It’s here! We’re leaving Wonderland today (and probably tomorrow too, in reality). We’ll set up camp in the spare room at the outlaws place for the first week or so while we prepare the shed for moving. The plasterboard is all done now so it’s well on the way to being a home, not a shed anymore!

The sproggets and I are unwell today. We all have head colds. Nothing major, but we’re snotty (Babyman in particular appears to have a fairly constant supply of thick, green snot on his upper lip), we’re a bit grumpy & we’re tired after a restless night.  All in all, a good recipe for a home day.

When I was at school I craved home days. If I merely had a headcold I was dosed up on vitamin C and sent along to school with a hanky & a packet of butter menthol lozenges, just like my class mates. We couldn’t afford too many days off school, we might fall behind! The only way to get a home day was to vomit, then I’d have a special bed made for me on the couch where I’d lie watching videos & sipping lemonade through a straw.

My children aren’t of school age yet, but already I know they can afford to miss out on school. Not just on the days they’re unwell, they can miss out on school every day because they’re simply not going to fall behind.

Our sick day today has gone like this:

We’ve collected some firewood from around the property to light the fire. Even though it’s not a particularly cold day I’ve decided to light the fire because I subscribe to Rudolph Steiner’s theories about warmth. The energy my children don’t have to put into maintaining their core temperature is energy they’ll have to put into healing, growing, learning & just being. Today, because they’re unwell I thought it was even more important to take care of their warmth & light the fire to take the chill out of the air inside our home. Wonderland is a chilly house, often colder inside than it is outside. The sproggets spent some time lazily basking in the Winter sun on the deck while I folded washing. Once the washing was folded & put away the sproggets played in The Bubble’s toy/bedroom while I started making a chicken soup for our lunch. The sproggets have just finished their soup & are playing very quietly while I finish my food & type this blog post. In a moment we’ll wipe our noses yet again & hop in to the big bed for a snuggly afternoon sleep.

They’re not going to fall behind anyone or anything, they’ve been learning all along, just like we all do.

The big bed, all ready for us to snuggle & get well together...

Playing along with Owlet’s Unschool Monday.

We’re going to break the lease here at Wonderland.

It is a beautiful house, and it is a very impractical house.

The issue of safety is a huge one for us. We feel it’s just not safe enough for the sproggets here with the large, unfenced pond/lake so close to our doorstep. I’m having to be hyper aware of their every move in case they go outside without me noticing & it feels like I’m stifling them. The sproggets are frustrated by being trapped inside so much of the time & I feel frustrated with having become such a “No! Mumma”. I’m afraid to even use the toilet without inviting them in to be my audience in case they slake off again while I’m on the toilet. That’s how I know it takes Babyman just 30 seconds to get from our deck to the edge of the pond, it’s how long he was gone from my side while I used the toilet that day…

We’re also concerned for Dave’s safety, since he ate a rat bait at another house on this same property, a house he visits several times a day. He comes back from that house with various bits of compost & food scraps all the time & we’re concerned that if he eats another bait we may not realise it until serious damage has been done. There’s no fenced area we can keep him contained in, & it’s difficult not knowing where he is when he’s not in the area immediately surrounding our house. His training has slipped a bit since we’ve been here too, he’s forgotten that he’s not allowed inside because he’s being allowed into the other houses. He’s only 6 months old & consistency with training is crucial in this early stage particularly, since being here we’ve begun to lose status with him.

There are other things that make Wonderland unsuitable for our family at this time in our lives, which I’ll not go into now simply because that’d make this a lengthy & boring post, so I’ll just jump straight into explaining our (very) left field solution…

We’re going to move in to a shed.

Bean’s parents (the outlaws) have a reasonable sized shed at the top of their block, which will be easily insulated & gyprocked to convert it into a comfortable space to live. Their block is on a hill, & their backyard is in 3 levels.

At the very back there is a rear access gate, & space to park the kombis next to the shed. There is also a retired chook house which will take very little work to return to habitable condition for us to have some feathered friends again (BIG YAY!). Between the shed & the chook house are 6(?) empty garden beds just perfect to plant out with annual vegetables.

Stepping down from the top level takes you to a grassed area which is bordered with gardens. At one end of the grassed area is a mature Granny Smith apple tree & a mature pear tree.

Both of these garden areas will be easily fenced with inexpensive dog fencing, creating a secure yard for Dave & the sproggets. We can separate the top & second levels also, so Dave can be kept separate from the sproggets if I don’t want to directly supervise their play (I don’t leave the sproggets alone with dogs because I think they’re still too young for that).

The bottom level of the backyard is about 6ft below the second level, there is a large retaining wall between a courtyard & the second level which in effect separates the rear yard from the house.

We will have our fridge, pantry & gas camping stove in the shed plus the hooded BBQ outside meaning we can store & prepare food without using the kitchen in the outlaws’ house. When we are able to buy a new thermomix blade the thermomix will be back in action also & we’ll be even better equipped to prepare food in the shed. We’ll have water plumbed to the shed for handwashing & dishes, but we’ll have to use the bathroom in the main house for showers & baths. We’ll likely sort out some kind of composting toilet solution also, in time. Our washing machine only requires that cold water be plumbed to it so we’ll set up a smaller temporary garden shed to be our laundry. The water outlet can be directed to the base of the fruit trees & to the ornamental plants already in the gardens around the lawn using a grey water hose.

The shed is large enough to have a kitchen (there’s already internal walls separating a small room from the rest of the shed), our beds & a small lounge/dining area with our couch & coffee/dining table. We sit on cushions around a low table to eat dinner so that won’t change. It is a small space, but as long as it is a warm & dry space we will be fine living in it. With such a fantastic blank canvas for a productive garden I imagine we’ll be spending a lot of time in the garden anyway. We’re all happier out of doors.

The outlaws’ place is in town, easy walking distance to the beach & even easier walking distance to the town centre. It’s also a 5 minute walk to Bean’s workplace. We’ll be a lot less reliant on cars there, which is good from an environmenatl & an economical point of view. We’ll be more able to afford to drive across to Denmark (where we really want to be) once or twice a week also, since we won’t need to use our cars just to get in to Albany to go to the library, museum or shop.

The best part about it though is that we won’t be paying rent! If we are able to put the amount of rent we pay each week into our credit card & personal loan repayments we’ll be able to knock a huge chunk of debt off by the time Bean finishes his apprenticeship.

Finances have been worrying us a lot, so the motivation for our moving in to a shed is definitely financial.

It certainly won’t be perfect, there will likely be times I’ll resent it, but it is still a good solution to the problems we have with our current living & financial situation.

Besides, we’ve both lived for extended periods of time on forest blockade camps & I’ve also lived for months at a time in a kombi van so a shed with running water, insulation, electricity & even heating is luxury compared!

Following on from this post, here is a photo of the kitchen at Wonderland.

This relocation hasn’t panned out very well at all so far. We’ve had an absolute baptism of fire with financial woes, illness, car troubles, dog poisoning (he’s ok now, on the mend, he’ll be fine thankfully ), house incompatibility issues, interpersonal relationship issues between all of us… it goes on.

We’re seriously questioning, already(!), if this is the right place for us longterm. We’ve been actively searching for a homeschooling community & we’ve found one other unschooling family so far. They have been here for a lot longer than us & they haven’t found anyone else yet either, so we’re beginning to think there isn’t the community we thought there was/is down here… We’ve been here 6 weeks now & we’ve made no friends, we’ve been extremely isolated & the children are suffering for it.

The Bubble sobs inconsolably for 15-45 minutes at a time every single day & when asked what’s wrong her response is always,

“I just feel so sad.”

She sometimes elaborates with,

“I don’t have anyone to play with.”

Babyman is incredibly clingy & whingey, which is uncharacteristic of him.

I know 6 weeks isn’t long, but there are a lot of things pointing to this area not being suitable for our unschooling family. There’s very clearly not an unschooling group already running down here, or if there is one it’s an underground super spy style group because we can’t find it in spite of searching! The broader homeschooling group is nigh on impossible to infiltrate – we’ve been trying to contact the co-ordinator regularly since before we moved & we’ve had no joy yet.

It’s very beautiful here & the geography of the place does speak to my heart, but my children’s despair speaks to my  heart even more clearly, & it’s heartbreaking. If we had moved to an area where there are already unschoolers who meet regularly The Bubble would have made friends within 6 weeks. She was well & truly into the swing of the group in Perth 6 weeks into it. We all were. Meeting with people twice a week will do that…

Our only regular social interaction here is with the outlaws & with each other. It’s just not healthy to be so isolated. Bean & I have been discussing it this evening & we’ve come up with a plan (subject to change, of course).

We’ll stick it out here & keep trying to find people to socialise with, probably try to find ourselves a different rental because Wonderland is not very safe or practical for very young children (HUGE pond 100m from our house, hidden from view of our house, which we discovered AFTER we’d signed the lease & moved in… grrr), when Bean has finished his apprenticeship he’ll do a couple of stints of high paying FIFO work to get rid of our debt & then we’re off traveling in search of the perfect community for us.

Melbourne then Tassie will be our first stops because we’re looking at both of those places with rose-coloured glasses(!), after that, who knows…

We’ll decide closer to departure time whether we’ll fly & hire a car, or whether we’ll road trip it in one of the kombis (probably Van Halen, if we get him decked out with a camper interior in time).

We’re aware FIFO is damaging to families, my sister’s husband works FIFO & the negatibe impact on their family unit is clear, which is why we’ve set ourselves the absolute limit of 3 swings away, or of a short term mine-shutdown contract, whatever is available & only enough to clear our debt (which should be do-able in just 2 swings).

So that’s our 6 week update. Unfortunately I was hoping to be able to update with how amazing the natural learning community is here, how smoothly we’ve transitioned to this new place, how fantastically Wonderland is working for us etc. and it just hasn’t worked out that way (yet?!)!

Finally…

Our loft bedroom, "The Cubby House"

The Bubble's bed in The Cubby House

The view from The Cubby House

More views...

Pretty views, pretty stained glass & HUGE-bubble bubble wrap

Stained glass at the top of the stairs

More stained glass down the stairs

Stained glass & a view to the deck at the front of the bedroom building (now a glorified shed)

The Bubble's other bed in her bed/play room - yes she has a quilt cover that matches ours

Loungeroom, right side

Loungeroom, left side

There are no pictures of the kitchen, because Bean forgot to take any. He was too busy making these…

Cane sugar free spiced biscuits

That’s the beautiful island bench they’re sitting on, I’ll get on his case about taking photos of the whole kitchen this weekend. Until then, enjoy the pic-heavy post after many wordy posts.

Update 23/5/2011: A picture of the kitchen can be found here.

After years of dreaming about it, I now have a sewing room! Not a space in a junk room for my sewing machine & table. No! I now have a real sewing room. I don’t share it with the redundant pedestal fan over Winter or a heater over Summer, I don’t share it with photograhy gear, I don’t share it with a herbal dispensary… It’s just a room to sew!

With each day I live at Wonderland, I fall a little more in love with it. After radically rearranging the furniture we’re finally making this gorgeous, but somewhat impractical, house a good home for us. Now, finally feeling good about the more important rooms in the house – the kitchen (with new cupboard/drawer locks), our bedrooms & our main living area – I felt able to set up my sewing room Saturday morning.

The room is a small office just off the main living area, behind the stairs to the loft. It has a large glass panel in the roof, so the natural light is amazing. It’s a nice size with room to store fabrics, room to cut, room to move & room to sew.

This door leads to outside...

Sitting in my newly set up creative space Saturday night I felt inspired to get more work done on my reverse applique sampler which has sat untouched for a few months. I’m at the point of hand sewing and my right hand is quite stiff due to a couple of bone surgeries 7 and 12 years ago so hand sewing is slow going for me but even so, I’m loving reverse applique, it’s a simple technique & I think it looks fantastic. I love traditional applique, & learning reverse applique has opened up a whole new world of textile art for me.

Last night we bought cupboard locks for the kitchen because I’m sick of saying “no” to my children & I’ve had enough of being hyper-vigilant in case they open the cupboards & play with the (breakable) crockery or the rubbish & (breakable) recycling.

As Bean was fitting them I felt a sense of calm & relief come over me, followed by a sense of uncertainty. Feeling calm & relieved about placing restrictions on my children’s freedom isn’t very “unschooling” of me. Shouldn’t I just be more calm about it & let them explore their environment with complete freedom so they can get it out of their systems & move on?!

This weekend we’re planning to erect a makeshift fence of chicken wire to enclose the large deck & a section of yard around the deck so the children can freely go outside & come back inside without me and so I don’t have to supervise their outdoor play.

There are 3 dogs, including our own, at the property Wonderland is a part of, there is a very large pond (verging on “small dam”!)  at the house closest to us & the 2 other houses may also have hazards unkown to us in their immediate vicinity so I feel reluctant to give the sproggets complete freedom to roam free range on the property. As vigilant as we are with Dave’s training, and as calm as the other dogs appear to be, dogs are still wild animals & either sprogget could easily do something that triggers a prey drive or a frightened or aggressive response in a dog so I like to supervise their play with the dogs. The pond is a big concern for me, I didn’t realise before we moved here that there was a path leading directly from our back deck to such a large, unfenced body of water. Babyman has already made his way to the pond of his own accord, and luckily he was followed by The Bubble who alerted the caretaker (whose house it is) to their presence. I was in the toilet at the time, it took Babyman less than 30 seconds to get there!  Hazards aside, I don’t want the sproggets at the other houses if the people who live in them haven’t explicitly invited them.

Thinking about this, these things we’re doing to make my life easier, I feel reassured that in restricting their freedom I’m able to give the sproggets more freedom, ironically. Making the areas of the kitchen that are dangerous, or even inconvenient, for them to access mean I can relax when they are in the kitchen area (which is right between their playroom & the loungeroom) instead of hovering over them being the oppressive “no” woman. Making an enclosed yard will give them the freedom to choose when they play outside & when they play inside. I can stay inside & do my thing while they play outside, knowing they’re not rolling about on a dog or putting their arms in his mouth to see if he’ll bite, knowing they’re not headed for the pond, knowing they’re in a safe area that still has plenty of interesting nooks for them to explore. As an added bonus, enclosing the yard will also give the guinea pigs a bit of relief from the salivating dogs who sit next to the cage watching them intently, trying to work out how to get in the cage & enjoy a guinea pig feast!

At first I thought unschooling was about total freedom which I feel uncomfortable giving to such young children, but on further thought, I see unschooling as freedom in widening circles. As I learn to trust our environment, & the children’s ability to be safe in that environment, I am able to let go of a little bit of control & they are able to gain a little bit more freedom – their circle widens. The sproggets are both still so young, and so their circle of freedom is currently quite small. I don’t believe it’s oppressively small though, in fact since moving to Wonderland where all of a sudden there is a lot more space available to the sproggets, I feel I’ve had to be more oppressive than I’d like to be in order to keep them safe. Their circle of freedom got too wide, too quickly & it’s been a bit of a shock to us all. In fencing the yard & securing the kitchen cupboards, we’re able to reign in the “too big” circle of freedom & get back into a “just right” circle of freedom.

Unschooling is unfolding in our home all the time. Slowly, as the sproggets get older, as Bean & I learn to trust. As we learn to trust them, learn to trust ourselves & learn to trust the journey.

In spite of how beautiful Wonderland is, I have been finding the practicalities of living between 2 buildings quite difficult.

The bedroom building has no wood fire or gas bayonet, so contrary to our sustainable ideals we end up using electricity to heat it. I know wood fires (& gas heaters too for that matter) aren’t very sustainable, a fire box would not necessarily be my heating method of choice in a home I owned, but an electric heater is even less sustainable!

We light a fire in the main house (kitchen, lounge, loft, office & one bedroom) which we benefit from for a short time of an evening, and then once the children are in bed Bean &/or I usually go to the lounge in the bedroom building so we can be close to our sleeping children. There are 2 doors & a deck between us if we stay in the main house while the children are in the bedroom building, which is just too far away for my comfort (or theirs).

Today I decided that in order to make Wonderland work for us I had to do some pretty radical furniture rearranging! I moved The Bubble’s bedroom/playroom into the large bedroom in the main house. That room has a nicer outlook & more natural light than her old room anyway so it will be more suitable for day time play. It also has tiles, rather than carpet so will be easier to clean & has the added bonus of not smelling like carpet cleaning chemicals like the bedroom building rooms do. I was able to move The Bubble’s bed on my own, but I had to wait for Bean to get home to move our bed…

We moved our bed up into the loft. That was very, very hard work! We also have a spare single bed in the loft in case The Bubble decides she wants to sleep with the rest of us. Even though moving out into her own bed in her own room was her choice, one she was happy with for a long time, she has recently felt a need to return to sleeping with, or near, us. I’m actually glad of this, I’ve missed having her near. She’s convinced she’s so big, but she’s really still small. She’s three, that is small. Three is small, challenging & beautiful.

The loft is very warm because it’s right above the fire place. One wall of the loft is windows looking out at the treetops, it’s pretty amazing. There is also a window in the ceiling of the loft, which means we can see the stars at night. They are so clear & bright out here where there is no light pollution.

The office will become my sewing room. It also has a window in the ceiling & the natural light is fantastic. It’s currently got a whole bunch of “sheddy” stuff & my bottles of herbal tinctures in it. We had originally planned for one of the rooms in the bedroom building to be my sewing room, so I could work close to where the sproggets sleep & play. The darker, cooler room we’d originally planned for my sewing room will be a much better herbal dispensary room, and the shed stuff will be much easier to arrange neatly in one of the other rooms in the bedroom building.

I found some mould on the wall in the built-in-robe in The Bubble’s new room. The wall is adjacent to the shower so obviously there is a leak. Our wonderful property manager (she really is wonderful) got onto the owner straight away. He’s actually coming to stay at the property (in another of the houses) for a few days from tomorrow afternoon, so it’s pretty good timing to have found a maintenance issue! He’ll have a look and decide what he wants to do from there. I’m sure it will be resolved quickly.

We’re finding money very tight, on an apprentice’s wage, so we’re considering finding someone to sublet a room in the bedroom building now that we’re not going to be living in it. We will use one or two rooms as storage, which will leave at least one bedroom & the lounge/foyer empty. Wonderland is an ideal space to share because the bathroom, toilet & laundry are separate to the main house & the bedroom building. Whoever is in the bedroom building would have space away from the chaos of family, until they want to use the kitchen. We’ll discuss it some more then perhaps put our feelers out…

I’ve just finished tidying The Bubble’s room & the lounge/playroom in the bedroom building (remember that Wonderland is 2 buildings joined by a deck). Normally The Bubble & Babyman (to some extent) help me put the toys away in the baskets & on the shelves at the end of the day. I was going to let it slide tonight, I’m feeling lazy after a long day (The Sproggets woke early & only Babyman is asleep so far at 9.30pm!) but The Bubble was feeling uneasy about the toys on the floor, so asked me to pack them away for her.

I’ve noticed the toys get played with more readily when they’ve been packed away the night before. When all the trainset parts are in the trainset basket, the farm animals are in the farm animal basket, the blocks in the block basket, the playcloths in the playcloth basket etc. they’re ready to be pulled out one by one & be played with. When we wake to the mess from the day before, it seems to put us on the back foot. Mess is not the same as an unfinished project. There have been times when The Bubble has requested that we not pack up a particular game until tomorrow, because she’s not finished with it yet. Mess is the finished game that we walk away from before packing it away because something more exciting came up. Mess becomes more of a chore, the longer we leave it. When I leave mess, I feel a bit more hostile to it every time I walk past it, until I feel so hostile to it I start to wonder why it hasn’t just picked itself up so I don’t have to. I begrudge it for still being there. If I don’t tidy before I go to bed, I don’t sleep well. If I know I’m waking up to a sink full of dishes in the morning I’ll have a restless night, no matter how tired I am*. For this reason I’ve become one of those neat-freaks who puts things away as soon as I’m finished with them. I wasn’t always like this. My room was always untidy when I was a child. I was never very bothered about mess before having children myself actually. It’s almost as if the nesting instinct so many women experience during pregnancy just came one day and decided never to leave. It didn’t disappear once the first baby was born, and if anything it’s become even more settled within me since the second one.

I find that when my environment is disordered & untidy, I have trouble staying focussed & I often feel stressed or muddle-brained. I also observe the opposite of this, that when I’m feeling particularly depressed & in a slump, I don’t care for tidying up. My brain is feeling muddled, & so I make my otherwise ordered environment muddled also, so it matches how I’m feeling inside. I’m noticing similar in The Bubble. Babyman may be the same, but he’s still too young to really care much for his environment, he’s still quite focussed on what is right in front of him. He’s very good at living in the moment! Perhaps it’s just me? Perhaps The Bubble picks up on my inner chaos & makes it her own? I do think though, that she feels more centred when her home environment is ordered. She says she’s happy when her room is tidy & she takes pleasure in helping to pack things away into the right baskets. When she is having a rough day she will deliberately up-end toy baskets, not to play with the contents, just to make mess to walk away from.

Tonight, The Bubble now feels ready for sleep, assured that her tidy room awaits untidying tomorrow…

*Thankfully, dishes is really Bean’s domain & it’s rare for him to have to leave a sink full of dirty dishes for not having had time of a morning to do them before leaving for work.