Demons vanquished (or at least squished a little)

The demon of the playroom has finally been vanquished. For now. It's a huge achievement for me and I'm patting myself on the back. I reach the nirvana of everything in it's place (and broken and unloved toys sneakily disposed of) a couple of times a year. It took me 3 days of solid hard graft this time while the kids played and left me to it, throwing me the odd pitying look that said 'She's at it again, let's just leave her to her madness'.

 This particular demon seems to work in totally the opposite way from the demon in the Poltergeist film. Instead of sucking everything into the playroom (which would be nice as it would be doing at least half of the job for me) it whirls things around in there and spews things out all over the rest of the house. The demon in Poltergeist also abducted children, which is a tempting thought at times, as long as I could have them back unharmed when I'm ready for them.

 The amount of time I spend picking things up off the floor leads me to conclude that there is another demon at work, who spends all his time (got to be a 'he') putting things on the floor for me to pick up. Maybe it's only a mischievous demon trying to be helpful, I mean it has obviously spent a lot of time watching what I do and, seeing that I spend so much time picking things up, he has decided that either I enjoy it or that it is part of my function and role in life, without which I'd be lost. 

 Then there's the elves. You may have them too. What they do is to steal something important, like car keys or glasses, and keep them for themselves just long enough for you to notice they are missing, at which point they follow you around in your frantic search for them and will only relinquish them when you've looked in the same place three or four times. They will then put them in that very place, leaving you muttering 'But I looked there already'. St Anthony can occasionally be relied upon to make them put things down. I've no idea how as I don't believe in him, but that doesn't seem to matter. if you are absolutely desparate you can ask for his help and things appear. Of course there may be a perfectly rational explanation for both phenomena to which Occam's razor can be applied and which doesn't involve either elves or saints.

September alert!!

It's rolled around again like a nasty rash or a dose of the flu, but this year I'm ready for it and I have vowed it's not going to get the better of me ever again. In the past when September rolled around and everyone else's kids were trudging off to school again something strange would come over me. I'd get a case of the teachery wobbles ( I was a secondary school teacher in a past existence) and would start  to panic about 'getting the kids to do something educational'. This would always end in tears, usually mine, as I tried to squash some learning into my kids and they would dig their heels in and seemed to want to sabotage my best efforts at 'structuring' them. I appreciate now that they will not be squashed or structured, no matter how hard I try. So this year (somehow the year always starts in september for me- old habits die hard) I am going to be true to myself and more importantly to my kids and follow our unschooling instincts and be a lot more calm about the whole thing. All through the summer the kids have been following their own learning patterns and filling their growing brains with plenty of new experiences and ideas and building on what they have already amassed in there. Why reinvent the wheel? If it ain't broke don't fix it. I don't really understand where these academic panics come from, but I'm just going to acknowledge that they are there and then ignore them. So we'll go on outings of various kinds and they'll do their own educational thing and I will try not to turn every experience into a learning opportunity. I'll just sit back and marvel at the organic way that children have of making sense of their world, and I'll be there at every turn to help, find resources, suggest ways to enrich their discoveries and generally and genuinely appreciate the efforts they are making for themselves.