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All Posts By

Stuart Balkham

FamilyNew Year Letter

Christmas Letter 2023

Happy Christmas to all our friends and family, near and far. Wishing you peace and joy for the new year. A brief update of what we've all been up to over the last twelve months for those who know us and might be interested... The year started with a big…
13/12/2023
Home Ed

Home Ed 2.0

An update, for our own family history as much as anything. We are now entering home ed two point zero... A couple of weeks ago we deregistered Hatty from school and she officially began home educating alongside Wilf. In many ways this transition has been on the cards for some…
18/11/2023
Unschooling

Home Ed – One Month In

I wrote a post a couple of moths ago about our thoughts around school and home education. Reader, I'm happy to say that we did it. In December we requested that Wilf was taken off the school register and notified our local authority that from January we would be electively…
02/02/2023
New Year Letter

Christmas Letter 2022

To all our friends and family, wishing you a very merry Christmas and a happy new year 2023! A little update, which may be of interest to those who know us, recounting some of what we've been up to for the last twelve months and what's coming up in the…
14/12/2022
Unschooling

Thinking About School

I feel a slight left turn coming. Both on this blog and in our family life... The last two or three months, we've been increasingly interested in the idea of home educating our kids. And right now, we've pretty much decided that we're going to take Wilf out of school…
30/11/2022
Holidays

Wilderness Wood Tour

After our mini warm up cycle tour at Easter, this summer we gently pushed the kids a little more with a full week of cycling and camping. This time, we extended the excellent Cuckoo Trail and broke the whole trip up with a holiday within a holiday at Wilderness Wood,…
30/08/2022
Holidays

You’re In Charge, Warm Up Tour

During the easter holidays in 2022, we took the twins on their first loaded cycle tour. Here's what we did and what we learnt...We last took our kids on a cycling holiday in 2019, towing a Weehoo and a double bike trailer buggy just under 300km over nine days around…
28/06/2022
Carfree

I (sort of) Accidentally Sold our Car

At the end of January, based on not much, my partner and I started discussing the idea of going car free. We’ve got six year old twins, live in a small, hilly town, with rubbish walking and cycling infrastructure. We have elderly relatives which we can kind of only visit…
22/03/2022
CarfreePlanning

If Not a Car, Then What?

We have decided to go car free. We’re a family of four. Two adults, two 6 year old kids (twins). We’re doing this because we want to lessen our carbon impact on the world and also because cars kind of suck. We live in a small town in the UK…
28/01/2022
CarfreePlanning

Going Car Free as a Family

For many people, the pandemic has provided an unexpected opportunity to pause and reflect. For my family, that has meant taking time to assess what is important to us, and trying to work out how to align our lives more closely with those things. One thing we have decided to…
21/01/2022