Easter

Recent Unschooling

I'm a little annoyed with myself that I only seem to keep records like this of weeks that look stereotypically bookish and "Educational".  It makes sense in a way, I mean, those weeks when we muddle along drawing and playing and generally doing our own things don't produce evidence, and don't (always) make good pictures...  The part of me that sees those weeks as weeks "off", as non-learning activity, is a smaller part than it used to be.

Still the feeling lingers, that a week that produces bits of paper is a week where we learned a lot, and I feel like I'm doing a good job of providing a rich environment and supportive parenting.  When a long stretch of "looks like nothing" happens, I wonder what I'm doing wrong, whether I need to buy different resources or provide different assistance.  I wonder when, if ever, I will really truly trust.

This week, though, three little girls were constantly asking questions and looking for interesting paper things to fill out and reading and bringing books to be read to.  And watching Blackadder and Doctor Who, and playing Harry Potter.  It can't *all* look like school.  ;)

And making paper sculptures, and cutting things out, and doing maze puzzles and colouring mandalas, and...

A big stack of books that have been in constant use this week: lots of history, art, geography, and nature study for the most part.  It's funny how that balance happens over huge long cycles that I barely notice at the time.  

Earlier this month we had solid weeks of mathematical questions and games, and half a maths text book worked through in one week by a determined and interested Jenna (who usually professes not to like maths).  I try (very) hard not to grind my teeth when she sits for half an hour crying and saying she doesn't understand a very simple question (it isn't as if anyone is *making* her do it, or telling her she has to stay "stuck" on that question, either!) and then suddenly blast through the next twenty.  Watching her work is almost like the torture that was my own experience of mathematics in school.  Only she actually wants to work at this, using this book, in this way.  Argh!

A whole load of dried up old paints got pulled out so that she could put down a couple of layers of her first attempt at an impressionist style of painting.  She is nagging me to get more paint (usually the children seem to do a lot of watercolour painting and I don't regularly buy any other paints).


We're also, in spite of so many illnesses one after another, getting outside every day.  It feels scarily efficient and with few of the usual attendant frustrations (like Rowan losing her shoes, or Morgan refusing to wear a coat, or all of them falling out and refusing to walk together).  I am half enjoying things seeming so easy and pleasant and wholesome, and half waiting for another week (or month) that scares the pants off me and makes me doubt my ability to Do This Thing.  That's how it seems to go, when trying to provide great experiences and a healthy environment, whilst at the same time trying to keep myself from getting in the way and imposing constant adult-ness on everything.  ;)  Half amazing, half terrifying!

Talia

Talia Willow, sweet baby, she is a very placid creature, happy to potter and play.  From very early on she hasn't been centred on me (and milk) but on the family unit as a whole, bouncing from person to person and with a particular instinct for comforting whichever of us feels particularly lonely or sad.


She loves all small figures and dolls, anything with a face.  Tali makes the Ostheimer animals talk to each other, and kisses the Sylvanians.


She must inspect any game any of the others have.  She also helpfully likes to blow on their food for them to cool it down, and blow out candles, it's one of her favourite tricks (along with throwing bricks and crayons down the back of the radiator and saying "uhoh").  Rowan is getting very frustrated with all of this cheerful "helping" now.  Especially when her elaborate train tracks get destroyed.




The age and stage I find hardest as a mother is this part where they are so mobile yet still non-verbal.  As Tali picks more and more words, and starts to really communicate with us and respond to speech, I get a greater sense of give-and-take, of being able to negotiate and co-operate.  Talking, really conversing, is the point at which I feel like I really start to understand them again for the first time since they were utterly dependant on me.  I adore how Talia talks, how her clumsy baby words fit together.  We're getting some kind of rhythm back now in how we work together as a unit.

Week in Pictures - evening light

1. A rainbow-filled corner
2. Sleeping precious
3. Much-needed encouragement
4. Night sky
5. Sharing matzoh ball soup
6. Zen garden

Still here...

Updates are lacking not because anything is terribly horribly wrong, but only because we are in that plateau state in between disaster and recovery.  There is no way to bounce back yet, as we still have no further information, so we are stuck with that crazy-making sensation of waiting for the other shoe to drop.  And when it does - if it does - we'll deal with it.  I hate being cryptic, but I don't really have any choice and I *can't* not talk and I *can't* not write.  We are here in this... odd, flat, precarious safe place where nothing drastic is happening and we are just carrying on as if everything were normal.

It's Rowan's birthday next week.  Jenna is going away with my mum just before.  I haven't even started making the required birthday gift for the little person who will be four, nor begun the task of packing for the eldest one.  We're also right in the middle of Passover and Easter stuff.  With the usual craziness that comes from my merrily keeping two sets of feasts that often fall at the same times.  The festival preparations are so grounding and normal and filled with colour and joy, I can't help but be cheered and uplifted.  Perhaps this is part of what the wheel of the year is for, all those little celebrations marked off around the journey to remind us...  Things are changing, we are not stuck, and that there is always reason to glory in the season of life right here and now.

I could really put all of this into far fewer words.  We are all OK.  Really really OK.

Out of My Rut

Needing a new groove, I started off yesterday determined to follow the children's example as much as possible and stay in the moment, try to shake off the overthinking and the dark mood that has been following me around.  I needed to take my eyes of myself and what I'm doing/not doing.  I can't say it was easy, or magically returned me to some kind of equilibrium, but I didn't spend the day crying or berating myself for being a terrible mother for any number of reasons (all of which I would laugh at myself for on a better day).

I spent the day reading to little people, making paper pirate hats for Rowan, playing endless finger rhyme games with Talia, journalling with Jenna, spotting bird tracks and making dinner with Morgan, cleaning kitchen cupboards, rearranging book cases, and planning Passover meals.  And yes, we even enjoyed the frozen outdoors.







Today, I am not sinking back into despair.  I am keeping my eyes on the blessings.

Week in Pictures - Rose Howey and other highlights

1.  Train
2.  Banister sliding
3.  Drying yarns
4.  Morgan with workbooks
5.  Vinegar and bicarb play
6.  Lemon muffins
7.  Yet more icicles!

More thoughts from the storm

The snow is still falling, and I am still low.  Every time I look outside I see more flurries of snow, more white skies, every time I step outside and the biting wind cuts through all layers I feel resentful.  I don't *want* the pretty white cold stuff.  I'm ready for Spring and warm earth and planting and light and green.

The ceiling isn't leaking any more.  I'm counting that as a major improvement on the situation.  The work men coming and going laughed to be followed pied-piper-like by a string of small children wanting to see what they were doing.

Yesterday Rowan asked me why I was crying, and I told her it was because I feel like I get everything wrong.  She patted me gently and said, "You don't, mummy."  Sweet as she is, I don't believe her.  I really feel like everything that could have gone wrong this month did, and I'm still waiting for worse news.  If it could possibly be extrapolated as my fault, it is.

Lemon yoghurt muffins are in the oven as I procrastinate about making lunch.

The living room still looks like a disaster zone.  I have been trying to tidy it, unsuccessfully, all morning.  I'm so easily distracted - by muffins, by music, by just going to check the dye pot one more time, by a snippet of something floating through my head that I have to check *right now*.  I am not getting very far.  Procrastination is pretty much the main thing I have got done today.

I can't remember the last time I really felt like me, and it was a long time before that when I last felt like I knew what I was doing.

Jenna is sitting scraping the last bits out of the bottom of the yoghurt pot with a long spoon, reading a recipe book - she is planning to cook for us again and can't decide what to make.

Sweet children, curious and lively and bright.  Still, after all this long Winter, the snow is just more magic and another adventure.  The lack of transport and money are irrelevant, life is just fine in a house full of books with the park so close and friends who drop in to visit.

Without saying a word to me, they somehow creep in to this miserable overwhelmed posting of mine and make it lighter.  The way little blonde naked baby edges her way up to the stool to sit down, not yet quite confident to judge distances; the way she shouts "HIYA" at me in outrage because she wants my phone.  Morgan with a hippy flowered headband, lots of sparkly rings, and rainbow owl socks.  Ack, they are perfectly lovely people.

Home and other places

This week, I'd rather like to run off back to the hippy commune and live in a happy crazy beautiful building site.

We had a magical weekend.  Rose Howey is an amazing place.  I really fell in love with the old building, incredible light and oddly shaped rooms (some of them smelling of damp and several piled high with abandoned furniture and builders' rubble).  Turning a corner and finding a stack of old chairs or a pile of very dusty bowls left from goodness knows when.  The community is working hard to bring the place back to life, and that really calls to me.



Especially when back home in my little terrace, the ceiling is inexplicably leaking, and we need to somehow buy floor covering from the bathroom because the tiles we had to take up for work to be done are unsalvageable.  Especially when there are so many worries here about work and money.  Especially when the children keep asking when we can go back and why we can't pack up and move there.

Right now, here feels like home (albeit one I'd like to run away from) and Rose Howey feels like a magical place where I don't fit (but... maybe one day).  A holiday *was* just what I needed though, and time amongst such lovely people was very healing.  I wish it had been a longer stay.  And that home was a bit of an easier place to come back to right now.

In the meantime, at least I have new books.  Cheaper and easier than running away.  :)

(Almost) Week in Pictures - still not Spring

1.  Cupcake (sadly not mine)
2.  Farm
3.  Snow (?!)
4.  Stories from sister
5.  Baby

My life in projects and crafty things

I stayed upright long enough to do a craft fair on Saturday.  Em and I made a few sales between us, enough for the experience to feel generally worth repeating as well as it being fun to sit and chat to people all day.  My antibiotics were working well enough on my poor mouth for me to be able to talk, but sadly not well enough for me to be able to eat the gloriously pretty cupcakes on the next table.



I brought all my in stock yarn home again with me though.  I didn't expect to sell any yarn, given where we were, but I couldn't resist taking it all anyway.  It looks so pretty together.


This leafy hat is one of my favourite things ever.  Trust me, if I could force Talia to keep it on her stubbornly bare little head, I would keep it.  If I can't bear to be self-pitying about being ill, I will indulge in a big "woe is me" over having a baby who will no longer permit me to put knitwear on her.  It's a crime against nature, that's what it is!


And I added some sweet embroidery to a custom Easter egg, I just couldn't resist the hand dyed sock yarn scraps that I had lying around.  *happy sigh*

Finding the words for pain

Knitting, reading, surviving, when life just seems to be throwing up one disaster after another, and pain becomes normal, and stress stops me from sleeping...

I started feeling shaky as we walked to the library early in the week, just after the car failed its MOT so spectacularly we can't afford to repair it.  This bright jewel of happiness, this one picture, is pretty much all the evidence that I had of my week until a few moments ago.  I have been totally knocked out by illness and stress.  I was tripping over my feet trudging home yesterday from an emergency appointment, antibiotics in hand, feeling like the universe is actually trying to kill me.

I feel whiny for "being negative" and fake for trying to find the beauty and light.  Words are coming so slowly, each one replaced, deleted, re-written.  I can't pour out everything without sharing things better not to say publicly.  I can't *not* pour out everything without feeling inauthentic.  I suppose all I can do is hold the space, and wait.