This Week the Kids Helped Me Start a Business

Our kitchen is so loud, this is where we all work, play, cook and do our thing. Over the last few days our kitchen has become our office, our kitchen table has been a humming heaving mess of computers, pens, papers, pencils and general stuff. Anthony and I have been working on a new project. In order to do it and to get it up, it has meant that we had to 100% concentrate on it to finish it off.

During all this I have had that nagging feeling of ‘oh what am I doing as a parent to help the kids around education…?’ it didn’t feel like much. Then I noticed them looking over my shoulder, they threw in ideas, they picked up pens and started drawing, they asked about how it all worked. The girls took over our We Draw Cats Pinterest account, they started filming our cats, to start a youtube channel. They grabbed the tablet and took our cats portraits, I told them to get the cats in the centre of the frame, as best as possible. They asked about Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Etsy, they marvelled at how Fine Art America can seamlessly turn my illustrations in to cushions, shower curtains and phone covers (I also marvelled too). They made me draw a cute fluffy kitten, honestly they made me do it! Then all went ‘Aaaaahhh!! Mum that is a seller.’ They asked questions about how it works, how this business works, Anthony and I answered as best we could.

Then I realised, this is it, this is learning.  I have had to give up a lot around what I think learning should look like and at those moments when the scripted part of me is saying, I am doing nothing to teach/help them, I realise this is it, they are learning loads. Learning how the internet works. Learning how to create their own businesses. Learning that sometimes you have to commit hours to something, learning that when you find yourself laughing and loving what you are doing you are probably on to a good thing. It is all learning and actually maybe it isn’t even learning it is just life, work, play, wafting through our kitchen and it is either going in or it isn’t but mostly I think it is going in.

It is nothing like how my education looked, within all this on days when we struggle as parents to find ourselves getting on top of the day they hear motivational youtube videos! It is all going in on different levels.

This is learning, this is unschooling, this is life…

And by the way the super illustration at the top of the page is done by our son, it is of a cat robot and a cat with a ball of string and here is the new business website we are proud to annouce www.wedrawcats.com