Guess Who's Back?

If you mentally finished with "Back again. Shady's back. Tell a friend" then you're probably nearing your thirties, or already well into them. I find that my husband and I have a weird tendency to fall into quoting old Eminem songs inadvertently while having totally unrelated conversations. Anyway, rap music that's no longer socially relevant aside... It's been a hot minute since I came around the website, much less actually wrote a blog post. 

Long story short, life with an infant and a toddler is insane. I'm lucky enough to be able to stay home with my children, but all the glorious time to write that I assumed this venture would afford me was clearly some insane fantasy concocted by the midnight unicorns that prance around my sleep deprived brain pan. Apparently they were smart enough to hop on the ark when Noah was ready to set sail. (Bonus points to you if you can name the tune I'm referring to.)

Coffee-guzzling zombiedom of motherhood aside, I've been getting the urge to put pen back to paper, and let the incessant babblers in my head get their stories out of me so they'll shut the hell up. Silence is golden, unless you have a toddler. Then silence is horrifying and suspicious... 

For those of you just tuning in, meaning you've never read my work or are a recent follower, I'll give you a bit of an intro to me. My name is Randi, but my wordslinging moniker is R.A. I'm a lover of music, and you'll see it often as an element in my writing. I have a bad tendency to get 90 million ideas all at once, start them all, then get so bogged down that I leave them in limbo. I want to teach myself to write shorter fiction pieces, so I'm going to give some anthology submissions a shot. I want to write a full story in 10k words or less, not just send in the start of what will likely be another abandoned series rotting on the shelves of possibility, waiting for that fabled "someday" when my children will be old enough that I get two seconds to hammer out some words while they're awake.

My primary series is The Ragnarok Legacy, a paranormal saga that throws together werewolves, Norse mythology, the local music scene, vampires, magick, and an unfortunate girl caught up in all of it who has to make a tough decision.

But in my mental story bank, there's a series with a magically inept witch who runs a cupcake shop and accidentally summons a demon (Sisters Rasputin), another series starring a hunter of supernatural creatures who've overstepped their boundaries(Eater of Hearts), and a steampunk/sci-fi number starring a saloon girl trying to keep her family's ranch from going under (Clockwork Heart). We won't even get into the short story ideas milling around and slamming into each other like bumper cars...

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If any of that seems interesting to you, I hope you'll stick around and check back in frequently. I love conversing with any reader of my work, or fellow writers! If you're an avid reader and want to get insider info, read things before the general public, and have a chance to win swagalicious goodies (now gluten-free!), drop by my street team group on Facebook. The Darqling Brigade is in need of some new recruits.

Unschooling: why it's important to me

Some of you know already, but for anyone who doesn't, I'm a stay at home mom. I'm also an author, but the most important part of my life (and the most time consuming) is parenting. Being an only child who always had an abundance of what so many fondly refer to as "me time", becoming a mom has made me realize that the concept of time to myself is foreign and borderline unattainable with a toddler and baby number two to make his/her debut this November. Two kids under age two... Apparently I'm a crazy masochist.

Don't get me wrong. I love my son, and the bun in the oven that will soon make my belly move around like a sci-fi movie prop. But adjusting to the total lack of solo time has been rough for me. There are still days where it rankles. But then my toddler will bring me one of his many board books to read, he'll parrot the few words in them he can say, and help turn pages, and it makes me proud. Proud that he's a fast learner, that he loves books as much as his Mega Blocks. And proud that he's learning things that I taught him. Not some website, or app, or the TV. Me.

When I notice him taking an interest in something, I make a point of trying to incorporate more of that into our day. When he took my pen and scribbled on four pages of my planner, and was super pleased with himself, I got him some crayons and heavy paper to make his art with. I want him to love learning, to be able to nurture his passions, and for him to live a happy and fulfilled life.

The current standard of education will not be adequate for providing these important parts of life for him, maybe not for any of my children. I went through public school, but was given the bulk of my education at home. I still love learning new things and soak up knowledge like a sponge, and I'm fast approaching age thirty. Institutionalized learning was... well, just that. I remember taking Scan-tron tests in kindergarten. I thought nothing of it, but as I got older, I realized that we weren't being taught problem solving skills, or much of anything as far as core skills go. They were teaching us how to score well enough on the standardized tests for the school to obtain their rewards: grants and funding.

And now... don't even get me started on how they're removing literature, arts, and creativity from schools--even more so than before I graduated! Canceling a kindergarten's end of the year musical/play because they "need to focus on studying, for college placement and their future careers", or having them read Volkswagon tech manuals instead of literature so they'll "be prepared for working in a factory some day"... You can find links to those specific stories online, if you want to really get your blood pressure up.

I want to adequately prepare my children for life, not program them to be drones in some corporate machine. If they choose to become functional cogs in that same machine, of their own volition, that's a different matter entirely. That's their decision.

So, while this post is titled "Unschooling", I guess it's more about why I want to homeschool right out of the gate. I think unschooling happens when you have to deprogram your children and unteach them the boring, busywork filled ways they learned in a public/private school setting. I wish my parents had decided to homeschool me, so I wouldn't have gotten so bored and complacent with school work.

I'd love to find a good homeschool group or co-op, once my kids are old enough to start school, that is. However, my husband and I aren't religious, and from spending much time online hunting, finding a group that teaches the science we agree with (and not religious ideas that we don't agree with) seems difficult. But we still have a few years to work out details, so I'm not overly stressing it just yet.

Long story short, I want to encourage my children to immerse themselves in things they're interested in, not have their career and entire life path predetermined the second they walk through the door into their kindergarten class.