OK, it’s the first day of 2004, and I think we’ll try one more time with the blog. Beware, brain download following.
We’ve been doing a lot of talking about home edding and family life in general – we’ve had some tough times, behaviourally speaking with dd, who is 4 in a short while, and I’ve been very down as I chose redundancy, and then really wondered what I’d done. Today though, we’ve been out with all of my family, including two six year olds and another boy who is 4 tomorrow, and quite frankly, we don’t have anything to worry about with the behaviour. Dd can and does behave incredibly well most of the time, and, not wishing to offend anyone, we’re beginning to think that the end results of school type socialisation is something we desperately want to avoid.
Something that is intriguing me is religion, philosophy, morality – the big questions. How and when do you introduce those to your home edded children? Dd thinks that christmas is just about Santa bringing her presents, oh, and giving a few to other ppl, and there’s something to do with carols, mainly away in a manger with lor jesus and a cat called chloe. I was brought up C of E, but I no longer subscribe to that religious viewpoint – dp and I have had several difficult conversations in the last couple of weeks trying to thrash out what it is I do believe, and also trying to work out what approach to take with dd. I think that I’m closest to humanist, and was interested to discover that the quakers may be open to a humanist approach – I have been wondering if I am depriving dd by not being a part of a community for some kind of religious/ moral support – kind of the an atheist is a man with no invisible means of support route.
Another thing that I’ve been exploring is the continuum concept, which I find to be very interesting, but open to some odd interpretations. It does seem to me that children are not really meant to be raised in the very small family units that we live in, but I’m not up to moving to an intentional community or commune, so we’ll ge continuing in this vein for the time being.
And none of this is really making any sense, so I think I’ll give up now, and hope to be a little more coherent next time I call round.
Hope you all had a wonderful new year.
