One of the things I’ve been working toward is leaving this sense of lack I seem to have. The clearing I’m doing in our home is a piece of that. There’s this odd sense of anxiety that was once very prominent in me, and slowly, with time, is becoming almost non-existent. The anxiety is completely lack related: we don’t have enough of this or nice enough of that. Our home isn’t fancy enough. Our clothes aren’t nice enough. Our car isn’t expensive enough. On and on the list once went. I have come to the place with many things of being good with what we have. No, we don’t have a new or big or fancy car. We have a little eleven year old honda civic, that is often dirty both inside and out. Our little car gets us from point A to point B. She’s a good car. She’s what our family needs. More importantly, she’s what our family WANTS. She fits us as we fit her. This is true of many of our things: they may not be the biggest/best/fanciest, but they fit us, as we fit them.

On the road to unschooling I’ve had my share of bumps. I recently started hyperventilating a bit because my daughter is turning five this spring. You know, kindergarten age. And I see friends, both near and far, struggle with figuring out all the schooling options out there for kindergarten. Because, as society tells us, if we don’t get our kids into the right kindergarten we are dooming them for a life of homelessness and or a career at McDonald’s. Hell, if we didn’t get them into the right preschool, that is what we have set them up for.

That’s the thing. Why, would a decision made when a child is FIVE YEARS OLD ruin opportunities for them more than a decade down the road? Opportunities, mind you, that we cannot even begin to fathom because of the rapid pace technology and science are moving at. [Read more…]