A Stressful June: Moving On

June seems to have passed us by in a whirl of stress, between hectic work issues for me and Jon and friendship troubles for Emily.

Sadly, we've had to draw a line under our friendship with one family. Two sisters had spent months being mean, nasty and spiteful to Emily, sometimes in person and frequently online. We had enough and I attempted to intervene directly with the girls, which made things worse. Finally had *more* than enough and attempted to involve the mother. Her response, predictably, was an aggressive refusal to admit they'd done anything wrong and a ridiculous attempt to paint her (much older) daughters as the victims and my (painfully shy) daughter as the aggressor, despite month's worth of written evidence and adult witnesses at this end and not one shred of evidence to support her claims. To cut a long and sorry story short, we had to cut all ties with the family - a great shame as we had genuinely believed they were good friends for a number of years, but we were not prepared to tolerate that kind of nonsense. I wouldn't allow another adult to treat me that way so I don't see why we would allow other children (and adults) to treat Emily that way. There comes a point where "friendships" of that nature are just not worth bothering to save.

Much as it would be (very!) therapeutic to go into further details and talk about people behind their backs in the way I know for sure they will talk about us, I'll leave it there. It was very, very upsetting, extremely stressful for us and for Emily, but it's over now and we're moving on. Regrettably, it does leave Jon without a regular psychic circle to attend as the family concerned ran the one he was going to, but we're looking around for other options for him to continue with his mediumship development.

On a positive front, Emily has just started weekly horse-riding lessons and is absolutely smitten by it so far :-)) She has had to give up two weekly sporting activities for reasons given above, but something positive has come out of it as we can now afford the riding, lol!

Home ed is continuing apace, with lots of politics, economics and history being studied. Emily's doing well with the (free! yay!) MEP maths curriculum and is working her way through year 7 stuff there, so just a little bit ahead of where she "should" be. I'm still a little bit stuck on science; not quite sure what we're doing to do there. Still thinking about it. We gave up on the literature study as such because I just couldn't bear to hear moans and groans about reading a book....but Emily's back to reading voraciously with books of her choice.

With the hot weather recently there's been a *huge* amount of pool time :-)) and during June we've also celebrated Jon's birthday and Grandad's birthday and Emily's had a ball out with Jon at various car boots, markets and charity shops. We had an extremely expensive shopping trip into Lincoln at the beginning of June where we bought an outfit for me to wear to a friend's wedding as well as the most beautiful hat for Emily's wedding outfit. We also went to Hall Park Farm with Hazel, Romy and Tansy and have enjoyed our regular Wednesday afternoon psychology-library sessions with them too. Jon has been to the gym every week day for the last five weeks (!!!) and is leaving me well and truly behind in our fitness efforts!

This morning we went to the weekly home ed group meeting in Grimsby for the first time and met some lovely new people. Emily wasn't very relaxed and didn't fancy joining in the group activity, but we'll persevere with it for a while as there were some great adults and children there and I'm sure when she relaxes she'll enjoy it a little more.

I'm sure lots more went on since my last post, but it all got a bit lost among the negativity and the stress. I'm certainly not sad to have waved goodbye to June but I think we're breathing easier now and looking ahead to the rest of the year with something bordering on optimism :-)