Do you know what you REALLY think?

Phew! Finally getting a moment to write a post! There has been a lot happening here, and I STILL can’t really say all of it yet!! I am sworn to a certain level of secrecy at the moment, and that may continue for a while. We have trialled a new medication for our son’s anxiety this last two weeks, and boy…what an amazing difference it’s made so far. OK, that’s all I can say for fear of saying too much Back to my main post topic. 

It has lately come to my attention that many people have different opinions about homeschooling. Well, der.. of course, that’s obvious! What’s not so obvious is that I have started realise that people don’t really seem to understand what their opinion is. I am getting some very conflicting points of view and often from the same people! 

For example, I have started noticing that when people speak to my son (a very regular occurrence because he just talks to EVERYBODY!), they will often seek me out to chat to me and ask me questions. I have had several conversations that have gone like this lately. All with total strangers, and all after striking up conversations with my son. 

Stranger: “Hi! Your son was just having a chat to me. He was telling me some very interesting things!”

Me: “Oh yes? Well he’s a very interesting little fellow!”

Stranger: “I was wondering why he isn’t in school today? Is he feeling sick?” – This is pretty obvious to me that they believe a child his age should be in school at that time of day, and they are trying to work out what my story is!

Me: “Oh, he’s homeschooled. He’s just on a break right now.”

Stranger: Often they’ll raise their eyebrows in surprise, look from my son to me, and you almost see the gears ticking in their heads… then to my surprise, they’ll say something along these lines…”Oh! I thought there must be something different about his education! He’s so incredibly articulate and polite! He speaks beautifully!”

I usually thank them politely and they often move on. This got me thinking though. It’s fairly widely frowned upon if you homeschool. Either you are a religious zealot who is trying to shelter your child from the evils of the world; you have something you need to hide and don’t want your child telling everyone all your family secrets or perhaps you have a deep and political/social mistrust of government, system and rules and want your child to benefit from your views.

With all those rather negative views in mind why then, do people unconsciously associate homeschooled children with being smart, articulate, polite and well educated? Yes, they also associate them with being naive and not having a larger understanding of the world, but actually that seems to take a back seat to the former. It doesn’t make a lot of logical sense does it. 

My theory is that we, as a society don’t really think as hard about education as we could do. We are fairly lucky in Australia in that we have a reasonably good schooling system (when compared to other countries around the world in terms of safety, and freedom of choice, resources etc…I’m being fairly generalised here so don’t shoot me!), we enjoy the ability to choose whether we send our children to certain educational facilities and if we have enough money, that choice widens further. 

Sadly, home education has suffered a bit of a bad reputation, and I’m inclined to blame a number of (being deliberately vague here..) political and religious parties for getting everyone to think that kids need to be herded into classrooms and made to follow a set of rules which may or may not work out for that child’s best interest intellectually. 

Ok, so everyone blasts on about socialising kids and that teachers are trained to teach and we should therefore let them take our little people and mould them into good citizens. Fine…if your kid fits the bell curve. Fine…if what they are learning from their peer group is to be kind, respectful, understanding and tolerant. Unfortunately, in my experience, there are too many schools and communities, where those are not the things the kids are learning. They aren’t being taught that stuff by either their peer group, or their teachers. 

Now, to cover my arse, I will specify that I’m talking about the schools I’ve either had personal experience with, or heard about from friends. There are bound to be many brilliant teachers, peer groups and school communities out there who are teaching the right things!

I guess what I am trying to say, is that schooling is a choice. The education that my son receives at home may well be better than the one he could receive at the local school, or at a $15,000 a year private school. While he’s small, I am getting to choose the people he hangs out with. I am careful to make sure he hangs out with different types of people from cultural backgrounds different to ours too. I am able to socialise him in appropriate ways, and teach him tolerance and how to deal with bad stuff in life in a constructive way.

There will be plenty of time for him to learn that kids can be mean. There will many opportunities for him to see hatred and racism, sexism and many other things in the world. Why would I want him to learn that stuff now? Why wouldn’t I want him to learn stuff the other way BEFORE some other group of seven year olds help him form other opinions on that stuff?

Just have a little think about what you really think about education. What do I REALLY think? 

I think that education in a free and democratic society should be about choice. Not just choice for the parents, but for the kids too. Whatever form of education works to teach your kids the right lessons about life, and also all the good knowledge and skills they need to learn about whatever they are interested in, then that is the type of education they should be getting. To be honest, it doesn’t really matter to me where that education happens, as long as we as parents are mindful of what is being learnt and that we see it as a positive experience that will help our kids grown in all possible ways. 

How to catch and not kill a not-so-mocking-bird

Well, we have reached new levels of ingenuity here. No, my seven year old son hasn’t started reading books on the reading list for year 9 students. Nor do I have anything much to say about that particular novel, despite my title. What has been going on here is somewhat more literal. 

As many of you know, we have chickens, and they have a cage (not that they spend much time in it and the door is never closed anyway!). The chicken food lives in the cage as one would expect, but we keep the door open so the chickens can come and go as they please. As it happens, so do many other birds from the local area.

Sadly, we don’t get any lovely birds like Rosellas or Wild Budgies. We get nasty flea ridden Indian Myna Birds. Here in Australia, we hate them. They pick on all the other birds and they are noisy and ugly to boot. 

My son decided he would really like to catch the birds that use our chicken house as a fast food fly through. I thought, OK, he’ll never be able to manage that, so I’ll humour him. First, he managed to sneak up on the slower kind of Dove that also frequents the cage. He trapped it in the cage then entered to catch it in his hands and bring it to show me! I was glad to see that he had no interest in harming the bird at all, he just wanted to catch it and hug it then let it go.

The Myna Birds are much faster than the Doves though. What to do?

Why rig up a rope from the door of the hen house down to the back door of course! That way, he can sit and wait in comfort from the verandah and wait until a bird enters the cage and then use the rope to close the door! The first day of the trap operation saw two birds caught! One Dove and one Myna Bird! Both birds where brought back to the house to show me, hugged and stroked then released to go about their business. 

Now of course, the nasty birds are starting to realise that something is not quite safe in that backyard with the ‘free’ food. They came in much smaller numbers today, much to my sons disappointment as he waited patiently between homeschooling lessons for a bird to enter his trap! 

Rather than discourage him, I decided to praise how gently he caught the birds in his hands, and how carefully he held them. I cringed when he kissed their heads, and made him wash his hands straight afterwards, but how could I tell him not to do it when he was so excited to… in his words…

“…hug a birdie!”

Interestingly, he’s also taken to getting the giant white puppy to sleep on his bed with him. I don’t know how he can stand it since the dog takes up more space on the double bed than he does! Oh well, when you love your animals, you love your animals!

My Singing Debut

Well, last night my singing group had its concert. It was so much fun! I was a little stressed for most of the week as my cold got worse,and my voice gradually started to fail. I managed to pump myself full of every vitamin on earth the last couple of days, and then yesterday I didn’t talk at all. I sucked on various different lozenges and sipped on honey and lemon hot water. By yesterday afternoon, I managed to get it back, but it was still pretty rough and husky. It also had a tendency to break at odd moments if I tried to be too loud.

My son and husband came along as my audience, and joined all the other family and friends to make up a very large and responsive crowd. Wine flowed, chips and sweets were consumed, and lots of fun was had by all. Although as a whole, our group didn’t sound perfect, I think we did a reasonable job. I was a little disappointed that I couldn’t hear myself at all on the video my husband took, but I guess that’s a result of me deliberately not singing close up to the microphone, for fear that my voice would break and fail. 

I was extremely proud of myself on another level though. Firstly, I wasn’t too nervous going up there. Secondly I was able to remain calm and lucid for many moments during all of our songs, allowing me to just get into the music and enjoy the ride! 

I’m looking forward to seeing what songs we are going to do next term, and I really hope that I have my voice at full health for that performance. 

I’ll also mention that my son was beautifully behaved for the entire show (which was quite long as there were actually three groups who sang 6-7 songs each). He watched, he listened, he danced, he sang along. He even told the little boy next to him, 

“Sit here and watch my mummy, she’s a really good singer!” awwwww

Did I rock?…..yeah… just a little bit…

We could only really get one good picture, and it was of our group when we sang with the boys group. I’m the one in the front row sitting down on the far left end. 

Death by…no coffee!!!!!

Last Friday, my lovely and much appreciated coffee machine died. It just stopped performing its duty with a sad whoosh. Naturally I have been quite concerned about this turn of events, particularly in light of the fact that homeschooling starts again tomorrow!

Now I only really have one cup of coffee each day so it’s not like I live for coffee. The problem is that my one cup of coffee is timed at such a point in the day that it holds all the comfort and enjoyment of a warm beverage, while also giving me a much needed break from my child and chores. The process of making the coffee with a real espresso machine and warming the milk is as much a part of the fun so don’t even dare to suggest that I just drink instant!

Naturally I bundled the beloved machine up carefully and took it to my nearest fix it place. They assured me that its not worth getting it repaired because of the cost involved compared to the quality of the machine. I was devastated. I could buy a new one the same, but I couldn’t help thinking that it would be good to get a bigger, more powerful one so that it doesn’t take hours to make coffee for my friends when they come over.

Newer, bigger ones cost way more than I can afford. I had resigned myself to a life without coffee, (and using a spatula to open my washing machine, which broke on the same day as the coffee machine, but I don’t care as much about that!), but set up pretend crying to my husband each time I looked at the empty space on the bench.

Cue fabulous husband…he quietly went and checked out eBay and found a very lovely, shiny machine with lots of power. The ones that when new, cost $850. Someone was getting rid of theirs only an hour drive from our house. They are selling it with ALL the accessories AND a really good grinder! So my darling man is sacrificing his Sunday to drive up the coast and pick up my ‘new’ coffee machine for less than the cost of the old one!! Wooo hoooo!

Now…drive faster honey….please

Gold Mining and Head Colds

Waking up this morning was like dragging my eyes open after someone had dropped a bag of plaster of paris over my head during the night and then unceremoniously hosed me down to set it! Yes, I woke up with a cold. Not one of those really bad ones, just one of those full head, sore throat kind of ones. Yukky. Fortunately for me, my husband made me a lovely warm bowl of porridge with honey and brought it to me in bed, then he set a steaming cup of honey and lemon drink next to my bedside and little plate containing a banana and a Tim Tam. He then organised both dog and child, and they left the house for two and a half hours on a bike riding, park visiting tour while I slept. I feel very loved.

What have we been doing this past week? Well, we decided to extend the school holidays by one week after OT camp week and have a little family getaway. We visited a place called Gold Rush Colony in Mogo NSW. Our son loves everything about gold mining…well everything except of course anything that requires him to stand and listen to a tour guide giving him information about the gold mining town or methods. Or for that matter the actual process of mining because it was a lot of panning with not so much success.

That being said, we had a lovely time. We stayed on site at Gold Rush Colony, which is set backing onto a lovely national forest. They do have a very informative and interesting set up and they allow pets to stay, which meant we could take the giant white not-so-much-a-puppy. We spent the first afternoon settling in and doing the tour. We then set straight to learning how to gold pan and we did find some real actual gold, albeit very tiny little flecks. There were geese and chickens, and kangaroos and all sorts of lovely birds. Our little cabin was clean and comfortable, and we did a LOT of walking. 

They had a little steam train and a track and our son spent countless happy hours chugging along the track pretending to be a train himself! On our last afternoon, we decided to take a long bush walk. It was just so lovely and peaceful, with only our own crunching steps and the birds to break the silence. Oh… and the incessant talking of our son of course.. but we are quite used to that by now! 

The boys had fun throwing rocks into a gorge and learning how to throw further and more accurately each time. The white puppy and myself had a lovely time looking at all the interesting flora and finding quartz rocks in interesting shapes. Daddy found a very nice stick and we returned to camp to sit on logs while Daddy smoothed the stick and the whittled the end so that it made a lovely ‘Harry Potter’ wand for our son. It was then that Daddy noticed a leech on a nearby log. He thought it would be prudent to lift his trouser leg and check himself for leeches. He had one sucking his blood just above his sock line. Naturally, the boy and I freaked out appropriately, but Daddy was calm and told us all about leeches and how it’s better to just let them fill up and fall off etc. We weren’t so sure, and wouldn’t let Daddy come near us with that on his leg, but we were happy to look at it and treat Daddy as a curiosity for a while… until…We went back into the cabin and sat down to wait for Daddy’s leech to disembark. Daddy pulled off the boy’s gumboots and there was a very full and very large leech just above his sock line! Well, naturally the whole experience was a lot less interesting when it was on his own leg!

I must say that he was actually very brave. He squealed and screeched “Get it off! Get it off!” then covered his eyes while Daddy got it off with the back of his pocket knife. I was naturally very supportive, and not so quietly glad of my very high gumboots and my tight leggings tucked securely into my socks deep down in my high gumboots! With everyone out of danger from blood loss, we got ready to go out for dinner. 

On the way home, we visited a cousin on their lovely block of land and finally got to see all the cool stuff they have done and are still doing to their house. It was so lovely to catch up with them and hear all their news and see the new lifestyle they’ve created on a gorgeous bush filled block of land.

We then stopped by and visited a school friend of mine that my husband and I lived with for a few years after school. It was great to see him again and have a good laugh over some of our happy times together. Interestingly, our son took to him immediately! This friend is over 6 feet tall and we call him ‘Bear’ so perhaps that has something to do with it, but our son was determined to hold his hand when we walked to a cafe for lunch, and then use him a climbing/cuddling frame later. It was actually quite lovely to see actually.

So with all that done, we have had a lovely little holiday, and now I have a cold… and some gold. Monday we start back at ‘school’ again and I haven’t sorted out the school room yet or written the new schedule, which is a bit annoying, but what can you do when you are sick?

Sadly, I can’t put any photos of our time away up because the footage went to another good cause that I can’t disclose at this time.

Post OT camp breakdown thus far…

While an exhausted little person watches some kind of crazy spin off thing from a popular children’s movie series involving some zoo animals who find themselves in various ‘wild’ adventures, I think it’s time I got around to giving those who are waiting for one, an update!

Yesterday’s OT camp was described by the therapist as “volatile”, but with some positives as well. The good thing is that they were actually prepared for that. They know him well and know the sorts of explosive reactions he has. It’s very stressful waiting at home and wondering whether he’s in trouble or trying to hurt anyone, but good to know that they are aware of his needs and pre-prepared for those sorts of things with him. Of course the great thing was that there were positive moments as well. 

When he got home, we asked him what he thought about it, what happened and whether he had met any nice new friends. He of course just wanted to tell us all the bad things that had happened. He focussed on the fact that no one was listening to him and even told me that one kid had tried to kill him! Naturally, no one tried to kill him, and people were trying to listen to him, but that’s the way he felt about it, which must have been hard for him I guess. 

The really great thing though was that he wanted to go back again today and he even said that he was hoping for a more positive day today. 

When I arrived to pick him up this afternoon, he was sitting on a two child swing seat with a little girl eating their afternoon snacks. Lovely. They had had a really tricky start to the day, but a LOT of fun was had and they all managed to get down to some really constructive and lovely playing. The therapist said that he had a lot of really great moments today, which I of course, loved to hear. I noticed that he had a small scratch near his eye and I asked him what happened. He told it like this…

“We were playing a game, pretending to be animals. There is a boy called Bob (for purposes of protecting the names of those involved!), he was a wild animal and I was a domesticated miniature poodle called FiFi (go figure… I have a weird kid, what can I say?!). He lashed out at me and caught my eye.” Now while we were talking, Bob had sidled up to hear the story. He piped up at this point to say that it was an accident, and although my son wasn’t ready to actually say those words out loud, it was clear that he wasn’t angry at Bob and had accepted that it had happened by accident in the middle of play. Whoo hooo!!! Imagine my joy at hearing that story?! And to see Bob completely unharmed in any way too. Whew!

I think this whole week is just going to exhaust him, but in a really good way. He’s already learning so much and getting in some great socialising practice, which is just so awesome!

If anything a bit more exciting happens during the week at OT camp, I’ll be sure to let you know, otherwise, that’s it for now!

OT Camp

OT Camp started today and I find myself sitting here wondering how he is going. What is OT camp? Occupational Therapy…every day… multiple kids.. for two hours each day. It’s pretty full on for kids with sensory sensitivities or social difficulties. This is our son’s first try at going to OT social camp. He was super excited about it, I just really hope that he has a good time because otherwise we’ll be dealing with a grumpy little man this afternoon! Two hours doesn’t sound like much to some people I’m sure, but when it usually takes you only 2-3 minutes of being around other kids before you piss someone off or hurt someone, two hours is a life time!

so, while I sit here worrying about him, join me in hoping he’s having an absolute ball of a time!

I’ll let you know how it all goes…