May You Live in Interesting Times

Oh boy, our lives are complicated.

We have to ask, have we gone wrong somewhere - and we have to consider all the things we are doing, and how we may be out of God's will.

Today, I caught sight of a taxi job in the local paper, and Neil phoned up about it. We're still waiting to hear, but it's a chance of a full time job, barely above minimum wage, but regular (oh, I'm almost excited about the notion of having a regular income to set against regular outgoings) - and I would have to run the farm sinlge handed - I can do that, if I have to.

What is really testing us is whether we have made a mistake in sending the girls to school - it's a very small fee, more of a co-operative funding arrangement, and they've been incredible lenient to us in our hardship - but is this time of trouble to do with being out of God's will? Where do we stand on school?

Academically, they are gaining with French and Spanish, losing with History and Geography (ow, Mummy's and Daddy's pet subjects respectively), breaking even in most other subects (though H is getting away from me in maths, so that is probably a gain) and then gaining from those things we couldn't provide - PE, Drama, Choir - in this country, there IS no christian home ed community locally. Not for us. That's where we went wrong before. Isolation is not nice, and both of them love all that 'group' stuff.

We do feel we are losing them to some extent to our family vision - but on the other hand, they are learning to develop their own vision - which of these should prevail? The travel element is nearly killing me, and of course, it costs a lot of money. Which at the moment, we don't have.

They are in school all day, and doing homework all night. They almost never ride. It is hard to teach them to keep home, to take part in our business, to do the chores they're committed too. Something will need to give. I've been aware for some time that we're trying to live two lives. And they don't fit.

If Neil gets the taxi job, we may have to take them out of school for at least a term, if not two, while we catch up with the backlog, and stop spending all that money on diesel for a while. Perhaps that will make us all think.

Tonight, Cormac got colic - he's been really poorly, and another huge vet bill looms on the horizon. I am sitting on the sofa at nearly midnight, waiting to check on him, before going to bed for six hours of not much rest. Vet again tomorrow.Late on into the process, I decided that no one was going to school tomorrow. We're too tired. Harrie is too harrowed. We'll catch up on homework, all being well with the boy.

There is a shred of optimism. If we can get this job, just for a few months, while we build our business. If I can run the farm, and make a little extra and ... if we can ... keep up with school? Go back to homeschool? If we can get our feet back on dry land?

We value your prayers, and all your support.

Long, long post as light dawns

A lot has happened in the last year or so, and not all of it can be blogged here. Chiefly, my children are in school, and life has changed around that immeasurably – I spend a lot of time driving them, and Neil spends a good deal more time earning money to pay for them.
That’s a massive oversimplification, but that’s what’s happened. We didn’t know if they would cope, academically and socially, and they have done both. Socially, they are surprisingly at ease, and academically, they are easily up to standard.
There were several reasons why this happened, and as I have said, I can’t go into all of them here, but by and large, it was my fault. I had two areas where I was not doing well – one was practical, the other personal/emotional – possibly a health issue.
Practically, I was not coping, my time was not organised, the house and garden were falling into disarray, I don’t want to rehearse here all my failings, this is not meant to be some kind of confessional, but suffice it to say, that home was not exactly where the heart was.
The other area – the personal one – is stuff I’m not going to go into here. Lets just say, I have a lot of issues. I even have a bunch of issues I didn’t even know I had until a few weeks ago. There is a lot to deal with.
The girls have been in their Christian school now for half a year – that’s one and a half terms in old money – and they are loving it. Just as I start to feel , what have I done? Why on earth are they in school?
I certainly felt a great empathy with Marisa when I chanced upon her blog last night. For a number of reasons.
The reality is, I have always gone off at a moment’s notice. Before now, if I’d thought, ‘oh, I want them to come home’ I’d have worked on my husband for a day or two, he would have come around to my point of view, and then the week after, we’d have given notice to the school. Not any more. My selfish, one person actions , have done enough damage, and now I have two young ladies with thoughts of their own to consider.
So. I have a new vision (or, as my niece, Jo would say a 2YP – two year plan) and this time, I do believe I have found the threads God intends to weave into my life, and if I can only stick with it, I may finally make the beautiful tapestry I know He has for me.
It’s like this. I miss my simple life, my homesteading, homeschooling (sorry , British pals to whom ‘home education’ matters so much, the phrase ‘homeschooling’ has personal meaning for me, and in this context, I must keep it. In ‘public’ I try hard to use the preferred term) and the close to God’s Word, deep in Creation, literal life I led.
At the same time, good stewardship requires us to look at how we are living – renting this property is not a wise fiscal decision, though given our past history, we don’t have a lot of choice right now. But we may do in a couple of years’ time.
I need to accept that I can’t just snatch and grab. If I want the girls to come home, they’re going to have to want it too. And most of the clearing up that needs doing to make that a possible scenario, is My Work. Two years is when it all seems to happen. So I have some targets, and I am right at the foot of the mountain.
• Home has to become the place we all want to be.
• That means my practical issues need to be resolved, organisation and harmony need to reign. Home needs to be the shelter, not the storm.
• It gives me two years to get my business (my veg box scheme) back on track. It doesn’t need to be a corporate whammy, just a little home business to help out a little. While I have the time, I need to use it wisely.
• I don’t do group therapy, but some of my personal issues need to be not issues. Whatever that takes, be it prayer, counselling, self discipline and/or a visit to the doctor, this box must be ticked.
• The while, I need to pray my girls will choose home, and try hard to make it the best choice. If they don’t, I must accept the alternative.
• We need to consider that in that time, our past abysmal financial record should be cleared, and there are also possibilities of affordable housing locally.
• That means our dream of a farm must be built on the land we now rent independently. This is a bloom where you are planted issue.
• Those last two are a whole nother post.
Finally, there is one other element present, which has been nudging at our hearts for some years, and which may become part of the plan. That counts as another thing about which I can’t blog yet.
I’m being put to the test by the fact that lambing is about to begin, and Neil contract lambs for someone else first, and is already into 70hour 7 day weeks in preparation. For the first time, I will have no willing little right hand girls to help take up the slack. I’m on my own.

Ah yes...

Thanks, Dorothy, I knew there was something!

The girls are loving school. Three days in, we are all exhausted from all the accurate time keeping, and H is getting used to mountains of homework which, bizarrely, she quite likes. We'll see how long that lasts! Boo is a fish in water - always social and competitive, she loves the charts, the competition, the PE ... she was always going to love it though!

It feels a right time as if H is finally (an unbelievably, thank you , Lord!) ready for it all, in a way which was unimagineable at 6 - it's taken six long years, and now, I believe, she can cope. Boo probably would have been ready earlier, but not at the just-barely-four they wanted her. She was still a baby, she still needed her mother. That's the sad thing about the system, it insists that one size fits all.

I don't know how long this season in our life will be, or if we will ever home educate again, but two things I do know:

Firstly, this was a necessary thing - it was only after they were at school that I realised how hopelessly dysfunctional our home had become. It will take me at least half a term to get the house into a state where I would not be too ashamed to invite someone in. Hey, maybe this is why we don't have any friends?

Secondly, if ever we do home educate again, it won't be until we move somewhere else. Or, if it becomes critical and we are still here, I will do so in isolation, or with the local home educators. One of the biggest burdens I feel has been lifted from me, is the 'christian' home ed group we used to attend, and the unkindness and bullying of some (chiefly one) members. I know the children also feel the weight has lifted, that they don't have to spend time with such thoroughly nasty children. The two families who were lovely, we are still in touch with, so we can still see them. The others? So long, and thanks for nothing.

By contrast, both children and adults at the little christian school (where I don't feel the need to use inverted commas) seem polite, normal, and friendly.

So our interim report is, so far, so good.

Decade - Pt3 - No2 to West End

The move from No 1 has to qualify as our most bizarre. The house next door, that is to say the other one of a pair of semi detached cottages, came up for rent. It had a lot going for it – the unattaced end of our cottage faced north, was overshadowed by the old forge, now the village shop, and was damp and dank – whereas the end of No 2 was south facing, and had a large lawn, and an apple tree. It was in better repair, had central heating instead of an old coal fire, and was generally a nicer house. It only had two bedrooms, but that was because it had a lovely upstairs bathroom! Not the one in the back yard.
So we moved next door. Most of the houses in our village are owned by The Crown Estate, so we didn't change landlords, we just moved!
I might add that when we came to move out, we found that the loft hatch in No 2 was considerably smaller than the loft hatch in No 1, and since we had just shoved our stuff across the loft, we were unable to extract it! We had to call on our neighbours, who thankfully were friendly, to get it out through their house!

While there, H started school, Boo started preschool, I registered as a childminder, I had some minor social life, and Neil ran a rather successful garden contracting business. We rented a field for the sheep and Buttons, and acquire Maggie, a miniature shetland, for Boo. I taught part time for some of the time, at a local Riding School. We were reasonably normal.
But H hated school. She was bullied, she was not well taught, she started to react very badly to all manner of foods, and life situations. Poor little H, so full of quirks and character, was having all the edges knocked off. And it wasn't working for her.
We prayed about how on earth we might manage to homeschool her? Where would we get books, for example? Days later, the school, having fundraised and fleeced parents for months to obtain new books for its new library, emptied the contents of its old library into three wheelie bins. Not to Oxfam, not to the Third World, not even to the village jumble sale. Into the trash can.
With permission, a shocked friend and I emptied the bins, and we had a school library. That's called a direct answer to prayer!
So at around the time that I made a final comittment as a christian, I also made the commitment to homeschool. And at first, it was sheer joy. We 'did' Beatrix Potter, we drew rabbits, we read and wrote and learned about Herdwick sheep and the National Trust and the Lake District.
And eventually, Neil took on a full time job as a head gardener, and it seemed we were set.
After two years, yet another cottage became free. This was on a friend's (still Crown Estate) farm, and was out of the village. I'd coveted it when my niece lived there, it had more space, a Rayburn stove, and was much, much cuter. It was further from the field but it was also away from the village school.
When we first moved to the village, the school had been a major attraction, it was small, cute and all Miss Read. I had been moved around a lot as a child, and wanted my children to stay put in one school, with one set of friends, for their entire childhood. However, H's experience in the school, which doubled in size, and built all over it's idyllic tree shade playing field in the year she began, was totally awful. And now, living right opposite it, but having deserted and maligned it, we often felt a bit threatened. So for the fifth time, in H's seven years, we moved. We moved to West End, and the hardest bit of the journey so far.

As Captain Beaky famously said

Well I'm blowed!

Look at this!

What ever next. Just as well we have second hand book stalls and our own old dictionaries.

The calm ... erm... after the storm!

Had a lot of tempestuousness going on just lately.
We're once again considering school for the girls .. but I must admit today the panic subsided, and once again we felt like we might just survive, the way we are .. the problems are kind of multi faceted .. the isolation is not good. There are other ways we could address this, but school would be a really nice one ... then there's the time.
I have, over the last few days, discovered the true extent to which I have let my daughters down, in terms of inadequate housekeeping, standards, and training. It's been scary. I can't let it carry on this way.
If they were at school, someone (me) would get chance to monitor the state of their rooms, fore example. As it is, I am responsible for homeschooling, running a business, half running a farm, running Sunday School, running a Guide unit, looking after four horses, trying to grow all our own food .. as anyone who has ever been overcommitted knows, urgent begins to take precedence over important, and then things go wrong.
It is simply not ok that it has taken two days, and will take another, to make my younger daughter's bedroom habitable.
From the isolation point of view .. we just don't seem to make friends with other HEers. Partly, this is because, we are too busy to go to anything - our local christian he sport club is good, but in winter, we can't get there, and be back in time to do barn chores and shut chickens up. We get few enough chances to ride in these dark, inhospitable days, and we can't be playing netball when there might be chance! My daughters make friends at Guides, and Pony Club, with children who go to school - they aren't, and don't want to be, oddball off the wall types! Me? I just don't have any friends. Ali, who I see once in a blue moon, but talk to a lot, is a real friend, other than that, I have no one. No one to invite round for coffee, no one to have lunch with, no one to talk or pray or sew with. That can't be right.
I have a burst of optimism about our chapel, we love it dearly and would love to see it full (your prayers appreciated!) - but really, I'm the youngest by a mile and I'm no spring chicken.
I can do all things, through Christ who strengtheneth me. Which is just as well.
It will work out. I wish I knew how.

God, bless Patrick Jones

Recently, Waterstones cancelled a poetry reading, following a protest by Christian Voice. You can decide who was pulling whose strings here.
A furore in the christian homeschool world led to several people joining the email campaign to get the event cancelled.

Strangely, my own concern that this is not what Jesus would have done, has been censored, so I can't discuss it with my homeschooling fellows in that arena. But I can say what I like here.

Jesus said:
11"Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. 12Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

or:
11Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. 12Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you.

or:
11-12"Not only that—count yourselves blessed every time people put you down or throw you out or speak lies about you to discredit me. What it means is that the truth is too close for comfort and they are uncomfortable. You can be glad when that happens—give a cheer, even!—for though they don't like it, I do! And all heaven applauds. And know that you are in good company. My prophets and witnesses have always gotten into this kind of trouble.

depending on which human being translated it.

and this (Luke 6)
27But I say unto you which hear, Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you,

and this (Matt 5)
44But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,

and this (Luke23)
34 Then Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do.”

So just because other religions, based on rule keeping and punishment, kick up when someone publishes a book which offends them, is it right for us to do likewise?

Luke 6:26-28 (King James Version)
26Woe unto you, when all men shall speak well of you! for so did their fathers to the false prophets. 27But I say unto you which hear, Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you, 28Bless them that curse you, and pray for them which despitefully use you.

Are we teaching our children to follow the world and false religions, or are we teaching them to follow their Master?

It kind of sounds to me like we should let him read his poems, and quietly love him, and pray for him. We don't need to do that in view of the national media, since, strangely, that's not who we are praying to. Odd though that may seem.

Here, and unapologetically from 'The Message' which quite often causes me to wince with self awareness, is a little piece of advice, from Matthew chapter 5:

43-47"You're familiar with the old written law, 'Love your friend,' and its unwritten companion, 'Hate your enemy.' I'm challenging that. I'm telling you to love your enemies. Let them bring out the best in you, not the worst. When someone gives you a hard time, respond with the energies of prayer, for then you are working out of your true selves, your God-created selves. This is what God does. He gives his best—the sun to warm and the rain to nourish—to everyone, regardless: the good and bad, the nice and nasty. If all you do is love the lovable, do you expect a bonus? Anybody can do that. If you simply say hello to those who greet you, do you expect a medal? Any run-of-the-mill sinner does that.

After a long winter of deliberation

it seems the girls will not be going to school.
Try as we might, we cannot see where the money is coming from - we simply can't afford it. People have said 'step out in faith' and to be honest, if we were a few quid short, maybe that would be worth it. But to consider school fees, when sometimes we're pushed to afford shoes? (I'm not trying to be melodramatic here, shoes are unconscionably expensive, you must admit! And we are, like it or not, a low income family!)
Added to which, the three hours daily in the car, I really do not think I could cope with. Not to mention yet more expense, and the carbon footprint!
I feel better that we have considered it fully, discussed it, visited the school, really explored the option.
So we arrive at Candlemas, and according to myth, yesterday's foul weather means that spring is on it's way, and winter is behind us! Hurrah! Onward and upward, home educating, making a home, making a life. And occasionally babbling about it ...

As they grow ....

One of the reasons my blog is in witness protection, is that my daughters may well be going to school next year. Now in homeschool circles that's a hanging offence, and in christian homeschool circles, it's a burning offence! And I simply don't feel that way.
Saturday was a very special day for me. I watched my 10 year old daughter (who we think may have Aspergers Syndrome, though we do not know, we are hoping to get her priavately diagnosed, but there is a hold up, and this may turn out to be of the Lord, because I am now wondering if it really is as bad as we thought) grow up a step, and was privileged to hold her hand and help her along.
Firstly, we went out hacking, and I had to have her younger sister on the lead rein, as she is going through a nervous phase, and I watched as H happily and competently cantered on ahead of us, negotiated gates and bridges (she does all the getting off and on, on our rides, LOL) and set off across open country, leaving us behind, trotting sedately up the field margin, watching her plait swing in time with her pony's bustling chestnut bottom, cantering off into autumn mist and freedom. It was quite a tear jerker.
We then had a long and deep conversation about life, friends and school. H was taken out of school at 6, a jibbering wreck, frightened, confused, and we thought, damaged for life. We have homeschooled ever since, and worked with her to try to learn how to be her, without being afraid. She has of late realised that she would really like ot have friends. So we worked through how her ideal outcome would be that she would stay homeschooled, and have a ton of friends, but that outcome did not seem terribly likely. We have tried with making friends, but it doesn't seem to work for us with homeschool groups, and fellow christian homeschoolers. Partly, I have to tell you, there are some very strange homeschoolers out there, and partly, because, you know, it just isn't the same? Friends at school are different.
We have a christian school about 30-40 minutes from us, and thus far, the main stumbling block for me, has been the length of journey, I feel like this journey, twice daily, aside from the effect on our carbon footprint! robs us of a day a week! The cost is not too astronomic, and would have to be offset by my making more of a contribution to the family budget in the time when I would have been homeschooling. But can we give that time? It remains to be seen. H really desperately wants to go to another school, an all girls, private school a similar distance away, but that really is financially out of the question. I also don't think she would cope - not at first anyway, it's a lot bigger. But I truly believe that if my brave girl can seize the day, and try at least to get back to school, albeit in a small, protected, christian environment, it will be for the best.
I have noticed that when I am seized with the desire to say 'no, we can't do it, not after all we've been through' it is for me that I am feeling fear, doubt, failure, not her.
Finally, on Saturday, she said that if it came down to school and friends, or homeschool and no friends, she would like to go to school. I am so incredibly proud of her, unless you know the child, you can't know the courage it's taken. We have decided at the moment to see this school year out at home, and aim for admission in next September, but it does mean we will have to arrange to see the head soon, and it may be that it will be better for her to go in the summer term, and have one term in the junior school before she hits seniors in the autumn. We will see.
As for Boo, the younger - it is likely that she will opt to go along too, as she has always craved society (!) but we have decided that if she digs in her heels and wants to stay at home for a term or more, just to make the point that she too can have choices, that will be fine by us.