More exhaustion, and an update

Hello, we're back.

The reason we'd gone for a little while is because we were downright just bloody surviving, and didn't have the cognitive capacity to even think about writing anything down, let alone constructing something worth posting online.

Which is when it hit me - this is the mistake I've been making

I've been trying to create beautiful, complete, neatly-packaged posts for this blog, which I can't possibly hope to finish in the twenty minutes here and there that I actually have available to spend writing.

Those kinds of posts take far longer to put together, and as a result, I currently have sixty five draft posts - unfinalised brain-dumps of ideas and information that I'm yet to get round to finessing and posting.

Which is no help to anyone, and just causes me stress.

Furthermore, the clichéd "Ten ways to do ..." and "The five things you need to help your toddler achieve..." have been done to death on heaps of other homeschooling and educational sites that there's very little value in me trying to do the same.

It's also not very personal. And the point of this blog is to be a timeline of our adventures with bits of advice and knowledge that we've picked up along the way, intended as some form of 'letter to my former self'.

On a side note - the rise of AI such as ChatGPT means that anyone can type in "write me a blog post about homeschooling gifted children" and churn out a well written and informative article with little to no effort whatsoever.

So what's my point?

The point is this blog is entirely organic.

It's a raw, unfiltered, human account of what it's like to raise three gifted and incredibly demanding children.

We will never use AI or any computer programme to write content for our blog.

It's all us.

It's the very real story of our best attempts to try and provide them with the right balance of entertainment, exercise, sleep and stimulation that will give them the best start in life, without being overbearing or letting them down.

And so far it's proving rather tricky.

Marie hasn't had more than 2 hours sleep in one go since 2022, such is the nature of our children's sleep pattern, and I've just spent six months revising for one of the hardest postgraduate exams it's possible to sit in medicine, while also trying to build two online blogs-come-businesses to sustain us in the long run.

So you could say it's been rather busy.

But I'm determined to keep this going, because I know I'll enjoy reading it back in years to come, and hopefully someone will find it reassuring to know there's at least one other family fighting the same battles that they are.

So here goes.

Some status updates

• We're sticking with our plan to homeschool, and are super keen on the idea of worldschooling - travelling to various countries to learn about the world first hand - if we can afford it. But we're pragmatic, and it may well be that we totally change our mind in the future and decide conventional schooling is the way to go. It's unlikely but we're not stubbornly going to persist fighting it if we ultimately feel it's better for the kids
• To do this, we're going to try and get our house 'Air BnB'able' so that we can rent it out while we travel, to try and offset some of the cost of such a ridiculous lifestyle, and possibly even use it for 'home swapping' with other worldschooling families around the world - check out this facebook group if that sounds like your kind of jam
• Kid-progress wise we now have a 4 year old, a very-nearly-3 year old and a 10 month old. The four year old generally sleeps through the night now, the 3 year old is variable and can wake up between one and five times a night, and the 10 month old is a bloody nightmare, essentially breastfeeding the entire night and causing Marie no end of sleep-deprivation

It's a work in progress.

We're figuring out the dream life

We spend hours, Marie and I, in between screaming child wake ups and panicked revision sessions, discussing what the hell we're going to do with these three bonkers kids, our careers and the future as a whole.

Like ruminating giraffes we chew the same discussions over and over, batting back and forth different ideas and preposterous proposals, arguing for and against each of the possible suggestions we devise in our our deliriously overtired minds, trying to figure out what's affordable, what's feasible, and most importantly - what's the right thing for the young, expensive loud things we've allowed to live with us?

So far it looks something like this:

• Educate on the go - travelling, visiting places and generally seeing the world - worldschooling is a lovely term for it - anything but a conventional classroom.

There's nothing quite like learning physics in a canoe.

• Use our house as a base, but spend as little time as possible in it - ideally we'd be out and about exploring and discovering as much as possible as a family
• This may or may not involving renting or buying a motorhome, but again - to be decided
• Flexible work - If you know a doctor who works in the NHS you'll have no doubt heard how inflexible the rota systems are, and how little control you have over your time, especially as a trainee. The way to gain extra freedom is to step out of training altogether, and work as a locum (the medical equivalent of a supply teacher). This has the benefit of flexibility, and better per-hour pay, but the downside of insecurity, with no guarantee of a fixed income, and also not progressing towards becoming a consultant
• Earning online - This is a personal mission - it's entirely possible to earn a very decent living from a laptop, and this of course, can be done anywhere in the world. If I can get to the point where I'm earning enough to cover expenses through online writing and building teaching resources for other doctors and homeschooling families, then that would be a dream come true

So what are we doing now?

I finish my current training job in February 2024, after which I'm going to step down and take up a life of locuming, to add as much flexibility into our job as possible. To give you an idea of how ridiculously bad the pay is - I'm currently working 48 hours a week and earning less than if I did just six 12 hour shifts per month as a locum. Bonkers.

Marie is going to be taking a year out of training after she finishes her next block in August.

Then we're spending the next year trying to create a stable but flexible home-slash-world-eductating infrastructure upon which to build our dream family life.

And instead of trying to write beautiful crafted articles, I'm going to focus on raw, unfiltered updates to give you an idea of what it's really like homeschooling three gifted and very, very demanding children.

Please feel free to come along for the ride.