Bullets for speed

The best way to catch up is in a bullet post.

Everything is going well and I'm really happy living back in our old hometown. I hope we won't have to move again for a long, looooong while. The kids are happy with their school and we get lots of exercise walking them to and from school, uphill all the way. I'm keeping fit!

I've been looking for work in Switzerland and I hope I can find a good placement by next year. My goal is to get my French citizenship approved by next September. It's almost impossible to get a job in Switzerland without being an EU member, at least in the Canton where I want to work--lots of hurdles to cross. Anyway I'm at the end of my carte sejour in June so I have to do it now. Before now I've just been really lazy about it getting my papers done but it's time!

Even though I swore I wouldn't do the sales I've bought about twenty things so far. Shopaholic? Maybe, but the French sales are tempting because everything gets marked down incredibly low. I'll share some pictures. I bought some fun stuff from the usual stores, ProMod, H&M, shoes from Bocage and few pieces of jewelry from the odd shop. I swear this is the only time of the year when I don't thrift my clothes. Normally I buy everything second hand because it's so much more fun.

Charlotte has the chicken pox. She seems to be one of those kids who gets everything. She turned four in November and seems to be calming down a lot. She's still full of energy and sass but in a more constructive way.

Little S is doing really well in school. He loves his teacher. She's really good with him. He can almost read now. He's got a few friends at school but no playmates yet which is tough.

I'm happy but we're all a bit lonely here. I unfortunatey had to leave all my friends I had in Paris when we moved. I had a nice circle of ladies and we were a fun group. I created the group in fact and now they've kept things going without me. We did ladies night once a month and changed whose house we'd hold it in. Our kids were all the same age and it made life easy when you were stuck because I had about six people I could call on for help. Our husbands were all friends too and we did lots of dinner parties. I have neighbors here but everyone is really distant. I invite them sometimes and then it just sort of fizzles. I seem to remember that from living here before. It was really hard to meet people and I was often lonely talking to the walls.

That's all I have for now. I'll add more bullets in another post when I get time.

Back to what we know

Life has certainly changed in the past six months. I'm not exactly where I imagined I'd be. I thought I'd be sipping Chinese tea in my modest 15th story apartment complex in Shanghai, taking art classes with expats, homeschooling my kids. Life though decided to have me rethink everything from top to bottom. I guess you could say that I am not even the same person I was six months ago (which in retrospect isn't necessarily a bad thing).

My biggest changes are in my professional life and in my diet. I work now which probably explains the lack of blog posts. I'm back in the working world and it feels good. And I have a new way of eating which just sort of evolved over the Spring and Summer. I'm gluten-free and dairy free and I'm eating about 75 percent raw. My diet is sort of my new hobby.

My kids are thriving in regular old public school and we live in France again. That's about it. I'll share some photos soon.

Well," said Pooh, "what I like best," and then he had to stop and think. Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn't know what it was called. ~A.A. Milne

I don't really know what to say here right now which is why I've been gone for a while, thinking. I am on a journey, a vision quest whatever you want to call it. I'm trying to balance a plate of dishes on the end of a stick, all the while spinning around myself. I know I'm being mysterious but there isn't much else to say. I'm still here but not there is all I wanted to say.

Yeah just give me a sec would you?

I came across this vacation picture of our cat from a year and a half ago and it made me smile.

School update

Well here comes my little break from the blog. Posting will be on the lite side as we delve into our new life over there. And just when I need to blog too--so much to share. Go figure.

Someone mentioned to me that I hadn't talked much about our homeschooling lately and this is true, probably because we haven't done much of anything different yet other than having the kids home. Right now we're unschooling and trying out little bits and pieces of Waldorf style homeschooling. We really do much of what we've always done,--story time, painting, nature walks and raiding the recycling bin armed with duct tape, glue and string. The only difference being that we do it pretty much full time now and whenever we want. It kind of makes me dread the scheduled version I've created for Fall of next year. I really think unschooling works and I trust it but I'm not alone to decide and I have to respect Seb's say in things. It's been hard enough trying to make him see the benefits of waiting for Fall for S to start reading again. Maybe over time he'll see. A few years back I thought the whole concept of unschooling was completely daft. I mean who lets their kids do NOTHING all day? Now of course I get how it works.

Actually we do a lot in a given day and we've learned lots of new things like mini bookmaking and S is really in to portrait sketches now--no idea why! He never drew people all through maternelle and up until last year. The psychologue who saw him each week at school thought this was a big sign of something wrong Now it seems he ONLY draws people. Of course he only draws people from the story of Narnia, these sort of medieval people with weapons, and then he tapes them all over the walls of our house.



One of the funnest things we've started doing is knitting. I've taught Little S finger knitting and even though it took a few weeks of trying and stopping and trying again he finally got it all on his own in one of those divine "spurt-leap" moments that John Holt talks about so often in his books. It was like suddenly it just clicked in a split second. I'm doing real knitting now which I learned by watching videos and I really enjoy it too. I hope to teach S next year and he's really eager to learn. He's very cute with his knitting and walks around with the yarn everywhere he goes. We try to do handcrafts in the afternoon a little each day to prepare for next year when we'll follow the Waldorf homeschool curriculum I've chosen. We also do a lot of wet on wet watercolor painting which is really relaxing. I have a hard time getting them to use one or two colors but they're learning. Color and paints have always been a staple in our house so it's almost impossible to backtrack and say "okay today it's just YELLOW" but we're getting there. We have a set story time after lunch where they sit around and I read to them from the internet (mainlesson.com is a great resource for this). I sometimes forget about it but they don't. They hound me chanting story time! story time! at exactly one-thirty. I'm surprised they like it so much. After story time we break out the block crayons and they get to draw their perception of the story. I push Little S to do MLB style drawings because I know this will help jumpstart him when we start lesson in the Fall. He does beautiful borders and he even reminded me that people in the moyen age did borders on their pages and books. If you know Little S he is completely obsessed with the moyen age so I'm not surprised he found a connection.



The rest of our afternoon is devoted to being outside, usually a good ninety minutes to two hours of playing, exploring and walking. We've invented some games that we regularly play and we bike a lot. It's a good rhythm.

In a few days we'll pack up the paints and supplies and haul them downstairs. I imagine we'll have to buy more supplies while we wait for our things to be shipped to China. See this is how I end up with so many art supplies--all the moves!