With the last blogpost published more than a year ago I guess the time is right for an update. So here it is :)

Although I shamelessly stole the title of this post from a very nice book, it’s not about an extended family travel. I like how the meaning of ”sabbatical” is described in Wikipedia as “any extended absence in the career of an individual in order to achieve something”. Family sabbatical in my case is about an extended absence in the career and about a family.

And, to clarify the context a bit, I should add that my youngest daughter, Emily, was born half a year ago. I planned to blog about it, but lots of things happened then, so those of you who are not connected to me in person or on a Facebook had probably missed it. Well, it’s better late than never :)

I combined being a mother of a little kid with work long enough to find out that I didn’t enjoy the combination. I feel that’s I’ve got far enough professionally to take a break from it to focus on the other side of the equation – my family. I have no idea how long my “sabbatical” will be. I guess until I get a sense of mastery at the homefront, get bored with it or get a professional challenge hard to resist. So far it’s far from it – there is enough food for thought, challenges and learning.

I also feel that I’m about ready to get back to blogging as thinking in public, but I’m still trying to figure out the details. Given the legacy of this blog I’m not sure what would make more sense – remodeling it to fit my current interests and loosing focus (even more :) or just opening another blog and crossposting here on specific topics.

I go to Nancy’s blog to look for the Pear & Cranberry Chutney recipe to cook for tomorrow and then remember that I have a blog too and that it had been silent way too long. So here I am :)

The truth is that I feel a bit like a caterpilar in a cocoon – hiding from everyone and in a process of a transformation. I never thought that I would think of stopping blogging here – so much this blog was me. What I didn’t realise is that identities change or, to be more specific, some of those many identities in each of us take leading role for a while. Or, to be even more specific, I didn’t realise how much my professional identity was leading in my life. Untill I stopped working :)

Letting go professional identity gave time and space to all others that were also in me, hidden. It’s an interesting process to reflect on – letting go parts of your old life to give space for new things to emerge. And scary at times (enough not to write about it :)

As for the online writing – it feels funny to see how social media is getting picked up by lots of people I know and, at the same time, not to have much of the need to do it myself. I do write online – under a different nickname, mainly private and in Russian. Somehow that fits better what I need now (and helps building very different networks). Hopefully writing in Dutch will come as well (as I need it too), but I’m not there yet.

So, what I’m busy with now? All things “green” and local, sewing, house and kids, as well as alternative educational modes. There are a lot of things to write about there, although I’m not sure anymore that this blog is the right space for it (well, if you want to hear about my compost worms let me know :). The last topic would fit pretty well here, but at the moment writing about it feels a bit like writing about internal corporate issues while being employed there – it’s a thin line to navigate and I’m not there yet.

I do miss many of you with whom I connected via this space. Unfortunately letting go work also means that lots of shared activities and shared spaces where you connects with your network go to the background. So, I just send all of you my best wishes for the coming year – strength to go out of your comfort zone and time to enjoy life :)

It’s hard starting after a break – there are way too many stories to tell and way too many thoughts that came in between. So I start somewhere.

I had a burnout – going on and off after my PhD defense and not very obvious behind the usual “not feeling normal” during my pregnancy. But eventually it came to the surface and things are slowly getting better. Between other things that means less time online (and mainly lurking :) and much more time making things with my hands (rather then typing and talking :).

And, of course, we had Anna. With her all the background thinking and feeling about “work, us and our kids” surfaced again. Only this time I didn’t have an excuse of having a PhD to finish, so I had to deal with it, making choices that I had to make to stay true to myself (like extending my maternity leave to the maximum possible).

And, with Alexander approaching school age, it was also a time to rethink all thoughts I had about learning and education from a very personal perspective. It’s much easier to think and write about learning as what it could be or learning as “this is how I want to learn”, but practicing what you preach when it comes to your own kids is far more difficult. Especially since you easily bump into lots of real constraints of the society you belong to.

The process is still on the way, but a few things are clear so far:

- I’m leaving work. I’m pretty sure I want to be active professionally, but I have to figure out a different way to do it. (Some say that a burnout is a signal that something is out of balance pretty badly :)

- Time to reinvent life to fit our kids there. Not as inconvinience or as a a well-fenced part, but as an integral part of how things work. In a short term that means being a mother more than everything else and focusing on the local physical world more than paying attention to the global network.

- Unschooling as a shortcut name for educational trajectory we find important for our kids and figuring out what does it mean in practice. May be a bit cryptic right now, but there is lots in the pipeline and I just have to figure out how to put it into words. Funny to think that I started this blog from an “edublogging” angle, then moved to all other topics, but now it feels that I’ll be back where I started very soon.

Paper tea box that’ve been at Alexander’s play kitchen for ages went into recycling. A few days after he founds a lid of it and then realises that the box is not there anymore and can’t be brought back. The tears of loss come and then I embrace him in my arms to tell a story.

A story of a paper tea box that went into an exciting journey.

First to sit on a curb with other papers we put there. He knows – we do that every month.

Then to travel in a paper garbage machine, the one that Alexander finds so fascinating to look at, when it comes with blinking lights and a crew of guys who pick up piles and boxes from the curb and throw them inside the machine’s belly.

Then to a recycling factory – to soak in the water, to mix with pieces of other papers, to whirl, to be sifted, pressed and dried on a screen. He knows that too – we made paper together.

And then it became a box, like those that the postman brings, that hide new gadgets or books or “something for papa” that is actually a present not to be seen before the due date.

And then a tiny piece of the tea box that became part of the parcel that comes to our house smiles from recognising the place where it had a good time playing in the kitchen.

And then Alexander starts smiling and I know that the cycle is complete…

…there is a lot of turbulence underneath.

• I’m trying to figure out if I had a burnout (looks very much like it) and what is a way out.
• Still rethinking work-life balance. My professional values and parenting values align quite well, but the realities of putting them into practice do not mix well.
• Looking at the alternative forms of education. Mainly focusing on the Netherlands and primary education so far, but the interest goes much broader.
• Learning about all things green-local-environmentfriendly and figuring out how to adjust our lives accordingly.
• Inventing ways to get my Dutch further without much time or energy for formal language classes.

Unfortunately dealing with the first point means serious slowing down and trying not to be too ambitious about all other points. And hardly any time for writing since Anna doesn’t sleep much during the day and I usually fall asleep when the kids go to bed (may be I should drink more cappuccinos in the evening like today :)

They grow so fast.

Of course I knew it. But to know, theoretically, and to feel time slipping away from you are two different things.

The box with baby clothes, first sizes, just-in-case-there-will-be-one-more, is almost ready. And there is that first dress that doesn’t fit anymore. I just can’t put it in the box – not yet. May be it can linger in a drawer for a little bit longer, stretching the time that slips away so fast. May be…

Those who talk to me now know that the question of going back to work is around. With Alexander that was about this time when I started to work again. This time is different – I’m not ready yet. Work is tempting and taking longer time away from it is a bit scary, but when I look at the dress and things fall into their places.

…learning how to live life with two kids

…building forts

…washing diapers

…growing tomatoes and trying to eat berries from our garden before birds eat them

…observing practices of online parenting communities

…suffering from the hot weather (well, at least diapers dry fast :)

…enjoying summer evenings

…reviewing reports

…allowing email backlog to build up

…holding wiggling baby when making passport fotos

…cleaning sand from Alexander’s pockets

…learning the art of getting things done while staying close to the little girl (she sleeps on my chest as I’m typing this :)

…thinking again and again where my new work-life balance should be and not finding easy answers

Our Anna is here!

One more little hand to hold, one more little person to learn from, one more life full of discoveries… Tired, happy and loving every moment of it.

2 June 2010, 18:13

I’m on maternity leave, which this time happens to coincide with a strong need to sort out offline things (like accumulated mess in the house, nothing too scary :))), so I’m quiet pretty much everywhere online.

If I get to online backlogs I might post some work-related things here, but in the coming few months the chances are pretty low that I’ll engage in much of professional conversations (unless it’s about managing work-life balance with little kids around :)

I’ve been playing with this idea for a long time and it’s far from having any definite shape, but, as usual, writing about it should help. [This post is another round of thinking on What a coffee corner provides, how to call it and a research agenda and an attempt to integrate bits of thinking that I don't have a name for, but tagged PAT for a time being.]

The “problem” line:

• in many of the professional activities sharing physical space is an essential ingredient
• shared space provides opportunities for various types of interactions – goal-oriented ones, but also informal, unstructured and those that we probably wouldn’t even call interactions – like observing or overhearing others
  • non-goal-oriented interactions are essential for the things that create a foundation for working together (and goal-oriented interactions) – common ground – developing shared understanding and building relationships
• when work moves into a technology-mediated realm, things start to break
  • non-goal-oriented interactions tend to disappear
  • where existed, common ground shrinks; new teams get into problems of establishing it
  • goal-oriented interactions weaken

In this case we tend to think of f2f as a solution, but it’s very resource-intensive and is not always feasible. So, I’m looking at how the effects of “being there together” could be achieved in a technology-mediated way.

There seem to be several essential ingredients for it:

• a shared space that provides
• excuses to be there that are not necessarily involve working towards a shared goal or being intentionally social,
• opportunities to see what’s going on and to be seen in a non-intrusive way,
• easy switching between inward- and outward-oriented activities.

[This list is heavily based on the ideas about conditions for emergent social activities in urban public spaces from Life between buildings by Jan Gehl. I also used similar terms to explain how weblogs support relationship-building across boundaries, see Blog as an edge zone.]

Now to what I believe is at the core of it: tools to support sharing, observing and interacting around presence and activity traces. Think of instant messaging, (micro)blogging, social networks:

• while to various degrees those tools support communication, all of them make it acceptable or even essential to broadcast various statuses and update
• seeing those updates from others is often similar to observing them in a physical space (Lilia is here/awake/recovering from a flu/thinking about presence and activity traces), reinforcing the feeling of being connected and finding where ideas coming from different people overlap
• updates might trigger interactions, that take relationship building and developing shared understanding further

So, that would be an alternative/additional to f2f way of “being there together”. That’s said there is lots of unanswered questions around it. For example:

• The balance between manual and automatic updates. Manual updates take effort, but they are likely to be more relevant for others (partly because the effort that goes into it signifies the importance); not everyone wants to/has time to blog or twitter. Automatic updates are easy, but we can easily get overloaded with irrelevant stuff and they raise lots of privacy issues.
• Number of channels and critical mass of relevant others. There is way too many tools already that work around presence and activity traces, creating a whole “how do I manage my presence and activity in all those places” issue. At the same time, to use them as a reliable substitution of f2f encounters all the right people have to be there (ideally in the same channel), which hard to expect.
• F2f spaces are organised around specific contexts (meeting, shared office, coffee corner, home, sport club, etc.) and moving between those physically correspond to switching between various types of activities and people associated with those activities. This is possible in a technology-mediated way, but not easy and natural, since in the most cases it requires a range of strategies and additional activities to make that work (e.g. LinkedIn for work and Facebook for friends, switching Twitter client off when focusing on getting things done, etc.).

And now I’m off for dinner wondering how much all of this makes sense :)))