiration for this method but they work for me and that is the important thing isn't it.  I very much had a love hate relationship with house work before finding this inspiration, I wanted to do it but hated the tasks so never got started.  Breaking it down like this is perfect for me which is why I am still doing it three years later.  It is now a habit and an integral part of my morning routine.

Favourite quotes 

I am a sporadic collator of quotes, I have a few that I keep in the front of my diary and transfer from year to year.  I did not write many down this year, I thought I had more but this is all I could find.

We can't change our history but we can change our relationship with it.  

These are words that I have read on repeat this year to remind myself that things that happened in my past were not my fault.  Like a big hug, which we all need sometimes.

The thing that screws us up the most is the picture of how it is supposed to be, what if we deleted that, the idea of that, and we just looked at what is and found it to be enough.

I heard these words on a podcast and pressed the rewind button so many times to listen to them again and again before realising that I needed them to be written down.  They were spoken by Glennon Doyle.  These words have reframed things for me completely and when I find myself reverting to the unachievable picture these words pop into my head as a reminder that that is a less than helpful place to go to.

Enjoy the little things in life because one day you will look back and realise they were the big things.

A friend shared these words with me as she had found them to be a comfort to her.  She didn't write them and I have seen them written elsewhere too.  In the last few years I know that I have changed my focus a lot and one of the things that gets more of my time is those seemingly little things.

Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret.

I went on a course many years ago, which spent some time looking at the impact of our actions on others.  I don't remember much about the rest of the course but that part has continued to stay with me.  I always try to be careful about the words I use around others to ensure that I don't cause harm or hurt, I also accept fully when I have done that to others.   I have been on the receiving end of messages that were written in this vain in this past year, if I had written a reply immediately it would have come from the heart not the head, writing and speaking when emotions are running high is never wise and invariably leads to pain.  Pausing and reflecting is the only way I can respond rather than react.

I have learnt

I rekindled my Duolingo account, after a long hiatus, at the end of 2021 after watching many films in Swedish and wanting to learn some of the language.  I managed it for a few lessons and then my limited knowledge of the intricacies of grammar in English meant I had to stop so I switched back to French.  I am lucky to have an old Duolingo account which was set up in 2012 so I get to make as many mistakes as I like as I have unlimited lives, you have to subscribe to get that on an account now.  I received some stats at the end of November which told me how much I have learned in the previous year, I don't remember receiving this before or maybe it was switching to the app on my phone that meant I was a lucky recipient.  Duolingo is learning done in isolation but alongside millions of other users worldwide, you can, if you want, be a part of league tables but I found them to be too distracting so turned them off on my profile.  I was somewhat surprised to learn that I was in the top 6% of language learners on the platform, I didn't think I used it that much with only a lesson per day, I spent an astonishing 4756 minutes (that is 79 hours) learning 1422, new to me, French words.  The few minutes each day add up it would seem.

When Alice secured a place as part of our County's contingent to travel to the World Scout Jamboree taking place later this year I knew that we were in for many hours of fundraising.  I had organised very little fundraising before so it has been a steep learning curve for me and all my fellow parents.  I think by the time we have raised the full amount we will be experts in what works and what doesn't.  The things that you think will be big earners have turned in to big flops and those that you cannot imagine will raise much end up being the best and easiest.  We are nearly there and need to keep going this year to get to our total, I feel sure we can do it and I know I will miss this part of my life when we get to that point.

Not long before Alice secured her place to attend the Jamboree I stepped up to become a Scout Leader myself.  My unit is the one for older teenagers, 14-18 year olds, we call them Explorer Scouts in the UK.  I have been volunteering on and off for this unit for the last twenty odd years but doing a little bit now and then is very different to being the leader.  I am so lucky to have the support of two very dear friends both of whom have years of scouting experience between them.  It was very time consuming at first as I often had to look things up before doing anything, I also wanted to set up my own systems which again takes time.  They always say that your first year in anything new is about learning and your second is about consolidation, this definitely rings true with me and I feel so much more confident with what I am doing now.  There have been moments when I have wondered what I have taken on but I know that learning about this role and learning about fundraising and all the time that consumes, at the same time, was not ideal but I am through the other side now.

I have long wanted to have more spontaneity in my life and be ok with it, to not be controlling and planning everything to be totally watertight.  Life is not like that.  I tried a bit more spontaneity in our lives over the summer last year and it felt ok, in fact it felt more than ok, it felt good.  I really enjoyed the flow our lives had at that time.  I know that I could not be like that all the time and that is ok too, the balance of a bit of it now and then is enough for me.

I have listened

I love listening to Podcasts, they are my own curated radio station these days.  I cannot remember the last time I switched on the radio to listen to a programme.  I could not have imagined writing that a few years ago when the radio was my aural wallpaper from waking up to going to sleep.  I listen to huge variety of podcasts from current affairs such as politics, the environment, LGBTQ+, book reviews, comedy, music, my local countryside and many more besides.  Stand out favourites this year were the wonderful candid interviews on Call me Mother, I hope there is another series this year.  The monthly seasonal podcast released on the first of each month As the Season Turns, it is a cornucopia of interesting information about the natural world.  The fascinating and witty Stories of Scotland which explores Scotland's nature, culture and heritage, each episode is completely different but well researched and a joy to listen to.  I am so grateful to all the folks who give up their time to make podcasts available to us completely free, I donate to some of them to support their work which I hugely appreciate.  

I have not listened to as much music this year, I have some downloaded on my phone but tend to listed to Podcasts when I am driving.  I listed to Spotify at home but don't have it on my phone so can't have it on when out and about.  I often have Spotify on in the evenings when I am reading things online.  They kindly created a playlist for me of my 101 top listen to songs this year, all six hours 35 mins worth, I think some at the bottom have probably had two or three listens, so it is stretching it a bit.  I don't know how many hours I listened to those at the top of the list as I don't have the mobile app, but I do know that my top three songs were, Painter by Låpsley, Roses by George Taylor and Burned by Love by Juke Ross, I know that I listened to these alot, they were amongst a set of songs that I found towards the beginning of the year and made up, along with fifteen or so others, into a playlist which became my go to songs in the evenings.  The artist that featured the most in the list was Blanco White closely followed by Tones and I, two completely different musicians both of which I love.

I am looking forward to

The diary is already looking busy for the coming months, weekends are filling up fast, we blocked out some time to travel to spend with friends who live way south of us, an old school friend for me and a friend who has moved there for Alice, we are looking forward to these days with them.

We are in the process of finding another big house to rent for a few days for another extended family gathering, we need fourteen beds so they are few and far between.  I very much hope that we get something organised again as it was such a lovely long weekend last year.

A few plans for 2023

I don't usually make resolutions for the year, or come up with a word, although I love to read about others doing both, they don't work for me.  I have a few intentions which I am hoping I can make into habits or make happen this year.

I want to make time for my friends, to arrange calls or meeting up face to face.  I always think this will just happen but time drifts by and it doesn't, life is such that I need to be more intentional about making this happen rather than just hoping it will.  My visit to my old school friend is the start of that.  I have already made contact with few other friends whom I don't see or speak to often to see if we can arrange a date for a catch up chat.

Alice had a hard year last year with her oldest friend going off to school which was difficult enough but much exacerbated with a total lack of support extended to her, from them, as she worked through that transition.  She started to feel ready to make new connections at the end of last year and we tentatively started attending a new group.  We have reached out to a new family and hope that we can meet in the coming weeks, she is nervous about this, the lingering effects of last year's events.

Alice and I started doing sewing every week at the end of last year and once we have completed the project we are currently working on we want to make clothes.  I got a book of patterns for Christmas and am looking forward to doing this with her during the year.

I have mentioned my morning routine earlier in this post, another part of that is my daily yoga practice.  On the days when I need to be out of the house earlier I don't manage to fit this in as I am not prioritising it.  When one day becomes three and then more, I really notice the ripple effect of this on the rest of my life.  I want to make sure that I don't miss more than one day in a week during the year this year.  I am also going to restart a journal this year as I know that this will help me to support my yoga, amongst other things.

My last intention is another thing that I have neglected and that is making and eating more fermented food.  I regularly used to make sauerkraut, chutney and pancake mix amongst other things.  I have a lovely fermented food recipe book which I want to start looking through every month to inspire me to try new things.  I know that my gut is in a much healthier place than it has been in the past, my Chrohns Disease has been in remission for 18 years now, but it it is important to look after your gut all the time not just at those times when it needs a bit of extra support.

Thank you so much for reading this very long post.  Thank you to all my lovely readers and those of you that have commented in this past year, I am grateful to you all.  I very much look forward to reading along with you all in 2023, which I hope is a year filled with memories to treasure for you all.

I will leave you with a poem to start your year:

May love and laughter light your days and warm you heart and home,

May good and faithful friends be yours, wherever you may roam,

May peace and plenty bless your world with joy that long endures,

May all life's passing seasons bring the best to you and yours.

Learning to embrace Spontaneity

We are well and truly into the throes of Autumn here, weather that changes from gloomy grey, heavy showers and bright blue skies all in the space of a few hours.  It keeps you on the toes and you never quite know what clothes to wear.  If the sun is out it can be really warm but the second it goes behind a cloud it is baltic.   I always feel like it takes longer to get out of the house at this time than it does in the depths of Winter when many layers are an absolute must.  You never quite know which coat to wear, if at all, do I need a waterproof? hat? gloves?  I usually end up packing them all into a bag which they invariably never leave, but I know that that one occasion I don't is when I will need them.

For the second or maybe third year running, I have not been keeping track, my sunflowers have decided that this is a good time for them to burst into flower.  Whilst most other plants in the garden are dying back, they are blooming away, a burst of sunshine amongst the decay.  I am hopeless at growing flowering plants, I think they collude behind my back, but this waiting until it turns cold before flowering, whilst rather wonderful and cheery is also a little baffling.  Perhaps I should just stick to edibles, they seem a little easier to master.

We have slowly found our groove with a rhythm gradually evolving and revealing itself as we find our feet with a new college timetable to work around.  Cameron is totally settled into his new course, Alice is still trying to find her way.  She is really missing being part of a group of friends, we are looking at ways to make that possible.  She is not ready for too many new things, they feel just a little too much right now, the recent changes have not yet settled for her.

As we have transitioned into our Autumn rhythms, I have also been reflecting back on the Summer.  It was a super busy one this year, maybe a little too full at times but I did love each and every one of the things we did.  The heat, the sunshine, feel like a distant memory now.

My house was very neglected for a few months.  I usually do cleaning and tidying as part of my morning rhythm, this was totally abandoned for most of the summer.  The laundry was about the only thing that got regular attention, the kitchen surfaces stayed clean and I waved a cloth at the bathroom when things looked bad.  I was pleased that I did not notice the dust bunnies having a merry party in plain sight.  They were invisible until I started my morning clean again,  I think they have mostly been moved on to new party locations.

Our summer days had a very different flow to them this year, we completely abandoned our structured learning time which we only usually stop if we are away or have guests.  As we spent most of the summer doing one or the other it is unsurprising that the days when neither were happening there was none of that going on.  On those rare days that we were at home without guests or a trip away to get ready for, we were busy just being.  Resting.  Doing whatever felt right for the day ahead, the hours slipping by so fast that it felt like breakfast was followed by tea.  Learning still goes on all the time, structured learning time is not always visible in this house, only when it is requested.

There was a time when I used to worry about those days where you did whatever felt right.  They felt wasteful as often they seemed to disappear in a flash of nothing.  I had nothing to show for them, it has taken me years to realise that you don't need something to show every single day.  Some days don't have measurable evidence of achievement, and you need those days too.  They are an important part of the balance, not everything we do needs or indeed should be measurable.  Those hidden achievements are the building blocks of life, the skills that give a foundation for life and are more important than knowing what 126x39 equals or the effect of the Romans on British society.

The summer is a time for spontaneity.  It is so much easier to get out of the house in the summer, there is no requirement for organising clothing which can take as long as you might end up being outside, it has certainly felt like that at times, especially when the children were really little.

I have always thought that I am not very good at spontaneity, it is all too easy to get into a mindset about what spontaneity is.  When we view it through the lens of other peoples life and what they get up to and the bits of their life they choose to share, it feels impossible to replicate in our own life.  Unsurprising really.  We have no ownership of it, it is like trying to fit a square peg in a round whole, it will just not fit.  When I looked at what we had been doing during the summer this year I realised it was spontaneous, it was my spontaneity, our spontaneity. It is not quite a perfect fit more a work in progress.

I didn't need things to be organised well in advance.  I said yes to many things at short notice.  I abandoned all pretence at keeping the house clean and tidy.  I had lovely days that evolved as they went along.  I went to bed when I felt like it.  I had long lie-ins.  I woke really early and went for walks.  We ate meals at random times of the day. 

I loved it, but I know that I could not be like that all the time.  I needed that space over the summer, the change, a break from the norms.  I am loving getting back into my rhythms.  I have welcomed back my mornings, filled with language learning, yoga, cleaning, breakfast, before my focused time with Alice or getting ready to go out depending on the day, like a long lost friend.  

Autumn is my favourite season.  I am totally ready for a slower pace.  I need the rest after all that spontaneity and busyness!

The shape of learning

It has been a long time since I posted anything in this space about my children's education.  I have half a post written about something else but I don't have the headspace to complete that this week, it requires thinking!  My head is a bit full at the moment.

Before I go any further I want to say that I am not against schools, my choice to home educate my children was based on their individual needs, I did not think that they would learn as they could do in a school setting.  We made the initial decision back in 2008 for Cameron and again for Alice in 2012, I am now in my thirteenth year of home educating.  

Cameron chose to continue his learning at a local college* which he started in September 2021.  This has been a huge period of adjustment for Alice and I as we get used to it only being the two of us at home.  This has followed a two year period of our lives which, like those of so many, was turned upside down and inside out by the arrival of Covid on our shores.  So many people said to me in those early days that it would not be any different for us, having to do learning at home, it was very very different and really really hard as it was for us all.  What I did not have to do was to get my children to do work that had been decided upon and organised by someone else.

Education in schools is usually based on a curriculum that has been decided on by either the school themselves or, more usually these days, by local or national government, depending on where you live.  A curriculum that covers subjects and areas of those subjects that it has been decided that children should be taught.  Who is to say that that is what children should be taught to give them a rounded education? Do they even need to be taught?  Where I live I do not have to follow the curriculum that has been decided on by my government, I could choose to teach them, but I don't.  My children choose what they want to learn and I facilitate that learning with them in ways that suit their way of learning.  

That does not mean that they spend their whole day online, gaming or watching videos of people gaming, far from it.  Today as an example, Alice started her day making her own breakfast, this was followed by piano and guitar practice and gymnastics exercises, we then went out to a new gymnastics class that a mum has set up for home educated children.  It was the first one for people to try it out, Alice loved it, it will be her second gymnastics session in the week as she also goes to one on Saturday too, she wants to do both for a bit to see how it goes.  When we got home we made dinner (lunch) together, ate it whilst playing a homemade bingo game to help her improve her multiplication skills and then cleared up together.  After dinner we reviewed the science experiments we did yesterday morning, sang a song together and I read another chapter from a book of Greek Myths to her.  I also read a chapter from our dinner time chapter book that I read every week day.

Our days flow the way they need to, depending on what we are doing.  I had talked to Alice before she decided to try the new gymnastics class as it would have an impact on how we usually do things.  It is usual for us to spend the morning at home when we have time that is focused on our main topic, at the moment this is Science, we do some maths most days, sing songs, I read to her, recite poetry, whatever Alice wants us to do together.  This is our together time, learning that is facilitated by me but always driven by Alice asking for me to do this with her.   If we go out we prefer this to be in the afternoons.

I have built up a huge range of resources over the years, we had a very structured way of doing things for a few years when they were younger.  It was requested by them so I provided it.  Alice is now doing much of what I did with Cameron at that time, adapted to suit how she learns and where she is at with her reading and writing skills.

I know when our own experience of learning has involved sitting in a classroom with a group of children being taught it is hard to imagine any other way of doing this.  I mentioned earlier that Covid had a big impact on us, before the restrictions it placed on all our lives we were out every day of the week at a group or class somewhere. We had an art class, followed by a forest school/singing group on Mondays, Piano lesson followed by a drama session at a local museum on Tuesdays, Wednesday we went to a French class in the afternoons, Thursday I ran a craft group once a month in my house, on the weeks we were not doing that we met with friends for a walk or a play, Fridays we had a day in the local town doing the weekly shop and meeting with friends in the library and then go swimming together at the town pool, Saturdays Alice had a gymnastics class in our local town.  We also met with friends to go mountain biking, for walks and storytelling workshops, we did Conservation work with local charities and were working towards two Awards one in the Arts and one based on the Environment.  In the evenings there was volunteering at Beavers for Cameron on Mondays, Scouts for Alice on Tuesdays, Archery for Cameron on Wednesdays or on Fridays once a month when he had Explorer Scouts.  It was busy but that was our life, it all stopped mid March 2020 and very little of this re-started during the two years since.  So being at home all day every day was very much not the shape of our learning or the life that we were used to.

I found ways to make things still happen when we could not meet up face to face, our beloved French class which we had been going to for five years when it stopped did move to being online.  A chance meeting with the Mum of a child who used to be in Alice's gymnastics class, who I knew taught French but had not bumped into for a long time even allowing for lockdowns, led to a new teacher and a class that we could do from home.  Lovely as our original class was it involved a lot of driving and took up most of an afternoon for a one hour class.  We are still doing that from home and Cameron can continue to learn French as we were able to fit this in around his college timetable.  

Two of the families who came to the craft group I ran moved from the area, so it was never going to be able to start up again in that format.  During lockdown we bought together a group online where we all created things together in our own homes, sometimes this was us all doing the same thing, sometimes it was based around a theme depending on what resources we all had to hand.   We have now started doing crafts with a family we meet up with once a week.  It is lovely to sit together and create, we are working on an embroidery project at the moment, we have made Christmas decorations, wee peg dolls and window stars.  In the summer months last year we met this same family for outdoor swimming in local rivers and lakes, I very much hope we can do that again this year when the weather warms up.

I feel very blessed to have been able to support my children's learning and education in the way that we have for the past twelve plus years.  I know that it is a privilege to be able to make that choice, it reduced our income considerably as I gave up work.  I started a very part time job two years ago and have added to my hours recently, as Alice gets older I will probably take on more hours of paid work.  We are not big spenders but I would gladly have gone without if we had had to, home education has enabled my children to learn what they want at their own pace.  This has been so important for Alice learning to read , although I cannot make the comparison with how she this would have been for her in a school setting I feel sure it would not have been as positive an experience for her.

You can find more posts here about the shape that learning has taken in our house over the years.

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* college in the UK is a place you would usually attend from the age of around 16 or older,  the courses are up to but not including degree level study, university is where you would go to study at degree level and higher.

Snapshots of a year

I have not been blogging much this year, being away from this space means that I take far less photos, I really wanted to do a roundup of the year post as a reminder to myself of what we got up to and I managed to find a photo of something we or I had done for each month.   So here are some of the things that I and the family have been doing this year.  

January bought us snow, lots of it, which meant that we were out sledging at every opportunity.  I love how the familiar world around you changes so much when it snows.  It becomes quieter and when the sun shines really sparkly.  The sound of snow creaking underfoot is unique to this time of year.   I do love a really cold sunny winters day when you wrap up warm and venture out.  

February is usually a grey, cold, wet month when I find myself wanting to be inside all the time, it would have been very easy to hibernate inside all month but as we were still in lockdown I was determined to get out, whatever the weather, for a daily walk somewhere.  We did have rare instances of sun, these were the only time the camera came out......

March saw the end of months of hard work by Cameron as he completed his Bronze Arts Award.  The final piece of this project was for him to run a tutorial based on the skills he had learnt for the other elements of the award.  He chose to run a tutorial on drawing cars which, as we were in lockdown at the time, had to be held online.  I wasn't sure how he manage running a tutorial, when he started this level of the award scheme he was nervous about this element.  He was totally ready for it and it was a great success, it lasted a whole hour and he had some lovely feedback from the children who joined him and their parents.  He did not dictate to the participants what kind of car they should be drawing, he just gave them tips and advice on each section related to different types of cars.  He chose to draw a vehicle himself at the same time, and the photo above is the car that he drew.

In April Alice was finally able to have the haircut that she had waited so long for.  She had mentioned back in November 2020 that she really want to have her hair cut short, at the time we were in a lockdown so I was not able to make an appointment.  When that was possible again, a few weeks later, the first appointment I could get was for January that ended up being cancelled due to another lockdown.  My lovely hairdresser who knew why Alice wanted this appointment contacted me as soon as she was able to start working again to make a date.  Alice had hair down past her waist and she wanted to donate it to a charity who make wigs for children whose hair has fallen out.  They particularly wanted donations over 30cm.  Alice donated a whopping 50cm/20 inches!  My hairdresser, who has been cutting my hair for over 20 years, would not take a penny for cutting Alice's hair she was so impressed with what Alice was doing for someone else less fortunate than her.

May was a rather chilly and blustery month with a fair amount of rain.  It is Alice's birthday month and she really wanted to camp with her friends this year.  She was not able to meet with anyone last year and was hopeful that she could get to spend time with friends whatever the weather threw at us.  It ended up being a very wet cold night but they still had a wonderful time.  They had a wonderful evening together cooking tea before the weather broke.  I am not sure that much sleeping happened as they all looked very tired when we went to pick them up!  Alice's best friend lives on a small farm and they were able to camp there, they had amazing views from their tent.  I am so glad that she got to spend her birthday with friends this year.

After a chilly blustery May,  June was much warmer and sunnier.  My husband had booked a weeks leave and it coincided with some lovely dry, warm weather.  We decided to make the most of the weather and the fact that the children are now much taller and stronger this year to take to the hills near our home for a walking expedition.  We planned our route to pass as many tarns (small lakes) as possible and packed our swimming stuff along with tents, provisions and other kit for an over night in the hills.  We managed to swim in three tarns over the two days, one right next to where we camped.  It was a beautiful spot well away from the crowds we had encountered as we set off that morning.  Whilst walking back to the car the following day we explored a few old mines and quarries, long abandoned but a reminder that the hillside would once have been a busy, noisy and bustling place. 

My husband had another week of leave in July, it was a wetter week this time but we still managed to find a two day window to do another walking expedition into the hills.  Again we started off from a popular place with tourists, we got ourselves ready the night before and set off as early as we could, once Cameron had finished work, to make sure we had a good spot to park.  We didn't see another soul until we returned to the car the following day.  We stopped to swim in the stream on our way up the valley reaching a high tarn where we pitched our tents.  We left Cameron to have a snooze (he got up really early to do his paper round so we could set off early) and headed up to the ridge above the tarn, the views were amazing from there and the photo above is taken looking down from there towards our tents which you can just see in the centre of the photo, above the tarn which we swam in to cool off after our ridge walk.  We woke the next morning to find we were in the clouds which was a little different to the beautiful sunny day the day before.  We swam in a tarn on the way down which was a really strange experience as it too was in the cloud and you could not see very far!  When we returned to the car there were so many people around, mostly enjoying themselves by the large lake in the valley.  We took the opportunity to swim in there too, it is a really deep one and we were amazed at how clear it was.  We wore wetsuits for that swim (we carried a basic swimming kit into the hills) which meant that we could stay in for longer, we only got out as we were hungry, the water was so warm we could have stayed in for hours.

August is a bank holiday month in this part of the world and often falls on a friend's birthday.  He wanted to go sea kayaking this year and ask my husband and I to join us as we are more experienced than him  and his wife.  We were blessed with glorious weather for most of the trip, the first day was rather foggy to start which made kayaking rather interesting as we could not see very far at all.  We were out for the best part of three days, paddling round two islands and camping in two different spots on the largest of the two.  We saw lots of seals and some birds species that I have not seen in years.  The wind picked up on the final day which made crossing back to the mainland rather interesting!  This was the first trip where we have left the children with friends and travelled so far away.  Over the same weekend Cameron also completed his expedition for his Bronze D of E Award which made arrangements for him rather complicated.  As I was writing this I realised that this is the only time I left the county where I live in the whole year,  I haven't travelled far in 2021!

Alice and I had a lot of adjusting to do in September when Cameron left us both to start college, after twelve years of home educating this was a big change for all of us.  We found things to do, her and I, including going out to a spot a short walk from home to do some nature study for a Scout badge.  We live in an area rich in geology and right where we live we have limestone and granite side by side.  She chose this limestone escarpment to focus on, we found a rich variety of flowers and learnt a few more names for grasses.  We visited a few times and were there for the Autumn Equinox, we had a small ceremony together and a short eared owl joined us for a fly by as we were pausing at the end.

October saw me completing two jumpers for myself.  The green one I started back in August pausing in September to knit up a smaller version of the pattern for my nephew as a birthday present.  I loved it so much that I bought some more yarn and knit another.  I have no idea how I have lived without these jumpers I wear them all the time, they are cosy and warm, fit me perfectly (I have long arms and bought jumpers are never long enough) and go with everything in my wardrobe.  This bought my knitting tally of the year to four jumpers and two cardigans along with several hats socks, mitts and cowls, the other jumper was for my mum who although a knitter herself is not very quick, I was very honoured to be asked to knit for her.  One of the cardigans was for me, the other a birthday gift for a dear friend who turned 50 in 2021.

Back in September Alice and I started going to a newly created home ed group, like all new groups it took a while to feel settled and established and is now a lovely, welcoming and friendly group of all ages.  Someone suggested that we do some knitting as a group (having watched me knit whilst there) and we came up with the idea of knitting squares to make a blanket to donate.  It has been a lovely social activity with upwards of 20 children and adults, some weeks, all sat around knitting and nattering.  Some could already knit, some were rusty and needed reminding of the skills and others were complete beginners.  The blanket is growing slowly and we now have 27 squares.  We are hoping that this will be an ongoing project and once one blanket is complete we will start on another.

A few years ago I started the slow transition to wearing a different kind of shoe, some call them barefoot shoes, I would call them super comfy and totally transformational.  This kind of shoe has an ultra thin sole (to mimic walking barefoot), are totally flat with no heel at all and have a lovely wide toe box to allow your toes to spread and sit as they need to without being squished.  The slow transition has not been because I don't like these shoes but because they are expensive (but worth the expense) or I have been searching for second hand pairs which don't come around in my size and a style that I like and works for my feet that often.  I am slowly replacing each type of shoe I own and for my birthday I received a new pair of walking boots.  These have been used a lot in December as we have been out for many walks especially during the Christmas and New Year holiday period.  I am loving these boots which are super comfy and have completely stopped any pains in my knees that I used to get after long walks.   I am now totally confident about crossing the many streams we have in this part of the world as it is so much easier for me to find my balance, my foot moulds around the rocks as I cross.  I got a second pair of shoes from this company for Christmas, the fabric of which is made from recycled coffee grounds!

Thank you for all of your lovely comments when I started blogging again recently, after a year away.  It was so lovely to be welcomed back into the lovely blogging community with open arms.  I have been really touched by your kind words.  I am looking forward to reading along with you and sharing more of my own adventures in 2022.

Circling Back

I had thought that it was more than a year since I had been in this space, in my head it was more like two.  Whilst recently exploring the rabbit hole that is Ravelry I noted that the last post was a tribute to my eldest who had then just turned sixteen.  One whole year felt like an ok amount of time to return, once again, to see if I can keep this space going.  The reasons that I drifted away a year ago have got lost in the mists of time, I suspect there were, as always, other pulls on my time.

I have, since glancing at my blog via Ravelry, started writing posts in my head, do you do that too or is just me? 

The soundtrack of my year has been punctuated with so much to think about and do, none of it onerous, all of it the ebb and flow of where the tide is for my family.  Big changes have existed alongside the everyday, the perfect harmony of yin and yang.  

That feeling that your world has stopped but everyone else's has carried on, interwoven with moments to treasure. Unsteady moments of sadness juxtaposed with happier times.  

We are three months into a new direction with eldest at college, dipping a toe into structured education for the first time.  It left a big hole for Alice and I after twelve years of having them both at home, all of Alice's life.  We found ourselves wandering the house like lost souls, cast adrift like a boat with no anchor wondering where our lives would go now, just the two of us.  We are finding our way, taking it slowly as is our way.  He is loving his course, film and photography, learning new things which he brings home and shares.  I look at my boy, so confident and content, I am glad we did things the way we did for all those years.  He was ready for this.

As I sit here writing this I can hear subtle noises through the wall, sounds that should be comforting but are wrapped in sadness.  Our neighbour of eighteen years passed away in October, he was part of our family it took me weeks to accept he had gone.  His children have been painstakingly clearing his house boxing up the lives of their father and their childhood, the noises I can hear are them.  The deafening silence through the wall is swallowed up in the hole that his passing has left in our lives.  We will get new neighbours, eventually, he was the last to move into our small terrace of five houses, that change too big to comprehend right now.

It is snowing here right now, the wind is howling, not the temperatures we had this summer which was wonderfully glorious and filled with family adventures.  Taller, stronger children meant that we could go out in the hills that surround our home with a rucksack, a few provisions and find stillness and silence away from the crowds that descended on my beautiful county.  We also threw swimming stuff in and fitted in many tarns and river swims to cool off along the way.  I love these times, when you are not watching the clock.   Camping miles from anyone, nestled in the hills, slowly watching the sun descend, what more could you ask for on a summer evening?

And now 2021 is drawing to a close.  Advent has started, I have made no preparations this year, yet.  It has arrived without me giving it any thought, the boat, it would seem, is still adrift.  Drifting amongst a life which is more in the present and going with the flow. 

Finding beauty in the ordinary

I love the view from my house, sometimes we can see for miles, sometimes, often at this time of year, it is hazy with fog.  A sunny early morning in Autumn will often give us a few special minutes, the near hills bathed in a beautiful light which makes them look golden.  I happened to look out the window at just the right time this morning, minutes later and everything looks less saturated, the contrast gone.

So many things in life can be fleeting, moments that we notice and take into our memories.  Special because they are fleeting.  They are a balance to all that is happening in the world right now, does anyone else feel like they are in a world where things don't feel real?  My decision to stop reading the news has rather backfired in the last few weeks as I have no idea what the rules are where I live, they seem to be changing every day.  I have friends who live in a different county who seem to have different rules.  The home educating community seemed to have fallen through a big hole until someone found a reference to us hidden deep in a government document which may now be out of date, who knows?

An evening swim at a local lake followed by tea on the shore with the sun setting, bathing the lake and hills in a beautiful golden light was a perfect way to end a long and anxiety filling day.  I am slowly filling our days, making sure that we have a balance of time at home and time out and about each week.  When I read my diary for the beginning of this year I can feel a rising of panic.  How on earth I managed to fit in all that we used to do, I have no idea, I know that I absolutely cannot go back to that life.  This pause we have had to take in our lives has been good for me, it has made me reflect on what is really important to me and how we shape our days and weeks.

The start of Autumn means we changed our seasonal table this week, we keep the pieces for the other seasons in shoe boxes, I love to get these down and be reunited with them again.  They are all homemade either by us or gifted to us by friends over the years.  I spent a lovely hour with Alice tidying away all the summer bits, giving the table a really good clean and then arranging all the autumnal bits.  We are going to make a few autumn inspired fairies over the next few weeks, the table is already pretty full but I love to make something each year.

We have been welcoming Autumn into our house for the past few weeks with Autumn stories during our daily morning gathering when we also read poems and sing together.  We have started lighting our candle too, I love this gentle light.  I have been doing a morning gathering with the children for years, it has changed over that time, I love the constancy it has threaded through our lives.  It brings us together to start the day, although these days it is more usually at around 10am and some of us have been awake and busy for a few hours.  It marks a change in intention, more focused, a time to think about the day ahead and maybe the next few days.  On a Monday we use this time to talk through the week, the plans that are already in place and things that the children want to do.

We had an autumn equinox ceremony in a local wood this week.  We chose the day based on the weather forecast at the beginning of the week, when the day came round the forecast had change somewhat.  We still went out and I am so glad that we did, it has been a long time since we visited these woods.  When the children were really small it is a place we went to often, we spent a least one year visiting every month to observe the changes in the seasons.  It used to take all day to walk around, short legs getting tired and needing to stop often.  So much to look at, feel and smell, mud to squelch through.  We picked elderberries this time.  We had not planned to do that, they were carefully placed in a rucksack pocket and survived the journey.  They have been brewed into a large quantity of elderberry syrup, the family are calling it the daily elixir, we are hoping it will keep coughs and sneezes at bay through the coming months.

Now it is the weekend, that time of breathing out and having a pause.  This one is stretching out ahead of us completely empty, our plans to go and visit relatives, were quietly shelved.  In the current circumstances we felt travelling so far was not wise.  I love weekends like this, particularly as my next two are really full.  I am hoping that we will be able to do a swim somewhere, the weather forecast is currently making that a possibility.  

I finally chose a pattern for a hat.  I had forgotten how much l love to knit fair isle, I am sure my technique is clunky and not very efficient, but it works for me.  I have managed to get the perfect tension this time, it has become instinctive which is important when we want to master something isn't it?  I know that knitting is not something that we are all able to master but doing the things we love and enjoy has never been so important to have in our lives than this current time.  I do hope that you are able to make the time for those things in you life too.  So a weekend of swimming and knitting what more could I ask for, I hope your weekend is filled with lovely things too.

A Peek into my Day

 

Outside my window it is cloudy and warm.  Once again the distant hills are obscured, this seems to be a bit of a theme on the days that I choose to do these posts!  We have had the warm temperatures return, warm for here, after a very cool and damp August.  I am hoping it will last the week as is forecast, in this last week of the Summer.

Around the house there are swimming bits drying from a late evening swim at the beginning of the week, part finished craft projects waiting to be picked up again, several parcels waiting to be taken to the post office by Cameron when he goes to work in the morning.

I have read on many occasions about people choosing a word for their coming year, I read something recently about choosing a word for a season, a month or day.  I love the idea of a word for a day, something to carry you through, particularly on those difficult days.  I am thinking of words that I could write down on small pieces of paper to put in a jar, I will keep it by my bed and each morning will take one out to be the word that carries me through the day.  

We are still continuing to swim outdoors regularly, at least once a week, sometimes more.  I am so thankful to live in a beautiful area where this is not only possible but makes the swim even more special as I am surrounded by wonderful scenery too.

In my kitchen there is once again three bananas going black waiting to be baked into banana bread, a bag of pears slowly ripening, a thoughtful gift from a friend, a bowl of fat waiting for the purchase of more bird seed, so that it can be mixed in and put out for the birds who love it and the washing up from dinner.

My mittens are off the needles and need the ends weaving in, actually I think it is just one end left to weave in, I really should get on and do that.  Now I am creating a hat using some leftover ends of yarn that I found in my stash.  I had a bit of a needle fail as my circular needle came apart near the tip, I have glued it but not that well, I only need to knit a few more rows before changing to a bigger size, I do hope it lasts long enough to do that.

Tomorrow is a day out for us, well nearly a whole day, I am going all over the place. The Archery range with Cameron, dropping Alice for a piano lesson, doing the shopping, going for an acupuncture appointment and then picking Alice up from a friend's house on the way home.  I could do these things on separate days but it would make the week really full and not very flexible so we are trialling doing them all on one day, it seems to working ok for now, I just need to come up with a simple and quick meal for tea as we ate at 9pm last week!

It is my birthday next month, one of those birthdays where the age ends in a zero, a new decade for me.  I am pondering a few ideas of what to do now that we have new restrictions in place, it has put paid to some of my very simple plans!

My birthday plans are being further complicated by the fact that we have flights booked to travel in November.  We booked them back in January when COVID had not reached these shores.  I am hoping that BA releases it policy, for flights during the period we are due to fly, very soon, which will allow us to decide what to do as we are not at all comfortable with continuing with our plans and would like to change them at minimal or no cost to ourselves if at all possible.  We were due to be away for a month which my husband has booked off work, we don't want to take a month off in the UK but would like to take some time off and if possible have a holiday in the UK at an alternative time if we can but there is not much of the year left now to rebook the time.

I am still reading the books I mentioned last month and have added a fourth one to the list!  A Long, Long Life of Trees by Fiona Stafford, it is not like me to be reading so many books at once.  It is a good light read for the end of the day when I do most of my reading.  The other books tend to be read during the day, which doesn't happen very often, they will be on my reading pile for a long while, I think.

One person can't do everything, but every person can do something is my favourite quote at the moment, I remind myself of this as we navigate through this incredibly difficult year we are all experiencing.

I am looking forward to meeting up with two friends at the weekend, it is something that we try and arrange to do every six weeks and I hope that we can continue to do that for the months to come.  It is so nourishing and restoring.  We try and coincide our meet ups with the wheel of the year festivals, it is the equinox next week so we will be celebrating what this time of the year means in our lives. 

The current restrictions here in the UK have just made it even harder for home educators to get together, I am learning to accept that this is likely to be the new normal for us for some time to come.  It is hard enough to forge a different path in life without having to justify why you are doing what you doing when you are out and about.  The restrictions are so confusing it makes it difficult to know what we should be doing, and where you draw the line on what is defined as educational, and what is social, gathering.

Cameron is interested in going to college next year to do an art based course.  I am wondering how long I should leave it before contacting them as I know that they are still grappling with restarting their courses for this academic year.  It would be good to know what they will require him to have in terms of exams etc and get those organised.

I am wearing navy leggings and a tunic top with large 70s style flowers in blues and greens.

I have spent quite a bit of time listening to Podcasts today,  there are some I always listen to whenever a new episode pops into my feed, Code Switch is one that l am listening to and learning so much from.

A Peek in to my day.

Lines and Circles

We live in a highly literate world, the written word is everywhere, you need to be able to read to engage in society fully.  I love reading, I always have a book on the go.  Cameron loves reading too, he used to leave a trail of books around the house so I could tell where he had been.  We both started our reading learning at around the age of five, Alice turned 11 a month or so ago and reading is still very much a work in progress for her. 

It has been a long, slow, learning journey for her and for me, one that we are still working at.  I love that my children learn in completely different ways, that they are interested in completely different things, but Alice's difficulties in learning to read has laid bare to me that sometimes these difficulties are made so much harder when they are trying to gain a skill that we place a lot of value on in our society.  I am always so saddened when I hear about children who are not given the support that they really need to learn this skill that we place so much emphasis on.  Learning to read later than the 'required' age, which should not even be a thing. should not be seen as a negative, we all learn in our own way and given that reading is a skill that we place such importance on, we should be encouraging children and helping them to learn to read by considering their needs and how they learn.

I remember when Alice was about five she asked me to help her to learn to read.  It was the first thing she had ever asked help with learning, looking back, hindsight always makes things seem obvious, I should have realised by the way that she was asking that she was frustrated that she couldn't work it out, working things out was something she had been for some time, and still is, exceptionally good at.

I want you to imagine, for a moment, that you come across an object that you are not familiar with what might you do to work out what it is?  Might you pick it up and feel it, look at it from all sides.  Might you leave it where it is and walk around it looking at it from all sides.  What if you could move it around in your head, seeing it from all sides without actually touching it or moving it?   You might think that is not possible and nor would I had I not read that this is a skill.  I should have realised that Alice had this skill when she played the game in the photo above.  It is aimed at age 8 +, she was five when she first played it with my brother and I.  We played it four times and she won every time, this wasn't us letting her win, between us we couldn't beat her.  She could hold one of those tiles in her hand and turn it round in her head, rather than moving it around in her hand, to work out where to put it, she also played with strategy which is a whole other post.  I wished I had realised at the time how key this skill was to her difficultly in being able to read.  The ability to move something round in your head is a wonderful skill if you are trying to build, make or design something, work out how something mechanical works or fix a problem, it is however hopeless if you do the same with words.  

After Alice's initial request I used some of the resources that I had put together for Cameron to support him when learning to read.  I soon realised that she was not ready for those yet and I needed to come up with a completely different method to help her.  Those resources relied on her knowing her letters which she had yet to master so I started with that.  I created a story for each letter and using a variety of resources we slowly made our way through the alphabet, she created her own alphabet book with words, pictures and stories that she dictated to me and I wrote out for her.  Once she had mastered those we started to put them together and that is when things started to get harder for the both of us.  I couldn't fathom how she could read a word fluently one day and then have no idea what it was the next.  It took me a long time to realise that she was reading words backwards or jumbling the letters up like a she was making anagrams with them as she was reading.  We needed another pause so that I could work out how to help her next and she could have a rest.  Reading was exhausting for her.

It was around this time that I started to wonder if she might be dyslexic.  I knew very little about it except that it was a label given to those that had reading issues.  I headed to my local library to see whether there were any books that I could educate myself on how to help Alice.  I was fortunate to find many and one in particular was so good that I bought a copy for our shelves.  It had a suggestion for a test that you could try and then an exercise based on the results of the test (none of which involved reading).  They sounded so far fetched to me that I wasn't sure they could possibly work, but I thought nothing ventured, nothing gained.  The exercise would give Alice a means to stop the letters in words dancing around when she reached a word she couldn't read.  This book had bought to my attention something that I had failed to notice that she would reach a word she didn't know, pause try to work it out and after that word she would have difficult continuing but she managed it at a slower pace, by the time she reached a second or third word that she could not read she would not be able to read anything else.  The book call this a threshold of confusion where disorientation has set in as the symbols/letters have become so distorted that they are no longer understandable.  

The book also suggested that she may have a picture for every word, in fact some dyslexics think in pictures instead of words.  Words such as house, dog, car, tree are easy to create pictures of in our heads, the, and, if, of, other, just and many more the picture is not quite so easy.  I have established that this is how Alice sees the world and how she reads words.  This also means that every time she comes across a new word it is a complete mystery to her until she has created her own picture for it.  Can you imagine that?  How difficult that makes reading?  How exhausting that would make reading?  It is hard for those of us that read to imagine this isn't it?

We are now at the stage where Alice will pick up books and read them to herself, they need to ones with a basic typeface, those really flowery typefaces are an absolute no no, and with few paragraphs on a page for now.  Her absolute preference for learning is through combined visual and audio, the internet has been a life saver.  We spend time together searching for things that she is interested in, which we usually watch together, as they are often of interest to me too.  She still loves being read to and it gives me such pleasure to read chapter books to her that would take her months if not years to read.  

I do hope there is time when she can read without getting exhausted, I feel sure that time will come at some point.  Throughout the six years since she asked me to help her learn to read, all her learning has been driven by her and I am always in awe of her determination to master this seemingly to her at times, impossible task.  She is not ashamed to admit that she cannot read that well and will always ask for help when she needs it, another really useful skill that I feel sure will be useful to her in the future.

When I started home education nearly eleven years ago, I had no idea where that would take us.  It has been a wonderful journey and I have learnt more than I could ever have imagined.  What more could I ask for?

The recipe for an ordinary day

When I wake each morning, during the week, one of the first things I do is housework.  You might think that is slightly bonkers, perhaps it is, but it works for me.  I used to be a do it all in one morning housework type of person but it would feel like a drudge when I did it that way.  It didn't matter how I thought about it, most weeks I would do the bare minimum.  When I discovered TOMM back at the beginning of the year I wasn't sure how long I would last, six months in and I am not going back to how I did things before, this totally works for me.  I had to write prompts in my diary at first to help me remember what I was doing each day, now it is just Fridays which is my deeper clean in a particular room day.

Doing the housework first is a good way for me to wake up, I am often slow to do this.  I am often alone in the house, Cameron is out doing his paper round and everyone else is still asleep.  I don't wake to an alarm so there is the odd morning when I wake up after my husband, it feels like someone is invading my space when that happens!  I sometimes plug myself into a podcast on my phone if I can cope with input.  

I don't do the jobs in the same order each day, I often get distracted by other things that need doing or checking messages on my phone and answering them.  When Cameron comes home with his daily newspaper that is often a distraction too, although these days I have retreated from most media input, the news reads more like a soap opera these days.  Have you come across Positive News?  I can recommend it as a source of news that won't have you feeling like you have got off the bus at the wrong stop and are now living in a parallel universe.

I have been doing yoga stretches in the morning for about three or four years.  I started with a sun salutation which lasted five minutes or so, I have gradually increased this to about twenty five minutes on average as I have added other positions.  I have woken exhausted or with headache or feeling very out of sorts and after just a few minutes of yoga I can feel everything relaxing and calming.  It is such an important start to my day that I can feel it when I don't do it, not to mention the fact that I feel stronger as it keeps my muscles in daily use.

With the housework done and my yoga stretches completed I head for the shower.  I have a friend who lives near one of the many lakes that gives my part of my country its well known name.  She had taken to swimming in this lake as many mornings during the week as she could manage, often joined by several friends.  They would do this year round, in the summer they would swim in the winter it was a 'dip' in and out, but whatever the season they would fully immerse themselves.  I have heard that this is really good for you and my friend has often told me of all the wonderful benefits of cold water immersion.  Sadly I don't live near enough to any lakes to make it viable for me to do that but always one to think outside the box I figured I could have a daily cold shower instead.  It seems I am so last year the Independent were writing about the benefits of a cold shower over 20 years ago!  I started doing this late last year and managed to keep going through the depths of winter, it is as invigorating as anyone who writes about it makes out it is.  I dare you to give it a go!

On a day when I have had a really good sleep and managed to stay focused it might be around 8am by now, but most days it is nearer nine, but whatever the time it is breakfast on mind next.  I expect this meal is rather different to what you might eat.  The only cereal we have in the house is oats, I honestly cannot remember when I last ate a bowl of cereal for breakfast.  The menu depends on the day of the week it might be oatmeal pancakes, or fermented pancakes with sautéed spinach and onion, boiled egg with salad and rainbow flat breads or occasionally millet and quinoa porridge.  Once this meal is over and cleared away my mind starts to focus on the rest of the day.

I used to have days when I would need to be out of the house at 9am with food and drink to last us the day and clothing for a messy art class followed by forest school with a 45 minute drive in between.  Admittedly that was our busiest day and I was used to it then as we would be out the house at something everyday.  We get used to things when they are normal and what we do each and every week don't we.  

It seems such a long time ago, but I can still remember that week when slowly, like the receding tide, the things that defined and shaped our week were cancelled, leaving our diary a blank and empty page for the first time since we made that huge step to start home educating.  We found ourselves at home all the time, along with rest of our country, confined to its walls by our need to come together to protect the vulnerable and prevent the health service becoming overwhelmed.  

We found ways to make that normal.  Slowly building ourselves a rhythm that included some of the things that we had always done at home and adding in those things that we had done in classes and groups but we wanted to continue.  We had mornings of focusing on nature journalling, creating, French, projects and exercise depending on the day of the week.  The afternoons were about a daily walk and video calls to catch up with friends who we could no longer see face to face.  There was lots of sewing, the garden had never had so much attention and my recipe books were dusted off, old favourites were rediscovered and new ones tried out.  

We were doing ok.  

No actually I was doing more than ok, I loved being in lockdown.  I loved the peace and quiet it bought to my head. I no longer needed to be thinking ahead, what are we doing today, tomorrow, next week.  I could live in the present.  

When life was busy, many of the things that really needed my thoughts, I had quietly shelved, now I could take them down and give them focus, find acceptance with some of the most difficult ones.  At times it felt like I was opening a flood gate, that I was drowning in words and thoughts that I couldn't get into order, but reaching out to a few dear friends has deepen already solid connections and helped me to make sense of things.  I am still a work in progress as we all are, but I feel a peace that I haven't felt for years.  

And then my husband got that call, the one that we all knew would come one day, furlough pay was not going to last forever, he had to go back to work.

It was another tide going out, inevitable and not in our control.  We had to find another normal.  As the main facilitator of the children's education much stayed the same but being the only adult at home full time with the children was not something I had done for years, not since Alice was a baby.  The little time I had in pockets during the day seem to evaporate.  I began to wonder if those few hours that I had each afternoon had gone back to work with my husband, it always seem to be time to make a meal.  I was exhausted all the time.  I pared back everything I did to spending most afternoons resting as I worked out how I could fit in the things I needed to do along with those that I wanted to.

In the background was the news.  Things were changing, we were 'allowed' to do more.  Meeting up with friends became a possibility, I knew that Alice was desperate to do this and arranged for it to happen for her first.  It felt surreal, driving in the car (Alice's second trip out the village in months), walking in a familiar place with friends but doing that weird dance to ensure that you maintain space between each other and those we met whilst out walking.  I came home exhausted and wishing it would go back to lockdown when everything was calmer, easier and clear cut.

But life continues to be one of change and we found ourselves being able to do more of the usual things, most shops were able to open, the roads got busier as people moved around more.  The tourists returned to where I live, I encountered queues when driving for the first time in four months.  It was all rather unnerving. the world had sped up and I wasn't able to keep up with it and didn't want to.  

We have met with friends my own, Alice's, Cameron has spent an afternoon walking with one of his.  He has plans to go mountain biking with a different friend next week.  I am torn.  There is a part of me that wants the living in the present to continue, to not have to think about arrangements for the coming week.  I need the headspace before meeting people so I prefer not to arrange things at the last minute, I am exhausted afterwards so still need to make sure that I don't arrange too much in a week, just now.  These complications fill my head, as do the thoughts of making arrangements.  But I am loving spending time with friends.  It is another normal that I am yet to get used to, it is a work in progress as each change has been.

So each morning as I rise, I am comforted by those hours that are the same every day.  I am holding onto those for as long as I can, they are the important ingredients in my life right now.  What are yours?