a hippie with a minivan

ughh….

I am sick…

Last week Colin and Khéna were sick and Khéna is still coughing in a way that makes him throw up a few times a day, especially when he lays down. I felt bad on Sunday and then felt better on Monday… enough to go out on Monday to a friends house with the boys…

Then, right on the way back home…. it hit me…

I feel miserable. My throat feels like it is going to swell shut and it is so painful to swallow that I flinch each time. It is Wednesday morning and I have felt like this since Monday night…
It is SO hard to be a mom when you are sick… I can’t really relax and take care of myself and the more that I try the more the boys need my attention.

Of course, being sick can’t be enough…

Now the dryer broke… We are biting the bullet and buying a new one… it should be here on Friday but until then we can’t do much laundry and I am at the end of the cloth diapers…

It has been raining for two days so line drying hasn’t been an option… (I think that we are going to get a sunny break today though)

Homemade Sushi…

I make this about once a week…

I am addicted…

food colouring…

It has been almost a year since we decided to stop eating foods that have colouring. Our original reason was upon knowing that food colourings can affect behaviour in a negative way, the other reason was that Colin seemed to have a physical reaction to food colouring.

It has been hard to cut everything out but we are getting there and still discovering foods that surprise us… the boys are also getting used to it and know that it is not good for them. The battles are getting easier and are almost non-existent now. When Xavier shops with me he points out the foods that have colouring and asks me to check if others do.

Though it was a goal before it has forced me to go toward that whole food, non processed diet that I have been wanting and though there are still some things to work on I am feeling happier about our eating habits. There are however, still a few things that enter the house for us adults and yesterday one of those things confirmed one of the reasons that we avoid colouring…

Yesterday I made Sushi and while I was making it Colin was picking pieces of Tempura out of the bowl. I had finished making his so I had added some crumbled some honey snacks in the tempura (the sushi shop near me has sushi with it in and it is so good) and well, they have colouring….

Well, Colin must have gotten a little piece because he got hives all around his mouth and started coughing after…

There was nothing else that could have done it, and about an hour later the hives had gone… but now I am 100% sure that he has a real allergy to food colouring… and though we are really careful, we have to be even more… what he could have gotten was such a tiny piece… I don’t want to know what more could do…

Support…part 2…

Well, as I said in my last post… we are starting a homeschooling support group in our area. We are at the moment 5 families that homeschool…

However, I am the only unschooler.

The first meeting was last week… we went to the house of the seasoned homeschooler so that the “newbies” could ask questions and see her material. She is not only a homeschooler, but she loves collecting homeschool curriculum, books etc and is even starting a library in which people will be able to borrow material from her to compare different curriculums before buying. So, in her house downstairs she has a classroom set up (a large table for her kids surrounded by bookcases, posters a teachers desk etc…) and she has so much stuff… too much…

The other mom’s were loving looking at everything, asking questions, comparing stuff…. though my friend Isabelle was a bit overwhelmed by it all…

As for me… I was dissapointed by the meeting. I don’t want to talk about curriculum and what kids “need” to know by what age… I don’t want to talk about the logistics of how to school at home. Half the time I was there I could not relate at all to what the concerns were… the rest of the time the colourful workbooks had me wishing that Xavier was interested in that stuff…

I am going to tough it out a bit but I am a bit worried that it will not only be what I don’t want in a support group, but that it will make me doubt my choices and beliefs.

new found support…

ok… a few things I forgot to blog about…

A few weeks ago I went to my first homeschooling support group meeting and it was pretty nice.. the problem though is that it is a bit far (about 45min/1 hour away)… At the moment that doesn’t matter for me though.

The group seems to be a eclectic bunch… a few the lean towards unschooling or unschool, a few that are a bit more school-at-home… It will be nice to have some planned activities, To get out with other homeschoolers and meet up with other parents that homeschool. I think that the kids will like that also, especially seeing that other kids don’t go to school and it is not only him…

I told my friend Isabelle on that Thursday about the group and how I enjoyed it and how we had planned activities for the upcoming year and how there are a few moms near here that are now HSing and how we are thinking about starting a group…

Anyway…. Her dd had told her that she didn’t want to go back to school… (she went to K last year and was due to start G1 on the following Tuesday) and when I talked to about that she again told me how much she wanted to homeschool and then asked me tons of questions and then I said that I would share some links…

Well, on the Sunday night I got an e-mail from her saying that she is taking the leap and is going to start HSing…

She was the first real friend I made when I got here, we have very similar parenting values and I find it so exciting that we will be able to support each other…