I haven’t posted in a while, in fact I have been very quiet all round!
The end of 2016 and most of 2017 has been tough. My father was diagnosed with thyroid cancer at the end of 2016, so 2017 started off rocky. In August my father in law was diagnosed (well not so much diagnosed as that I read and googled the big words in the report he had to take from one hospital to the next – we had a merry go round public health system experience that I will never wish on my worst enemy) and my father in law passed away the day after Christmas 2017.
Adding to that the constant onslaught of new rules and regulations pertaining to home educations as proposed at the end of 2017 and constant information overload and guidelines on how to oppose these new laws. Homeschooling was in mainstream media a lot and it felt like a battlefield on opinion posts of news outlets. Home educators began fighting among themselves about who was more dedicated to the cause by their willingness to submit well thought out commentary before the closing date, nitpicking at details and constantly painting worse case scenarios.
The thing is: if you know why you want to homeschool, if you understand why you have to homeschool, if you have unshakable faith in your decision you do not need to surround yourself with others’ negativity – you have my permission.
Answering the socialization question 5 times a day, helping others face their fears of made up “what if” scenarios, trying to prove our sanity to random online commentators on published articles on the net, while basically ignoring your own family can break even the most hardened of homeschool activists. I was done. I removed myself from all but one group on Facebook – it was and still is amazing!
So What Are we up to?!
So we are quietly busy in the back ground doing home education. We will be finishing up this years work by the end of April because in 3 weeks time we are climbing on a plane and leaving for Europe for a travel holiday.
We will be starting in Amsterdam. Every year for our birthday, every person in the family gets to chose an outing. Daddy takes the day off and we go on an adventure. This year for my birthday I chose to see the tulips at Keukenhof. We are flying back home from Paris where B will get to see the Eiffel Tower as she has been dreaming of for more than a year now and as the Little Brother has his birthday a few days after we get back from our trip, going to Disneyland Paris will be his birthday outing. We will be seeing my grandmother in Friesland (a province of Holland), hopefully we will be going to Belgium, Germany, Austria or Switzerland but we will have to see how travelling with 3 young children go. If all else fails we will go to a resort and spend our holiday relaxing while we watch the kids playing.
We will not be doing any “school work” on this trip. B (nearly 9) is in charge of writing up a daily journal of what we see and do which will serve as her handwriting work for the year! For a little over a month we will be worldschoolers!
I will not be blogging about our experience as we go. I might write up a blog post when we get back. But in the meantime I have started a Facebook page where we will be sharing photos of our travels and daily life. You can join the page from this link or if you want to search for it, it looks like this!
Hopefully I will get back into a routine of blogging when we get back!
See you in June!
xxM
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The Craffords 