Welcome to Tutus and Mud. I’m Hayley and we are the Higgins’s; a home educating, military family of six currently based in Hertfordshire England.
My husband Will is a serving officer in the British Army and until September 2020 we lived what is described as married unaccompanied. That basically means that I stayed in one place (St Albans Hertfordshire) from Monday-Friday with our children, and Will would live on what ever base he happened to be posted at at the time coming home to us at the weekends. Although this wasn’t always ideal it worked for us, and we lived this way for 9 years.
Life After Covid
Like so many other people the pandemic completely changed my outlook on life. See this blog. Up until 2020 my eldest two children Noah and Phoebe attended school, and I thought I was pretty content with our manically busy and rushed little life. We were a family that didn’t experience the heartbreak that covid brought to so many families. For us it brought peace, it slowed life down and it brought me time with my children – real time that I hadn’t had with them since they had started school (as covid hit they were years 1 & 3 in primary). We embraced home learning and whilst it was very different to what we do now, I absolutely fell in love with educating my children, and lucky they felt the same way. Fast forward to September 2020 and I just knew that I couldn’t send them back, on September 3rd I sent our de-registration letter and we decided that without school keeping us in one place that we know longer needed to stay in St Albans, that we were free. Free to travel, free to move around the country with my husband, free to live in a tent if we so wished (that wasn’t our wish). At the time Will was based in Dorset and we decided to up and move ourselves onto a military camp. The plan was to test it out for a year. To ride out covid without the kids being in and out of school lockdowns like yo-yos, to make sure we could be with Will in any subsequent lockdowns (the army most definitely didn’t get to work from home or slow down), and if we were going to go through lockdown again then we may as well be locked down on the beautiful Jurassic coast.
We lived in Dorset for 18 months and it was the best decision I have ever made for my family. We spent days working on our allotment, reading on beaches, exploring Roman forts, baking, painting, cuddling up practicing fractions, and for the first time ever learning to live as a family – every single day!
In April 2022 our time in Dorset came to an end. As a military family a new posting happens every 2 years – sometimes less, so it was time to pack up and move on.
For our next adventure we were heading back to Hertfordshire. It was a bitter sweet move really. I fell completely head over heels in love with Dorset. It’s just the most beautiful place to live and was a perfect fit for our family. However Hertfordshire is home, so although we were not moving back to St Albans we were going to be a lot closer to our old life, friends and family than we had been. Although both myself and Will were born and bread in London I am definitely not a city girl. However as much as my heart aches for the Sandy beaches of Dorset, I fully intend to embrace being a stones throw away from London, and we will be exploring the city like tourists with the added bonus of having local knowledge, and enjoy all that is great in Hertfordshire too.
Tutus and Mud is our new little home on the internet. As a family we love to explore, play in nature and go on adventures. My dream is to one day pack all the children into a camper van and worldschool. Tutu’s and Mud is a place where will share our days out and adventures, a place where we will discuss everything home education from choosing curriculums, planning unit studies to answering the big questions like how our children socialise.
If you’ve got this far thank you! My aim for Tutus and Mud is not only to share our life with you but to primarily build a community of likeminded people. To share ideas with other home educating families, to laugh together, cry together and learn from one another. They say it takes a village to raise a family, and I am hoping Tutus and Mud can be a part of that village.
