Monster & Teeny

We woke up this morning and it was such a nice sunny day, but my Mummy was going out to work. So we had breakfast, but we had to eat it quick because my Mummy was quite late - as always! So we went to collect Lucy and R and don’t forget R too. Mummy came back from work and I had something really exciting to tell her because I got to the fair level on the Curse of the Were Rabbit game on my X box.

And then we went out to the farm. We went to see the cows, but R thought they didn’t smell very nice! Then we went to see the lovely sheep. I liked the lambs the best and especially liked watching the lambs being born. But my favourite part was stroking the lambs and going into their pen to stroke them.

Then we came home, but we had to bring Lucy, R & R home first. Then we went home and we did everything that we wanted to. Then we had dinner and then we had some jelly beans. 

The End.

I read Monster The Velveteen Rabbit last night as his bedtime story. He was so inspired by the story that he wanted to write a sequel. We have been working on that, and another dictated story tonight instead of a bedtime story. I then asked Monster if he’d like to dictate his day to me so I could blog that instead of my take of our day, so the above is dictated to me, from Monster, with no prompting at all.

Gill is asking the question over on Sometimes It’s Peaceful. I will leave a briefer answer in a comment over there but realised that while I’ve talked before about why we started I never really mentioned how I found out about Home Education.

I was probably always aware of it as a concept - I recall watching a girl not much older than me on Wogan being interviewed with her father who was hot housing her to pass her Maths A level at 9 or something. So I knew there were people doing it but assumed it was genuis children taught in a homeschool manner by academic parents. Funnily enough all of the percieved downsides to that lifestyle such as not having school friends or doing much PE all really appealed to the 9 or 10 year old me - the chance to just focus on schoolwork without any of the other dreadful stuff that school threw up sounded wonderful .

I was reminded of Home Education again when I held a newborn Monster in my arms during that period with your first child when you feel sure you will never be parted from them and allowing anyone else to even hold them would be like having your own arm ripped off let alone sending them away from you for seven hours a day when they are barely five years old. I just as quickly wrote it off as a bad idea for me personally and didn’t think about it again for several years.

When I had Monster I didn’t really have any friends with children, I would not have dreamt of getting advice on anything from my own Mum so most of my support and assistance came from online places. I spent lots of time on a newsgroup - uk.people.parents where I discussed and got advice on everything from sleeping to weaning, walking and talking and how often people were changing nappies. Many of the parents had similar aged babies to Monster and several more had older children so were that valuable ‘voice of experience’ for me. I drifted away from the newsgroup when we moved and it took ages to sort out internet access but I returned to it again when I had Teeny and found a whole new crop of parents with same age babies as me again as well as finding plenty of the people who’d offered me support still there too. At that particular time my big concern was Monster being so clingy and really struggling with the childcare day nursery I was using. I changed to home based childcare which he thrived on so it seemed pretty logical when my fretting moved to him starting pre school to contine to do that from home too. I’ve just spent a happy hour or so trawling through the archives of that newsgroup and reading messages I wrote to the group in July 2003 asking about Home Education with replies from Alison and June recommending among other things that I head on over to the Muddlepuddle (now EarlyYears) list, which I duly did.

I would very much credit the fact that people I knew (albeit online only at that stage) and respected as parents and considered pretty normal were already doing it for me looking further into it. Knowing it exists as a possibilty  is a long way from knowing it exists as a possibility for you and your family. I joined EO, attended camps and met many, many more families, all Home Educating, all Home Educating their way. It was real people already doing it that gave me confidence to do so many of the life choices I have made, including parenting issues such as homebirth and cosleeping. I may well have researched further into things and already known about them as concepts before hand but knowing real people who were doing them made them accessible and possibly ideas for me too.

Laterly, when Monster actually got to school age and we truly went from ‘considering Home Education’ to actually ‘Being Home Educators’ (I know we actually were doing it years before he was official but it was my standard line to people who wanted to interogate me when he was still 3 years old!) it was the massive circle of friends we had made who also Home Educated, locally and nationally, in real life and online who held my hand and jumped alongside me. It was reading blogs, meeting people at camps and seeing all the children who were Home Educated doing so well that convinced and comforted me.