They all bake bread!
Why do homeschoolers all seem to bake sourdough bread?
Has anyone else noticed this? The home education families that I follow on social media all seem to bake bread. Not just bread, but sourdough. They also seem to bake pies, and biscuits, crackers even. They make their own mayonnaise, pick their own garden salad, raise their own chickens and some even milk their own cows!
There’s no disparaging in my tone here – I don’t know how they do it all, and facilitate an education (I’m still catching up on mine!), they run the house and home, and work. I am in awe. But maybe they just don’t spend the same kind of time as I do, procrastinating.
Sourdough on a drip
But, I’m finally back in the habit. Gradually, I bake bread most days. It started with pancakes every week, just to keep my sourdough starter alive. I did this for nearly 2 years, as I used all my other time trying to settle into our new house, settle our kids into school (a very rocky ride), and ultimately commit to home education.
But turning over the discard every 7 – 10 days, just to make some cheesy crepes kept the embers going, and I’ve suddenly found my groove. Not just loaves of bread, but even brioche, poppy seed and experimenting with etching patterns with a lathe.
A long time ago..
In my 20s I used to bake bread – kneading it by hand, enjoying the process. Actually I used to bake all sorts of treats, just for the fun of concocting in the kitchen. Chocolate cookies, coffee cakes, haggis parcels with filo pastry, then I’d try anything in filo pastry. I learned how to make a fresh curry (my favourite!), roast a chicken, make fresh pizza and invite my parents over.
Last of the day, trying to skill up our children
It all gradually ground to a halt. Maybe it was an accumulation of more and more hours my children spent in state care, ironically, my time became less and less my own. My children would need smart uniforms for school, homework doing, play dates that I thought were imperative to their proper socialisation. Time in the home became less prevalent. And with it, time to bake bread.
Whatever was being taught in schools was not contributing to their innate exuberance nor honing their abilities. And it certainly wasn’t letting them burn off energy. They weren’t learning skills, learning to swim, or following any musical skill for longer than a 10 week block.
Extra curricular activities took any spare time available, so we could give our children the skills and experiences I believed they needed as young boys, within and without our pod style ‘family’ units.
https://thereisnoshouldbe.com/when-the-truth-comes-out/
The business of extra curricular
Swimming and scouts, youth groups and football. Trying to prepare my children for social norms, I believed many of these activities would support them to fit in, to survive the race.
Awkward
We’re really not a football family, but “all boys need some football in their repertoire”… “football is a universal language of boys” I hear my past self say.
If only I could put an arm around my younger self – there’s a lot I’d say. One of them being, “football is not the universal language of most of the friends your children will ever have”.
I think I was trying to spare them the exploits of school break and lunch, but either way, it didn’t work. Instead, on those Saturday mornings, and Wednesday evenings I could have invested in my children, and their true interests.
Instead I was validating the hierarchy of the playground, elevating the status of the ‘popular’ kids, when I could have been validating their own unique interests and talents.
The narrowing of mothers’ and children’s role and time in the system
It’s interesting that in “The RoutledgeFalmer History of Education”, the writer describes new pressures that mothers found themselves facing during the new movement of mass compulsory schooling. With children no longer contributing to family life for the first 15 years of their lives, mothers additionally had to provide packed lunches, clean and neat uniforms, and children’s completed homework on a daily basis.
It completely changed the role of mothers in the family, as well as children’s. The state’s distrust and intervention of the families raising their own children meant that mothers’ time became very diminished, and the use of her time, very narrow.
What changed
We’ve been committed to full time home education for a year now. You would think that with the added ‘burden’ I’d have even less time. In many ways, you’d be right. And yet somehow there is time to bake bread.
Gradually, as I consider priorities, curriculum, lifestyle, I find myself leaning in on time together at home. I try and facilitate down time for my children, fuelled with delicious food. I am drawn to more time together, with well fed children.
Pizzas from the supermarket are still very regular, and shamefully bags of salad make their way home, even with heads of lettuce in the garden. A lot is not homemade.
But less and less are lunches being thrown together to make time for the next achieving endeavour. Or at least, maybe still a little thrown together, now with some home baked bread here, or a smoothie there. Some brownie on the side.
Watch this space!
Hats off the the homesteading, home educators out there. Miles ahead with their steadfast dedication, and tireless skills. But I don’t really endeavour to be like them. It seems slightly unattainable, from my view point. But I can bake bread.
No I can’t make mayonnaise. But it’s imminent! Watch this space. It’s next on the list. And once I can, everyone will know – once I can, I make it over and over. I’m always a little straighter when I learn something, whether it’s mayonnaise, or Liszt’s Un Sospiro.