unlearnt at last

Dora the What?

2011-09-20T19:52:00.000-07:00

When I was a kid I loved my My Little Ponies (MLP). This is one I used to have It's kinda pony like, it's got a mane and a tail, maybe it's a bit sappy, but you get the idea. I had a play set that went with them too, it was an apple stand, ponies like apples so that kinda makes sense. I really wanted the hot air balloon so my MLP's could go adventuring but my mum said it was too expensive for a pile of plastic that was made by child slaves.

This morning I had kids tv on and there was an ad for a MLP. It looked like this.

That's not really pony like, unless it's a pony from the far reaches of outer space. Admittedly the MLP of the 1980s is a rather abstract interpretation of an equine creature but the MLP of the 1980s was seriously lacking in one area. SEX APPEAL. Yes that' right. The modern MLP has been SEXIFIED! Its body is thinner, its legs are longer and thinner, its eyes are ... well they're kinda hard to describe given that they're on a pink plastic pony, but at a stretch they're sexy!

Wow! That's pretty stupid right!?

So the next ad was for a Dora the Explorer toy.

But I think I must have missed something somewhere, because Dora is an EXPLORER, not a ballerina! And Dora is a chubby little girl, not a skinny long legged thing. Call me crazy, but isn't exploring, and going on adventures more interesting than ballet? Granted some ballerinas have wonderful careers, and ballet is fantastic, but it's not about cutesy, fluffy tutus, it's about strength, creative expression, often a tragic love story, but not frou frou.

Soooo the next ad was for some strange rodent like thing. It's probably a hamster but we don't get them in Australia as far as I know, we get guinea pigs so for the sake of familiarity I'll refer to them as such.

Finally something that's not sexified! Unless there are some sexy legs hiding underneath that fur. But! There had to be a but (or two in this case) when you look at the play sets, these are apparently SHOPPING guinea pigs! Guinea pigs who like fashion and accessorising! Perish the thought of them just living like normal guinea pigs! ALL little girls love to shop and wear fashion so it's appropriate that toy guinea pigs like it too if little girls are going to play with them. You wouldn't want to stretch the imagination would you. Adventuring guinea pigs would be uncool, no one would like them EXCEPT

BOYS!!! Boys like guinea pigs that BATTLE and have missiles strapped to them!

Yes, that's right. Angry, armed to the teeth, battling guinea pigs!!!

Gee. I wonder why there is such a high divorce rate?

Missed Opportunities

2011-09-14T02:26:00.000-07:00

One of the reasons people insist on sending their kids to school is so they don't miss out on any opportunities. This is an admirable reason, but what if we reframed it. What if LIFE was the opportunity? What if FREEDOM was the opportunity, and by sending kids to school for 30 hours a week + homework + extra curricular activities you were actually stealing those opportunities?

Mostly this refers to the school trips and the computers and technological stuff, but also the socialising. Let's get the socialising out of the way first. We all live in a society. School is not a society, it's a school, it can be considered a part of the community, but it's not a society, and most of what happens there is anti social, not social. When someone can give me ONE SINGLE VALUABLE BEHAVIOUR from the playground (that can't be absorbed outside of school) I'll eat my hat. My partner would like me to start with the green furry one but I'm volunteering my sun hat because it's a bit tight.

Technology plays a huge part in our modern society, it's understandable that parents want their kids to have the best stuff. I went to a technology highschool and learnt how to use computers, modems, and other stuff, but these days everything I learnt is completely 100% obsolete - for which I am wholly grateful! My mac is a darn site better than the old apple macs that my school had! My lessons on the internet were apparently very advanced. It took about half an hour to go through the process of connecting, and then we got to send a single message to the neighbouring boys school, who returned a one sentence message in time to shut it all down and go to lunch. I wish I could remember the message, I vaguely recall it being hormone fueled and there being a fair amount of giggling.

Tomorrow my daughter is going on camp with her girl guides troupe. We often go on day trips, to the museum, the art gallery, bush walking, camping, the swimming pool, the library, the shopping centre and a huge array of other places and events. She doesn't miss out on anything! In fact, when we go, it's often on a school day and we are close to the only people in the entire venue, so we can spend as much time on any particular item as we want. We don't waste time counting each other, waiting for each other (we happily split into groups), we can eat when we're hungry, go home when we want to, and so on. My memories of school trips to the museum are not nearly as fond as my memories of trips with my mum.

Look at it like this. While schooled children are at school, my kids are playing in snow, cooking their own lunch, caring for their pets, reading the books they're interested in, doing the projects they're interested in, growing their own vegetables, spending time in the community, learning how adults manage the house they live in, and not being compared to anyone but themselves! They know they have to do stuff that's boring because we all clean the house together, they don't need 30 hours a week of boredom to learn how to do stuff they don't want to do, half an hour a day is sufficient!

My daughter has sleep overs, she goes to the bakery with friends, takes the dog walking and runs into the local kids and has a chat, she spends time with her cousins, and with all that I can't believe that I was once worried about her missing opportunities! But I guess that's just another part of the propaganda of schooling isn't it. If they didn't tell you about the wonderful opportunities they offer at the local school, if they said "Send your child to us! We'll ensure that they spend 30 hours a week sitting still, being talked at, following instructions, being compared to each other, and sometimes we'll take them on a strictly regimented day trip" would we still be concerned about the many "opportunities" our kids might miss? Maybe if we view LIFE as a great opportunity, we might start to question the way we remove children from society and prevent them from living as nature intended them to live - freely - for those early, most crucial, formative years.

How to pull your kid out of school

2011-09-06T22:02:00.000-07:00

Schooling is so indelibly imprinted in our brains that the idea of removing our kids from a school can seem overwhelming, no matter how tempting it may be. I'm going to do a post about how to go about pulling them out based on how I did it, and what worked for us. Please add your own suggestions or link to blog posts in the comments section!

Step 1: Decide you want to do it

A lot of people set arbitrary dates - I did - like at the end of that school term, or year. I set a date for the end of the term, but after much thought decided that there was no point leaving my daughter in the school any longer, so I pulled her out three weeks earlier than I'd planned. The day I pulled her I made the snap decision sitting in the playground waiting to collect her. My sister asked me why I had set a date and I really didn't have a good answer, so I asked my daughter if she'd be happy to finish that day and ... she never went back!

Leaving the playground that day was so liberating! We walked along the street by the school and I said to her "are you SURE you're finished" and she said "no, actually, there's one more thing" and she stuck her middle finger up, and we kept walking ... it would be a lie to include any references to sunsets here because it was only 3pm, and this was really only the beginning of a sometimes bumpy road!

Step 2: Decide what you are going to tell the school

We had a few problems with the principal and the truancy agents, so I suggest plotting carefully. Know the laws in your state. We were threatened with legal action if I didn't return my SON ... yes SON to school. The truant agent didn't read what the principal sent very well. We were hoping to avoid registration as home schoolers but when they threatened us with legal action we chose to register quick smart.

Given my time again I would tell them we were going on a holiday, moving state, or maybe even joining a canabalistic religious sect. I would ask for all the appropriate paperwork as though I was planning to re-enroll my daughter in another school. I had a lot of reasons to pull her out though, and I wanted to tell them how lousy their school was. At the end of the day, the school wasn't my problem, I should have left them to work it out by themselves. I doubt they changed anything based on what I had to say.

Find out what registering for homeschool in your state involves, be prepared to do it if necessary - or perhaps you'd rather register, that's entirely up to you, just know how it all works beforehand.

Try this link

Emergency curriculum kit costs $45

The curriculum I used - feel free to copy it!

Step 3 : Now you're on your own!

A child who has been in school for a long time will have a lot of stress to let out, and a lot of de-schooling to do. There will possibly be some grief even if your child is really excited about it. Changes often bring grief. We tackled this in two ways. Firstly we did exactly what we would do on school holidays .... NOTHING! Three weeks of NOTHING! Holidays are normally two weeks, but we snuck an extra one in for good measure. Then at the end of that my daughter started to do what I've read is quite normal, and worry about not learning (because until now learning had all be judged and set in front of her ... and boring) so I wrote lists of useless activities for her to do and told her she was learning. Lists included things like

Read the bus timetable (this was maths)

Read a book (english)

Make a pie chart of the colours of cars that drive past our house (maths again)

Choose a country, cook dinner based on that country's national dish (geography)

Research the ghost stories from the Tower of London (history)

And you get the picture. It was pretty mundane stuff but it made her feel like she was learning. The first week I put 30 things on the list and gave her a week to do it, telling her to ask for help if she needed it. She had the completed list to me two days early. The next week I put 20 things on the list, she got it to me early. The next week we did 20 things again but she had a bit of a panic to get it to me on time. The week after that she didn't finish the list and stressed that she hadn't done a good job. I asked her if she thought there were too many things on the list - she said she did. The next week I put less things on the list. Lists were getting boring by now .... so I asked her if she'd like to stop doing lists and (huge sigh of relief) she said she would.

Step 4: The work of de-schooling begins

De-schooling will apparently take six months for every year of school your child attended. I found that this wasn't entirely accurate. What I found was that de-schooling was a process of ebb and flow. One step forward, two steps back. It was like that for the next 18 months. She'd binge on tv, stay up late, engage in mind numbing activities, and basically she achieved NOTHING that was visible. But underneath all the destructive behaviour was a whole lot of unwinding, and learning to trust herself, to self regulate herself and her activities, learning to entertain herself and basically becoming a free spirit again, she had to reclaim herself from the institutionalised worker bee she'd become.

During this time I had to really look at myself and my own beliefs. it was hard to stop myself from making value judgements about the worthiness of what she was doing some days! It was hard not to suggest that she do something that used her brain (perhaps beg would be a better word). Sometimes I failed, sometimes I succeeded. I had to do a lot of reading about unschooling to keep me on track, to stop myself from being scared about it, and I had to really look at what I'd spent my entire life believing. It was a journey of self discovery for me, my daughter, and the whole family!

Step 5: wake up an unschooler!

De-schooling ebbs and flows, I really can't stress this enough. Sometimes it will be you that needs to unpack your stuff, sometimes it will be your kids. But eventually, one day you will wake up and realise that you are unschooling. You'll have stopped looking for learning opportunities, your kids won't be bored anymore, you'll look at the learning after it's happened and be amazed (and maybe even a little bit smug) at how far you've come, and how happy your kids are, at how liberating the whole experience is!

How big is a whale and other important questions.

2011-08-04T00:46:00.000-07:00

For some time now Spikee has been comparing how big thing are to how big a whale is. I decided it was time to actually show him how long whales are so after some quick googling we found measurements for bluewhales, hump back whales, orcas, whale sharks, great white sharks, and finally the humble dolphin.

We wrote all our information down on a bit of paper and headed to the park with some chalk and a tape measure. We drew a chalk line to mark the place we started measuring from and then drew another line every 5 metres until we hit the 30m mark, and the length of a blue whale, then we added all the other animals to our line.

He was quite impressed by how big they are, even though he had believed they were bigger, and the rest of us were rather daunted by the length of a great white. I knew they were big at 6.5m, but looking at that distance made me even more certain that I love swimming in pools!

I'm reading the first Harry Potter book to Spikee and he's really loving it. He has traded in his Superman cape temporarily, in exchange for some Harry Potter glasses and a wand. We're going to see if we can find some material and sew him a cape. He loves dressing up so much, far more than Stylish ever did, and this week he is refusing to answer to any name but Harry (given we'd only just gotten used to calling him Superman it's presenting us with quite a challenge)

Stylish has finally decided to give Harry Potter a go, and has read The Philosopher's Stone in two days flat. She's starting The Chamber of Secrets tonight. I think that seeing the movie really piked her interest. We've seen all the movies together, but the final one really seemed to awaken something in her. When asked this morning if she preferred the movie or the book, she had to confess to thinking the book was better.

Stylish has been so creative with her frog tanks lately. She really adores her frogs. I'm told there are 7 of them, two species. She's been finding all her ferns and mossy branches at the park down the road, and she found a heap of good stuff when we had our snow hunting picnic.

She also has a scorpion that came home on some drift wood she found at the beach. The scorpion is quite fascinating, it's quite enjoying its' diet of cockroaches (stow aways from Sydney), and we all love seeing it grab hold of them and poison them - maybe we're sadists, or maybe we've just lived with a few too many cockroaches!

Word Count

2011-07-29T00:54:00.000-07:00

It seems that Angus has really started talking and I thought I should write a list of his words while I can still count them!

Mum

Dad

Hot

Hello

Na Na Na (which is booby for some reason!?)

La la la (like Elmo's song)

Ernie (Bert and Ernie)

Most mornings he wakes us up by saying La La La, so we end up singing Elmo's song to him, every time he's anywhere near the fire he says "ot ot ot ot" very seriously, and when I'm carrying him he likes to say "up" lots. I just love this stage! I can't believe we're planning a 1st birthday party already.

My kids could have been at school

2011-07-26T03:12:00.000-07:00

Today we woke up with next to nothing planned. We decided to make the best of the winter by taking a picnic lunch and setting out to find some snow. We drove towards the Tahune rainforest and took the Hartz Mountain turnoff.

It's all dirt road from the turnoff. We probably drove about fifteen minutes up the narrow road until we turned a corner and suddenly there was snow beside the road. There was no shortage of excited squeals from the back of the car.

We kept driving until we couldn't go any further. The front bumper bar was dragging through snow and it was thick on either side of the tyres from 4wd vehicles before us. We left the car in the middle of the road and clambered out of the car to have a look.

We all threw some snowballs and climbed up the side of the road in the slippery white snow, loosing our footing when we weren't expecting it. Then we built a snow person and decorated it with bark, stones, and my scarf. Angus told us that the snow was "hot" which we assume was because his hands were burning from holding a little piece of it.

After we tired of snow we had to drive in reverse to get down again, there was nowhere to do a U turn safely in the snow. We reversed a couple of km's and then found somewhere dry to turn easily. Then we headed for the picnic ground.

The picnic ground is such a pristine area, just outside the national park. We set up camp at a table there, ate our lunch, which was sausage sandwiches on homemade bread with baby rocket and home laid eggs with balsamic vinegar, chocolate and shortbread.

Then we lit a fire using lots of wood that we found on the ground. It was quite wet so it took a good while to get it going, but once we did it definitely took the chill away. It was probably about 5C. Then the big kids ran around and explored, finding lots of cool stuff down by the river for Stylish's frog tanks, and playing with toy cars, and Angus and A and I kept warm by the fire. Angus had lots of booby.

In keeping with out new unschooling of food, I handed out liberal servings of shortbread biscuits as we headed to the picnic spot, and Spikee happily ate two home laid boiled eggs for his lunch.

THIS is why we moved here! In Sydney 20mins driving would take us to a large shopping centre ... here it takes us to a National park and in winter, to snow.

Unschooling all of life

2011-07-24T01:24:00.000-07:00

Banana and chocolate muffins

I often say to people that unschooling is easy, it's just LIFE, and with all of our lives we do unschool except one. Food. So now I've decided to take the plunge. What clocked me over was when I caught myself saying "but that wouldn't work for my kids".

I was instantly reminded of all the people I've heard saying exactly the same thing only about unschooling. It was a light bulb moment for me. Since then I've been going over it in my head quite regularly. I've come to the conclusion that it might work with my kids!

They self regulate bed time, dressing themselves, computer time, TV time ... the only thing we don't unschool is food. I've had the "that wouldn't work for my kids" broken record playing over and over for quite a while now.

Bliss balls with cacao, berries, and coconut

So why do I think it won't work?

Because my son has a damaged gut and he maintains the unhealthy flora with sugar, yeast, and carbohydrate cravings. However he will willingly eat quite a number of healthy foods, fruit, vegetables, yogurt, eggs, and nuts to name a few.

So why do I think it will work?

Because the idea that children are unable to self regulate is not supported by common sense, nor any facet of my son's life.

Why do I want to do it?

Because I believe it will self regulate his eating, and balance his cravings for unhealthy food with healthy food.

So now that I've gotten that off my chest I have to learn more about how it works and do some planning so that we can start soon!

Sugar free berry cheesecake

Three Reasons to (NOT) Send Your Kids to School

2011-07-01T19:10:00.000-07:00

1. So they learn to do unpleasant things.

You pay bills, you clean the toilet, you wash the dishes and many other mundane tasks. Is that because you went to school? I just do it coz it needs doing and I'm an adult. The fact that many of us live so irresponsibly when we leave school is proof that schools don't teach kids do do unpleasant stuff, they are just unpleasant!

2. So they can be bullied, thus teaching them how to deal with bullying as adults. If bullying at school is such an important rite of passage, and it yields so many crucial lessons, why is domestic violence not credited with building resilience and creating character? When was the last time you heard a strong admirable person say that they owe all their success to the bullies from school?

3. So you can have a break from the kids. While you're driving them to and from school, washing and ironing their uniforms, scouring the playground looking for lunch boxes or hats, and arguing about homework. Thats not really a break, it sounds like a second job to me!

The Propaganda of Schooling

2011-06-28T21:07:00.000-07:00

I was recently asked what I would do if my child asked to go to school. My response was that it would depend on why they wanted to go, and whether or not that was a reasonable expectation of schooling.

I'm an unschooling mama but I'm not a stupid mama. If my child wants to go bike riding at midnight without a helmet, it's my job to say no because that would be unsafe. In my view, schooling is also unsafe. It's unsafe physically, emotionally, and because I take education very seriously, it is educationally unsafe as well. So it is likely that I would say no to any immediate request they had regarding school attendance.

Some people might say that they enjoyed school, but it's like playing russian roulette. You may or you may not do well academically, you may or may not get teased relentlessly, you may or may not enjoy what you do there. One thing is certain, it's easier to excel at something when you enjoy it. My kids are too young to know how that works, but I'm not, so I get the final say on where they are educated.

Society has a lot invested in making schools appealing to both children and parents. We need schools to churn out the worker bees that fill the most mundane jobs, the factory workers, the check out chicks, the sales reps, and the garbage collectors. Now, let's be realistic, those jobs are important in our society, but they're also unfulfilling, and undervalued on all fronts.

Despite what television shows / movies / books set in schools would have us believe, schools are not encouraging hotbeds of creativity. Not one single famous inventor, or successful entrepreneur ever credits their schooling years for their success. They all credit either their university, their family, or their life experience.

If sitcoms suddenly started portraying schools in their true light, with peer pressure, festering bullying, high stress levels, boorish classes, obsolete homework, backstabbing, sexism, smoking, rape and rejection more parents might seek out an alternative.

When any of these realities are shown in a creative dramatic context the ending is always happy. The bully learns hie / her lesson, the individual child is celebrated, safety is restored and life returns to "normal".

In reality a bullied child is rarely vindicated, a unique child learns to conform, and schooling maintains that status quo very successfully.

If my child wanted to go to school because of a story they read about school, or a movie they watched I would explain to them that what they are expecting is not the reality of institutionalised education. In reality schooling involves many hours of sitting still and being talked at, and very few hours of the fun times shown on tv.

My answer to the question "Would you let your child go to school if they wanted to?" is a resounding MAYBE. Firstly I would establish whether or not their desire was based on reality or propaganda. Then I would try and meet those desires in a home setting. Then if my child still believed that they had unmet needs that a school could fulfill I would have to consider schooling them.

I've been through it before, and each time our family encounters this hurdle to unschooling the outcome is more unschooling, and I think that's because it really is the best thing we've ever done as a family!

Natural Learning: firing on all cylinders!

2011-06-24T23:20:00.000-07:00

Yesterday Spikee spent half an hour quizzing us about fire so today we did an experiment to show him how fire needs oxygen.

We got a 3 litre milk bottle and sawed the bottom off it. Then we stuck an candle into a jar so it wouldn't fall over. We filled the sink with water, put the candle / jar in it and lit the candle. Then we covered it with the bottle and watched as the flame went out. We did it again, and this time, as the flame dimmed we took the lid off the bottle and watched it spring back up again.

(Goofy grin anyone!?)

After that we went for a walk to the park. We did the platypus walk along the river and as we walked out onto the lookout we spotted a platypus! We stood transfixed, watching it dive down and come up somewhere new, for about 10 mins before Spikee announced that he wanted to go to the skate park.

Ebb and Flow

2011-05-20T05:23:00.000-07:00

I get about the online unschooling traps a bit, and one of the things I notice is a certain level of guilt about not facilitating consistently at all times. I know that I've felt it too! So lately I've been dissecting it a bit and I have a few thoughts I'd like to share.

First off let's compare unschooling with school for just a moment. When children attend school there are holidays and weekends, and schooling parents don't feel guilty that their children aren't learning during those times (well some might, but we can't cover all bases). Also, schooled children take mental breaks throughout the day, every day they attend school! After all who can sit in a room being talked to non stop and not zone out, at least occasionally? So it's probably safe to compare the ebb periods with week ends or holidays or just plain daydreaming. There's nothing wrong with daydreaming! I bet some of the greatest inventions, novels, scientific theories etc were dreamed up when their creator was tuning out.

Unschooling parents are most commonly schooled parents. I can make that assumption because the overwhelming majority of people in our society attend the institution for their education. To that end, we tend to have ingrained ideas of what education and learning should look like, and deschooling ourselves is a complicated and ongoing process that I suspect takes longer than we know, and may not ever be truly completed, although we may come close. (actually I think deschooling ebbs and flows too, but that's another post). Sometimes our kids are hell bent on extracting every bit of knowledge they can possibly attain through all manner of sources, and in those times we feel involved, virtuous, we feel as though our choice to unschool is paying off because we can measure their progress. But when they hit that brick wall and the ebb stage take over, us parents often feel a bit wobbly about it all. But you know what? It's impossible to live in a state of "nil learning". IMPOSSIBLE! Even though what they're learning may not outwardly appear educational, or it might not appear at all, they are still learning stuff. They really are!

School analogy: A kid may go to school all day and learn "nothing" (many of us have asked a schooled child what they learnt only to be told "nothing") But on the bus on the way home they learn about bus route, bus fare, reading timetables, it's just that the schooling parent might not notice that and assign it any value, but the unschooling parent does. Using public transport to navigate your way around the world is a really useful and worthy skill.

Right now we're on an ebb period. Sometimes I feel like I should go and razz the kids up, get them off their computer games and make them do something that my previously institutionalised, schooled self deems appropriate. And sometimes in the past I have done just that. But this time I'm not doing anything. I'm not standing in their way, I'm not banning them from Mario Brothers, I'm not telling them to go outside and play, and I'm certainly not handing them text books and expecting them to complete set exercises. Why? Well strike the text books off first, simply by saying that they voluntarily complete work in text books when they feel like it, if I go and force them to do it they won't enjoy the books anymore and they won't learn from them if they're just using them to get me off their case. As for going outside and playing, well they do that every day anyway. They walk the dog, they play chasings, they sometimes play a ball game and most days they engage is some loud wrestling match that disturbs the overall peace of the household significantly.

I have a feeling we'll soon get flowing again.

the ebb, sleeping near Mario Brothers

Our classroom this week

2011-04-27T03:06:00.000-07:00

our classroom is where the faeries live!

our classroom is where the frogs live

our classroom is cold!

our classroom is reflective

our classroom is in the kitchen

Gladiator fights in Antarctica!

2011-04-19T20:52:00.000-07:00

Spikee has always been interested in history, and he recently discovered Gladiators. In keeping with our "channeling revolting habits into good things" modus operandi we thought this was the perfect outlet for his rough play.

We hired a book about gladiators from the library and discovered that people used to hire gladiators in the days before dvd hire shops. We learnt all about diet, life for fighters, training, various types of gladiators and how they fought and defended themselves and a whole heap of other stuff.

Then we found ourselves in possession of some foam swords and in order to "channel revolting habits" we organised a gladiator day!

The kids made shields and practiced sword fighting, and then A and I took denarii (chocolate melts) and chose which gladiator we'd like to hire. We examined their muscles and asked them what type of fight they entertained with. Then we took them to the Colosseum, placed our chocolate denarii bets and they fought while we cheered from the comfortable seating by the arena. A fun time was had by all ... even those involved in the dramatic throes of death.

Examining the Gladiators for hire. I selected a fine, fit gladiator and named her Gladiola.

The fierce and entertaining fighting!

A's gladiator Titus, is victorious whilst I jeer at Gladiola for her poor fighting performance.

At the end of the games I had won 8 denarii and A had won 10. We were kind ... we fed it all to the gladiators.

The World Will Stop Spinning Without Maths

2011-04-13T03:57:00.000-07:00

Some of the best numeracy I learnt, I learnt in the bath!

I've stopped calling it maths, I now say numeracy. Because, as with literacy there are many facets necessary in order to function in a modern society. Literacy is reading, writing, and comprehension, maths is sums. Numeracy is mathematical literacy, reading and interpreting graphs, (like timetables) telling the time, fractions (for cooking) percentages (for shopping) and many other things which we use daily but are unaware of.

So now we've covered that I should explain the reason this post is dedicated to numeracy / maths and doomsday. Today I was in a cafe and someone asked me what school Stylish goes to. I naturally responded with the truth, or a version thereof, "we homeschool". Technically we unschool or pursue natural learning, but I'm not playing semantics with strangers in cafes when all I want to do it eat my raspberry cream yo-yo biscuit and imbibe caffeine. The first thing she said to me was "how do you teach her maths?". Fair question! In fact it was the first question I asked before I began this journey. It's also the most common query I encounter as a homeschooling or natural learning facilitator. I get asked this practically every single time I mention it to someone with no experience of life without school.

There are a couple of reasons for this and they are both a result of institutionalised education and cultural indoctrination. Firstly, because of the grading that students are given for their ability to correctly complete arbitrary mathematical tasks. Grading fails students at every step of the way because it does not reflect numeracy nor the practical application of mathematics in life. It also fails to represent the full extent of variations between student capability. Whilst a student may not successfully complete tasks correctly in a test given one year they may well correctly complete the same test one year later. Children's brains all develop at different rates, thus making the comparison of their abilities a pointless exercise. Secondly, the over emphasis placed on mathematics within the educational institution. Whilst numeracy is very important, most of what is taught in schools as "maths" is not, and children will never encounter it in their adult lives. I am confident that I'm not the only adult who has never needed a quadratic equation. Which is just as well because based on the school's system of grading me on mathematics, I was a complete and unmitigated failure! Had they graded me on numeracy however, I would have been deemed successful.

So all the people who are curious about my ability to teach maths assume that she has to learn quadratic equations, complex algebra, calculus and all the other things they teach in maths classes that most kids hate and many fail to absorb. They think that because that's what their school told them and most likely it is what their parents believed. But that's not how we do it. As natural learners we recognise that the goal of education is to make children ready to live as independent adults not to teach them every single thing there is to know, because that is impossible, and fortunately we are never too old to learn new skills should we require them for real life.

All these people (including myself about two and a half years ago) also based their personal valuation of their numeracy on the grading they were given in a school and not the practical daily applications of their mathematical skills.

There are some fundamental problems with the way that schooling both teaches and judges the children they are entrusted to educate. The system leaves many children thinking they are dumb because they can not do completely useless, overly complicated maths. It leaves children (and adults in turn) feeling as if they do not have functional numeracy even though a more thorough dissection of this view would lead them to believe they are quite competent mathematically. There is no reason for children and adults alike to abhor maths other than the over importance and harsh judgment of their abilities as decided by the institution..

Unschooled children never encounter these obstacles to their numeracy, they just naturally absorb numbers and the skill to work with them. They are naturally driven to become independent adults and so they work on acquiring life fueled numeracy. They work with mathematics at a pace that they able to, and acquire the skills necessary to function in an adult capacity. The same way children learn to walk and talk, they absorb maths, and they find it interesting and they deem it something to strive for.

So that is how my kids learn maths despite my institutionally graded failings! They learn maths

passionately and they never lose faith in their abilities so they never stop trying to learn. And that is just one more reason that I love natural learning, or unschooling. It just makes sense on so many levels if you can get past the indoctrination we all live with.

Literacy taking off!

2011-04-11T05:24:00.000-07:00

Today we went for a drive to the shops and out of the blue Spikee piped up from the backseat "S is for Snake isn't it, Mum". Then he went through lots of words and told us what letter they started with for about another half hour. He is also getting really good at reading numbers thanks to all our UNO playing lately.

Stylish is enjoying guides more every week and starting to form some friendships with the other girls there, and her other friend will be coming to visit for a few weeks at around the time she turns 13. I'm sure they are already planning lots of mischief and steamy talks about spotty boys.

Angus is completely mobile now and crawls about the house baby proofing it for us. He has a new push along walking toy that he loves because he is able to stand up on it and hold on, but he's even starting to let go and balance for a very short time now. He is just off 8 months and is getting his fourth tooth in two weeks (top left), he isn't an easy teether, he's been miserable the poor little thing. He's currently fast asleep in my lap, wearing an all in one polar fleece suit with dinosaurs on it. I'm sure it's the height of baby fashion!

Adding to the family

2011-04-07T06:09:00.000-07:00

Today we got some new furry friends for the kids. They really wanted something small and cuddly so we got them a guinea pig each. Spikee has called his "Atomic Betty Rat" and Stylish has called hers "Guiness" although owing to the beer reference she's thinking of renaming it when she thinks of a name.

Poor Spikee came off his bike at the park yestersay and has a HUGE bruise on his face, grazing and a cut the size of a 20c piece on the inside of his cheek. He's also got a badly grazed knee and a cut on his forehead from where the helmet hit the ground and quite frankly I'm very relieved he had it on. I was reading something not long ago about how helmets are no use. Well maybe they aren't in a collision with a car, but for falling off the bike when the dog wants your pink crocs .... they're ace. He would have cracked his skull without it, no question in my mind.

Stylish is very pleased about the guinea pigs, she's been hassling me to get rats for ages and I kept saying no because she used to let them run around the house, but now we have the pink croc chasing dog that's not really an option. The pet shop said the guinea pigs were skittish, but they look pretty tame to me, one in each lap as the kids watch a movie!

Angus is crawling all over the place, he has two teeth through and it threatening to get a new top one any day now. He is really miserable with the teething. He stands up on furniture now and is close to stepping around holding onto stuff. He is making all sorts of baby babble noises and is starting to wave. He loves it when we sit out in the garden and he can crawl around.

Yesterday we took advantage of a glorious Autumn day and drove down to Southport for a picnic. The kids ran up and down the beach finding shells and feathers. We also found dead squid like things that when you walk on them they ooze purple ink. That's why I assume they were like squid, they looked like seaweed other than that! We saw a starfish, and wallaby, penguin, crab and dog footprints which we're sure was edumacational for them. A has drilled holes through many of the shells and the kids are making necklaces out of them.

Welcome to our classroom!

2011-04-04T03:09:00.000-07:00

Our teachers are our family!
Our classroom is in the air (cable cars at Taronga zoo)Our classroom is at the park

Our classroom is in the back yardOur classroom is in the chook shed
Our classroom is in the sun
Our classroom is in the mud

Our classroom is out the front
Our classroom is in the rain forestOur classroom is a boat in the garden

Our classroom is in the bath.
Our classroom is in the creek
Our classroom is in the SPA BATH!
Our classroom is in the frog tank

School made me feel dumb

2011-04-01T20:48:00.000-07:00

But I'm not!

When school started failing my daughter I started to see that I had been brainwashed, and what was worse? I was participating in the brainwashing of my daughter. I believed that the only way to succeed in life was to finish school and get good marks ... but I hadn't finished school and I was still alive! And my partner hadn't finished school, and he was still alive, and most of my friends had either not finished school or hadn't done very well, but they were all smart people who were doing well in their lives.

So why did we all leave school? I left because I was afraid to fail. I knew I was smart enough to do really well if I applied myself ... but therein lies the truth of it. I wanted to enjoy life! I was young and having fun, and school wasn't fun, it was anti social and boring. And my friends who quit had all quit for the same reasons, and those who stayed and didn't do well had failed for the same reasons. Schools aren't for everyone, some people will do very well within the system, but others need to get out and experience life in order to discover their authentic selves. Schools glorify certain subjects (maths and english) but completely devalue others like art, drama, and music. My friends were all smart kids but they preferred and even excelled at humanities, and the institution simply loses those children between the cracks. How sad.

So, back to the subject at hand, and why I believed I was dumb. I went to a school to learn all the things deemed crucial for modern life but I hadn't really learnt much - or so I thought. I was literate, I was perfectly competent numerically, and I had all the skills necessary to acquire any further knowledge I needed, but I hadn't learnt anything about myself or what I was good at. I had also had my literate and numeric abilities completely undermined by all the institutional measurements. But the things I had never learnt, or had forgotten had never caused me a moment's grief. After having a good look at all this I concluded that the emphasis schools placed on many subjects was not proportionate to it's usefulness in real life.

So if I'd gone to school to learn all that stuff, and hadn't learnt it, what was going to make it different for my daughter or my sons? What would ensure that they came out of school with a healthy self awareness of their abilities? There just weren't any answers for those questions, and so there was really only one course of action I could take. I began unschooling my eldest daughter after almost six years of institutionalised learning, and I will always unschool the youngest two.

I know that when they reach adulthood they will have a good and functional level of literacy and numeracy, and they will have a really solid wealth of knowledge on a multitude of other subjects too. Those subjects won't always be neatly divided into categories like maths, english, science, history and geography, but that won't make their knowledge any less valuable.

As a teenager (and even as a child) I thought learning was boring, and when I was reading a book about dinosaurs or animals and learning really interesting stuff, I didn't realise I was learning, because no one had graded this knowledge on a scale of worthiness. No one tested me on it, no one valued what I learnt unless it was taught to me by a teacher. I used to see adults learning and envy them because clearly they enjoyed learning. What didn't occur to me was that they only studied the subjects they were interested in. And they only retained their knowledge because their memory was fueled by interest and practicality. The same goes for children. That is why children forget long division but remember the names of dinosaurs.

But not knowing how to do long division isn't an insurmountable obstacle! You are never too old to acquire new knowledge or skills, and in the mean time there are calculators and the internet and libraries and many other sources where one can obtain the necessary information for living. If not learning stuff at school and not passing exams means that for the rest of our lives we are destined to fail then there are some pretty big problems with society!

When I was a schooling mother I couldn't keep up with the institution in a way that it approved of, I felt like I was forever striving and falling short of the ideals. Neat tidy children, perfectly completed homework, perfect lunch boxes, and so on. I just didn't have the same values, I wanted a happy family and I didn't see how forcing my kids to learn about completely useless and uninteresting things was going to make them happy fulfilled adults. I didn't see how fighting about homework was beneficial to education. I didn't see how any of it was actually going to work as a long term plan because it didn't inspire any internal motivation it was all external coercion and valuation - or devaluation.

So if school left you feeling confused, like you were a failure, like you were dumb or left you with no idea what you wanted out of life, maybe you would have done better unschooling. If your kids are struggling with maths but brilliant at computers, or they can't spell but they are excellent at painting or sculpting, maybe your kids would be better unschooled too! You know the expression "don't put all your eggs in one basket"? Schooling has been used as the only basket for far too long.

Unschooling Monday!

2011-03-21T04:58:00.001-07:00

Today was a busy day (like every other day). Summer is in its' last days and the last week or two have been absolutely divine. Perfect weather for walking to a friend's house and picking blackberries on the way, gardening, and also for more mundane tasks like washing and scraping paint.

We were about to throw out an old blanket when Spikee decided to make it into a boat in the back yard and asked me to go boating. So we got an atlas and used the map of the continents to decide where we were going to visit. We visited Antarctica and threw snow balls, Africa and saw zebras and ate couscous, Asia where we ate stir fry with chopsticks and spring rolls, and South America where we spotted macaws and poison dart frogs before a visit to Machu Picchu . Tomorrow we have a few more continents to visit and many more sharks to fight off on our journey. Angus had a lovely time, and the dog did too, all the while driving us crazy.

Spikee has also been really enjoying work books. He decided he wanted a text book at about the same time Stylish announced a desire to do maths out of a book (hardly a coincidence) He has one with letters and one with numbers and his dexterity is notably better now than it was only a month ago. Yesterday he drew his first person!

Stylish is enjoying the girl guides but today staged a little protest by refusing to sing what she describes as the "God" song, about "how he made hills". The teacher was rather unsure what to do because she's never encountered that before (free thinking is disturbing). She has prepared an activity for everyone to do next week, it is of course about dart frogs. She's written a list of scientific names and everyone has to find out what sort of frog they have.

She's also decided to start doing maths, and asked if we could get her a text book. She's plowing through it and enjoying herself a great deal. I'm surprised by just how much there is in it that I learnt at school but never ever used, and have forgotten. Some of the questions are so blatently stupid I tell her to forget about it. Funnily enough, I remember ripping the answers out of maths text books when she was in school. Now I would never need to do that because she does the maths for her own enjoyment, and only uses the answers to help her.

Anyone who says their child would never be motivated to learn on their own should pay attention to this!

l like unschooling!

2011-03-06T20:20:00.000-08:00

I really like unschooling the kids! I've been a schooling mama and it just didn't gel with me.

I never liked washing and ironing uniforms, packing lunches that I knew only ever got thrown out or went mouldy before I could find them, homework fights, waking the baby to get to school for collection on time, having to hand my daughter over to someone else and needing THEIR permission to parent her between 9 and 3 and many many more!

What I like about unschooling, or natural learning, is that we can really plot our own lives. We can go for a day trip or a holiday when it suits us. We can get up as early or as late as we like, and the same goes for sleep. The children can learn about what interests them, and by following their instincts they learn about so many other things that I won't even attempt to list. I am the one who knows where my children are at, and I don't need to wait for a report card. I know that my kids socialise with lots of different children, that are all different ages.

In fact, come to think of it, I think I love everything about natural learning! And here's an update on all the things that have been happening lately.

Angus is now crawling and sitting up and babbling lots, and he is threatening to get a tooth. He loves playing with everyone, and is interested in the pets and all his toys. He loves having a bath with me and Spikee and his favourite bath toy is his bath book.

Spikee is learning lots about how computers work, and he likes doing lots of typing, changing colour and font, navigating his own way around youtube, and some dinosaur games we found on the www. He is still interested in geography and when last seen was wandering around with an atlas telling us where South America and Tasmania are, and that South America is much bigger.

Stylish has taken herself off to her first girl guides meeting this afternoon, with another little girl who unschools about two kilometres from us. She's also bee regularly attending rag rugging classes and making significant progress on her rag rug, which she seems rather pleased with. She's been doing lots of art, drawing horses and frogs, and last week she decided to write an essay about dart frogs. She wrote them most amazing essay, using an extensive show of vocabulary and scientific understanding. I asked her what she would like to do with frogs when she grows up and she told me that she would like to go to South America (possibly explaining Spikee's interest in that particular continent) and discover a new species of frog, and help to classify some other species. She then informed me that there are about 22 new species discovered each year. I am so thrilled with her plan!

The things that go unnoticed

2011-02-08T05:18:00.001-08:00

I often blog about the things that are evidently educational and could be used to demonstrate socially valued learning, but what goes on behind the scenes? There must be lots and lots of things that the kids learn that I'm completely unaware of. Here are a few that I hadn't considered.

fire lighting
social skills
vocabulary
physics (without the mathematical equations)
dexterity
self appreciation / esteem
music appreciation
interpersonal skills

And surely plenty more. It's easy to measure learning in areas such as literacy, numeracy, science, history ... and all the other areas that are taught in schools, but not so easy to quantify the rest until we are faced by adults that have learnt to be human by simply living!

I love natural learning *happy sigh*

Naturally Learning

2011-02-03T02:24:00.000-08:00

Spikee has been playing our new game word pool. We got it at vinnies for $3. The aim of the game is to collect all the letters in your word. Older players can play with up to seven words but we just use one. The photo above is of him after winning a game, you can see his word was "cat". He is also getting really good at playing Guess Who.

Stylish has been spending lots of time with her new friend, and we are starting rag rugging classes next Wednesday at the local design centre. She's also been taking an interest in the portrayal of women in video clips so we've been discussing that a lot. I'm so pleased to see her absorbing (albeit painfully slowly) some feminist critique of her "culture".

Angus is now sitting up and very nearly crawling. He can move from one spot to another but he's not quite sure how. He's at that really gorgeous smilie interactive age and he's piling on the booby fat in preparation for more organised movement.

Lists Again...

2011-01-14T01:52:00.000-08:00

Stylish has requested some schooly activities so I've given her a list of things which she is eagerly ploughing through. Here's a few things she has to do.

I gave her a project where she has to budget for everything she might need when she moves out of home, and told her she would be earning $545pw. She had to find a house to rent, write a shopping list, meal plan, list non food items her house may need, and a few other things. Then she had to work out what the cost would be it it were divided with a room mate.
A heap of maths work sheets, including fractions, long multiplication, time telling, percentages, and times tables
Some comprehension work relating to the book she is currently reading "The Horse Whisperer"
A project about cells
A volcano diorama
A wave experiment.

See how it goes! I doubt she'll do it all, but it's keeping her out of mischief so to speak, and she feels like she's being productive.

Spikee has been doing lots of drawing and painting, and we've been reading lots of stories.

Angus is very close to crawling and is practically sitting up by himself.

The Importance of Secondary Edumacation

2010-12-13T05:45:00.000-08:00

We've always noticed that there's a shortage of older kids at our homeschool / unschool groups. and I've been forming a bit of a theory about this over the recent days. Bear with me while I bash it out for you!

I've noticed that a lot of people seem to think that now Stylish is in highschool I'll get over my "phase" and do the "right thing" by sending her to school. But I'd rather chew my leg off. The more I think about their well meaning, IRRITATING commentary, the more I begin to see why though. People who think it's ok to homeschool for the primary years but for highschool kids NEED a proper, state sanctioned edumacation, have totally bought into the idea that without a leaving certificate, children will FAIL FAIL FAIL. And you can't blame them for that because the state puts out a lot of propaganda to support that.

I'd like to address that first, just quickly though, because I've already raved about it in previous posts - I think. Think back to your last job interview. Did the interviewer ask you how well you had done in school? Or did they just want to know what life experience you had which qualified you to fill the available position? A leaving certificate is useful - but not necessary - for entering university, but not much else. Home schooled kids (yes, even unschooled ones) regularly enter tertiary education institutions, and they do quite well (thankyou very much!)

So, that aside, why is highschool so terribly important? In my experience .... it's NOT! Children learn very little in highschool, that will serve them later on. They learn to hate study, they learn that learning is only important if it's about things the state deems necessary, and they learn to smoke cigarettes and use sexist, homophobic, racist language from sun up to sun down. However, primary school is an entirely different matter. In primary school, children learn the crucial skills of literacy and numeracy. Literacy is the backbone of our society, and numeracy is handy too. I should note here that that is the intended purpose of primary school, it's not always the outcome.

So, no. I'm not going to send my daughter to school now she's in highschool. She is naturally curious, and driven to learn at her own pace, about things that she intends to use in her lifetime. She learnt to read and write and count in a school (although probably mostly at home when I think of it!) and she's learnt everything she's actually interested in, and using daily, since she was removed from the institution. Stop stressing your kids out about exams they're never going to need the scores from, stop stressing about them remembering the useless facts they're not going to remember in two years time (probably even two weeks after the final exam). Teach them to cook dinner, grow vegetables, care for living creatures, manage money, and let them focus on what they're interested in. The world has enough worker bees, we really need some more free spirited queens! So my theory is that many people, even home schoolers believe that the most important stuff in highschool. And my belief is that this is simply not true.

I love my tall kid!

2010-11-28T04:27:00.000-08:00

Stylish went to bed leaving the light on in the rumpus room, so I went in to remind her to switch it off and she was writing in her diary. She invited me to sit down and she read me some entries. I was so moved when she read me the entry from the night Angus was born, it was so funny, and so joyful that I was crying happily while she read. Although I did not give her the gift of a birth, I have given her the gift of being part of a birth. I know that, should she choose to have children, they will be born at home. I'm so proud of the young woman she is, she's smart, funny, helpful, thoughtful, and she can also be the complete polar opposite of all those things but ... she's a tall kid, we expect that.

Lately she's been taking more of an interest in her appearance and her taste in clothes is quite fluid. One week she likes flowery flowing things and the next week I have to fight her to get her into anything but skinny leg jeans. I refuse to buy the hideous skinny leg things, but if she takes her pocket money to vinnies and buys them herself I grit my teeth and cope. I find myself really liking some of her clothes and really detesting other items. The amusing thing is that if we go shopping together, everything I show her is AWFUL and results in multi syllabic use of my name ("mUuUuUm, omg you're SOOOO embarrassing!") but if I bring home the same item a week later she is often grateful, and happy to try it on with 50 possible accessories.

It's funny how we love our kids little and wish they would never grow up, but at the same time we burst with pride at all their new stages.

Hey, like stop dissing teenagers, like!

2010-11-26T16:22:00.000-08:00

As the mother of a child entering the teenage years head first, I've decided to share some of my feelings about the way our society treats teenagers. We spend years forcing children to be independent, forcing them to sleep on their own, use the toilet, feed themselves dress themselves, sending them away from us for six hours a day and many other historically odd practices. Yet as soon as they hit twelve or thirteen and want to flex some of their independent muscles we start wishing they were babies again.

As a whole, society has unrealistic expectations of teenagers. People literally can't stand them. I have heard countless people complain about the behaviour they have witnessed teenagers exhibiting in public - or at home, but what people seem to forget is that teenagers are not adults, and expecting them to sit quietly, politely conversing. on the bus when there are members of the opposite sex present is insane! You may well be tired out from your day at work, and concerned with relaxing, but this is hardly the fault of the teenagers you encounter.

What people forget is that teenagers are just children, tall ones, pretending to be grown ups. No one batts an eye at a two year old pretending to talk on the phone or cook and serve food, so it baffles me that we don't grasp the need of adolescents to play. Play grown ups, with boy friends and girlfriends, play responsible people, able to confidently make their own decisions, play dress ups (in skinny leg jeans and makeup) and play at navigating their way successfully through life. When you see them engaging in loud, obnoxious behaviour, try to remember that they're probably on their way home to eat the food their parents have cooked, have their clothes washed (although they often don't see how dirty they are) and "chillax" on the sofa watching Channel V.

Another thing that strikes me as absurd is the way adults demand respect from a bunch of tall kids with raging hormones, that they offer no respect to in return. Respect is a two way street! I remember when I was a teenager I would sometimes encounter older people who were simply rude to me because of my age. Why on earth should a teenager behave respectfully whilst they are being judged and disrespected? Keep in mind that an adult struggles to maintain equilibrium under such circumstances, what skills is a teenager in possession of that enable them to respond calmly? I think rule number one of living in harmony with teenagers is RESPECT! Try to stifle your laughter at their undersized jeans and over sized sun glasses until they have left, eh?

If you have kids then you have probably realised that one day you will have teenagers. Try to look fondly, or at least with more compassion, upon teenagers when you encounter their strange play. Chances are that they aren't doing it solely to irritate you, chances are that they're trying to impress you with their astonishing maturity! Respect them, simply because they are people. and all people no matter their age, deserve respect.

AHHH!

2010-11-22T16:24:00.000-08:00

MUM! I found your pasword mwah-haha, and I find out you put that embarrasing cable car photo up! AHH! DELETE IT or else! Currently drawing you a new frog, but that may stop! HUMPH.

DELETE IT NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Frogs, for a change

2010-11-21T03:46:00.000-08:00

Here is some art Stylish has done lately. She's doing a very large project at the moment, documenting lots of Australian frogs and drawing pics of them all. Can't wait to see the finished product!

She is so good at drawing frogs she just copies the picture, these are not tracings.

We love natural learning!

2010-11-21T03:25:00.000-08:00

Spikee is really loving reading! Tonight we made him a dinosaur book. We printed out lots of pictures of dinosaurs and he coloured them in and cut them out, and I typed and printed "This is a " and then we glued it all onto paper and stuck the pages in a clear sheet folder. Now he reads it and points to all the words. He's very pleased with himself.

We spent the day building our hot house, and I can't wait to get a veggie garden up and running again. There's so many REAL, USEFUL lessons in growing food. We've also added some chooks to our family and there have been many opportunities for learning there! It seems that this is the perfect state for natural learning.

2010-11-18T02:42:00.000-08:00

Unlearning in Antarctica

2010-11-18T01:34:00.000-08:00

We've been in our new house for nearly three weeks now and there has been no shortage of unlearning. We've done renovating, acquired chooks, explored the town and surrounds and had a ball reconnecting as a family without time pressing down on us.

Stylish took to ripping up carpet and pulling out nails like she'd been doing it all her life. Then once we'd varnished and moved our stuff into the house she went faster than greased lightening to where she'd been hearing frog calls. She was well versed on the Arctic legalities pertaining to her favourite amphibians, and spent a good chunk of her pocket money buying a tank to house four Southern Smooth Froglets. She confidently informs me that the name is deceptive because they are actually bumpy and their scientific name is ..... I forget. Today we had a plumbing emergency which required the rose bush out the front be ripped up, it was then that we discovered two nests in it. One with tiny silver eye babies getting ready to fledge and the other with nearly ready to hatch blue / grey speckled eggs that are jumping about. We waited and waited but their mothers didn't come home so we seem to have acquired some new albeit temporary family members. Who knows if the eggs will hatch, I'm doubtful, but apparently they're black birds and they're a real pain so we are trying not to feel too bad.

Spikee has developed quite an interest in reading and is starting to recognise some words by sight and remember others when they're in an early reader book I found at the tip ship. He's also cemented counting to ten and is getting more confident reading the numbers. He's really taking to life in Antarctica and for some unexplained reason is starting to try a couple of new foods and on the whole eat better. Must be all the fresh air! The training wheels are off his bike now (one got lost) so that's another new thing, he's a little nervous but he'll be fine soon enough. His geography fascination continues and we have been playing cricket with a small rubber globe ball. He's just a happy chappy at the moment!

Angus is very chatty and can roll over (but he's not sure how). Soon enough he'll be up and crawling and we'll be baby proofing again!

Pics from The Journey South

2010-10-16T22:59:00.000-07:00

The Guillotine

The Mechanic

life size full grown salt water crocodile

Corroboree frog breeding program at Taronga

In the cable cars

Pics of The Great Migration in Action

2010-10-16T22:38:00.000-07:00

Driving a space shuttle

Learning about dizziness

At the zoo

Geography free styler!

Natural Learning our way to Antarctica

2010-10-16T20:51:00.000-07:00

In the last three days we've travelled 1000 km from Sydney to Melbourne with three kids and a placenta. Quite an ambitious feat! We've driven through snow, crazy wind, pouring rain and narrowly avoided getting stranded by flood water and road blockages in Albury.

After leaving our house in Sydney we spent a further week staying with my father before finally leaving Sydney. We were like tourists in our own home town, we visited the museum and the Taronga Zoo and ate at our favourite restaurants. At the museum Spikee enjoyed the Search and Discover room which is more for older kids, he's obviously growing up! Lately we've noticed that he's fascinated by geography and he found a globe at the museum and happily pointed out South America, Sydney, and even Antarctica .... I mean Tasmania.

They had a blast at Taronga, saw too many exhibits to list them all and probably learnt something along the way. Stylish enjoyed seeing the Corroboree frog breeding programme and Spikee liked the lions and tigers. Personally I enjoyed seeing the crocodiles because they're my favourite animal (such cute and cuddly things!) and A enjoyed the Civet cats and regaling us with tales of how they eat coffee beans, shit them out, and are responsible for producing the world's most expensive coffee.

We had a farewell dinner at our favourite Vietnamese restaurant and Spikee actually ate something. He had a whole bowl of boiled rice, a vegetarian spring roll, tasted a bit of tofu VOLUNTARILY and then polished off the orange slices that were brought to share between all of us. We also had dinner at my best friend fro highschool's house, made sure to eat as much real Indian food as two people could possibly manage, and just enjyed being in the Eastern Suburbs of Sydney for a week. It's a lovely part of Sydney. Incidentally, my father told me that the park I used to play at when I was growing up has now been named (by him) Ethel Turner Playground because she was a notable woman from Paddington and apparently all the other parks are named after men.

So after our final days of civilisation we left Sydney at stupid o'clock and drove to Canberra where we spent all day at Questacon while the rain poured down like I haven't seen in years. The kids certainly absorbed lots there. They loved the roller coaster ride, Stylish loved the Free Fall where you free fall down a slide, and Spikee loved the Mini Q area where the pretend bakery is, but this time he git absorbed in the mechanic area fixing a car wearing little denim overalls. We heard a fascinating dinosaur talk by Questacon's resident paleontologist who told us some really interesting things including a recent theory which states that all dinosaurs had feathers at one stage of their lives, and ripping the guts out of Jurassic Park movies telling us that the movie used deinonychus and not velociraptors. Velociraptors were only small but the creative license over rode truth because deinonychus is hardly a terrifying name even if they were a terrifying dinosaur. He also said that most of the dinosaurs were from the cretaceous period, not the the Jurassic period. He had a box filled with real dinosaur relics including a tooth from a Tyrannosaurus Rex and a claw from a velociraptor (which was actually about a foot long despite the size of the whole dinosaur).

Tomorrow we're heading to Melbourne Museum. We were planning to go to the zoo but it's too balmy and cold. Melbourne is in the grip of one of its' coldest Octobers ever and there was even heavy snow fall a few days ago. The last time I went to the museum here I was 19 weeks pregnant with Spikee. Then tomorrow night we'll be on the boat heading for Antarctica!

An Anniversary Slipped By ....

2010-10-02T15:13:00.001-07:00

I just realised that we've been unschooling for two years! Two years and and about three weeks, not that I'm counting.

In that two years I can't tell you how much our lives and our world has transformed, and how I now feel there is real hope for my kids, not just hope that they'll survive the system and come out edumacated and with direction.

When we started, we were on shaky ground, fearful and unsure we were making the right decision. My daughter had to unschool and so did I, and I think I probably struggled with it more than she did. For a while there we took two steps forwards and one back, but then it smoothed out. Then periodically I'd encounter another stage of parental unschooling and have to wrestle it out mentally, usually blogging about it.

What are the best things about unschooling for us?

knowing our kids are happy, safe, and interested in what they do.
knowing our kid will learn REAL life skills
seeing them pursue their own interests
knowing they are only competing against themselves so they always try their hardest
seeing them become themselves!

What would I change?

NOTHING!!!!!!! Except I would start sooner.

2010-10-02T00:58:00.000-07:00

Here is a photo of the newest family member helping pack. He's 6w 5d.

General Update From a Slack Blogger

2010-10-01T22:49:00.000-07:00

The great migration is nearly beginning! Our world is in boxes now, and everyone except me is packing like mad. I'm sitting underneath a baby with my boobs out. The kids are a bit unsettled by it and the sooner we're on the road the better. The week after next will be nice though, we'll be free to just faff about in Sydney enjoying ourselves. We're taking the kids to the zoo and the museum and pretty much just slacking off after all the hard yakka of packing everything up, organising this enormous logistical adventure, and stressing constantly for a month.

This is going to be one hell of an adventure. We're not only over hauling our lifestyle, we're taking a really exciting road trip. We'll leave Sydney on about the 14th of October and travel to Canberra to take the kids to Questacon and the National Gallery. We'll stay the night there or maybe press on until Gundagai for the night. Then the next day we'll go the rest of the way to Melbourne and spend a couple of days enjoying the sights before catching the boat over night to Tasmania. Once there we plan on spending a night or two with A's parents before making the final stint to OUR HOUSE!

There's been plenty of natural learning here over the last little while, from a birth and a new sibling to maths, and tennis. Stylish has really enjoyed tennis over the last few months and she's made some nice friends there so it's a shame we're moving now.

She visited a friend of her Grandma's and found a tadpole last week. Spikee has been very interested in that. We have to let it go next week because we can't take it over state lines. Stylish tells me that there are only 14 species of frog in Tasmania which is very disappointing, moving to Queensland would have been a far wiser decision because they have 43 species there. Unfortunately the real estate there is pricier, possibly due to the greater number of frogs residing there!

I'll be without internet for a week or two during the great migration, but I'll have plenty to update when we finally have access again, so stay tuned!

2010-09-09T04:25:00.000-07:00

A homebirth story!

What's been going on?

2010-08-06T18:57:00.000-07:00

Well, there's still no sign of a baby at 42w and 4 days. But there's been no shortage of things happening so I figured an update was probably in order. the last week has been the week from hell! I've had a really nasty cold which has landed me with bad asthma and aches and pains from head to foot, and A has slipped a disk in his back so he wasn't able to look after me! We kind of struggled through, each of us doing what we could and everything else going by the way side. If it weren't for Stylish we would have been a lot worse, she really stepped up and helped out when we down!

The great migration is well under way, and we should own the house by early next week. I'm really excited about the move, and so is the family. It's going to be a huge change, leaving a city of several million, and going to a town with 800 people but in time I'm sure we'll adjust. The kids are very excited about getting chickens and a dog. There's a shed in the garden at the new house which we'll convert to a chicken coop. Some little nesting boxes and some insulation and a door will probably cut it, we want them to be free range of a day, and we'll keep them safe and warm of a night in their little hen house.

Yesterday was the first day in a week that we felt well enough to actually take the kids to the park. They had a lovely time running laps of various play equipment areas and trees and using the stop watch on my phone to try and beat their last time, then Stylish climbed trees and Spikee played at the base of them with his toy dinosaurs. A and I sat in the sun for as long as our varying ailments would allow, then we trudged home in time to collapse into bed with hot water bottles and rest up before forcing ourselves to organise food for dinner.

Stay tuned, there are bound to be more interesting developments in the coming days and weeks!

Unschooling In Action!

2010-07-21T23:49:00.000-07:00

Today over lunch Stylish started chatting about something I had no idea she knew anything about ... GENETICS! She told me all about the dominant and recessive genes in rats, and what they mean for coat, colouring, and illnesses like tumours and respiratory conditions. I didn't earn anything about genetics until I was in year 10 at school and yet my child already knows more than I learnt. I really enjoyed genetics, I quite liked science in general, and it's so wonderful to see your child enjoying the same things you enjoyed, only VOLUNTARILY!

Spikee is still loving puzzles, and every time he does one I can see how he's getting more confident. Sometimes when he's not listening to me as I give him clues about where a piece goes I find it so frustrating. In those moments I find I have to really take a step back and remember that he is barely four years old, and to my brain it's obvious where the pieces go, but to his it's a minefield of possibilities! Seeing him get better and better at it each time we try makes me glad that I am able to take that step back, not show my frustrations, and just help him to over come his brain fuzz. He's always so pleased with himself when we finish doing a puzzle, and I've had to take quite a few photos of them.

Just pics

2010-07-16T05:45:00.000-07:00

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This is the outfit Stylish sewed for her pet rat. And the rat modeling it.

Spikee laying in bed watching The Philosopher's Stone. At long last someone in the house likes Harry Potter, damn shame he's to young for anything past the first one!

the belly at 39w, and the birth pool as a back drop.

Blessingway!

2010-07-10T03:55:00.000-07:00

Today I am 38w pregnant and my wonderful friends held a blessingway for me. I had the most beautiful day, and I feel like the way it truly blessed.

Here are a few pics.

Stylish decorating the belly in henna. We chose a design of the Egyptian Goddess Heket. She is the goddess of fertility and midwifery and she is a frog, so it had meaning to us both. She was a bit nervous about drawing the design on the day so she drew it in texta last night and then just went over it in henna today. She did such a beautiful job! The Eye of Horus is also included, this is a symbol of protection.

The finished product! I think it looks amazing. I'm such a lucky mama to have my precious eldest child draw such a fantastic design on my belly.

It didn't take Stylish long to locate the resident pets. It should come as no surprise to our viewers that the snake was her favourite ...

This is all the candles that will be lit by friends when I am in labour. Everyone brought one along as we lit them all together today.

Finally, an update with pics!

2010-06-24T03:02:00.000-07:00

Lately Stylish has been feeling very creative, she drew this dragon, I love it!

Spikee has just taught himself to skip with a skipping rope, I must take some video of that with the new camera. But this is a photo of the jigsaw he is in love with - minus two pieces.

On a side note, we have decided to go ahead and take the lunge, the great migration will happen some time after the baby is born, probably in mid october. To celebrate and keep track of the journey I have started a new blog, hope to see you there some time!

Us In Antarctica

General happenings

2010-06-16T00:50:00.001-07:00

We have a new camera, I should really work out how to upload some pics coz we have quite a few!

As I hit 8 months pregnant I flew down to inspect a house. I spent a relaxing 3 days without children! I really like the area we're looking at moving to. There is a small village within walking distance of the house, lots of parks, bush, and it's all within reasonable driving distance of Hobart. It'll be a massive change, but it'll all be worth it once I adjust. I suspect everyone else will adjust more easily than me.

So the move to Antarctica is all looking very promising, we have put in an offer on the house and been accepted, and are now waiting on finance but I don't see any problems arising there as we have a substantial deposit. The kids are very excited and have been choosing different colours almost daily, that they might be able to paint their rooms. Spikee wants a lilac room with turquoise trimmings today and Stylish wants similar but darker colours. I think we'll let her paint her own room, she's old enough (in fact she will be 12 on Saturday!).

Stylish has taken to drawing dragons, they look amazing! She's also getting quite good at computer drawings lately, I must work out how to upload them onto the blog. The rat has had 13 babies, she had 14 but one died. I got an excited phone call on my first day in Tassie, telling me of the delightful event.

Spikee is fast approaching 4, and still happily breastfeeding and anticipating the arrival of his new sibling any time in the next 6 weeks. He is really enjoying his duplo and building tall towers and arches and whatnot. He's enjoying lots of books at the moment, from hide and seek ones, to adventure ones where you have to work out puzzles to finish the story.

Remembering Times Gone by ....

2010-05-11T23:40:00.000-07:00

Since my camera is broken and I sorely miss posting photos of our daily happenings, I thought I'd reminisce over OLD photos and daily happenings!

Frog tank made by Stylish

An interesting frog from Cairns - I dunno what it is, Stylish does though.

A day at Sydney Aquarium

The no recipe cake

The LemonAID stall - raising money for animals hurt in Victorian Bushfires

Remembering Times Gone by ....

2010-05-11T22:54:00.000-07:00

Since my camera is broken and I sorely miss posting photos of our daily happenings, I thought I'd reminisce over OLD photos and daily happenings!

This is a basket of delicious herbs and veggies from our garden

A crocodile warning sign in Cairns *gulp*

A deserted birds nest Stylish found when she climbed a tree

The frogs!

Cold Breakfast Not In Bed

2010-05-11T18:05:00.000-07:00

Today is my birthday! Stylish wanted to make me breakfast in bed so she saved her pennies and went to the shop this morning to get a few things. Then she set about cooking up a storm, complete with sending Spikee into the bedroom where I was hiding in bed, to ask for my order.

It's interesting to see a child set free in the kitchen. She's seen me cook bacon and eggs a million times so I knew it wouldn't be too much of an issue. First she put the bacon and eggs on, at the same time, so the eggs were ready way to early, and the bacon wasn't as cooked as she was hoping, and then she burnt the toast. The tea was perfect.

She was very pleased with her efforts, and I was too, and when she asked me about it I was honest, but told her that I enjoyed it very much - and I did! It was a lovely, thoughtful present.

The kids both made me beautiful cards, Stylish's was naturally covered in frogs, and said that she loved me as much as a rabbit on fire (which seemed to giver her laughter convulsions!) and Spikee's was just colourful and Stylish wrote Happy Birthday Mum on it for him. He was very pleased with himself. He's been a bit baffled by all the celebrations lately, with it being Mother's day last Sunday and my birthday today. He's woken me up every morning this week by shouting HAPPY BERFDAY MUM!

What more could a mama want on her Birthday?

Unlearning Continues!

2010-05-10T19:40:00.000-07:00

I was just pondering how much we've done lately, with me being practically bed ridden with exhaust, when Stylish came in to show me the dress she is making. Yes, you heard it here first ... she's MAKING A DRESS! She found some old scrap material and draped it around herself, and is trying to find different ways to tie it on. I offered to help her sew it together this afternoon. Having never voluntarily worn a dress in her whole life this is quite a turn of events, somehow I doubt it spells change, just an afternoon activity. Times like this make me really mad that the camera isn't working!

She was very disappointed to hear that there are no tennis lessons today or next week, it looks like she's really getting into it. She even got out her racket yesterday and practiced hitting the ball against the wall out the front.

Spikee's fascination with cave people and dinosaurs continues. He spends a good deal of time in the garden digging for dinosaur bones and getting absolutely FILTHY, which I am assured is a sign of a happy child. We have swapped sleeping arrangements because it was getting too hard for me to roll myself out of bed around the side car cot, so now A is sleeping on the same side as Spikee and the cot. Spikee was extremely unimpressed by this change the first night, but last night Daddy suggested that he get some books out and they could read for a while. Spikee went to his book shelf and chose a book about cave people, and one about pyramids, and they spent ages reading them. He's fascinated by it all!

The kids are currently on the way to the shop to get a few things for lunch. We usually cut up stuff and put it in the middle of the table and then they make their own sandwiches. They quite like having a shopping list with a few things on it and going up to the local shops together. I suppose I should go and get everything out and ready for lunch!

Frogs and The Grand Prix

2010-05-08T00:16:00.000-07:00

Spikee has been taking a lot of interest in car racing and he and Stylish have set up a big race track in the hallway. They spend hours picking the fastest car teams and having races, measuring winners with a ruler in some complicated fashion that eludes me completely. The Mr.Men obsession continues unabated, and recently when he had a cold he spent nearly all day in bed with either me reading the books or watching the stories on youtube. Since making daisy sandwiches he's developed a real interest in making his own sandwiches.

Stylish has been busy with her frog tank again. Yesterday she took all her hard earned pocket money, caught a bus by herself to bunnings, bought black silicone and foam expander, and then came home all by herself. I was so proud that she managed to navigate her way there! She even remembered to call me upon arrival. Last night she made a rocky background out of the expander, this afternoon A helped her to cover it with black silicone and peat moss. Apparently the moss will grow! So the tank should look really good one of these days, I can't wait to see the finished product. For now it's lying on its' side on the front porch, drying.

Mr.Men land

2010-04-30T02:00:00.000-07:00

Spikee is seriously obsessed with Mr.Men stories atm. I read them all day long until my voice is hoarse and I can say the lines without reading the book. Fortunately I discovered the animated version of the stories on youtube, being read by Roger Hargreaves, so Roger and A and I are taking it in shifts now. Tonight's dinner was inspired by Mr.Funny and Mr.Nonsense. Mr.Funny east daisy sandwiches .... and so did we! A daisy sandwich is an English muffin cut in half, topped with ham, a slice of cherry tomato for the centre of the daisy, and pineapple for the petals, all covered in cheese, and baked. Spikee made his own, and ate two of them! Then for dessert we're having custard when I can drag my pregnant self off the bed and cook it. Mr.Nonsense thought there was custard everywhere, but it was snow. Snow is yellow in Nonsenseland apparently. I wish our camera was working!

The belly babe is busy as busy can be, and that's really no surprise at 7 months! It's going to be a busy few months coming up, with baby planning and house buying, and organising the move, and buying a dog (which is apparently a real emergency item according to the kids), and a new car. Plus we have all the birthdays in one hit, starting with mother's day, then my birthday three days later, then Stylish's in June, Spikee's in July and a baby due at the end of July - aiming for August. I'm planning to fly to Tassie to look at the house we're interested in in the next month, we're praying it's still available! There are a few in the area but I particularly like one of them and it's right in our price range with plenty of yard, and room to renovate exactly how we want. Keep your fingers crossed for us!

The Bird Leaves The Nest

2010-04-19T22:56:00.000-07:00

It looks as though the noisy mynah has finally taken leave and gone back to nature - in the middle of a major city. Although we always knew this day would come, Stylish is upset about it and constantly checking the garden for signs of Bird Brain, and micro managing the cat - poor long suffering cat he is. I've explained to her that the fact the bird isn't coming to her calls is a GOOD sign, not a sign that it has been torn to shreds by the cat (or her pet rat who gave it a good whirl!)

Owing to some boredom lately I've given her a small list of things to do. They include learning the provinces of China on the geography game, learning about eh one child policy and the effect it has on women and girls, finding out about the Chinese government, learning about some frogs from China and some other animals. She's sunken her teeth into the list with a vengeance I wasn't expecting! I also gave her some sums - which she always loves since leaving the institution - and a few other odds and sods that I can't remember off the top of my head.

Spikee has suddenly taken his love of dinosaurs to a whole new level, and we're reading dinosaur books every day. He's also really interested in ancient Egypt, and cave people, so we read books about them too most days. I must read Mr.Funny about five times a day, and The Three Billy Goats Gruff just as many times. It's good that he likes reading stories so much because running around after him is challenging at this stage of pregnancy when it's still hot and my blood pressure is stupidly low. The other thing he is loving is his uno moo game, which is just uno, but for little people so it's got coloured animal figures instead of cards with coloured numbers, and you put them all in a barn.

It looks more and more as though the Great Migration to Antarctica will be happening, and probably in October! We've found a number of houses that really tickle our fancy and I'll be going to look at some in the coming months - leaving the children at home! I won't know myself!

What Are We Up To?

2010-04-07T22:19:00.000-07:00

The pets are all doing well, Zippy the rat went walk about for a couple of days but was found in the bottom of Stylish's chest of drawers this morning. The noisy myna will be ready for release soon, and is learning to catch it's own food by instinct very successfully.

Stylish is still going with the science textbook, and has been playing a geography game online, learning about the different provinces of Italy, now that she has the globe down pat.

Currently she is watching a show about some young British people who have traveled to India to work in a sweat shop factory. She is is awe of the low wages, stifling conditions, and the cost of groceries in comparison to the low wages. I suspect she will understand more about why we prefer second hand shopping, and perhaps think I'm less of a stickler for fair trade and more of a concerned world citizen.

How goes it?

2010-03-31T00:16:00.000-07:00

It's rather busy here! I bought a 2nd hand science text book - although I have no idea why - and Stylish has started doing it off her own bat. She can't STOP doing it actually. Todays efforts were about food additives, pesticides, and a few other foody things. She raided out cupboard and read food labels, wrote down her findings, and was assisted by Spikee.

The bird is going well, it's drivimg me mad coz it's so loud, but hopefull it'll grow tail feathers and be ready to get back to nature soon. It's flying quite efficiently now, but apparently they grow tail feathers before they leave the next.

The rat is doing well too, but she still refuses to look at rat food. You wouldn't know that a few short weeks ago she was at death's door!

OPERATION I SMELL A RAT!

2010-03-28T19:19:00.000-07:00

I've been considering getting myself a really big treat for my birthday, a daschund. Whilst scouring the internet looking for breeders, I came across an ad that JUST FELT WRONG. It said "Hi, if you need to re-home your pet rats, please email me. You can drop them off at my house. I have room for 7 rats all up, and offer the best care possible whilst I re-home your loved one" or words to that effect. It also described the rat this mystery person already owns, and gave some details about the happy existence it has. Soooo, feeling a little bit suspicious about this, I checked the contact email address and to my non-surprise I discovered that IT WAS STYLISH'S!

As tempted as I was to charge down the hallway, guns blazing, calling for blood, I decided that that particular method would not involve any lessons learnt, and may in fact just cause further tensions. So I thought carefully about what to do, and then contacted a few friends and asked for their assistance with this matter. One friend volunteered to email her and OPERATION I SMELL A RAT began!

My friends sent her some emails offering her rats! One had a litter of 12 that were of an undisclosed sex, and were only 2 weeks old. One had three male rats. One of the emails said ...

I have 6 rats, one has a resected bowel and needs regular care because it basically leaks diarrhoea constantly, but she's a real sweetie, very cute and cuddly. One of the other ones was born a siamese twin, it's twin was removed by the vet, but it still has one extra leg that couldn't be removed, and the scar is prone to infection so you need to be on to that - I'll bring you the rest of the antibiotic cream to put on it as well.
Thanks so much, I think it's great what you're doing.

and another said ...

Hello,

I saw your ad on xxxxxxxx and would like to offer you 3 pedigree Poodle Woollen Rats (One is fluoro pink, accident with highlighter I'm afraid), 1 Blueberry Rainforest rat, 1 White tailed Chocolate Rat and 1 Skipping Tree Rat. When could you take them off our hands? We are moving out of Cairns to Kuranda and need to get rid of them ASAP. I can throw in the cage and the dry food too.

L.

P.s The Skipping Tree rat bites. Suspect its not pedigree but a mutt given how close to the common garden rat it looks like. And it doesn't skip anymore.

She sent responses like

Hi

Oh I am so sorry but someone just abandoned two rats with litters and now I have 22 rats! I am having a hard time hand rearing 6 that the mother won't feed so I can give you a contact number for someone who can help as I can't?

and

Hello, OMG I would be so happy to help! but they would need their mother at that stage up until 6weeks so can can you deal with giving her up to? I am quite capable of helping I just raised a litter of rats with my mum that were found abandoned at my door step they were rehomed to a lovely woman

Then she sheepishly came into our bedroom (where A and I were muffling our laughter because we knew she'd just checked her email) and told me about a terribly sick rat that needed to come and be cared for by us. And then added something vague about how she'd put an ad on a website and then "forgotten about it" - not before we got two revolting, stinking male rats the size of your average Great Dane! And it was at this point that I said to her "You should be careful what you advertise on the internet, because YOUR MOTHER MIGHT FIND THE AD". She didn't cotton on, and repeated the case for the poor sick rat with 5 legs and a seeping wound ... so I repeated my sage advice, and suddenly she froze. She'd worked it out! She wanted to get angry at me, but she was laughing too hard, thank heavens!

Soooo, I think that a valuable lesson was learnt here tonight! There are lots of freaks on the internet, be glad it was your mother (and some freak with a pink rat!) who discovered this ad and not a real, dangerous, predator.

She has removed the ad now I'm pleased to say.

Rats, Birds, and Tennis

2010-03-23T03:24:00.000-07:00

Today we went to Stylish's first tennis lesson with a bunch of home schooled kids, mostly about her age. Apparently it was BORING ... but isn't everything meant to be boring when you're nearly a teenager? I told her that she can do a few more lessons before she decided that she doesn't like it, then if she doesn't she can stop going. I thought if she REALLY hated it she'd kick up a stink but she barely managed a moan, so it can't be THAT bad.

The rat is almost back to full health! She still turns her nose up at rat food, but she eats so little that it's not really a big issue. After her ordeal recently we're just happy to have her, so if she wants boiled eggs and strawberries, I suppose she can just have it. She was well enough to go for a walk around the block on Stylish's shoulder this afternoon, and her coat looks so shiny and her eyes are so bright and sparkly!

The bird is sprouting feathers and starting to flap them enthusiastically. It's also formed quite a bond with Stylish, and this evening when it was tired it called and called until she went and got it, brought it into the room where she was watching tv, and sat it in her lap. The baby bird fell asleep straight away - birds are big on attachment parenting apparently! It's such a loud little thing, it has her up, feeding it nice and early every morning, she even tried to reunite it with it's family (unsuccessfully) because of it's early morning antics *I will not laugh*.

Our move to Tasmania is starting to look like a very real part of the future! In the next couple of months I will leave the kids here with A and fly down to look at a few places, then if we find one we're perfectly happy with we'll buy it. We plan on having the baby while we're here with a fantastic support group, everyone from our wonderful doula, to our midwife and my counselor! Then in October - or there abouts - we'll head on down to Antarctica! Spikee is very excited because one of the houses we looked at had snow on the front lawn, and Stylish wants a ferret (which we will not get, but she insists we will).

Bullying Builds Youth Suicide Rates, NOT RESILIENCE!

2010-03-20T03:47:00.000-07:00

The other day someone told my daughter that if she were at school and bullies gave her a hard time, it would build resilience. Is this common opinion the reason we don't actually put forward any real methods of dealing with bullying? Because it's making kids resilient? Does violence in the home make children resilient?

How often do you hear of someone who was so damaged by bullying that they attempt, or even succeed to commit suicide? And plenty of adults are in therapy because of bullying.

Why do we take bullying in the work place seriously enough to let the law deal with it, and yet many incidences of bullying in the playground, where children are forbidden to leave, are all but ignored.

I know from personal experience, from the experiences I had attempting to deal with bullying when my daughter was in prison, to the many many anecdotal stories I hear from individuals as well as media outlets, that schools are completely inept when it comes to dealing with violence. I also know - and would like to stress - that violence is not just physical, it can be emotional, financial, verbal and I'm sure there are other varieties of violence too. A child does not need to be punched to be a victim of violence - threatening behaviour, name calling, stealing (money or other property), online bullying and stalking, and all manner of other beastly acts are VIOLENT.

Perhaps we need to re frame bullying as VIOLENCE because the word bullying has come to diffuse the seriousness of this abuse, and the ramifications for victims are all too often a lifetime of pain - or suicide.

SMH article - School Did Nothing

The Age article - School Is Where Most Bullying Occurs

CNN - 5th Grader Takes Own Life

Suicide.Org - School Bullying Advice

A Bird Story

2010-03-19T23:39:00.000-07:00

Stylish's obsession with wildlife is gonna be the death of me! The neighbour found a baby bird and brought it to us because she knew A would know what to do with it. She took one look at it and said "that's a noisy myna, it's about two weeks old, they're nectivores, it'll fledge in about a week, and then be independent a week later" then bustled it inside and started feeding it honey water and cockroaches. To think, if she were at school she could be learning about .... gee I dunno!? And I doubt she could tell me THAT much about whatever it was.

I can't wait for this fortnight to be over ... they're not called noisy mynas for no reason.

A Ratty Update

2010-03-18T16:12:00.000-07:00

The little rat who has been in labour for days seems to have taken a strange turn. We have a feeling that she was too young to give birth, she' is an extremely small rat - not that I ascribe to that school of thought, I know pelvises open, but she laboured for over 72 hours and no kittens appeared. Rats have babies in about 2 hours generally speaking. Sooooo she was exhibiting labour behaviour, lost blood, and didn't have babies for three days, leaving us all terribly worried that she would die of an infection. But miraculously, her swollen belly has gone down, and she appears to be on the mend - sans babies! The only explanation for this is that she is reabsorbing the babies, as can sometimes happen in small mammals.

She has been sleeping on Stylish's bed, we left her well alone in a darkened cage while she appeared to be straining in labour, when it looked like it was going to be a marathon effort we did give her honey water and lots of protein rich food every few hours. She seemed to want company but we didn't want to disturb her body in it's efforts to do what mother nature intended for rats to do. When her labour stopped she seemed so desperate for company, climbing up our hands when we put food in her cage for her. So we got her out and gave her lots of cuddles and spoiled her silly with tasty food.

After all the worry, when he eyes got bright, and she seemed to want to move about, and she was eating, drinking, pooing and weeing, we started to feel like there could be some hope, but she was still very weak and we didn't wanna get out hopes up too much. But it's been three days now and she really seems to be recovering! Last night after consuming half a strawberry she got up and walked out of her little nest. She walked about 30cm, and then back to her nest, which was the first time she had been able to do that. then over night Stylish woke up and went to check her and she had vanished, she was found in her favourite play spot, under Stylish's bed! She is still in her nest now, and refusing to eat rat food - why would you when you keep being given such exciting treats as strawberries, yogurt, and green tea?

So the vigil continues, but we are certainly hopeful that she will pull through.

School - Teaching Dependent Thinking

2010-03-14T18:27:00.000-07:00

Since the fall of the World Trade Centres we have heard time and time again how Westernised education teaches children to think for themselves, whereas schooling where "our enemies" are from teaches children by rote, without provoking independent thought or an ability / desire to question the powers that be, and read between the lines. The reason they question our system of government is because they are not free thinking ... apparently.

However, I can't comment on any style of education outside that which I have been exposed to.

In Westernised countries children are supposedly being taught to think for themselves, however I really don't see much evidence of that. Take the adults we encounter daily - those who were schooled for between 11 and 13 years in our free thinking system. How many of them are totally horrified at the state of education within the institution, complain about it, can see how unhappy many children are, and yet feel that my choice to homeschool is a purely rebellious and dangerous act that disadvantages my children!?

It's the same with hospital birth. One can spend hours bemoaning the state of our hospitals, how people are dying from anti-biotic resistant super bugs, they are understaffed, staff are over tired and make mistakes (like amputating the WRONG LIMB!), cesareans are all to often performed for no good reason, equipment is old and out dated, and yet my home birth is crazy and dangerous?

Why is it that [almost] an entire society of people, who have reportedly learnt to think for themselves, and question the status quo, fail to see the irony?

Possibly because it's impossible to teach people to think. Thinking is a natural ability that everyone has. However the institution judges individual thoughts and grades them according to a list of criteria that don't necessarily support real thinking. Given that a criteria must be set, in order to judge pupils evenly, it's impossible to include all the realms of possibility in that critique. So some thoughts are judged to be valid, and some fall outside the criteria and are deemed to be a failure.

It's also possible that the peer pressure in schooling means that children actually spend more time learning to question what THEY are thinking, and deciding whether or not to voice that idea, than learning to confidently consider the personal truths behind their ideas.

Another very real possibility is that schools teach children that some things are not up for question, only certain things warrant deconstruction, and they will be laid out in front of students neatly - with pre-packaged plans for class discussion and the rest will stay in the closet. For example if a student questions part of the curriculum. That is NOT up for discussion. The teacher knows best, the curriculum has been designed with the students best interests at heart, and as such ... it is not up for discussion. Another example would be that any decision a teacher makes about punishment is final, no discussion will be entered into - any discussion will result in further punishment.

So there are permissible subjects, and illegal subjects of discussion within the institution. That must definitely sway a child's ability to question the powers that be. A group of kids sitting in the playground mumbling about how irrelevant a particular subject is to them, or how unjust a teacher has been, feel like little rebels. Not Free thinking, valid, smart, aware people! By the time that same group of little rebels hit adulthood they have most likely been brainwashed into believing that their free thoughts were no more than the quibbles of insignificant children - personally I find that very disturbing!

There is so little room for freedom within any given institution that it is impossible for them to cater to each individuals needs. And the people that are given the responsibility of raising functional humans, humans to populate the work force, and re-populate the education system , are mere products of that institution! Drones! And one of the greatest lessons they learnt in school is that they are living in a free thinking country, surrounded by free thinking, FREE, citizens.

Dissent is silenced in our culture - something we are very fast to criticise other countries for! But the truth is that people are put in prison for expressing some views, they are chalked up as loonies, and laughed at by the wider community. For example, those who believe that the World Trade Centre attack was actually a government plan. Regardless of the merits of such an idea, the people who have used their free thinking skills to research and document their arguments are labelled as dangerous dissenters, little more than crack pots. Journalists who have reported - or attempted to report - these views are fired depending on the light in which they air this angle.

But surely, if we live in such a free thinking, free speech generating society, these ideas shouldn't be so threatening! They should receive the polite respect due to each individual when they express their opinion, shouldn't they?

I used to believe that schools were the only way to educate children - but I knew their limitations, I used to think that hospitals were the only safe place to give birth - but I knew how dangerous they were! I wasn't thinking for myself when I sent my child to school, or when I gave birth to her in a hospital. I didn't know there were alternatives! Our free society hadn't informed me that I had any choices in either matter. I used to think that terrorists hijacked planes and flew them into big buildings, killing thousands of innocent people. I still think that, but I now question whether or not there was government involvement behind the plot. The US Government would not be the first government to do something that harmed its' citizens in order to sway political direction.

In order for children to receive a full, free thinking education, in order to make them genuinely free individuals who can raise more free thinking individuals, we must give children BOTH sides of the argument, and allow them to discuss freely their thoughts, feelings, and ideas. For this to happen, schools must operate on a democratic system - something our country is unable to do. We must allow children the right to be children, allowing them complete bodily integrity (eat when hungry, pee when the need arises without seeking permission, seek comfort when necessary etc etc) allowing them to voice their views, follow their own interests, learn at their own pace, be judged against themselves and not other students, and most of all children must grow to understand and meet their own needs at a time that suits them. No institution can offer that, the fact that they claim to is worrying.

At home my children live in a far left wing, secular environment, but we openly discuss the views of the middle left, right, and far right. We not only discuss them, we try to imagine why these people hold their views so closely - the same way we do. We discuss religion and validate the rights of all people to choose and follow a religion. We allow our children to research subjects that interest them without telling them that any subject is not worthy of their interest (although I struggle with the monster truck as a worthy interest) or suggesting other subjects that society may consider more valid and useful.

My children will learn to think for themselves. They will epitomise everything our society is meant to foster .... their views will likely differ from the views of the state, and other schooled children but, for that I am glad! My children will be free thinking individuals! Unfortunately they will reside in a society that views it's greatest attribute to be one that it is not even in possession of - FREEDOM OF THOUGHT AND SPEECH.

Events ....

2010-03-14T01:46:00.000-08:00

Today Stylish's rat started acting strangely. We have a friend who is very involved in the local Fancy Rat Society, ans as soon as she heard our rat was being strange she came straight over to have a look. One look determined that she is in labour .... so we are about to be overrun with small fur free rodents - DRAT!

We went out for lunch today and on the way home we stopped in at vinnies. I found a jumper for myself, a green earthy t-shirt for Stylish, and a mauve pair of skinny leg jeans (apparently these are desirable items!?) that fit her PERFECTLY. it's like they were tailor made! I also got two triangular "made in Japan" brand plates, a Katherine Kerr book, and a fantastic book from the Eye-spy that is all about archaeology. Hopefully one of them will take an interest in it at some stage! All up, my shopping spree cost $19

I am now half way through a pregnancy, and feeling quite excited! The baby is starting to get quite active and I feel a lot of wriggling throughout the day. The kids are thrilled and keep asking me when the baby will be born, and being disappointed with my same old, same old answer. Spikee keeps insisting that he will be asleep when the baby is born, and if his prediction is correct then there's nothing we can do, he won't wake up, no matter how exciting the reason! Stylish should be about though, so at least one of them will witness the arrival of their sibling!

General happenings

2010-03-11T22:33:00.001-08:00

Spikee has started to take a real interest in reading. We spent a whole bus ride today discussing B is for Bus and D is for Dinosaur and so on and so forth, and I had to read all the signs to him. Tonight I'm thinking of showing him the Reading Eggs website and seeing if he's interested.

It's fascinating watching a child start to develop an interest in reading and writing, and not feeling like they need to go to school to learn. Knowing they will simply absorb it by immersing them self in daily life is such an amazing thing!

Stylish's latest obsession is birds and bird nests. She's become a regular bird watcher and can identify different types of birds and their nests. She's learning about which birds are native and which have been introduced, can tell you how long a baby bird stays in its' nest and when it learn to fly, what they eat (pigeons feed their young MILK!?!?!?!), the different names for the birds, depending on what they eat and so on and so forth. She even floated the idea of becoming an ornithologist ... but I'm confident we'll be back to frogs soon.

The maths obsession continues, and her quest to learn all her times tables (up to 12) is going unbelievably well. nearly seven years in a school failed to teach her what she's self taught herself in a matter of weeks. Her confidence in her mathematical ability has sky rocketed and it's really lovely to see the change from "I'm hopeless at maths" to "I can do this now, I just had to WANT to do it!".

We are thinking of moving to Tasmania towards the end of the year and buying a house there. There are several reasons to move to Antarctica ... I mean Tasmania. Firstly it means we can buy a house and have a very tiny mortgage on it, whereas if we stay here we would need a huge mortgage and be unable to afford holidays and other little joys like dining out. Also, the weekly repayments on a tiny mortgage are quite literally only 10% of the cost of our current rental property! Secondly it means we will be able to afford a solar panel! I want a solar panel because a) they're environmentally sustainable and b) it will cut our power bills dramatically - making living even more affordable! I also want a water tank for the same reasons. Thirdly and, possibly one of my greatest motivators, we will have the room for chickens and maybe even a couple of ducks! Plus a big veggie garden and a green house, and a dog! The lifestyle change will be dramatic, from living in a major city to living in a glorified country town (we're looking at places just outside Hobart), and I expect it will do us all the world of good! A move towards a more sustainable lifestyle is the greatest gift you can give your children in my opinion.

General happenings

2010-02-24T14:10:00.000-08:00

Stylish has been asking questions that are long multiplication so yesterday I sat down with her and reminded her how to do them. She had so much fun she asked for more. She seems to struggle with which column to put the carried over numbers in, and then forgets which one to add on when she is faced with that column, but it's nothing practice won't straighten out. Amazingly enough she seems to really know her times tables now, and that's more than half the work in this type of sum.

Spikee was very impressed with his sister doing maths and announced that he wanted to do some too, so I wrote numbers and he scribbled over them. He is starting to be familiar with some numbers, I'm sure Stylish could read all her numbers by now, but I could be wrong.

So many kids hate school!

2010-02-10T22:18:00.000-08:00

How many children begin each day begging their parents not to send them to school? And how many parents listen to their kids and keep them home, and how many offer useless placation and send their kids off in tears?

In order to live a full and healthy life we rely on four essential functions, according to Patricia Evans, feeling, sensate, intuitive and thinking. There are many ways we damage these basic functions in children, and forced schooling is the cause of plenty damage.

A child cries about not wanting to go to school because every day this week they have been picked on. The child uses their intuitive function to predict what will occur today, and yet the parent brushes this aside telling the child "it'll be alright, you don't KNOW what today will bring".

A child cries because they can not compete with their peers in an academic or physical subject, and the parent tells them "go on, try your hardest, you can do it". The child uses their feeling function to understand anguish, and the parent ignores their feelings - obviously with good intentions, but it is still ignoring a function the child is using to navigate their way through their day.

Intuition and feeling are very powerful and useful, crucial, senses, however we are socially conditioned to use our "thinking" function above all else, and the thinking function can not give us all the information we need for decision making. The other functions are viewed as weaknesses, failings, little more than an inconvenience in all things, from work to relating to other people.

Many of the parents who send their children to prison despite their tears are switching off their intuitive function in order to do so. Using their "thinking" function to override their intuition, telling themselves that the benefits of education outweigh the negatives of the "feeling" function of their child, and the child's intuitive fear. This is something that the parents of the parent most likely drummed into them in order to raise fully functional human beings. It has somehow become the norm to use only the thinking function to the detriment of all other functions, and the detriment of the human beings being raised to ignore such essential parts of themselves.

What does this teach children?

In order to be a successful human in our "dog eat dog" world, we rely on all the senses, and we rely on a connection to them, within ourselves to be fully functional, independent, whole beings. When we ignore a child's functional senses, we teach them to disconnect from themselves, we teach them that our thinking function is more worthy than their intuitive or feeling function. When in actual fact ALL of these things must operate together for harmony to exist within us, and we must be aware of them for them to guide us. We are teaching our children to disconnect from their inner voices, voices which may one day be relied upon in life and death situations .... and yet by then they are unable to access them, or they do not value the messages their senses are sending them.

I am well aware the homeschooling isn't a viable option to a lot of people, but I do believe that it's an option to more people than ever consider it. If homeschool isn't an option for you because you have court orders preventing you from making decisions by yourself, if you are a sole, working parent, or any other myriad of reasons prevent you from learning at home, you can still listen to your child and validate their feelings. You can work with them to find a solution for their aversion to schooling. You can employ a counselor, demand the school steps up to the plate and meets the needs of your child, you can look at changing schools to a school that has a different approach to the particular problem your child is encountering, or you can simply allow your child to have a "mental health day" now and again to relieve some of the stress.

If more parents did this the world would be a happier, more functional place! Our children would be healthier, less inclined to experiment with sex and drugs, and able to form more complete adult (and youthful) relationships with both themselves, other people, and the world around them. Imagine a world where children learnt to use all their feelings, without ever judging the value of one above another, and they grew up to raise children the same way!

Here are some other ways to value and encourage your child to develop all their senses and functions.

If your child falls over, don't tell them it didn't hurt and that they'll be ok. Just hold them close and comfort them quietly.
If your child tells you they don't like a particular food, don't tell them that it's actually tasty - you probably don't like green cordial, and couldn't be convinced of its' virtues.
If your child doesn't like a particular relative don't tell them the relative is nice, they should get to know them, let your child feel protected by you.
If your child does not wish to have physical contact with a particular person do not force it upon them, who cares if the adult is upset, it's your job to protect your child, not another adult's feelings.
If your child finds something too difficult, don't tell them it's easy, they will either grow into the skill or find other skills which they can accomplish easily.

A day at the MCA

2010-02-09T00:42:00.000-08:00

Today we visited the Museum of Contemporary Art with a group of home schoolers. The museum has a fantastic collection showing at the moment, by a Danish artist called Olafur Eliasson.

These are a couple of his works that we saw. There is a tunnel of mirrors and lights, when you walk through one way it's colourful, but the other side of the points which jut out is black so that when you walk through it that way you are in a dark tunnel. There is a room painted white that is lit by yellow lights so that everything in the room (people can walk in) is a rather off putting shade of yellow, and a darkened room with a fine mist of water that light shines on, creating a rainbow. If you stand right under the water you see a perfect circle of a rainbow in front of you, it's rather impressive!

There is also 300kg of white lego which the children were allowed to build things with, they spent an hour at least making houses and towers and various other creative things, then storing them at the side of the room where everyone else's creations were displayed.

Midwife appointments have begun!

2010-01-31T02:48:00.000-08:00

I forgot to mention that we have selected a midwife and that we had our first appointment. Spikee was so keen to hear a heart beat but the baby wasn't in a cooperative mood, so all her heard was about two beats, and a lovely cord swishing along. He is so excited about the baby, he has millions of things planned, from taking the baby and his dinosaur (the imaginary friend who has come to roost) for walks, to teaching the baby to ride a bike, and having booby with the baby (assuming he doesn't wean over the next few months) having a bath with the baby .... in fact he has planned out the baby's entire life already!

We have been watching homebirths on youtube partly because it caters to his interests and also because we want him well prepared for when I go into labour. Stylish has seen it twice already, she's an old hand at these things, but even despite that she's very excited, and I hear her telling Spikee about it quite often. I was going to have a spare doula here to care for the kids when I'm in labour, but I think that she will be ok to care for him, and we will have a doula here anyway. Stylish has talked to Spikee about all the fun things they can do when I'm in labour, like drawing, playing with their animals, watching dvd's, helping mum have drinks, taking photos, and baking a cake. She has also told him that he has to choose an outfit for the baby to wear and put it inside his shirt to warm it up ready for the baby, like she did for him .... not that he got to wear it.

Full steam ahead!!! Baby number four here we come! (baby number three was stillborn in hospital)

Accidental days of learning

2010-01-30T17:21:00.000-08:00

Yesterday we decided to head into the city for the day, we had no plans, we just wanted to go out for the day. We found ourselves in China Town watching Chinese Dragon dancing and eating Indian food - oh, the kids had Japanese food, they had sushi.

From there we caught a bus to Circular Quay and wandered down the length of the quay seeing street performers like a didgeridoo player and a man who rides the tallest unicycle in the world (according to him). Spikee was very impressed with the show, he rode a small unicycle and juggled fire, rode it while skipping, jumped over a child on it, and then rode the 4 meter high one and juggled.

From there we wandered around the Opera House, and into the Botanical Gardens where the kids ran amok for a couple of hours. I had forgotten how lovely the gardens are, with the harbour right there, and the bridge and the Opera House all looming large. The kids were amazed by all the flying foxes up the trees, and because it was late afternoon some of them were starting to wake up so they were chatty amongst their batty selves!

Then we decided that we had had such a lovely day it would be a shame to end it there, so we walked from the Quay to the city and had Italian for dinner before catching a train home. A fun day was had by all, and I'm sure there was some accidental learning involved.

I like my kids!

2010-01-22T02:00:00.000-08:00

Sometimes when I'm chatting to complete strangers and the subject of schooling comes up, quite often their response to home learning is "oooh I couldn't COPE with that, I need a break!". I'm not some super mother, it's just that I like my kids and I don't desperately crave time away from them. In fact the reason I had children was to spend time with them - that's a radical notion in some circles!

Even when my daughter was in prison I was practically the only parent in the playground not bemoaning the upcoming holidays, and complaining about what we were going to do to keep them happy for that extensive period ... of two weeks!

I read an article in the news paper the other day about the cost of children on holidays and was quite honestly gob smacked! They were making out like the only way to keep kids happy was to take them to expensive places and buy them expensive food that is guaranteed to contain trans-fats and be completely devoid of any nutritional value. Then the did a list of a day at the movies, which was complete with popcorn, chocolate, ice creams, and soft drinks. And a list of a day at the cricket which was just as silly.

I'm not a big consumer, I couldn't afford to be one for the longest time, and now that we have a little bit more money about we're used to doing things on a shoe string budget so we still do. A day at the museum costs us practically nothing. We usually take our own healthy food, we are members at the museum thanks to my father who gives us membership for xmas, and we don't spend much at the gift shop. So all up that's about $30, including transport, not the $109 average the news paper claimed a day out cost. Even when we go to the movies we take our own drinks, and a snack, and we only buy a small popcorn - how much popcorn do you need?

But cost aside, the main issue people have with with homeschool is spending time with their children, and never having a break. I wonder if part of why they don't like their children is because of the influence school has on them. My own experience of a schooled vs unschooled child is that they are complete polar opposites. My schooled child was often bored, usually rude, resistant to expressing who she genuinely was and often got about in the persona of some crazed little brat who I was sure wasn't my child! The deschooling process was complicated -and I believe it's a long term endeavour when your child has spent so long being indoctrinated, and struggling to be an individual within an institution (and credit to her for maintaining so much self under all that pressure!).

But despite the fact that nearly six years of resisting pink, fashion, shopping (like it's some amazing and self improving activity), continuing to study frogs, stick insects, enjoy sport, and wear clothes she liked rather than what her peers wore, that stuff still rubbed off on her. And when she was being one of her peers instead of being herself she wasn't the greatest child to be around .... but I still looked forward to holidays!

I wondered what would happen to our relationship when peer pressure wasn't steering us off course. I wasn't sure that removing her from the system would actually bring her back into herself, sure I'd heard all about it, but from what I was living it didn't seem entirely possible. However I was keen to try, I wanted to be more involved in her life, I wanted to spend more quality time with her, and I wanted to see if we couldn't just peel back some of that unpleasant exterior and relocate Stylish under it all. Over the course of a bit over a year we have done just that!

I like my children, I like spending time with them, but I can't wait for the school holidays to end now, so we can go back to the museum when it's empty, and the pool when there's only one grandma in the slow lane and us with the whole leisure area to ourselves. So ... for me, it took homeschooling to make me dread the holidays, and wish for them to end. But for very different reasons than I hear from other parents. It's sad that people don't like their children, and I really wonder if it's their children or the institutionalised versions of them that they don't like.

Plans for 2010

2010-01-21T21:59:00.000-08:00

After a discussion about the difference between the UK and the USA I decided to make some plans, or at least set some goals for this year. We're going to look at some maps and learn where countries, and continents and big cities are. We're also going to do some history because I believe history and geography are very closely linked ... Queen Victoria didn't rule from the USA.

So today on my way home from the city I stopped in at a great discount book shop and bought some books about prehistoric people, Ancient Egyptians, and the Crusades. Spikee got some dinosaur ones and a crocodile one. They were all $1 each which is a bit of a bargain! Stylish also got a book all about interesting rat facts (interesting to her anyway - spare me from hearing more) which she has already buried her head in for half an hour. I managed to get myself a book to! It's called The Heretic Queen, and it's about Queen Nefertari and how she came to marry Ramses II. It starts out beautifully, I started to read a little bit on the bus home but then realised Spikee was falling asleep so I spent the rest of the trip talking about lively things.

Last week end we bought Stylish a new bike! Her old one was getting too small, knees hitting handle bars is a good indicator that you've outgrown your bike, plus it was kind of rusty. We were going to lay by one for her birthday but then we saw the perfect bike on sale so we grabbed it and it came home that same day. She is overjoyed with it - despite the fact it's pink. I actually think it's a lovely pink! And I suspect it's grown on her too, I doubt this will cause a pink revolution in the house though.

more pics

2010-01-17T00:38:00.001-08:00

holiday pics

2010-01-17T00:30:00.001-08:00

Fishing at Questacon, REAL fishing, the spa with some boys in it, us playing which who in Goulburn!

about time I updated!

2010-01-11T19:39:00.000-08:00

We're home from our holiday, and it's probably time I posted some pics and told you all a bit about our trip! We had a great time down south, the kids loved the camping and so did we, but we liked the 4.5 star hotel on the way home even more (don't tell the kids).

Our two nights in Shoal Haven were pleasant, we spent some time walking up and down the beach opposite the hotel, and swimming, and playing "which who" (otherwise knows as Guess Who) and just generally relaxing. I was suffering from pregnancy exhaust so I particularly enjoyed sleeping in and afternoon napping!

From Shoal Haven we drove straight on to the camping ground at Eden which is on the northern coast of NSW. Eden used to be the biggest whaling community in Australia, and the whole world for that matter. The camping ground was lovely, our only complaint would be that they had too many people there, but that's to be expected at that time of year I guess.. Stylish spent the entire time begging to go fishing so one of the first things we did was ask the locals where the best fishing spot was.

She spent many hours at the pier casting her line out, chopping up bait, and catching and releasing fish that were undersized. We did manage to bag one that was a good size though, and she killed it, gutted it, and filleted it all by herself (with adult direction). Spikee was also very keen on fishing but we tried to keep him away from the pier as much as we could because he is so active we were worried he'd go over the edge! But he did spend some time sitting in his cow chair holding a broken rod and enjoying the general experience. My favourite part of the fishing was seeing little fur seals diving about just off the pier. I got so excited when I saw them that I nearly cried (I'm such a sap)

On NYE the kids had a party next to the tent, they had junk food and then played with plastic dinosaurs til late. The camp ground had a pool and a mini golf course which we all spent lots of time enjoying. Spikee kept calling it cricket so for the first few days we had no idea what he was talking about.

We went to the whaling museum in Eden and spent a rather long time there! I expected we'd be done in half an hour like at most small town museums, but we spent a good two hours there learning all about whaling in Australia. It was both heart breaking and fascinating. Eden is now a thriving whale watching community but once upon a time it was the biggest whaling port in the world. There was an Orca called Old Tom who actually worked with the whaling ships and his pod to herd baleen whales into the port where they were slaughtered. This worked for the orca's well because they cooperated with the whalers and they got to eat their fill - mostly lips and tongues apparently - before leaving them to the whalers. The view from the museum was spectacular! Gorgeous blue ocean, red rocks, and luscious green grass on rolling hills.

We went to Merimbula twice and saw the aquarium there. The kids sat for ages infront of a large tank spotting all the different fish that we could eat if we could catch them. We saw Tasmanian Sea-Horses, huge lobsters, cuttle fish, an amazing octopus, and heaps more. We also went to the vinnies there and scored a few excellent things. Stylish got some great clothes, and I bought some Hairy Maclary books for Spikee that were in perfect condition, and a set of overalls for the baby.

From Eden we decided to drive inland all the way home because the coastal highway is dodgy at best, and also because we always go up the coast and we thought inland might be nice for a change! We drove from Eden to Canberra in about 4 hours, and decided to stop there for a break and visit Questacon (what used to be called the science museum I think). The kids had a blast pushing buttons, going in the earth quake machine, watching lightning being made, creating tsunami's, playing on the computers and so much more. The end of our visit to Questacon was slightly eventful though because when we got back to the car we discovered that A had left eh headlights on and flattened the car battery. Fortunately we always travel with jumper cables, and after pushing the car into a good position a women helped us.

So from Canberra it took us a bit over an hour to get to Goulburn where we found a nice hotel and went to ground for three nights. Ordering room service, swimming at the pool, soaking in the spa that was in our room, and just generally enjoying being back in semi civilisation!

So that's what we got up to on our holiday! We had a blast and hope to do it all over again some times soon! It might be a bit enthusiastic, but in the middle of the year when A has time off coz we have a baby we might nick off up the coast again. No camping though, cabins all the way!

Merry Giftmas!

2009-12-25T01:02:00.000-08:00

I can't believe xmas came around so fast, I guess being pregnant, and raising two children makes the time fly by faster than is conceivable!

We had a wonderful family feast with turkey, ham, pork, and chicken that was all free range! And plenty of salads, a potato salad, a green salad, and a pasta pesto salad made from home grown rocket and basil.

To top it off we had chocolate chunk and berry ice-cream made by Stylish. We put the ice cream in mini cones, dipped them in melted white chocolate and turned them upside down (so they'd look like xmas trees) and the kids decorated their with m+m's. The ice cream tasted like very cold chocolate mousse, it was really yummy!

Stylish spent the day making videos of everything on her new ipod, and Spikee is in love with his new ambulance toy - complete with sirens. Tonight we downloaded Pink albums for her while Spikee and I played his new dice game. The game is with the characters from the movie Cars, and instead of having numbers on the dice it has colours so it's perfect for him.

Today he got a pencil on a mini etch a sketch and began doing some writing. He did a couple of tidy and organised little scribbles in the way you write letters! Then showed us all his writing, there was no doubting what it was! I was about to take a photo of it when he had to wipe it off - darn it! I'll see if I can get him to do it again.

Two days ago we got some pet fish for Spikee and Stylish, and they're going really well. The tank looks amazing! We have a crocodile that's mouth opens and shuts and bubbles come out to aerate the tank, colourful green rocks, glowing eggs, and a weird sort of decoration that looks like ancient pillars with coral growing off them (Spikee chose that ....). It was an early giftmas present. Spikee is really enjoying the job of feeding them each morning and night and he talks to them and gives them updates on everything from the impending arrival of Santa to the fact that I stored some clean rocks for their tank on top of the fridge.

In two days we head off on our camping trip! We're spending two nights in a hotel on the way to Eden, and we'll stay in Eden for a week of fishing, swimming, and fun family times!!! We're so organised it's ridiculous. We've bought roof racks off eBay, and a camp kitchen and chairs and tables this year to add to our already impressive collection of "make camping luxurious" accessories.

Tomorrow I'm taking the kids to see Where The Wild Things Are while A packs the camping stuff and watches cricket whilst consuming beer. I can't wait! I can only imagine how excited the kids would be ...

old school .....

2009-12-21T02:18:00.001-08:00

We've been going swimming at the local pool late in the afternoon. Two days ago we ran into a lovely girl that used to go to all Stylish's parties and whatnot. They swapped numbers and email addresses, so hopefully they'll catch up for a play soon.

Then today we went to the pool again and ran into a different child. She told Stylish that one of the girls they used to play with is pregnant. She is 12yrs old and pregnant. Now, the truth is that we don't know if that's reality or not, but either way it's terrible. If it's not true, it's sad because kids are spreading such shocking rumours about each other, if it's true, well what more do I need to say.

One of the reasons I pulled my daughter out of school was to protect her from the trouble she was starting to get into. One day she and the girl from the pool, the one who is reportedly pregnant, and another girl left the school. They went to the pregnant girl's house, played at their neighbour's house (they climbed through a hole in the fence), were fed fried chicken from a well known source, and black fizzy drink from another well known source. The mother then told them it was the end of lunch and that they could go back to school if they wanted. My daughter did want to, and was caught by a teacher, re-entering the school.

The girl's were nearly suspended over this event. They were put on what the prison politely terms "withdrawal suspension" where they had to go to another classroom for two days. My daughter was sent to the classroom of one of the most ridiculously "strict" teachers in the school. He made her spend two days facing the back of the classroom and told her off for turning around at any stage. The girls were also banned from playing at recess and lunch and had to sit in a classroom in silence, writing out the school rules.

I pointed out the the principal that these girls were old enough to know the school rules already, and that perhaps the school would be better off to work out WHY they had broken them. But that's just how schools do things apparently, and those are the rules. The fact is that my daughter was happy to leave the playground because several of the boys were relentlessly teasing her ... and getting away with it. The boys in question were putting sexual letters in our letter box, and prank calling us until midnight on Saturday nights. And when I reported this to the school? they informed me that they couldn't do anything about it because it wasn't happening in school time, or on school property.

Personally I believe the parent who allowed the girls to play in THE NEIGHBOUR'S YARD and fed them CRAP should have been bloody well charged with something or another, because her actions were wildly inappropriate.

And furthermore, how schools can claim to deal with bullying "HEAD ON" bewilders me, but it's whole other topic, I just thought it was a question worth posing at this stage of my rant.

So that explains some of the reasons I removed my child from the institution. But I didn't "know" when I did it that it was the right decision, I made that decision on impulse when I was dealing with massive grief (I lost a son and a very close friend within 6 months). It was a knee jerk reaction to a very bad, untenable, position, but it turned out to be the best one I ever made for my kids! Interestingly enough, as the last 18 months have progressed I've thought of more and more reasons to un-school them! I realised that removing her from that particular school wouldn't fix the problem, because when you take a child who is bullied from one school and put them in another school .... the cycle of abuse and bullying continues. I figured she'd find the same old kids in the new school, just wearing a different uniform.

It makes me very sad to think of a 12yr old child in such an environment that she is sexually active already. This whole situation makes me brutally aware of how I can only save one child, and that child is my own. If I manage to do that then I can be glad, but I will always wonder what became of the other girls who left school one lunch hour and triggered our un-schooling journey .....

100th post!!!!!

2009-12-19T22:11:00.000-08:00

I thought to celebrate our one hundredth post, I'd do a list of things we love about un-schooling!

no uniforms
no cut lunches going soggy
no homework
no bullying
no comparisons with other kids
no testing
no learning boring stuff!
no peer pressure
no drop offs and pick ups
CELEBRATING INDIVIDUALITY!!!
learning about things that interest us
gardening!
it's easy to be a non consumer family!
visiting museums, zoos etc when they're empty!
maths at midnight, but only if you feel like it
REAL socialisation with children from all walks of life and all ages
FREEDOM!
learning to think for ourselves
learning to read between the lines
holidays any time it suits us, not just when every one else is on holiday
real, genuine relationships with each other
learning life skills
no need to fill time, it fills itself!
kids at midwife appts, not at school!
helpful, responsible, participating, happy, CHILDREN!!! Children, not sheeple!

rats and restaurants .... not all at once

2009-12-16T01:39:00.001-08:00

Stylish is full of amazing ideas for decorating her new room, and most of them involve prettying up the rat cage and the frog tank. We had a bit of a worrying moment the other morning because she realised that she'd left the rat's cage open all night and only one little ratty was still home. After her old rat Pip had deserted her only a week before we were a bit worried that these ones, which are far less tame, wouldn't show up again.

After a few hours of worrying and crying, and insisting that they were gone forever she came into my room and - lo and behold! - was holding one of the escapees. Over the course of the next few hours she saw the other one running up and down the hallway numerous times but was unable to grab it because it was so fast and jumpy. Then yesterday afternoon she opened her desk drawer and noticed that there was a toast crust in there. She wondered how it had managed to find its way into the drawer so had a closer look inside, and right down the back, trying to look inconspicuous was the last little ratty.

This morning she made them a run in the corner of her room and put lots of inviting (if you're a baby rat) things for them to climb on, hide in, and explore. They've been in their play pen all day having a whale of a time.

I took the kids out for dinner at a local Vietnamese restaurant tonight. It's too hot, and I was too tired and pregnant to bother cooking anything. It was nice to go for a walk in the evening air as everything cooled down. At the restaurant Stylish chose to have fish with ginger and shallots and I chose the deep fried bean curd with chili and lemon grass. We shared it all of course. Spikee had two big bowls of rice, and two cups of green tea, and refused anything nutritious or tasty looking (I'm so over his breatharian lifestyle). The tofu was so amazingly delicious that I ate nearly all of it, and even bothered to bring the last two bits home with us to eat later - as soon as I got home actually. Even Adam thought the tofu was delicious and he's not much of a tofu eater. fall that walking After all the walking I am way past my used by date. Stylish just brought me a very nice cu p of tea so I'm chilling out in the bedroom playing on the internet and drinking my tea. What a lovely summer evening!!!

unlearning opportunities all around!

2009-12-13T23:04:00.000-08:00

Stylish found some lizard eggs in amongst the bricks out in the back garden. She brought them in and kept them in a tank for about four weeks, then today she decided that they weren't going to hatch and she was going to stick them back outside. She picked on up and POP! it burst open and a mini lizard leaped out! Then another one hatched, and now we have quite a few tiny little baby lizards.

Yesterday in the garden we saw an enormous huntsman spider being dragged across the garden by a yellow tail wasp. At first we weren't sure who was dragging who, but upon closer examination it became obvious that the spider was paralysed. I called Stylish to come and see and she told us all about it. Apparently she saw them on a David Attenborough doco a few weeks ago. She said to us "it's injected poison into the spider and paralysed , and now it's dragging the spider back to it's nest to feed it's baby" .... and sure enough we watched as it dragged it all the way across the garden to a cozy little burrow under our rogue watermelon, heaved the enormous spider down the hole and was never seen again!

more pics

2009-12-12T21:41:00.000-08:00

dinner from our very own garden

2009-12-12T01:55:00.000-08:00

I decided to uproot something in the garden that I was pretty sure I hadn't planted. It turned out to be the most lovely bunch of tiny little potatoes! We cleaned them, and boiled them, and ate them for dinner with fresh mint, chives, and parsley from the garden. We had them with salad that was all home grown (lettuce and cherry tomatoes), and free range chicken which I marinated in chili and lime sauce that we bought way back in April at the easter show from in the produce hall. As we ate there were many exclamations of "this is yum!" and "this is sooooooo YUMMY". And one member of the family (who shall remain nameless) rolling peas off the table onto the floor and telling us all - quite cheerfully I might add - to shut up.

There are two more bunches of potatoes growing in the garden now, and we'll leave them until xmas and harvest them for salad on xmas day. I discovered after a google, searching for cucumber plants, that our pumpkin is actually a cucumber plant! We have nearly thirty flowers on it and they're so pretty, but sooner or later they're gonna turn into a massive crop of cucumbers, probably not in time for xmas unfortunately.

I discovered a rogue watermelon that has decided to spring to into life beside the trampoline. None of us have any idea where it came from!? But there it is, doing it's own thing, growing well! We may get fruit off it one day! The potatoes began in the compost heap that is now our garden bed, so we have rogue potatoes too. And they taste amazing!

2009-12-11T23:53:00.000-08:00

a day at taronga

2009-12-11T23:27:00.001-08:00

Today we spent the day at the zoo, we got up nice and early (8am on Saturday is early!) and drove over there. We would have caught a ferry if I wasn't pregnant, but I thought all the walking and waiting might be a bit much after a day wandering at the zoo.

Stylish was very impressed with the Corroboree frog breeding program that was on display, and I was very interested in how many of them there are in captivity when there are only about 50 in the wild. Taronga is working on their resistance to a bacterial bug (the main reason they are critically endangered) to make their release back into the Alpine area where they live, more effective, and hopefully to replenish their numbers in the long term. She impressed us all with her reptile knowledge about various species which she rattled off before she had a chance to read the information next to the animal, she is such a wealth of information!

Spikee was kind of interested in stuff, and yet more interested in bolting about like a mad thing. he must have ran about two kilometres up and down hills. When asked what his favourite animal from today was he said "de effant" which translated into English is "the elephant". He also liked the part of the seal show where the seal was balancing a ball on it's nose and playing catch with the keeper. He was also really interested in the goats that he got to pat - don't get me started coz I really want a goat.

The zoo has changed so much since I was a child. One of the changes is the play areas that are kid friendly. There is a wading pool with a boat in it that Spikee loved, and we all dipped our hot feet in the cool water for a bit. There's also a large play area all constructed from wood, and it had a whole water play area with water wheels and water falls, and pumps, and a sand pit where we spent some time letting the kids just be kids without having to be interested in stuff! After half an hour there Spikee's mood improved notably.

Stylish got to climb inside the old bear enclosure and was horrified at the darkness and the tiny space that the enormous bears used to live in. it's probably less than three metres of floor space, and a large part of that is taken up with a water trough.

All round it was a lovely unlearnt day! Now we just have to muster up the energy to cook something for dinner! We have our last lettuce ready to harvest, and we also have about 13 tomatoes. And on that note, I'm gong to go and water everything and get some dinner organised.

isn't it amazing!

2009-12-10T02:09:00.000-08:00

Every day Spikee requests paper and writing equipment to do some writing! He basically scribbles, but he calls it writing, and it's most definitely the beginnings of literacy. His computer skills improve every day, and the hand / eye coordination required to operate the notebook mouse are starting to surprise me. Stylish was his age (3.5) when she started using a mouse and playing edumacational games.

Stylish got two new pet rats today. Pip ran away two days ago, and for such a tame rat I'm quite surprised that she hasn't come home! Never the less, if she does there's plenty room in the house for them all. She called them Matilda, Grape, and the first new rat we got last week end is called Electra. They're happily getting to know each other in their newly designed home, and eating the turkey stuffing that A brought home from work (we all ate the turkey). These rats are the best fed rats in this hemisphere. The more or less live off our kitchen scraps. Their home is decked out with things Stylish has collected from second hand shops (recently some plastic tissue box covers) and bedding hammocks that she has sewed by hand.

I can't decide what to do tomorrow, I was thinking we might go swimming if I can be bothered dragging myself all the way out to the pool. Or maybe we'll stay home while it's hot and meet A after work for laksa and a look at the huge xmas tree in Martin Place. Spikee seems to be catching the xmas bug at long last, so that might be right up his alley!

happenings

2009-12-08T20:47:00.000-08:00

Today isn't too hot so we spent a good deal of time in the garden weeding, and planting mustard which I'm hoping will be ready to eat by xmas. Spikee very enthusiastically waters his peas and corn each day, and was delighted when I showed him some of the pea plants we started ages ago now have flowers on them, so does our watermelon. Plus we have about ten or more pumpkin flowers, and twenty odd strawberry flowers too. The kids (and the grown ups) have all been interested in the seeds we plant because they .... look just like the seeds in the fruit or veggies that you eat. (pick the city slickers)

Stylish is really getting into the whole water saving thing now, and when the washing machine starts pumping out the water is often standing right there with the hose going into the watering can, ready to run it out to the garden and come back for more! It's rather therapeutic for me, so I suppose she finds it enjoyable too. We have such an elaborate system of bottles, buckets, and watering cans happening that we rarely waste a drop these days, which - owing to the size of our growing veggie patch - is great!

The kids decided that they're not going to buy xmas presents this year, they're going to make them instead! Which I think is lovely, and will be pulling out all the stoppers to assist them over the coming weeks. Recently for Grandpa's birthday Stylish gave him a red pot of soil with seeds in it for him to water and discover what she had given him as it grew, I thought that was creative. They both made him cards which he loves.

I had a bag of organic black beans sitting in the cupboard unopened for a while now and I decided to do something with them so I googled black bean sauce. It was the easiest thing I ever made, and everyone (except the resident breatharian) loves it! We've made it four times since then. We did some food science with the bean soaking process, because you're meant to use fermented black beans, so we soaked them over night and watched the yeast forming. Then observed how much it grew over the course of the second warm day until the mixture smelt disgusting - at which time we were hesitant to admit that the beans were ready to cook.

Stylish has started her new blog and is enjoying the creative side as well as the writing side. As soon as it's got more on it I am permitted to post a link here. She is really showing some internet competency these days, enjoying a couple of reptile and amphibian forums, and her game (which seems to be under control thus far).

Spikee keeps wanting to write, so today we sat down with a pencil and I wrote 'a' and he wrote it too! then I wrote mum, dad, Stylish, and Spikee, and he read them, and recognised them when written again! After that I took him to starfall where he enjoyed looking at the letters and saying what words he could hear the sounds in. Then after that he requested some 'nummas' so we went to poissonrouge and did their numbers a few times. He managed to more or less drive the mouse himself which is a huge development!

general happenings ....

2009-12-07T02:48:00.001-08:00

Stylish has decided to start a new blog with animal information. I'll help her to do that tomorrow, stay tuned! She also has a new pen-friend which she seems to be enjoying. And she has recently gone back to her old on line game with horses, I'm hoping that now she's more de-schooled than she was when she first got involved with that, it won't take over her life like it did last time. Limits will be placed on it if it looks like it's getting out of control. I much prefer self set limits though .....

Apparently her male frog is calling early in the morning and waking her up, she's not impressed with his efforts (I personally admire him, waking her up takes some effort!). We gave our old rat a few days to grieve, and then yesterday purchased a tiny little timid baby rat from some ghastly pet shop - it cost $20!!! Over the course of yesterday and today the poor wee thing is much less skittish, she's obviously not used to being handled.

Spikee is asking more often about writing. He asks me to write a certain word, then scribbles over it, I figure he's heading for some more controlled efforts ... in the next five or ten years. He's also learning to read numbers, and gaining some competency bit by bit at number recognition. His counting is really taking off too!

Yesterday he asked me if he could plant some seeds so I showed him what seeds we had and he chose some corn and peas, filled a pot with soil from the compost heap, dug little holes with his fingers, and the pushed the seeds in. He very enthusiastically watered them several times yesterday, and then again today.

Tomorrow we're gonna be making a clock out of a lemon - don't ask me how - so we'll no doubt have pics to show off! And Spikee will be watering the garden again ... and again.