In 2000 we had the nursery set up ready for the arrival of our first child. We were going to have a strict routine and our new baby would sleep in her own bedroom from day one. Well, Imogen was born and she spent her first night at home sleeping on her Daddy’s chest in the cosy big bed. I was going to give breast feeding a good try, but wasn’t very optimistic and certainly didn’t expect that in the following eleven years I would have just six months off.
Along came Jemima at the end of 2001 and the bed sharing and breast feeding continued.
I first heard about home education from a very creative dance teacher, who taught toddler dance sessions. It crossed my mind that we could try it, but we didn’t yet have the confidence and conviction to branch away from the conventional path and so we sent the girls to school.
Over several years we found out more about the alternative, met home educators from the Sheffield area. There was no crisis about school itself but we were gradually won over to all the positive potential from cutting free from the system. And so after the birth of our third child, Reuben, in 2007, we took the plunge and deregistered.
Our family was completed with the birth of Rosanna in 2009 and the arrival of Lily and Rosa, our two guinea-pigs. Then in 2010 we moved to a house with a large garden. We started with 0.2 acres of overgrown wilderness. After much hard work (mostly by Geoff) we are now growing vegetables, fruit and keeping chickens.
