Our Days in the UK

That's me practicing my old rusty Latin...Anyone know what it means? We have a fairly child-led perspective of home education, and we generally encourage the kids to pursue their interests and try to facilitate that. We also like to avoid segregating learning from life, and instead hope our kids view learning as something that happens everyday, all the time, anywhere, rather than in a classroom (or in our case, at the kitchen table.) But part of letting our kids explore their own interests means exposing them to the great and beautiful things of the world so they know what is out there to be interested in :) I try to do this through the books we read, the places we go, and the ways we spend our time. And when I'm really on the ball (which is not usually) I try to overlap our reading with our exploring so the kids get exposed to a deeper slice of whatever it is I'm trying to expose them to. Recently, I've been ordering a bunch of books on Roman Britain from our libra

Well, hello! Sorry for the blog silence, but I've been studying for my drivers' test. "Wait," you ask. "Didn't you pass your drivers' test back when you were a teenager, like TWENTY plus years ago!?" Why, yes, yes I did. But as an American now living in the UK, I get to take it again. Despite the fact that I have been driving for over twenty years, with nary a speeding ticket, accident, or even a parking ticket to my name, I have to retake the written and practical tests to get a UK license. No, this does not have to do with safety. I can drive for a year on my US license, and American tourists come and go on the roads with no problem. But as soon as I have been living here for one year, even if I have had no road incidents, I have to revert to a learners' license, pass the test, or stop driving. If I came from Canada (or Zimbabwe, for the record) I could just exchange my license for a UK without the test. But we Americans have to take the tes

I hardly have any time to write, but this place in Wales was so pretty! It was a 13th century Cistercian abbey, parts of which were even older. Justin loved the sewer system that ran beneath the abbey. In the picture of Becca's boots, you can see the notches for the sluice gates that washed out the sewer and drains. Both kids liked the hole between the kitchen and dining hall where cooks would hand the food to the monks. I loved the flowers growing in the old stones and the little bits of nature taking over now that the humans have left (or at least come less frequently.) It was set in beautiful Welsh countryside. Right after this we went to the best castle yet. I'll post about that later. But right now, it's sunny here, and warm, too, and this is the second day since we've been here that this has happened, so I'm going outside!!

When we first arrived here in January, we quickly tired of hotel and restaurant food so we sought out a grocery store for some supplies. We pulled into the parking lot of this Tesco Metro in Cirencester, and Justin delighted in the sign that said to "Please take a trolley." As a lover of all things public transport, he prefers the term trolley to shopping cart now I think.  I didn't take a picture then, and the kids both thought we should go back so we could get a picture for a Wednesday Word. Yesterday we had a home ed pizza-making workshop right next door so we popped over for a picture. Also, it brought back a wave of memories from our living-in-hotels-and-house-hunting days...Made us all grateful for our little cottage. Rebecca and Justin also thought that the little "Trolley Park" was funny, too. It's right next to the car park, which we've by now gotten used to as well. Proper parks that the kids can play in are generally called pla

I know this is a topic you've all been waiting for with bated breath: dirty laundry!! When we moved here, our house had a washing machine but no dryer. This is very common for houses here--even in our very affluent village we frequently see wash hanging out to dry (and, to be fair, sometimes getting rained on.) I think moving here as a home-manager and mother has made me notice more the habits and norms. When we lived in Syria Eric and I didn't have kids and I didn't spend much time thinking about running our home (to be honest, mostly because we had cockroaches and there were worms in our shower--I just sort of survived our home that year....) Anyway, coming here as a homemaker has made me think about things like laundry. And that means you lucky readers get a whole post on it! Our washing machine that came with our cottage was on its last legs, and so we replaced it with a washer-dryer combination. But since we don't have a vent we had to get a condenser

One of my very favorite things about living in England is the old stuff. I liked that about New England when we moved there from California, too, because in comparison there are older and better preserved houses in New England (with the exception of some cool adobe ruins in a park I used to play in when I was growing up...) But England really beats both California and Massachusetts hands down in the cool-historical-places-and-buildings game!  Pretty much anywhere you drive, you see old things (and old people, too, come to think of it, but that's a post for a different day...) Our little village has lots of history, people having lived here in settlements for two thousand years. And since people have lived here for so long, there are layers of history almost everywhere. Rumor has it, for example, that somewhere around Naunton are the ruins of the last standing round house, that was modeled on the old tribal construction techniques that existed before th