It's been a busy few months in the Laricchia household! The kids have been busy immersing themselves in their interests and traveling to meet with friends, and I’ve been busy supporting them, along with lots of other interesting things.
I spoke at the We Shine conference in June, a terrific gathering of unschooling families. Then I dove into putting the finishing touches on my own conference which was held in September. The speakers were terrific, the venue was beautiful, and the atmosphere was so open and supportive! It was an all-around amazing weekend. And this week I updated the Toronto Unschooling Conference website with info for 2011.
The Free to Learn book is deep in the copyediting process and I'm *loving* working with Alex! What a joy to delve into the minutiae of grammar and sentence structure. Does that sound sincere? I hope so because it really is great fun to discuss it all with an eye to ensuring that the ideas that I'm trying to convey are coming across as clearly as I hope.
What else? Mikey was looking for a way to make some money, and as a family we were looking for ways to be less tied to hubby's 9-5 income, so this summer I began researching online businesses and have learned, and continue to learn, so much! We recently started a business, Celebrate With Crackers, and we all enjoyed putting together some really fun packages for Christmas. Joseph told me just the other day how much fun he had assembling the crackers and that he's looking forward to the next round. I've also listed them on Ebay and am having fun moving my focus from product sourcing to marketing.
The Unschooler's Emporium is really cool idea one family had for an online business. It's a one-stop shopping website for products by unschoolers, for unschoolers. They were TUC sponsors this year and I have added the TUC Talks for sale on their site. I also wrote three unschooling articles for them, one of which is now available on their website, "What? No Bedtimes?!" It's about one of the common misconceptions often encountered as people learn about unschooling.
I also recently co-authored an article with Dr. Carlo Ricci and Idzie Desmarais for Our Schools, Our Selves, a quarterly journal on education published by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. From our different perspectives as an alternative learning professor, an unschooling parent, and an unschooled young adult, we all answered the question: "What does unschooling mean to me?" The flow was so interesting to read as we brought our pieces together and I'm looking forward to seeing the article when it comes out.
But in amongst all this learning and fun and writing and editing I've been missing writing more blog-length things! So I'm back here to rectify that. And I'm thinking I will expand the scope of the blog a bit, writing about the conference and the online business as well as our unschooling lives.
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