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trying to focus

Oops. O.K, so I'm not exactly a prolific blogger at the moment. But hey ...

There's been so much real life stuff going on. We've (almost) sold this house and (almost) found another. The France house is (almost) on the way to being ready. We've (almost) got the worst of the packing done - certainly all the sorting and throwing stuff out bits done. A big Freecycle posting is coming up!

The new house is smaller, and on a main road, but with a much nicer garden (bigger, private, green and leafy), which makes up for it. Also we've got far too much furniture for the new house so we're having to send some to France, nicely solving the riddle of how we're going to afford to furnish two houses. In a way we'll have two half houses. The garden in the new U.K house is big enough for a studio room, so Big M and the girls will be able to be as creatively messy as they need to, without having to clear it up every suppertime. Our workroom will be the smallest of the 3 (small!) bedrooms but there'll be enough room downstairs for all the books (O.K, *half* the books) and so all we need in the workroom is a desk and computer. We can go and have a coffee in the garden when it gets claustrophobic.

The girls don't seem to be worried about this potential half/half lifestyle. We've all done a lot of talking about what can go in which house, and what we can do where. Instead of having two sets of stuff we're going to try and do different things in each house, instead. The France house has a great 'field-like' garden for kicking balls, and running, and swinging and bouncing. The U.K garden is better for twiddling about with plants and flowers and stuff. The studio room in the U.K will be good for painting, and crafts, while the big barn in France will be great for building, and bashing, and hammering, and sculpting. The downstairs of the U.K house has more space than upstairs, so we'll be well set up for cooking, and eating, and doing stuff by the fire. The France house has no sitting room but the bedroom has enough space for our big screen and projector, so we'll move our dvds over there, and listen to story cds in the U.K.

Sounds like a plan? ... we'll see.

exploring scenarios ...

O.K, so I'm not very good at updating ... I thought that might be a problem for me, but hey, too much Life has been happening to get round to Blogging it!

You might have noticed that this blog has moved homes. I couldn't get the comments working properly on the old one, so I've moved here. Even though I can't make the page look just how I want it to, and it feels a bit clunky, at least I can have some interaction (if anyone really *is* reading, that is!)

We've all had a big couple of weeks. We had a bit of a scare when, for a few days, it looked as though the French were going to tighten their - already quite restrictive - home education laws. In amongst researching all that we discovered that vaccination is quite possibly mandatory in France. We had thought it was only if you wanted to register your kids in school (which, obviously, doesn't concern us) ... but 'parently not. The risk of A and Lil'M being forcibly vaccinated, and shoved into school regardless of our best efforts was too much for us, and so we starting re-exploring our options (again). In the end we found that spending just under 6 months of the year in France, and just over 6 months of the year here in the U.K would mean that we are still governed by UK laws.

It all turned out O.K. The French home education movement did a wonderul lobbying job, and the new laws didn't go through. However, Big M and I feel much more relaxed with the idea of not having to change tax countries, not having to work our way round new laws in an unfamiliar language, and not having to submit to regular testing of the girls ... and so we have decided to do things the new way anyway. It's a lot less scary. The money to run two houses might be a bit of a struggle, though.

But we don't want to stay in this house. We moved here to be near to Big M's first daughter, my stepdaughter. She's now older and doesn't seem to need us to be so readily accessible anymore. Most of our paid work is down in the Midlands (where I moved up from, heavy sigh), and we are thoroughly sick of the M62 and M1 ... and so we're thinking of moving to Derby, near where my working partner (and friend) lives. And so we are putting this house on the market, and househunting *again*.

Top 10 house selling tips, anyone?

new year, new blog ...

New Year’s day seems a good time to launch a new blog. Not sure what we want this blog to accomplish ... probably something between a family journal and a record for ourselves about how we're doing on the home education stuff. I’ll try and keep it up, but hey, the new year is a foolish time to make rash promises ...

Today we borrowed an idea from knitting yoghurt, and adapted it to fit our own chaotic lifestyle. Our planned Yule log became a New Year’s log ... because we forgot to do it the other day. So we wrote wishes for the new year, and also wrote down things we wanted to forget about the old year, attached them to a log, along with some dried orange, cloves, herbs and suchlike ... and watched it burn in the fire. The girls started up a spontaneous and unplanned “wishes come true” mantra as it burned, which was, admittedly, a little spooky.

The new Jarvis was the soundtrack to all this, for those interested in that kind of detail.

After the festivities, the girls settled down to some drawing with their new christmas chunky beeswax crayons. They both still draw lots of pictures of smiling snowmen, regardless of the madness in the world at the moment ... I think that’s a good thing, isn’t it?