where am I going with this?

One of my biggest failings/ blessings, depending on the circumstance is my chronic inability to do much in the way of forward planning.

I try. I plan weekly for meals, I budget for days out, supplies and shoes but somehow, things never quite stay on track.

Life happens.

A child can have a welly tearing accident, and when you live in a place where no day is currently complete without a shower of rain, you need to buy the new wellies now. Not in the four weeks when you planned to.

A car can get stuck so that you miss the Friday market, which means you don't get your eggs, veg and meat for a week as you normally would, so you need to improvise.

I can mostly deal with these twists and turns as they happen, and I've got much better at letting go, not stressing that the universe has not seen fit to allow my plans to go ahead as I'd liked, and trusting that the changes were meant to be.

Home education though. Ah, there's the one I can't quite let go of.

I have no idea where this ride will end up taking us.

In one afternoon there were conversations about binary (thanks to OLM), imaginary numbers (again!) the importance of maths, how the central heating uses calculus to operate, whether we should build a rocket from the NASA site here, who is interested in looking at the British Antartic Survey here, what the temperature is in the centre of an iceberg, Richard III and his bad press from Shakespeare, more Shakespeare in the form of Henry V, whether you could put seals and penguins in the same zoo enclosure, TinTin questions, Roblox questions, pocket money negotiations, Christmas present requests in the form of hand written notes which required spelling questions.

Lots of talking. Lots of listening.

The making of soup, the discussion of nutrients, the making of shortbread, the discussion of sugar. Having recently read Bill Brysons new book At Home, I was able to talk about the history of sugar from a different perspective, which led to salt and pepper, which led to the slave trade, and a long pause to absorb some of the horror.

The decision that Science Log Books were needed for the series of experiments we are planning to do (a revival of Science Tuesday! But on Friday!)

The days are full.

They fly by so fast I can feel the wind whipping my eyes.

If they were in school, I expect they would fly by just as fast, and I would have the comfort of knowing there would be an outcome in the form of GCSE's and A Levels and maybe University.

As a home educator, there is no safety net. We are free falling our way through education and learning. It can happen in an instant, or over a year or even longer. I just don't know.

The end result still may end up with GCSE's and more. It may not.

I just don't know where we are going, and some times it's a thrill, and some times it is heart grippingly terrifying.

Deep breaths.