I’ve spent a lot of time outside today. We met friends at the forest and the mothers chatted while the Children played; making dens, playing house – mixed ages – older looking out for younger. The mothers calmly checked in if there were cries from the littles. The mothers got some much-needed adult time and the children got unstructured play, without adults hovering; they would come back to us for food or to show us things they’d found occasionally.

It was, in many ways, just as I imagined an unschooling home education would be. On the way there and on the way home conversations included opera, maths and definitions of words. Recognising that, although it had been a pleasant, relaxed sort of day, my introverted nature still needed some downtime so I left my daughter with my husband catching up with a friend overseas on Skype and promptly came away with my laptop to catch up on work and writing and to water my allotment from where I now write this post. It’s a recent thing being able to honour these needs in myself and I hope in modelling them, my daughter will honour her own needs too.