A mile in my shoes…

My Mum rang last night and officially invited us over there for lunch so over there for lunch we went. Lunch was very nice (my Mum does put on a good spread ;)) and Ady and the children had a nice time mostly sitting in the lounge with Ady watching the football on their sky sports packaged HD big screen with the children playing with toys they keep over there while I had a very long and wearying conversation with my parents about our future plans. 🙁

I ended up in tears once and there was much raised voices, making points in a very Clear Manner before finally a truce and some joking and looking on the internet at small holdings. I think my parents firmly believe I am either a cuckoo (as in not actually their daughter) or simply cuckoo (as in mental!) but I seem to be deviating ever further away from their ideas about what grown ups are supposed to be like and what priorities one is supposed to have and how success is supposed to be measured. They (mostly) listened to my outlining of our plans before trying to totally rubbish them and list all the many pitfalls, which started to sound rather like a conversation a friend of mine told me about when she chose her profession only to have people list all the negatives of it, which to her all sounded like wonderful positives actually. 😆

Anyway we won’t dwell on that except to say that somehow the past two years of Home Ed, doing all the camps where we live communally, camp for weeks in tents during the summer, have been living on very meagre amounts of money, adopted the make-do and mend mantra, bought clothes etc from charity shops and ebay, made things like jam, baking, bags out of old pairs of jeans, raised chickens and killed and eaten them, regularly have food Ady has hunted and prepared for dinner and generally have stepped outside of mainstream living in all sorts of ways seems to have utterly passed them by. My Dad is still utterly hung up on our debts and ‘failure’ there and doesn’t seem able to grasp that this is planning on the realisation of a dream rather than a reaction to a mistake. It did inspire an interesting conversation about just what constitutes success though and whether happiness is the be all and end all (well duh! as far as I’m concerned!)…

We came home for dinner, more board games, DSing and I spent some time playing a word game that someone on earlyyears linked to which Davies came and watched over my shoulder reading the odd word here and there. Although I’d planned on an early night for them somehow they both ended up staying up late to watch The Twins Who Share A Body with us about cojoined twins which was just too engrossing to send them away from really. Scarlett has been speculating on who she would like to share a body with and apparently I’m her only choice as she’s discounted everyone else. While this is of course flattering and very sweet I’m not at all sure she’s thought this through and will be most concerned if she starts talking about plans to go into medicine and surgery any time soon :lol:. Davies didn’t say much and while children do tend to accept such ideas much easier than adults I’m sure we will have discussion on the matter at some point in the next couple of days.

Tomorrow we have our new local HE friends coming over to play which we’re all looking forward to and Ady is away for the night again at a press release in London.