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.

• Baby-blogs: pregnancy, birth and all kinds of things about parenting
• Mama’s day, PhD work and being grounded
• Soul searching

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…

• KMSS03: What I have learnt by organising it
• A long due update
• First derivative, knowledge workers and PhD

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.

• Hard to believe
• Unwritten posts
• Parenting: traditional wisdom and modern life

…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

• Leadership is pretty much like respectful parenting
• The first dress
• Baby-blogs: pregnancy, birth and all kinds of things about parenting

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

• One month
• Soul searching
• Expecting: more kids and challenges

While cooking dinner I get stamping pads and make a couple of potato stamps for the little guy. He haven’t stamped before, at least not with me, so I show him how to do it and ask to stamp on the paper, not on the table.

In ten minutes he brings the stamps back to me and tells that he wants to stamp with his hands. I say, “no, you are not supposed to stamp with your hands”.

“Waarom niet?” he asks, with that sweet inquisitive voice that we’ve learnt to live with in the last couple of months.

And then it hits me: why not?

Because you are supposed to stamp with stamps, not with hands? Because there will be a lot of mess and I’m busy? Because I said so?

I tend to question things taken for granted and authority myself, but he takes it further, questioning things I wouldn’t think about and my authority. I want him to learn making his own choices, but I also want him to learn that there are rules in this world and there are others to consider. I don’t know if the stains that will come from his stamping pads are washable and I can only assume that it’s safe on his skin. And I have dinner to cook, so I can’t closely supervise him to make sure that everything around him wouldn’t get colored.

I think again – about the things I want him to learn the most. Not how to stamp “right”. Not that I’m the boss to be listened to. Not that the rules have to be followed even if they don’t make any sense. I want him to be creative, not being afraid to make his own choices, but also to consider the impact of his actions, to take care of others in the process and to take the responsibility for what comes out of it.

So I tell him it’s ok to stamp with his hands. I explain that in then there are higher chances of staining his clothes and the things around. I ask him to put a smock, to be careful and to tell me when he is done, so we can wash the hands immediately.

And he does.

Nothing scary happens, just a bit of color on the table – but this is something that happens every day. He comes to wash his hands and I share the worry that we wouldn’t be able to wash the color off. We start washing and then I share his delight when the color disappears. So little to pay for the fun of discovery…

I can only hope that he learns his lessons, but I know I can learn mine.

***

I leave stamping pads at his table. Next time he doesn’t ask, he doesn’t put a smock, but he comes to us trying not to touch anything with his blue hands when he is done. And he tells the story about his painting – big waves, sun and a bear on a boat.

• Mama’s day, PhD work and being grounded
• Officially I should be back to work
• Work, us and our kids: childcare at conferences

I never know when it’s time to tell personal news online and how far it actually makes sense to tell them explicitly instead of letting people to figure it out by themselves by picking up signals here and there… Anyway, in case you haven’t heard yet: another kid is on the way – I will be on maternity leave from the beginning of May.

The fun of anticipating and preparing for a new arrival comes together with challenges of figuring out how to combine it with my professional life, especially given that I just started figuring out what and how I actually want to do after my post-PhD dip.

And it’s more difficult when the first time – now I knowing what being a parent actually means, how much (or little ;) you can actually do work-wise when you free time is not as stretchable as it used to be, how precious is the time when they are so little and how fast it flies. I know that getting back to work after the usual three months is tough, especially now, when I don’t have the PhD finishing line in sight, that I’ll have a couple of seasons when going to a conference would be a big challenge, and don’t even get me started on the long-term issues of combining work and motherhood (we have an extremely inflexible Dutch school system on the horizon)…

Well, there are still three months to go and lots of fun things to do work-wise. I’ll eventually figure out how to make the equation work, but at the meantime would appreciate your thoughts and pointers to success stories (especially those about women who managed to have it all :)))

• Combining PhD writing and caring for a sick baby OR New take on flexible working hours
• Hiberinating
• Private, public and selective sharing

Was struck after a conversation about leadership by the parallels I see between it and parenting (or, at least, the parenting values we tend to choose as a family):

• creating conditions for others to grow without treating them as “small”
• legitimate peripheral participation: creating conditions for learning by observing and participating on one’s own terms in existing practices, rather than telling about how things should be
• seriously addressing nightmares as serious stuff even when you can’t imagine how someone could be afraid of that
• nurturing passions while taking care of safety
• thinking in terms of boundaries and attractors
• telling what is going to happen and discussing the options instead of pulling others along for a pre-arranged trip
• believing that loving care and on-going conversation can get you much further than punishments and rewards
• figuring out how to express love in another’s terms, not in your own

• Late at night
• Readings on under-management
• Giving permissions to myself (to blog on baby-things)

While going through the hard times of finishing my PhD dissertation I joked about the time after it, suggesting that I might go into the symptoms similar to the people who retire and don’t know what to do with their life then. Well, I should know better what to joke about :)

Now, waiting for the PhD committee to react on my work and preparing for the PhD defense I see shrunken horizons expand: once the PhD is in the past and I’m free to do whatever I want to do, what that would be?

There are multiple parts to it. The first one is about the place for work in my life. As I read The 4-Hour Workweek or The Family Sabbatical Handbook I keep wondering how to combine the work I want to do with all other things I want to do as well. And, following parenting parts of the blogoshpere brings enough examples of alternative work-life balance scenarios that are family-centred (e.g. the one of Angelina Hart that travels the world with her daughters and produces The Little Travellers DVDs).

The second part is about work. When I started the PhD I didn’t want to be a researcher, but wanted time and space for a research-based practice: being able to reflect, to explore conceptual world behind what happens day-to-day and then bring those insights back to work. What I didn’t realise that once you do a PhD you become a researcher :)

So now I’m torn between thinking of an academic career or of one of a practitioner. Of course it’s possible to live in both worlds at the same time, but as any other case of brokering it’s hard work (that comes with it’s own occupational hazards :)))

Finally, there are all those interesting topics to explore…

• Notes on my PhD methodology: weblog studies
• Tagging four things
• Knowledge work as discretionary behaviour

It’s dark and quiet – only clicking of the keyboard. My two favourite men are asleep and I’m typing. I can easily picture myself like that – in a few months – working on the finishing touches of my dissertation.

late at night, 3 July 2007

It took longer than I thought. But I’m there now, putting words together like threading beads into a necklace, typing when my favourite men are asleep, working on the finishing touches of my dissertation.

Hard to believe.

[I'd better go and work on it :)]

• Wedding invitations
• Once more on languages…
• Sweet home