I have found the solution..

To that endlessly troubling HE quandry of feeling conventional in some circles and a total hippy weirdo in others 🙂 Make friends with other likeminded HE folk who share your ideas and just mix with them instead!

Okay so finding them might prove a bit trickier, but I actually now have at least 4 local ish friends who HE and whilst not having the exact same approach to it as me are certainly more likely to ‘get’ what I am on about and understand it. Kids all seem to get on too which is a result 🙂 Davies is already starting to feel that chasm between him and schooled friends of the same age so it’s nice for his mix of ‘friends’ to be largely biased towards other HE kids – serves to make him feel more ‘normal’ which is probably nice for a child!

So today we met up with Lisa – a fellow MPer living in Eastbourne and her two lovely daughters – K & D. We went to their house and thanks to lovely weather were able to spend most of the time in their garden. K is 6.5 and D is all but 3, so both older than my two. To begin with K played inside while Davies, Scarlett and D played together, then Scarlett wandered about for a bit on her own while Davies and D bonded (both of whom seemed oblivious to their age or gender difference but obviously having older and younger siblings the same way made them able to relate to each other just fine), then K came back outside and her and Davies totally bonded over an ‘Art Attack’ of the Pirate Ship from Peter Pan. They worked really nicely together as a team, made something really quite creatively good and then called us all outside to view it and explained what all the various bits were – it had a plank, rigging, a sail, a dungeon for baddies, swords, cannon balls and more 🙂 In the meantime D and Scarlett had bonded inside over colouring and playdough 🙂 Lisa and I tentatively shared views on various topics from HE to parenting to careers and found ourselves with huge amounts in common. All round a really lovely day with everyone really enjoying it – hurrah!

They are coming over to us in a couple of weeks time so already looking forward to that 🙂 We mused on how lovely it was for the kids to totally make friends without any assistance, and also how if the older two were at school their social conditioning would have totally prevented them from playing together – a boy of 4.5 and a girl of 6.5 would have largely ignored each other, let alone sorted out some common ground and really enjoyed each others company. Lovely to see one of what I consider to be the real positives of HE in action 🙂

We left fairly early as I was convinced Scarlett would sleep on the way home and I wanted to limit damage from that as much as possible. In the event due to some toe tickling, a box of tic-tacs and some loud singalongs to the Monster Inc soundtrack we managed her drowsy but not actually asleep and then they had a lovely hour in the garden playing with the inflatable ELC water thing (as pictured) and the sand while I sat in the shade with my laptop and the phone trying to do a bit of work and sort out our new WAG venue for this week.

Booted them back indoors after a swift hosedown, tea and now I am being hassled for ‘jamas and milk now Mummy’ so I’ll be off.