To bed perchance to sleep

Although I would describe ourselves as an autonomous family, especially where the children's learning is concerned, one area where I'm unashamedly NOT autonomous is sleep, or rather bedtimes. This is because, if the kids were allowed to let their bodies tell them when to go to bed, we'd have 3 different bedtimes and 3 different waking times which would effectively mean that I'd be on call most of the evening and starting the day pretty early due to their differing body clocks.I definitely need some 'me' time. I suppose to be strictly accurate I need some 'no kids' time in order to wind down properly and recharge my own batteries.  However we have been really struggling with how to get them to go to sleep at night. The usual bedtime for the older two, aged 9 and 6, is 8.30 with lights out at 9. This doesn't mean that they go to sleep easily. We've tried to make their environment conducive to sleep by making sure they eat well and exercise during the day, disallowing screen time an hour before bedtime, having a gradual wind down period, reading stories (most nights), not having tv or computers in their rooms and generally making sure that their bedrooms are comfortable places to sleep. They are allowed to have music or a story cd while they are in bed, which gets switched off at lights out time, and they each have a night light to offset any anxiety issues. Even with all this they take an AGE to go to sleep, some nights I even go to bed before they're asleep. I've been trying to get them up earlier in the morning but I'm so bleary eyed myself that I find it hard to drag myself out of my nice warm bed.

 Today was slightly different though. The two older ones got themselves up at stupid o'clock, I believe it was about 6am, an hour which I had heard of, but never quite believed existed. They played together pretty well in that we didn't hear them until nearly 8am and the day progressed well enough. At about 9.30am my 9 yr old called me to say that his little sister was asleep on the settee. This I had to see. Sure enough there she was propped up and asleep. Time for a sneaky photo I thought. She woke about half an hour later and we all went out for a picnic and a visit to a park with friends. On the way home Big Brother fell asleep in the car for a few minutes (hope that doesn't bode ill for his bedtime tonight) but the girls stayed awake, until we got home. Then I realised that Big sister aged 6 was again asleep on the settee at about 7pm. This hasn't happened for so long I couldn't believe my eyes. I managed to carry her to bed and sincerely hope she sleeps through and doesn't get a second wind later this evening.

 I think I need to go and get out my copy of 'The No Cry Sleep Solution' (the one for older children) by Elizabeth Pantley and see if I can update our bedtime/sleep arrangements. That's one of the hardest things about bringing up children: you need to constantly reassess what you're doing as the children get older. Everything is fluid, nothing stays the same for long. At least I have some good help in the books that I have found useful in the past. As well as giving some good advice, none of it judgmental, the authors have helped me to hone my thinking skills and arrive at our own imperfect solutions.  All I need is to feel awake enough to actually think clearly.

To blog or not to blog

As promised, well hinted at, in my first post, here's my attempt to explain to myself what I'm doing or trying to do by writing this new blog of mine. I have had an awareness since I started this blog that time is kind of stacking up against me in a 'gotta post, gotta post!' kind of way. My first attempt at blogging  here :http://lizngary.blogspot.com/ (hmm, there's my first snag, I don't know how to put a link in there) was good enough as a first attempt and I'm quite happy with the posts in terms of tone and message, but I just couldn't seem to keep it up. Maybe I wasn't sufficiently motivated, but I think it just probably wasn't the right time for me to be blogging. Is there ever a right time, I wonder? With a little help from my friends I had a bit more success being part of a collective blog here: http://loozingit.blogspot.com/ . I had a clear reason and aim in mind, ie formulating a healthy eating plan, and that helped me to keep on track, both with blogging and healthy eating.

So I've been trying to work out exactly why I feel like blogging now, when so many others are reaching the decision to stop blogging, whether temporarily or permanently. I guess that blogs, like email group members, will tend to come and go and I should base my decision to blog on my own feelings and motivation. I've also had more of a chance to have a look around at the blogging world and read various different kinds of blogs written by people in differing communities, so I've had a chance to think about the look and feel of this blog (and I have big plans, hindered only by a lack of familiarity with the software which is making the process frustratingly slow and painstaking).  I do have my 3 fairy blogmothers (thanks you lot) to help me overcome any glitches, as I have learnt that good support is essential in any undertaking.

I have been examining what I want and what I don't want from blogging and from this blog in particular. I think I'm clearer about what I don't want. I've been dismayed in the past by bloggers who seem to think that they are only writing for a select few, perhaps a group of friends. Now this is absolutely fine, as most of us probably envisage a small readership and expect comments only from people we 'know' quite well either in the real world or in cyberspace. What I didn't think was fine was that they seemed to forget that, unless you password your blog, it is open to anyone who wants to read it. As such I believe one has a responsibility to be respectful, especially if you are blogging about real people in real time. I've also felt very humbled looking at not only other peoples' blogs but also their lives. They all seem to have so much going on in their days that it made my head spin and I felt inadequte by comparison. Now I know that comparisons are odious but I just don't feel up to presenting our life that way. So what do I want from this blog? Well recently I have had experiences which I could have taken to an email group or discussed with friends, but it either didn't feel appropriate or it wasn't possible and I felt the need to examine my thoughts and feelings soon after the event. I think that's what I'm hoping to do, strew a few thoughts and ideas on this table I've created and push them around a bit till they resemble something.

Well, as I have hungry kids pressing me to cook, I'll end with just a brief explanation of the title of this blog. Most obviously I chose this title, or rather my dh Gary suggested it, because we live in a wooden house in the far north of england. We love our 'shed', it is a fascinating place to live and I'm proud and passionate about living here. However I do feel the need to get away and roam on a  regular basis. It doesn't have to be far, it can be a walk in the wonderful countryside near us, or a drive to visit other home edders. The view of 'our' valley as we come over the hill on our way home is a great reward for taking ourselves away for a while. And it gives me new perspective every time I see it. If ever I get wobbly about having moved our family 300 miles from our old home I only have to sweep along down 'Mile Bank' and I feel like a queen surveying her realm.

Hello world!

This is my second attempt at blogging. I'm still not really sure what I'm expecting from it or how I'm going to go about it, in fact one of my first posts will probably be 'To blog or not to blog' detailing the journey I've taken to get even this far! At the moment I'm just standing back and admiring the view.

The edge of the abyss

I've been waiting for the inspiration for this post to arrive. It hasn't, so I'm taking a friend's advice and just doing it anyway, so it may end up as a collage or a stream of consciousness or just a mess. Probably reflects the way life has been lately. I can't believe my last post was the beginning of October. I'm not very good with medium term memory so I can't really say whether we've been hectically busy. I do get the impression, as I think back, of lots of trips out (well, lots of driving anyway) and a lot of 'stuff' going on, like a new meeting place for our local group. There's also been a lot of niggling (the way a volcano niggles) family stuff to contend with, which culminates in the time-honoured game of 'Who do we upset this christmas?' Unexpected family members have come to our aid, and on the whole tried to ease the way, but everyone has their own agenda, so everybody's competing agendas have done a bit of jostling and elbowing, and hopefully it'll turn out ok. As long as I get my wish of noone throwing major wobblers or spanners in the works till the kids are tucked up in bed at the end of a happy christmas day I can stand all the frantic activity beforehand. And then there's the increasingly worrying legislative 'changes' and challenges. Just trying to keep up with all the 'paperwork' is enough of a headache without trying to work out what it means for home edders generally and us in particular, and what, if anything, can be done to head off the worst excesses of all this tweaking and tinkering. Not that I believe for one moment that that is all there is to it. I suspect an agenda behind it which will potentially change the face of home edding forever,and not for the better. It may even do way with it altogether. And I don't think that's scaremongering. Either there are a lot of paranoid people out here in home ed land or they really are out to get us. And it's not going to be any fun saying 'I told you so'. It seems like we're being cluster bombed with bits here and bits there of stuff that needs to be inticately examined for potential threat. Just because a particular document doesn't mention home edders specifically doesn't mean it won't affect us. As someone pointed out, the truancy legislation wasn't supposed to affect us. I'd like to thank all those dedicated people out there who are looking out for all our interests and putting their time, effort and skill into finding ways to preserve the rights we all have and which have been hard won by other home edders who also were willing to challenge and push and make sure everyone played fair. I'm not sure what my part is in all this as I haven't the first clue what to say in a consultation situation, but I know it's up to every single home edder to keep themselves informed and do what they can. It won't be any good saying 'Oh well, I meant to do something...' BTW that's a note to myself, not a challenge to anyone else.

Learning as a competitive sport

With Tiny (the middle one) at the age where she would have just started school I've been coming across a lot of other parents whose kids just have, and remembering how it was when my eldest was at school. She went right through school and I wish she hadn't, I wish I'd taken her out, (but that's for another post). The competition over whose child can do what, or more accurately whose child can do the most, was so prevalent. I think it's worse these days because of the way school is. I not only get asked what letters Tiny knows, but also get regaled with how much homework their child has (WHAT?!! they've only just started school, the poor little mites. They shouldn't be doing homework, they should be playing). The impression given by all this 'busy stuff' is that you've got to take education so seriously and just ram knowledge into your children or they'll just get left behind and be on the scrapheap by the age of 6, and then what about SATS results? If they don't achieve a high score presumably they'll never have a good job and will be thorougly miserable for the rest of their lives.
SO I ought to be feeling really smug about home edding, shouldn't I? Unfortunately the hangover from the school competitiveness doesn't just disappear and you can end up still being caught up in it. I feel like I'm being battered over the head by some parents who want to convince me how good the school is where their little on goes and that my two would be so much better off there than at home, and by others who probably want to bolster their need to be seen to be giving their child the best possible start by rehearsing what their child is learning when they're with other mums. It's only natural, you get validation of what you're doing that way. So I turn to the home ed community for a little sanity and for the most part that's what I get, but this competitiveness that we've all been taught from day 1 can really get in the way. Instead of hearing what other parents do and reading their blogs, and being inspired, I find myself being cowed by all the stuff they're doing that I'm not, or rather my perception of what they're doing. The feeling that I'm 'not doing enough' has been following me around since I first started home edding 4 years ago. I have to give myself a stern talking to though, because that's not what we're doing this for. It's not about stuffing facts and figures into young minds, nor about packing as much into a day or a week as we can. Even if the kids learn absolutely nothing (as if that's possible) , they will have benefitted from being able to do things at their pace, not at the pace a school might dictate, nor rushing to keep up with other families, who, after all, are just doing the same thing as us; running their lives to suit their family and its own unique style.

Living well is the best revenge

I use this quote by George Herbert so often it might as well be my motto. Actually I used to misquote it as ' The best revenge is to live well' until one sleepless stupid o'clock in the morning, with injustice on my mind, I googled it and found out where it actually came from.
I'm not sure whether I need to explain how I read this quote, after all what matters about a text, in my humble opinion, is how each individual interprets it. Suffice to say though, that I don't consider 'living well' to mean eating from gold plates and sleeping between satin sheets.
I think I first began to consider the concept of living well while I was still at school and irritated by those who were effortlessly popular and pretty. With hindsight I was able to say to my own growing up daughter when faced with the same frustrations, 'Well, just picture them in 10 years time. They may seem to have the upper hand, and all the attention, now, but which of you is going to go farther, them or you?' I didn't mean it in an unkind way, it's just that we can often lose sight of our own gifts when faced with such 'obvious' talents.
Later in life, when faced with slights, bullying, unfairness, injustice and intolerance it has been tempting to give in to murderous thoughts. It's difficult to resist the desire to poke someone in the eye, rant at the top of my voice, let the air out of their tyres, throw a brick through their window, watch them die slowly and painfully, hurt them as much as they've hurt me, but the trouble is that to act on that would not only be immoral, it would also not achieve anything and actually result in diminishing me. To actively and openly react to the provocation, however justified I felt, would have brought nothing new and useful to the situation. It's much more difficult, but ultimately more worthwhile and wholesome to one's own sense of self, to metaphorically lift your chin and stride on (and over). To keep your integrity intact and carry on living by your own principles, achieving in a small way every day, watching those you love grow brighter and happier and knowing that that is much more important that transient point-scoring, even when you know damned well you're in the right, is not only a good thing to do, it's the best thing. It's a bit like a home made cake. The most important thing is that you made it, no one else. And no one else could do it quite the way you did.

all welcome here :)

Well here we are, been meaning to do this for a long time :) now you can pop in and see us as often as you like ! Just pull up a chair, bring your cuppa and we'll put the world to rights.
The more the merrier , be it black, white, mainstream, hippy, muslim, christian, pagan, aetheist, left wing, socialist, right wing or raving loony party. All are welcome here, with nappys, bottles, boobs or a big sandwich and an apple - all are welcome here. Kids in tow, an aged old gran to bring along , no kids, some kids , old young , fat or thin, long hair or short or mohecan, all are welcomed here.
Pull up a chair on Liz n Gary's veranda and make yourself at home. We're here to share some tails, to put right some wrongs, to share laughter, fun or tears; all are welcome here.