It can be hard sometimes to empathise with a four and a five year old. It can be hard to slow life down to their pace and make the time to really listen. When bigger things get in the way, like having to get somewhere by a certain time, or the fact that it’s cold outside and a fairy dress just won’t cut it, it’s easy to snap and get cross and before you know it the tears are flowing.

It’s times like this that Atticus Finch comes to mind and I try to remember what it was like to be four or five and something was really important to me. I try to get inside my children’s skin.

“If you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you’ll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view, until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.” (Atticus Finch, To Kill a Mockingbird).

When I walk around in my children’s skin I can see how important it is that doggy is properly dressed before we go out, that today is actually a blue hat day and the label on those tights is really scratchy. I can see that the drawing just won’t be the same if it’s finished later, that the cracker needs a little bit of cheese and the message to daddy has to be sent now, not when we get there.

I give myself the luxury of time to finish stuff I think is important and I give myself the room to make my own choices and decisions. My children aren’t that different. They are just a bit smaller.

If you haven’t read To Kill a Mockingbird I would add it to your list. And let me know if any books have had this kind of impact on your life.

For months now there have been small projects which have been waiting for their moment. Things I’ve know need doing or sorting or finishing. My inability to get going with any of them I now realise was down to the stultifying effect of a major decision hanging over me. Last bits of stuff in our house to get rid of, rooms to paint, bits of DIY to finish, my own work to really settle down and make progress, decisions about where our lives are heading. The fog is finally clearing. I’ve started painting, sorted out the cluttered office, begun gathering the unwanted stuff to take to charity shops or sell. We’ve started talking about where we’re planning to go and when now we can finally think about traveling a bit and living somewhere different for a stretch. And my own work, for a long time lacking in direction, has just started taking shape.

Why is it so much easier now? Well that’s simple really, we have a purpose. We’ve taken a leap and started home educating and it’s liberated us in more ways than we imagined. Life is no longer restricted by school terms, life itself now seems to be a learning adventure and we’re gearing up to make it an exciting adventure. There’s a reason to sort the house out – we want life to be easy now we’re all here together most of the time, and we want it to be easy to leave when we’re away for several months at a time.

So if a big decision is holding you back, take the plunge and make it. One way or another it will free up your brain and let you focus on all the other things that are waiting in the wings for their moment.

By the way, if you’re interested in our education adventures, have a look at our new website.

I have recently returned from a weekend away with my oldest, closest friends. They are the ones I see less often than I’d like but when we meet it’s like yesterday. Of the 6 of us I am probably the most content and when I look at their lives it seems clear why that is. They all had difficult childhoods and less than rosy relationships with their parents. I am the only one whose parents didn’t separate or divorce. Whether it’s a fact of us all being daughters I don’t know, but they have all had particularly difficult relationships with their fathers. There seem to be so many lessons to learn from the way each of them has experienced life and in particular parenting.

The most obvious lesson is the career one. A parent working hard to earn money to make everyone happy. But as one of my friends herself explained, her family life was sacrificed for her father’s career. Sure he earned big bucks but at the expense of time with his wife and children. At the end of the day that is what they wanted and what ultimately might have kept them together. It’s a cliche, but happiness, he found, couldn’t be bought after all.

Another is where the parent/child relationship has been pretty much turned around. The parent is needy, selfish, demanding and self obsessed. The child is trying hard to please, be loved, fulfil expectations. Shouldn’t that be the other way around? What happens to “I just want you to be happy”? So often it seems to come with a dose of “as long as I approve” or “as long as it’s making me happy too”.

Many of my friends’ experiences of parenting are too personal to share but suffice to say the thing they all missed was time spent surrounded with happiness. Never mind the career, the money, the holidays, the buying stuff. What my friends needed as children were parents who were simply happy. If you are happy, chances are your kids will be too.

Before we had children we had never been stuck on how many we wanted. I grew up with a sister and thought having a sibling was important. Simon was an only child and agreed. I did have a thought that three might be nice but after our second we both knew our family was complete.

Our babies were not easy. They both had that mysterious, nobody quite knows what it is, general malaise they call colic. Or eldest screamed incessantly for three months. When I was pregnant with our second we both agreed this baby could never be as difficult but in fact she had even worse colic than her sister. For four months she yelled. Night and day. Her cry was incredibly loud for such a small person and people were often taken aback when she opened her lungs full throttle. By six months both girls were through the colic and life got easier.

Our babies, however difficult, were of course adored. It’s a stage in life we’ll always treasure. It’s just that we feel we’ve done that stage. All the baby stuff has gone. Our house is cot and changing-mat free. We’re looking forward to the next stage, the adventures, the conversations, the sharing. The next stage is mapped out a little. The path is right there in front of us.

Except for a few days it wasn’t. For a few days the path was more like a fork in the road. For a few days things had potentially changed forever. It sounds dramatic but it brought home the reality that you can make as many plans as you like but life just might have other ideas.

So what now? Well as it turned out it was a false alarm and life quickly screeched back to normal. But there, at the back of my mind, things were already whirring away. What if I had been pregnant? What would we have done? What if some other, unexpected event should come along and rock the boat? That momentary glimpse of another life filled me with ideas about other paths we could walk down. A bit of a quantum mechanics moment. Maybe the status quo sometimes needs a bit of a shakeup. Even a status quo that to many people might seem entirely un-status quo. Sometimes it’s good to remember that while life seems to simply slip along on an easy path, other paths might be worth exploring. Even for a day or two. Just to be sure.

It’s a small town. Maybe we’re outgrowing it. Or maybe we’re just getting lazy and need to start appreciating what it does have to offer. Simon’s passing comment in the park? We were having a picnic with our girls in our beautiful, Victorian, town park and he remarked that not many places have a park like ours. It’s true. It has a river running through it, huge trees, roses, ducks, an expanse of grass for lazing about or playing ball and a recently improved children’s adventure playground. I had forgotten how lovely it is.

The limited shops we have are enough for the everyday purchases we need to make and in fact the lack of shopping opportunities keeps overspending at bay. There are one or two very good places to eat and while we sometimes miss the variety of eateries London had to offer we now enjoy a home-cooked family dinner together almost every day. Compared to our last home, there is relatively little crime here and we feel safe, and confident that our children are safe.

Perhaps best of all on our doorstep we have some breathtaking countryside. Exmoor, the Quantocks, the Blackdown Hills. We can spend the day on the beach and be back in time for tea.

While we won’t live here forever, while we do we need to remember to make the most of the good things our home town has to offer. When the time comes to move on I want to look back and remember all the fun we had and not wonder why we missed so many opportunities. In London we did have access to culture, food, festivals, exhibitions and entertainment but there were plenty of reasons we left. Our new home can’t compare on so many levels, but it also gives us all the things we craved when we lived there. Maybe in our next home we will find a balance between these two, but for now we are going to simply enjoy where we are.

These people are not minimalists. Maybe you could call them accidental minimalists, but being minimal isn’t their intention. Instead they just actually don’t own much and keep the children’s stuff tidied away. They aren’t alone. Few of the houses we go to have evidence of the children who live there. A few artful photos maybe but no toys downstairs or artwork on display. A neighbour is nervous about having toddlers to play at her house in case they make a mess and I’m nervous when I take my children there. Her house is immaculate. Beautiful but impractical. She has a baby boy who is about to start crawling so her days as an accidental minimalist may be numbered.

Houses like this are ostensibly a more successful picture of living without stuff than ours. But they are also a bit cold. It’s my problem with super-minimalism. I like to be surrounded by my girls’ drawings. I want the garden to be a place they enjoy exploring. I don’t want to confine them to their room when they want to play.

Whilst we try not to have stuff we genuinely don’t need our house is a place to live life not a shrine to tidiness. Accidental minimalists may have something to teach us about unnecessary clutter but I would rather be surrounded by genuinely meaningful stuff any day.

Our (extended) family is on a fairly even keel. Even so, there have been divisions in the past. There are a few rumblings of a recent disagreement between two particular members still rolling around in the background. There are divorces and family break ups in the recent and not so recent history of some of their lives. There is instability. There has been jealousy. There has been death and the sudden and unexpected coming together that this brings. There are aspects too complicated to explain to my children until they are older but which we skirt around and change the subject to avoid. There’s also a lot of love and support and when I see the lives of some other families I realise how straightforward mine is by comparison.

Taken at face value, living simply can sometimes seem a little trivial. Clearing out your clutter, not buying too much stuff, doing more, having less. But in our eyes it’s much more than that. It’s about keeping a clear perspective of what’s important. It’s about prioritising. It’s about focusing on the important stuff, life experiences, fulfilling dreams, maximising potential, being brave about the choices we make. It’s a great way to live and one we strive for. But life is bigger and more complex, particularly when other people are involved.

I have written before about couples who make things more difficult for each other, rather than being the one, simple, supportive element in each other’s lives. I have written about the pros and cons of having family close or far away. But within our own walls, even our two girls bring their own chaos and complications. They ask questions we can’t answer and bring their own views of the world to the table. Their existence brings with it endless decisions about the minute details of their lives. There’s the beginnings of the political landscape that is childhood friendships. And boy is that complicated!

But much as we feel lucky when it’s just the four of us and we can do as we please and try to live the more is less life, if we lived in isolation we’d miss out on all those amazingly, wonderful complications. We hope that keeping our lives simple makes dealing with the complicated bits a little easier.

I arrived home empty-handed and sat down with my family. I told them that I’d had a revelation, that we should stop the madness and just not buy each other presents any more. That we should extend this to wider family members. My mother admitted that she and her brother had told each other to go out and spend some pre-arranged amount of money on each other and she was feeling badly that she hadn’t got around to deciding what to buy herself from him yet. She rang him immediately and told him of our plans and he wholeheartedly agreed. In fact, everyone did. There was a real sense of relief. Relief that we didn’t have to head back out into town for yet another Saturday and could instead focus our time more productively. Relief that we didn’t have to spend money for the sake of it. And relief that we wouldn’t be cluttering our lives up with yet more stuff we didn’t need.

Now many of my friends all tell me that Christmas gift giving is about the thought rather than the actual gift. That the person you are buying for will be glad you thought about them (and spent all your Saturdays leading up to the big day immersed in the horror that is the Christmas High Street). That we just didn’t put enough thought into what each other might like. As Christmas approaches though and they are all madly running around still shopping they each secretly admit that they too wish they could stop.

Of course this arrangement has been adapted somewhat since we’ve had children. I remember the excitement of presents when I was a child and wouldn’t dream of denying it to them. We adults still go without but they wake up on Christmas morning to a stocking and a (modest!) pile of presents under the tree. I guess that for children the experience of opening presents really means that the thought does count. For the grown-ups, or at least for us, the negative experience of all the mindless shopping outweighs the pleasure of the presents. Oh, and the other thing people think is that come the day we all sit around regretting our lack of presents. I promise, we don’t. And neither would you.

Making choices for your children is one of life’s toughest jobs. All you can do is what seems right and hope for the best. Choice is a fundamental part of life. The choices we make. How we make them. They shape everything we do and ultimately our experience of life. The are hugely personal things influenced by circumstances, opportunities, our outlook on life, personalities, preferences, ideals, values and so much more. At every turn we are presented with choices and the decisions we make take our lives down one path and away from another we may never know. Doing that for yourself is one thing, doing it for another person is just a little bit scary.

When term started all I could hear around me were people complaining about the end of the summer. They were having to go back to work. To work they didn’t enjoy. To a routine they had escaped for a little while. There was a sense that they weren’t in control of their lives, of the choices they had made. Whilst I understand that there are always limitations, and a big part of that is fear, surely we must at some point just accept that we are where we are because of ourselves and the choices we have made? If we want to change our situation we need to make some brave choices and face some of our fears. We need to stop feeling concerned about what other people will think about us, even what they will think if we fail because surely choosing to try something and failing is better than not trying at all.

While they are so young we are making choices for our children. We are making choices that we hope are right for them. We can consult them and engage them in the process but they are too young to fully grasp the consequences of the decisions being made. At some point though, they will start to make their own choices, and I wonder if that will be even more scary! I choose right now though to give them the autonomy to do just that though, to make their own choices. I want, more than anything else perhaps, for our children to grow up with an unquestionable sense that they are in control of their own destiny and, when the time comes, that they feel able to make brave choices about how they live.

There were also things I was apprehensive about. Would we be able to all do what we wanted to do? Would we tread on each others toes? My mum tends to need to know what we’re going to eat every day a week in advance whereas on holiday we like to be a bit more laid back. My dad is a little obsessive about the weather forecast. My sister’s kids annoy each other just by breathing, sometimes. I don’t want to give the impression we don’t get along because we do, but I wonder how people cope when their families live in the same town, street, house even? I know there is a lot we miss out on because we don’t but there are advantages too.

What makes life simpler? Living in close contact with your extended family or keeping a bit of distance between you? My best friend moved to the States about 15 years ago and has missed close contact with her family. She has two children who see their aunts, uncles, grandma, granddad, cousins maybe once a year and often less. When her first child was born, her mum flew over to be with her and help out, but a week later and she wasn’t just a phone call away, she was thousands of miles away.

At the other extreme, some families live in each other’s pockets. I have friends who wanted their mum to be with them when they gave birth (I’m close to my mum but there’s no way on earth I would want her there for that!). Two of my friends are sisters who live in nearby streets and see each other every day. Their children go to the same school. Other friends have their whole family living in town. Some couldn’t bear the thought of one of them moving away. Then again, one friend feels suffocated.

When I grew up I knew I would move away from the place I’d lived all my life. Many friends did the same but some stayed away and others returned. When we moved from London we chose somewhere not too far from family but far enough that visits had to be arranged. We’d never bump into them or have them call in unexpectedly. I love having my family to visit but I also love the independence we get from living with a little distance between us.

The holiday was a great success. We all got along, did what we wanted, enjoyed each other’s company. A week together was perfect. Any longer and things might have become complicated. My parents were tired out by the calls to play of two small girls. The teenagers started to need their space. Now we’re home again there’s just the four of us and life feels simple. Though needless to say we’re all really looking forward to our next get-together.