If you look at the archives of this blog, they read a bit like a time-travel novel with some very long commercial breaks.

In December 2019, I was writing about entering a new decade. My youngest was just a tiny toddler, barely a year and some months old, and I was navigating the intense, beautiful chaos of early motherhood.

Then, the world went through a collective spin, and I didn’t surface here again until February 2022 with a random, nostalgic post about Love Letters and teenage romance. It was a sweet, lighthearted moment. But behind the scenes, the toddler was turning into a preschooler, and the quiet pressure of the conventional world was starting to knock on my door.

And then? Silence. For four whole years.

I can’t just show up in 2026 and start analysing child-led learning without explaining what happened in those blank spaces. So, let’s fill in the blanks. Grab a warm drink (because this Lagos rains are currently doing their own thing), and let’s talk about how we actually got from love letters to unschooling.

The “Real School” Detour (Around 2022)

Shortly after I wrote that love letters post in 2022, my youngest was hitting the age where everyone starts asking, “So, which school is he attending?”

Even though we had been doing early learning at home and enjoying our own flexible rhythm, that loud, persistent voice of convention got to me. You know the one: “What if he falls behind? What if you’re doing him a disservice? Just do what everyone else does.”

So, I did. I enrolled him in school.

I joined the ranks of the early-morning school runs. I bought the uniforms, packed the lunchboxes, and spent my mornings watching the clock, praying we wouldn’t get forget something.

For a while, we tried. But very quickly, the reality of the conventional system began to clash with everything I believed about holistic growth.

I was watching a naturally curious, highly observant little boy start to view “learning” as a series of rigid tasks to be finished before a bell rang. The vibrant spark in him was being squeezed into a pre-designed box that didn’t care about his individual pace or interests. It felt like we were constantly rushing, constantly stressed, and for what? To fit into a system that just didn’t suit our family.

One day, after a lot of deep breaths and a healthy dose of “am we really doing this?” courage, I made the choice.

I pulled him out.

The Years of “De-Schooling” (2022–2026)

If you think taking a child out of school is the hard part, let me tell you: the hardest part is actually “de-schooling” your own mind as a parent.

For the last three years, my biggest job hasn’t been teaching my son. It’s been teaching myself to let go of the conventional checklist. I had to stop panic-searching for worksheets. I had to stop assuming that if he wasn’t sitting at a desk with a pencil for six hours, he wasn’t learning.

We had to find our own flow. And we did.

Today, our learning doesn’t look like school-at-home. It’s child-led. It’s unschooling. It looks like diving headfirst into a rabbit hole of documentaries when a random question sparks his interest. It’s learning math through cooking and budgeting, understanding history through storytelling, and building critical thinking through real, everyday life.

He is almost eight now (how did that even happen?!), and watching him learn on his own terms has been the most rewarding pivot of my life.

The Rest of the Whirlwind

Of course, life didn’t just pause to let us figure out education.

While the blog was silent, I was also navigating my own personal and professional shifts. Between running a busy household, trying out different business ideas, learning new skills, and wearing about five different hats at any given time, my mental bandwidth was stretched to its absolute limit.

When you are the default parent, the chef, the educator, and the entrepreneur trying to build something of your own, your creative outlets are usually the first things to get dusty. I’d think about writing a post, get distracted by dinner or a business detail, and suddenly, two weeks turned into a year, and then three.

But finding our rhythm with unschooling and settling into our family’s lifestyle has finally given me something I haven’t had in a long time: space to breathe.

And because I have that breathing room, I finally have the space to write again.

Moving Forward

So, that’s the real story of the missing years. We aren’t the same family we were when I was writing in 2019, and I’m definitely not the same person who wrote about love letters in 2022.

We’ve chosen a path that is deeply unconventional, often chaotic, but incredibly beautiful. Now that the air is clear and the bridge is built, I’m excited to share the real, unfiltered moments of how we live, learn, and grow on our own terms.

To everyone who read those old posts and is still here today, thank you for waiting out the long intermission!

I’m curious to know what “rules” you have had to unlearn in your own life lately. Let’s catch up in the comments!