On this day nine years ago, I married a man who has become my best friend.
Brilliant, funny, kind, caring, creative, clever, gorgeous J, father of my two beautiful children.
Thank you for being my husband. I love you.
Nine Years
All posts by lucindaleo
Cricket & Consequences
It’s been a week of cricket! C started on Monday, looking very much the part in whites handed down (along with Trixie cat) by our friends who emigrated to Australia. Being on our own reminded J and I of our days before C left school. We played lots of games and looked forward to picking C up once we’d had enough of the peace!
After a day at our home-ed centre on Tuesday, J decided to join in the cricket on Wednesday and Thursday so I had two whole days to make a start on the decluttering I’d planned for next week while the children are at summer camp.
Plus lots of planning for the next school year which, inspired by all the wonderful homeschooling bloggers out there, is definitely my favourite pastime at the moment! I just need to work on that non-strong suit of mine – finishing, in this case ending up with something we can put into practice in our homeschool come September!
Opportunities To Feel Good
What a great weekend! I often hear Abraham saying (on workshop recordings) that we are here for the thrill of the ride, the joy of expansion, for identifying a desire and riding the wave of bliss as we allow it into our experience.
One of my long-standing desires has been to be able to be keep my good humour even when other people around me have lost theirs. It seems like I’ve had lots of opportunities to do that lately – and I say that without a trace of resentment, Pollyanna-ism or self-righteousness, I promise!
It is said that every question you bring to an Abraham-Hicks workshop is answered, whether or not you are called to “the hotseat” and have the opportunity to ask your question directly. This was exactly my experience last year at the Abraham Alaskan cruise workshops, when on the last day a man asked “how do you stay in the Vortex [of wellbeing] when your partner is outside of it?” I reflect on one part of the answer often: you never need worry about leaving the Vortex when you know how easy it is to get back in. Over the last few years since I first came across the Abraham work I’ve got better and better at finding my way back to wellbeing. It’s so true that it’s worth being out for the thrill of getting back in 🙂
Summer School
I had thought we’d carry on with our usual homeschooling routine (such as it is) over the summer, varying it only in that most of our group activities (drama, Beavers, home ed group etc) will stop for six weeks and C and J will be doing a couple of sports courses/summer-camps. Plus more long weekends and the odd week at the beach, of course. But now that old school-friends are on school holidays, it occurs to me that a change of pace will be good for all of us. Then when everyone else starts back at school in September we can take advantage of that back-to-school energy that will be everywhere around us to start afresh.
A few things I’m going to continue as normal: J has been really gaining momentum with his reading and handwriting so we’ll be carrying on with Handwriting Without Tears, Sound Phonics and reading from Reading Literature: First Reader, all of which take only a few minutes each day. We’ll put aside our Singapore Math textbooks but keep practising number facts with games and maybe read some Living Maths books together; we’ll save our new science curriculum, REAL Science: Life, Level 1, for September but have fun with The Ultimate Book Of Kid Concoctions. And of course we’ll continue to read aloud and listen to the wonderful living books none of us perceive as anything but pure enjoyment.
Meantime, the children are indulging in a Harry-Potter-fest! Having listened to The Prisoner Of Azkaban at the weekend, they went straight onto The Goblet Of Fire on Monday – all 17 CDs of it!! I seem to remember that the books get much darker as the series goes on, so I’ve suggested that the next one be read rather than listened to. Hopefully that will put a natural age restriction on the content!
Freedom By Workbox
I’ve been coming across the notion of workboxes on homeschooling blogs a fair bit lately. The idea is that you put each child’s work for the day in a dedicated box/crate/tray, so that everything’s there to efficiently work through during the day, variously with and without parental involvement. An optional extra seems to be little colour-coded laminated cards on treasury tags – I’m not totally sure where they fit in but it all seems to require a level of forward-planning and organisation I am neither capable of nor (fortunately) aspire to! Nothing against those for whom it is apparently a Godsend – I love the diversity among us weird and wonderful home-educating folk and I know from my therapist training that we all see and function in the world in different ways – but as I educate only two children in an eclectic Charlotte Mason style, we do many subjects altogether (the children working at their own levels when they do things like narration and creating notebook pages), so workboxes would probably take more time than they save.
However one nugget of gold from these workbox discussions has managed to work its way into my homeschooling routine. It sounds so blindingly obvious that I’m almost embarrassed to admit it … (drum roll please) … I now store all our current workbooks, manipulatives, living books etc in one box! One box I can bring over to the sofa in the evenings for the pleasant task of gathering resources and planning projects, one box I can pull up to the table after breakfast time – an easy aide-memoire and toolbox for fun days learning at home, and – best of all – one box I can pop in the back of the car when we leave for the coast, ready to be brought out on a Monday (or Tuesday, or Wednesday…) before, after (on?!) the beach. I love being a homeschooler! 🙂
In The Vortex At Legoland
Few things feel better than staying firmly connected to a sense of calm, happy wellbeing even in the face of other people’s grumpiness and circumstances that might, in less mellow moods, be stressful. That was me, today! And of course no one stayed grumpy around me for long. 🙂
We spent the day playing in the gorgeous sunshine at Legoland with my mum, sister and nephew S. It was FULL of people, the queues were HUGE, and C did NOT start out in a fun mood! But I somehow I felt great throughout it all, and of course the day got better and better.
We left Windsor at 5pm and drove to the coast through summer Friday rush-hour traffic, the journey an extra hour long thanks to vehicles exiting Goodwood’s Festival Of Speed (in my good humour I actually LAUGHED at the irony!) Inspired by our recent visit to see “We Will Rock You”, we listened to loud guitar rock the entire journey, and we laughed. And I basked. 🙂
Surfing Mondays
This time a year ago as we wistfully left the beach on a Sunday afternoon, the sun still high in the sky, I looked forward to the time when C would be home educated alongside her brother and we would be free to stay and enjoy the beach for as long as we wanted, free of cares about Monday morning school runs.
I love it when a desire comes to fruition! Yesterday we played with our friends in the sunshine all day, had a leisurely supper on the balcony, and today enjoyed another beautiful day, the beach all to ourselves 🙂
A Day In Spain
Today we went to Spain! Well, virtually 🙂 With the help of You Tube, we tapped our feet to flamenco guitar, danced to the Gypsy Kings, and watched in awe as robed, hooded figures carried the Virgin Mary up Granada’s winding, hilly streets during a silent midnight Semana Santa parade.
We admired Spain’s flag: C took pleasure in colouring its intricate coat of arms beautifully.
J was surprised to find chain mail on the flag. (We recently tried our strength lifting chain mail at a Medieval History Activity Day – we have new respect for medieval knights!)
We found Spain on our inflatable globe, coloured it on an outline map of Europe, and C and J noted with surprise the anomalous British rock, Gibraltar, off Spain’s southern-most coast (and enjoyed my stories of how I would treat myself to Heinz baked beans and Typhoo tea there when I lived in Spain!)
J and C learnt some essential Spanish phrases – hello, thank you, chocolate ice cream, etc. And best of all, we lunched on patatas bravas, chorizo and tortilla at our local tapas restaurant, which really made us feel like we were ‘”de vacacionnes en España” 🙂
Mondays Are The New Thursdays
A few months ago I wrote I love Thursdays! about a lovely day at home. Life has changed a lot since then (ever-expanding, in wonderful ways). We have a few extra regular activities – we’ve started going to a home ed centre (45 minutes drive away) one day a week, the kids have started French lessons on a Thursday morning, and we’re well into our summer habit of spending weekends at the coast All that travelling makes me sooo extra appreciative of our time at home!
Today has been a wonderful day that just worked. We did enough “educational” stuff to keep me happy – reading, handwriting, maths (not just one but two kinds! Singapore Maths, which we’re trying out as a core curriculum, plus Living Maths (we read How Did Numbers Begin and continued with The Great Number Rumble, and looked at some ancient number systems in Think Of A Number). 
But there was also plenty of time for everyone to relax and take time out doing their own thing.
We honed our writers’ observation skills using all our senses describing cups of hot chocolate topped with fluffy pink marshmallows (something out of The Writers’ Jungle I’d had in mind for weeks) – some of my favourite descriptions were C’s “It’s like foam on a beach, glistening pink in the sunset” and J’s “I like the way it jiggles”:-). (Thanks, Gaynor, for introducing me to Brave Writer!)
All that makes it sound like we had a busy Monday, but we really didn’t. There was a wonderfully relaxing quality to our day, with plenty of room for the kind of spontaneity that is my absolute favourite part of home educating. An example – I’d loosely planned a science experiment continuing our recent fun with water.
But when J noticed “Seed Babies” on my iPad and asked me to read it, we found ourselves on a very pleasant bunny path culminating in seeds “planted” in jars with varying degrees of light and water – documented in a very scientific manner using these great free notebook pages 🙂
It’s great to be a homeschooler 🙂
Blessings
1. New shoes. Sparkly! Shiny! Perfect for the wedding Big J and I are going to next week 🙂
2. My lovely friend of a year, A, the Universe’s perfect answer to my requests for a friend with a heart filled with love and light, who lives 5 minutes away, whom I can text when I buy shiny new shoes!
3. C playing guitar, a week after I gave up asking her to 🙂
(You can see why I drove to Wales for that lazy-boy sofa.)
4. Our tomboy C has been playing with her dolls! Not dressing them in pretty clothes, exactly (Grandma did that at the weekend), but she did colour one of the casts a nice shade of purple 😀
5. J has been listening to Sara Book 1: Sara Learns The Secret About The Law Of Attraction! C listened to all three Sara books two years ago when J was a bit young to follow (and of course too young to have forgotten all that stuff anyway ;-)). I read him a chapter last week, soon after that he rounded up the CDs from around the house – and now he’s hooked!
6. While he listened, J joyfully arranged his Yu-Gi-Oh cards into “attack-ical” order 😀
7. My new friend C. Oh my, the BLISS of sharing ABRAHAM! A fellow home-educating deliberate creator! I appreciate myself and C SO much for allowing law of attraction to bring us together!
