We went through a big change almost two years ago now, which I haven't really known how to talk about here. But I miss blogging, and the big change made me feel like I couldn't blog here. It was the elephant in the blog or in my mind.
The big change is that my kids are in public school. Eldest started going part-time in February 2015 and continues. I was just too overwhelmed and I wasn't being the kind of homeschooling parent I needed to be, and I thought that having him out of the house most days would help. I'm not sure it helped, but it hasn't hurt. Then we discovered an amazing kindergarten teacher at the school, with a Reggio-inspired approach, so we sent Youngest there full-time for JK and this year for SK. Eldest spends two days a week at the outdoor school and the rest at public school, now in grade 5. I struggle with the public system, as does he, but we are muddling through.
The next big change was a year later, last February. I realized we needed more money and the job I ended up finding was a full-time 12-month contract quite similar to my old job. I would definitely prefer part-time work but that is no easy thing to find. So just like that I'm leading a life I had kinda wanted to leave behind.
When my kids started back into the public system, I found myself with a bit of a social media dilemma. I had some time ago identified myself as an unschooling parent on most of my profiles because I thought it would help explain my perspective on a lot of the stuff I was sharing. But when my kids went into public school, I was no longer unschooling. But I was the same person with the same thoughts and perspective on school, it's just that I wasn't able to carry it out. At this point, I'm simply not able to live according to my values. So that sucks pretty big for an idealist like me.
I also had shingles in April 2015 and ever since then I've been struggling with fatigue and exhaustion. I'll go a couple of days feeling reasonably well and hopeful the difficulty is behind me, then I feel flu-ey and exhausted for a couple of days or weeks. Now that I'm working full-time, that means pretty much everything else has been squeezed out. I'm not sewing much, I'm not parenting as well as I'd like, although full-time work has allowed me to call on some wonderful professionals to help fill in some of the gaps (although sadly finding after-school childcare has been almost impossible so I'm having to juggle my hours a lot for that). And we are mostly eating really, really poorly. Luckily, just before I started working, my husband got a new job with less than half the previous commute so he's able to be home on time to do most of the cooking during the week, when he has the energy.
So that all means I haven't felt like I have a lot to offer this space, which was meant to be all about making stuff and growing stuff and cooking good food from scratch. But I am still the same critical thinker, and I still have stuff to write about, so I'm just going to start sharing that stuff here. Expect lots of feminism and some fat activism and perhaps some trauma-based stuff, because we've been dealing with that in our family.
