Has it really been more than a month since I last posted? I guess it has. This photo is more than a month old, too, but that bag of clothes that needs to be sent to the charity shop is still sitting there. The thing that no one tells you about slow living is that the time still goes by awfully quickly. There have been a lot of things that didn't get done within the time frame I thought they would, because living slow means we do things, well, slowly. And that has proved to be a good thing for us.
One thing that it took me far longer to do than I anticipated was to get both kids back into ballet classes. I originally intended to sign both girls up for ballet as soon as we were settled in after our move. But then the settling in process took longer than I thought, and then we were traveling, and then we found out about the performing arts academy that Z started attending in January 2015. The performing arts academy offers ballet as well, but we didn't want to sign up for everything all at once, as the standard singing/dancing/acting block of classes is three hours long. To add another 45 minutes to that on a Saturday morning seemed a bit much to adjust to all at once.
So we waited, and I enrolled E in a ballet class for older toddlers in the fall, just buying time until she turned four and could take a shorter version of the performing arts classes Z was taking. She was allowed to start in January, a bit before her fourth birthday, and then we took a term to adjust to both girls being in performing arts classes before adding ballet for both in April. Start to finish, our timeline for getting both girls into ballet classes was twenty months, also known as nearly two years. And it was worth the wait.
This way, we all felt ready for the way our Saturdays work. We were able to spend the time during the week getting our homeschooling routine into place and meeting other home educators that we could hang out with. There was no unnecessary pressure or stress. Sometimes our Saturday mornings can get a little rushed, but usually all goes smoothly. We were all ready.
In the past, I might have looked at the timeline of twenty months and felt that I was somehow a failure for not giving my children this opporunity for an activity that they clearly enjoy. In the present, I see how our slower life has given us all the gift of less stress and less pressure. There are other things the children would like to do, and I am working on them. Z wants to take guitar lessons. Both children need to learn to swim. I am still figuring out what activities E might like to be involved in beyond what we already do. But we have time to figure it out. Not having those things in place right now doesn't mean they won't be in place in the future. It just means that we are waiting for when the time is right.
❤️💐🌸
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