Meeting Up

At the risk of sounding like a broken record (or should that now refer to an mp3, or are they obsolete already?) I need to blog more. I have posts in my head, but they just don't make it onto the screen, and they should do, as I'm on the puter enough!

Anyway, we have been meeting up with other home educators! Yes, its true!

We had found a family that we originally met a couple of years ago when S gave up being an Usborne organiser and I bought her stock from her, but we didn't contact each other for a while. Since we met again earlier this year, we have seen each other roughly once every couple of weeks. It is great to have someone to chew the fat with, who 'gets' our HE choice. She has two sons, Thomas and Curly (not their real names, but I feel that I need to start using more than initials!). Thomas is 5, and Curly is 3.5. The three boys get on great together, and as Carrie (blog name for S!) and I can chat for England, its a great relationship.

Carrie organised a home ed get together at her house, which was extremely brave of her, particularly as Thomas is on the autistic spectrum and doesn't cope too well with lots of people. I can't recall how many came, but I just remember that the kids spent all their time outside and the mums (and one dad!) hogged the kitchen. It was great. I had met several families before at the Not Back to School Picnic last Sept, but met a couple of new faces too.
Conversation revolved quite a lot around the standard introductory questions: "why do you it?", "what regulations do you have to follow?", "do you have permission?" etc. Hopefully the more we meet up, the more we can move away from these and get into the nitty gritty of life!

Inspired by this, I organised a meetup down by the lake. I'm aware that Bildung zu Hause, the Swiss Homeschooling organisation is very Swiss German, so invited several French/Swiss Romande families that I had heard about.
We ended up being at least 9 families, 3 of whom were French speaking. We had to leave at 4.30pm to get the van ready for Chris Evans (my blog name for dh!) to take Dr John (used to be M!) away for the night and they were still going strong.

I feel positive. These people do exist, and they seem keen to get together on a regular basis. I had thrown out the idea of a coop, a bit like latinetc (see elsewhere on the blog ring) a few weeks ago and I had a couple of replies, but I think now that it may have been a bit early. I do tend to run away with myself a bit!