A brand new adventure starting in 3, 2, 1....

This year, the Victorian school holidays are finishing with Easter. So in three days from now, schools all over the place will be re-opening their doors and a huge part of our population, those aged 4-18 (or thereabouts) will return to the day in, day out life of school. But this term, my boys won't be joining in. Why?  Because we've decided to give homeschooling a go. 

We started making this huge decision back in the summer holidays. I was loving having the kids at home and learning alongside me as we went about our everyday life. I was sad when they had to go back to school and so were they. We'd had such a great 6weeks together that it seemed unfair to stop because another school term was beginning. We started thinking about homeschooling. 

Throughout the term, it stayed in the back of our minds, but as things happened with school that we didn't really agree with (they weren't really bad things, just not to our beliefs), the idea became more apparent and we started researching and talking about the possibility. 

When the whole school went on an excursion that we had chosen not to partake in, we spent a few days playing at homeschooling and we loved it. But the boys (one in particular) weren't convinced still. 

I don't know what changed their minds, but a couple of weeks later, they came home and told me that they'd announced to their teacher that they would be homeschooled as a trial in term 2. We were a little shell shocked, but quickly recovered and went about putting the plan into action. We registered with the appropriate people and informed the school. 

The boys finished the term and brought all their books home, packed away their uniforms and excitedly prepared for our new adventure. 

We've received very mixed responses. Many were quite 'off' about our choice - maybe they're jealous, don't understand, just think we've completely lost the plot or are turning our back on society - who knows!  I just have to keep repeating to myself that our decision has no impact on them and that they can just mind their own business. On the flipside though, the support and positive reactions have outweighed the bad ones and have come from lots of places I wouldn't have expected. 

We've toyed with a bit of our homeschooling over the holidays, but as it is easter, we're taking a few days off of our formal learning (of course, learning will be just happening, even if we don't truly 'hit the books'). We're all loving exploring and learning together, with the flexibility that our days have now. Maths in our pjs is now normal and writing letters to grandparents, checking out the moon and stars at night and visiting the library have all become welcome parts of our day. 

Some people want to know what style of homeschooling or what curriculum we're following. The answer is, we're following our style. If we love something, we'll go with it. So being maths geeks 😉 we choose to do a full on maths curriculum (a year ahead of what they were doing at school) and with two bookworms, reading and writing have become more leisure activities rather than true schooling. Everything else will fit in and we're just going to experiment and see how it all works - I don't want to be unschoolers, but I also don't feel that we need formal curriculum to fit in IT, PE, science and SOSE - it's all there, in our everyday life, jut waiting to be discovered, expanded on and, well, learnt. 

It feels right and exciting and I'm truly looking forward to embarking on this journey with the precious little people we brought into the world. And, if for some reason, it just doesn't work, then we'll go back to the way things were and we'll be no worse off for the adventure. 

1/4 acre - is it enough?

We bought our lovely little house on our 1/4 acre block almost 9 years ago. It hasn't always been wonderful, but now we love it. We have 12 fruit trees, chooks, ducks, veggies and herbs, goats (which we get some milk from, but not enough) and bees on our 1/4 acre. We also have a 2 bedroom (+home office) house which has solar panels to produce our power, a waterless loo and rainwater tanks. The house is decorated the way we like it and really quite comfortable, and also has the awesomeness of our pizza oven and pretty surrounding gardens. But....

A couple of weeks ago, someone told me about a church for sale. A church on 1.5 acres that was a good cheap price. We checked it out and could picture what it could become and then suddenly, we wanted more. More space for more goats, the orchard and gardens set up better so that watering etc became easier and the chooks could live under the fruit trees. And other people put it into our heads that we would then have more room for our growing kids, who may not always want to share a room. It seemed ideal... We thought we could buy it, do it up a bit and then sell our home. But the bank said "no" because a church isn't a house and they don't like lending money for that sort of thing without us having to jump through a thousand hoops :(

But the idea of bigger was already in our heads, so we looked around. Our budget isn't huge, but we found somewhere that we thought would work perfectly (3 acres, gorgeous house that needed some work, fruit trees, shedding etc). Turned out, they'd advertised it wrong (grrrr!) and  though the price on the Internet was within our grasp, the actual price of the property wasn't.  Again, finances said no. 

Because of our budget, location, wants and needs, we're now out of options. So we're here trying to decide if we should put our home, that we really do love, on the market to pursue the dream of 'more' or if we should be content with what we have and try to make it work. 

We have a list of things we 'want' and our house fits many of them, but not ;

-three bedrooms

-wood heating (and preferably the space to grow some wood)

-room for a bigger, proper dairy goat (as well as our beloved minis)

It all boils down to space, and its hard to create space when its not there ;)

So we're thinking, thinking and dreaming, dealing with the aforementioned disappointments, trying to be satisfied with what we have and then coming back around to dreaming again.... *sigh*. I want to leave it all alone and go back to last month when this was enough. 

Solutions anyone? Or a time machine/mind eraser to take all of this back?

~~~PS I know I'm not here very often anymore - a time came when I realised that regular blogging wasn't what I wanted to do with my time, but I'm still around, reading your comments, blogs and thinking about you. I'm also still working away here and have decided that my blog can stay here for the times when I need to just get stuff out, like now~~~