I think we were somewhat saved by considering ourselves ‘thinking about home education’ for several years and only telling others and actually feeling like we were ‘properly’ doing it until Monster was school age. I have to confess to going through a wide variety of mentalities about our approach and having countless master plans, most of which seem pretty laughable now. Another bonus was that at the time of first investigating the idea of Home Ed we were living elsewhere and knowing that we wouldn’t be staying there so finding a local HE community didn’t seem worth doing.

I have always been rather glad that we didn’t decide we were home educating until our youngest was three and a half. I think it took us that time (and P three years at school) to reach the right point. When the children were tiny I just loved being a mum to a fascinating small person. I can see the advantages of deciding you’re home edders when they’re tiny (friends who understand and so on) but I’m glad I didn’t do it that way as I think I’d have worried and thought about the future too much.