New beginnings, Old vans and a dog.

Hello all,

It has been a long time since i was last spotted in the blogosphere, all will become apparent later on in this very blog! However, the dust has settled for long enough for me to write this blog, so lets get started before the next stampede of change gets the dust flying again!!!

So, where to begin, so much has happened since we last spoke, lets start at the beginning: We are now home schooling our four lovely children. This is something that we have done before, when we went travelling (did i mention that we travelled europe in a rusty old van with 4 kids? no? another time.....), and we have always wanted to return to. 

Technically we don't call it home schooling, we call it un-schooling. This un-schooling approach has a very specific way of working, and we have taken the general idea of and tweaked and modified it to work for us. The basic premise or context for the whole approach is that there is no forced learning, learning happens as a by-product of living.

I know for lots of you this will raise many many questions, which i am more than happy to answer by email or other means of communication, in the meantime keep reading......

To understand this approach you must first understand that a for a child the world is a place of endless wonder, limitless possibility, magic and beauty. Once you see this, then it is much easier to believe that a child won't go through life without learning, because they have an insatiable appetite for making sense of the magic in this incredible, proposterous world that surrounds them.

Start them young

And if, when a spark of inspiration and curiosity is glimmering, you fuel it, the learning is inevitable, and the creations are amazing. If you can support a childs mind to unleash it's creativity in whichever direction it needs to go, rather than try and control and harness it's dreaming, then what surfaces are gems.

The overall goal for us in raising our children to adults, is to try and nurture and maintain all of the talents that they were born with, creativity, empathy, ingenuity, the ability dream, and add to them the skills to use these effectively. skills like commitment, following dreams, and leaving the world a better place because you were there. If this is what we see when our children enter the world as adults, then my job as a parent will have been a success. I couldn't care less that my children reach a certain age with qualifications or intellectual knowledge, you can always get an A-Level, you can never re-learn creativity if it has been suppressed and forgotten.

So, the second change in our lives involves a dog. In fact it involves a dog to the point where there is a puppy right now in its bed in our kitchen! The puppy's name is Dylis,and it was Karina's (my wife), birthday present in December. It's a cockerpoo (a blend of cocker spaniel and poodle). And while this may not be a particularly big thing for anyone else, it kind of is for me, as i'm not a dog person. I have managed to put off adding a dog to the family for a while, citing babies and children as my excuse, but i knew it was only a matter of time, so there it is, a dog.

And now on to the most exciting part, I have very recently purchased a new camper van!!!! It is a 1988 ex-ambulance (see photo), and it's a thing of beauty, well if you like small commercial vehicles from the 80's that have been converted to home modern hippies, then it'll be right up your street. It's very advanced, it comes with extras such as an automatic oil cleansing system (oil leak), air conditioning (drafty, bad fitting front doors) and you never have to worry about running out of power steering fluid, because, well, it doesn't have power steering, and parallel parking is intersting, imagine performing brain surgery with a shovel an you'll get some idea.  The front windows were designed to work on friction, however after 27 years of use, now when you release the catch they are way to tight for the first inch, then they promptly fall into the doors.

It's old, slow and rattly, it has everything we need to create wonderful memories, this van has no idea that it will be carrying a crazy family of 6 to the sun, sea, snow and back home. It's our little home from home, and there are many adventures in our future that this van will be taking us on.

See you soon

Oliver