photoblogging

Ok, me, back again. I have been moonlighting a while over at Snowflakes on our Tongues, posting a few more photos and poems there. I recently went on a poetry workshop day and got hugely inspired by words and images working together. Here is my first poem/photo:

Bucket
Scooped out, gritty
Muddy sunken,
Sludge-and-ploppy
Magic potion.

Glowing, grainy
Spread out fingers
Ruddy, shining
Gunky-glistens

Bottom welling,
Dug out deeper,
Tip-and-sloppy,
Secret mixture.

Grinding, slippy,
Gloopy-handed,
Poured out patting,
Smoothly moulded.

I am continuing to write for the eventual ‘book of the blog’. Would be lovely to see some of you over there. Enjoy!!!

the beach

The lakeside was gleaming and fresh today; sunny, rainy, windy and still. We made dandelion pies, toes deep in the wet, claggy sand. I continued the mushroom hat whilst Squeak played. A bright, easy day – a day of contrasts.

Annecy

Three friends in Annecy, shopping for fabric, shoes, dress patterns and wedding ribbons for the girls wrists. All in all, a lovely day, faux filet for lunch, (cooked to perfection) by the sunny river. I found a silk-scarf strappy top for €9.99 and corsages for the girls for our wedding day to match our dresses, two patterns I needed; a suntop with big wooden ring at the front and a dressing gown I hope to make in silk when I have found the fabric.

Exhausted, yet the night called to me. Children in bed, so time to work out the final pattern for the mushroom hat.

the best thing (part two)

“Oh, does that means daddy will have to watch football at the pub then?”

So, there we go, no eyelids batted whatsoever. I mentioned it briefly to dOH before the fated Saturday night and chose that date specifically because he was out all night working – so we didn’t get into a huge argument about it. Since then, I have had a few comments thrown in my direction from him about not giving the children the choice to watch TV, (”not very autonomous/unschooling is it?”) and not giving him the choice to watch TV, but I just smile sweetly, not needing to say anything at all.

On his first day off without TV, the girls pestered him for two hours to play Pirates of the Caribbean. He was not amused. I continued to smile sweetly, an ‘I told you so’ look on my face.

And that is the thing that has changed; when we had lots of TV, all the girls could do in terms of imaginative play was choose a character from a movie or TV and say over and over again “I am ______, you are _______, come on!!” Sometimes they could manage to run up and down and use pouvoir (magic power) to blast the other one, but that was about it. They were incapable of playing without adults helping them to think up what to do next.

I hated it. And so did dOH. But since the TV broke, they have been dreaming up the most amazing games to play with each other, it is almost like a filter, which had been blocking their imagination, has been taken away – almost as if they are beginning to think again for themselves  – and dream. Now they go away by themselves and play for hours, making castles and dens, being mummies and daddies, kings and queens, no specific characters involved. They use their toys in a more imaginative way too.

I also conveniently made all the ‘themed’ and Movie/TV related toys disappear, including the beloved Buzz Lightyear and Woody.

A few months back I bought My Littlest Pet Shops for the girls, they played with them once and once only, not really doing much with them except arranging the pieces in the ‘hospital’ and looking at how many they still had to collect. So, after reading about the Waldorf experience of giving children plain toys which needed their imagination to make them into ‘things’, I gave them a load of old silk scarves and saris to play with instead and these pieces of fabric have been used for capes, aprons, blankets, dusters, tents, streams, wings, kites and tons of other things. They love them. I am still in the process of making the mermaids too, they are not Disney mermaids, but just mermaids.

I also have been trying to wean them off picture books, I found that Bubble was starting to identify with the pictures of characters in fairy tales, “No, Cinderella has yellow hair,” she would say, “Like in the book,” which I feel is just like identifying with the TV, only in a slightly watered down way. Books that are books with their own story, like The Gruffalo are absolutely fine (and necessary for children to learn about words) but generic stories such as fairy tales, I now try to introduce fresh to them by telling the story with no books or pictures, so they have practice forming an image of the characters in their own minds first. Mainlesson.com has loads and loads of stories which I have started to read and memorize and then tell at night with the lights dimmed, using our hands for props if the children need to focus on something in front of them.

Another thing I have noticed since getting rid of the TV, is that their concentration levels have risen. Bubble now will sit and draw by herself for an hour and a half, whereas before she could not last twenty minutes without saying she was bored.

And her drawing has suddenly blossomed.

She started, two weeks after the TV went, to create the most beautiful and imaginative drawings I have ever seen her do. Last night, whilst I was putting Squeak to bed, she sat and drew an amazing pencil sketch of the fish tank with the pump and filter and gravel in great detail, she then went onto draw her friends house with furniture in every room and a mountain scene with a beautiful eagle spreading its wings across the sky, squirrels eating nuts in the pine trees and an Easter chick hatching out. She even drew a police car and wrote PILIS on the side of it. All in pencil, all delicately and expertly drawn. She would never have produced anything near as sophisticated as this when we had the TV. It feels like she suddenly sees the world through her own eyes again, all the nuances and subtleties only a child’s mind can pick up on, instead of through a second-hand idea of the world, of cartoon figures doing outrageously distorted things, dreamed up by adults sitting in offices planning the next product to sell.

One last thing: They now move! They run and jump and shout and sing and dance. In the evenings, when they used to crave a shot of TV, they put on a show and we sit and watch them dance. They are now really truly tired at night, as we spend time outside moving every day come what may, fine weather or foul. Set Free Childhood explains how trained teachers can spot whether a new child in class is a heavy TV watcher just by the way they move their limbs. An hour’s TV watching a day is enough to make a child’s legs and arms heavy and the child clumsy and slow (and slow learners). Rudolf Steiner makes the connection again and again between body movement and learning (and a ton of other stuff such as emotional integration) and how the former is needed for the latter to take place successfully. Now movement is our absolute learning priority.

I must say that on the evening I wheeled our beloved TV out of the living room I had a sinking feeling in my heart.

“What if my children hate me for this, what if dOH hates me for this and what withdrawal symptoms will I have to cope with for the next few months?”

But, I have to say categorically that they have been totally OK with it, totally ready to accept ‘no TV’ as a normal part of life and totally ready to embrace all the things we have done instead. I realise that my children are still young, I have a (grudgingly) willing partner, who, underneath it all, does understand why I have done this and I live in a place where peer pressure is not a huge problem for the girls. But even if I had none of these things, I would still have done it without a shadow of a doubt.

But you will only know the real reasons why when you do it yourself.

*p.s. we still have the portable DVD player packed away high on a shelf, which has not yet been asked for since the TV died. Soon the children’s collection of 150 movies will be conveniently ‘left’ in the UK.

the best thing I have done, in terms of……

……..my children’s imagination.

So, I am harping on yet again about getting rid of the TV. Only because I have seen, in the last few weeks the most amazing changes in my children. I want everyone to know about it. Unfortunately it is not the kind of thing that I can banter on about ad infinitum here in France to my friends. It takes a certain kind of person to hear such things. In a normal cross-section of society, one does not come across a family willing to ditch the thing so easily. I was uncertain as to how the children would react to it. Getting rid of it I mean.

They did not bat an eyelid. Seriously.

Here’s how it went:

I had been having a few problems talking to dOH about the issue of getting rid of the TV. I decided to buy the book ‘Set Free Childhood’ and leave it somewhere where he could pick it up. In the past, that has been the only way I could get information into him and give him more of an informed decision about things (and backed up what I was trying to introduce to him!). He didn’t read it but skimmed through it and I think that was enough. He just wants an easy life. I want what is best for my children. The book is fantastic; it lays out all the facts about exactly what TV does to kids (and adults) in a quick and easy read. Some facts I knew about already, other things I was truly shocked by, most of all by the fact that we never, ever question what is coming into our living rooms and what our children are exposed to.

I had a kind of practice period before getting rid of the TV completely. It lasted for two weeks until I couldn’t stand it anymore. During this time we nearly get through without it being turned on some days. We have a portable dvd player (to use in the car) connected to the TV to play movies on, so I packed it up into its carry case (so it needed to be plugged in before the girls could watch it). Even so, I could see how much they were still addicted to it, they needed their fix most days.

I cleaned all the video and dvd cases up and put them in the loft, (easy to get at if dOH wanted to watch anything) I gave the whole area a good spring clean and pushed the TV right back out of the way.

I sorted out all the movies – the ones I thought were foul I chucked out, mostly free dvds from newspapers, then I made up a case for the three-year-old, which was left by the TV, and then a case for the six-year-old, which was put on a high shelf, then the ‘adult’ movies like Harry Potter and Pirates of the Caribbean, I put into another case and put it out of sight. I told Bubble that she could only have hers when little sister was not around and the adult ones were not suitable until she was older (lots of complaining about this).

I also had a chat with her about staying up ‘not being able to sleep’ and watching a dvd, she used to sometimes be up until 10.30 watching Mama Mia (which has now been given back to my friend). I said that she was not allowed to do that anymore as it was bad for her brain when she was trying to sleep to concentrate so hard on the screen, she seemed to accept this without question. I told her I would read and sing songs to her instead when she couldn’t sleep.

But during this time, TV in the morning was still there. I tried to coax the girls into the kitchen to eat breakfast instead of watching TV, but it didn’t work. It seemed like TV was more addictive than movies. They were totally hooked into it when it was on. But the cartoons finished at 8.30 am most days so they only caught a few of them – I could cope with that. I switched to a younger channel (there are only two showing cartoons in France in the mornings) with no adverts, which seems to be the lesser of two evils. Thank goodness they weren’t watching ‘Titeuf’ anymore (the most foul and evil cartoon here in France).

But, I was not satisfied with that. They could just about get through the day without watching the box, but were still asking for it all the time. So I set the date, (a Saturday night) put the girls to bed as usual and unceremoniously unplugged and wheeled the old dinosaur out and into the loft. The next morning I greeted the girls with sad news.

“The TV broke last night.”

continued in next post…….

So, why Waldorf?

Yes, I have hung up my unschooling cap for the moment. Here are some reasons why:

1. I was waking up most mornings thinking “What the hell am I going to do with the kids today?”
2. I was slightly worried that Bubble’s favourite films were Grease, School of Rock and Mamma Mia, although I thought it quite cool at the time, she was singing about kissing, rock and love at six years old. Thank God I had not bought High School Musical for her. With Waldorf schooling, everything comes in a sequence, building one on top of the other, and at certain ages things are introduced – only when the child is ready for them These adult movies cannot possibly be comprehended by a six year old and could actually do her more damage than good.
3. I felt that things were drifting, that they needed the guidance of a loving adult to show them how family life should be lived, to show them how important the strength of a united family could be.
4. I was sitting at the computer more and more, finding myself writing about things I actually should  have been doing with them. Writing about this lifestyle that was slipping away from me.
5. I can now see such changes in them, such brightness, such imagination, which was only just a glimmer before underneath the dullness of their media induced lives. I think they are thriving in this nourishing environment where I know that the majority if not all of the things they are exposed to are now approriate for their age and readiness both spiritually and emotionally.

And here are some things I have changed:

1. I turned the computer off, hence the fact there have been no posts for a long long time. This magically transformed our relationship together. I didn’t want my children growing up imitating me – i.e. sitting at a computer for hours on end.
2. I ‘broke’ the TV – not literally, but I told the children it was broken and unceremoniously wheeled the old dinosaur out of the living room, swept up all the dust and put some flowers in the place instead. I have to say this has been the single most influential thing that I have done to change things in the past month. More soon about the changes I have noticed in the girls since getting rid of the TV.
3. So, I signed up for a homeschooling Waldorf (Steiner) curriculum. I don’t know what spurred me on to do this initially, it was just one of those flashes of inspiration I had whilst thinking (and worrying) about the girls’ education.
4. We now have a set routine to the day – YE gads!!!! I would never have thought this possible, but, along with the TV, I have to say that this has transformed things for us. Every day we clean the house together, do ’school work’ (circle time) in the morning, a period of concentration for an hour or so, then cycle to the same place by the lake and spend a few hours getting fresh air and exercise, we incorporate some ‘handwork’ into the afternoon, knitting, sewing, playing in the sand, modelling etc. and then we eat at the same time everyday, bath and bed at the same time too.

Mermaids

I have been spending a while putting together a mermaid doll kit for Bubble and Squeak. They are from dancingraindolls.

The girls are mad about mermaids at the moment, so I thought I would make them their first Waldorf doll, not too late for a seven-year-old it seems. Only problem is, the girls want detachable tails and legs that then fit on, so that the mermaids can turn into girls. Fine, no problem I say, I, after all, did do a masters degree in textiles and fashion, ha ha. Might be a little rusty by now though. I’ll let you know how i get on.

Until then, be content with a picture from the site. I think they are absolutely gorgeous, they come in loads of skin tones and four different hair and tail colours. Amy makes the most beautiful dolls and she has really given me a huge amount of help. Unfortunately they can’t get wet, but they are so soft and cuddly and the girls will be content with letting their dolls play in the sand at the local lake.

The girls have wanted me to show them the mermaid page twice a day since we ordered them, they just sit and stare at the different colours of their hair and tails. Shouldn’t be long now until the kits arrive and I told them I would stay up all night, every night sewing if that’s what it takes to get them finished!! I’ll let you know how the detachable tale goes.

We have been reading stories about mermaids for a while now and I hope that the dolls will really bring the tales to life and that the girls will extend the fantasy by playing with them, they seem to be amazingly enthusiastic about them at the moment and I think the waiting is making it all the more exciting, I love it that they will be able to see the process of making the doll, starting from the fabric and stuffing and all the other raw materials right through to the finished piece. It is important to see where things come from, how things are made and to know that they have control over what the final doll will look like. All too often in our ready-made consumer society do we take it for granted that things arrive in our homes fully formed and complete. I think it is important that children learn about the effort put into creating good-quality things around them.

Especially when their mother will be sitting up all night sewing.

changes

So, I have been away for a while. I had to get a few things sorted. Here is the result of my activities away from the blog:

• My brother is out of hospital and still very tired, but improving day by day.
• dOH and I are getting married on June 5th in the UK. Soon he will be Dh! I am busy sorting out all the stuff I need to sort out. We want something SMALL but it is so hard to keep it that way; 30 people have suddenly turned into 60 people in a matter of days.
• I have signed up for a Waldorf/Steiner home school curriculum for the girls from Christopherus; kindergarten for both of them until September, when Bubble turns seven and will start Grade 1. I have been spending a while on their forum researching Waldorf principles and ideas, its a lovely community. I am going to post more about my decision to change from unschooling to Steiner soon.
• We have restructured our day, now the girls wake at 7.00 a.m. and are in bed by 8.00 p.m. (before, when we followed an unschooling day, they woke and got to bed whenever they pleased). They spend an hour outside in all weathers, we have started to walk places together, do a specific craft, cooking or art activity at a certain time of day and read stories and sing songs at another time, the rest of the time is for meals, bath time and free-play with toys I have streamlined, sorted out and made more accessible and yes, a much more structured day, it’s true; we even have a ‘pet-time’ before bed. And boy-o-boy the change in their behaviour has been really quite incredible. I have learnt to guide them through their transition times, (from Steiner) throughout the day and stick with them when that dip in the activity comes along.
• I have cut out TV, as much as is possible without physically getting rid of it and hope to tell the children it has ‘broken’ permanently soon. I want our home to be without the TV for good.
• I am doing a colon cleanse – I have really got to the stage where I am feeling pretty unwell most days. Time for a spring clean out.
• I have been listening to the ‘satsangs‘ of Adyashanti (one step on from Eckhart Tolle) pretty full on since I last posted. Needed some time to sort my self out, he has helped me hugely. Feel like I am on more of an even keel now.
• I have cut back on using the computer. Now I pick up emails once a day in the morning, but never sit on here when the children are awake. I think that setting an example of an internet obsessed mother is NOT GOOD.
• Unschooling. Yes, more about this soon. The whole idea of unschooling has really been put on the back burner for me at this time, not to say that it won’t reappear again sometime in the future.  I was struggling for ideas of things to do with the children and needed some direction. I still agree that children learn at their own pace, but I came to the point where I needed some more structure to base our day around. The  Steiner curriculum is gentle and really understands what stage children are at in their life. I came to a point where I felt unschooling was just too damned unstructured and for me to say that well, I’d never thought I’d see the day those words came out of my mouth. We are thriving on a more structured day and I feel so much happier knowing that the things we will be doing from now on will be absolutely age appropriate; children grow up too fast in this world, that’s for sure!
• One things for certain, we are still living a slow life, that will never, ever change!

So, yes, it has been a month of reorganization for me, I really went through quite a bit of a set back with my brother’s illness, (emotionally and spiritually) but I am back on track again now and looking forward to being a married woman, even though I never thought I would say that either! good to be back.

break

I am taking a break from the blogging world for a while. Thanks to all of you who have contributed here through reading and commenting upon my posts.

Identification with your mind creates an opaque screen of concepts, labels, images, words, judgments, and definitions that blocks all true relationship. It comes between you and yourself, between you and your fellow man and woman, between you and nature, between you and God. It is this screen of thought that creates the illusion of separateness, the illusion that there is you and a totally separate “other.” You then forget the essential fact that, underneath the level of physical appearances and separate forms, you are one with all that is.
Eckhart Tolle.

See you all soon, take care,
Lune x

evaporated ice cream

I ate homemade ice cream every night at my mother’s house, comfort food absolutely necessary at the time. I kinda miss it now I am back in France, so I searched out a recipe for basic ice cream yesterday and decided at 8 p.m. to make my own batch, listening to Chris Ayer’s Evaporate on a loop. You need to stand for a while and stir, so this was a perfect activity for five minutes of reflection in the kitchen.

I do not have an ice cream maker, I like the idea of making it by hand. We have no room for more equipment anyway and I am a little anti-gadget at the best of times (we do not even have a vacuum cleaner, for goodness sake). I wanted to use egg yolks and in this recipe they are gently cooked. I have no problem eating raw eggs, but like the idea of making custard first. I LOVE custard. I also love the idea that custard is called crème anglaise in french (english cream). There was much spoon licking going on at this stage, by all who entered the kitchen.

This recipe has a twist. I made it with crème fraîche and yogurt rather than 2 cups of heavy cream.

Here is the base recipe:

1 cup raw milk
3 drops of vanilla extract
pinch of Celtic sea salt
3/4 cups Rapadura sugar
5 egg yolks
1 cup crème fraîche
1 cup yogurt

Put the milk, vanilla, salt and sugar in a heavy-based pan. When Rapadura is used, the flavour is very caramel-like and a beautiful light brown in colour. Heat gently. Meanwhile, break the eggs into another bowl and whisk lightly. Pour a little of the heated milk into the eggs and mix then pour the egg mixture back into the pan. Heat very gently stirring all the while, scrape off any eggy bits from the bottom of the pan. When the mixture is thick enough to coat the back of the spoon thinly pour into a bowl already filled with the cream or yogurt crème fraîche mix. Whisk well, then let cool, then place in the refrigerator and then when chilled, put in the freezer.

To make ice cream by hand:

Place chilled mixture into a shallow freezer-proof dish (so it can be whisked easily) and place this in the freezer. After 45 minutes, take it out and whisk it. Break up all the frozen bits forming around the edge. Check and whisk the cream every half an hour thereafter. It should take 2 or 3 hours to freeze. Once it has frozen, place a lid on the container and keep in freezer until needed. Take the ice cream out of the freezer ten minutes before serving to soften it up. I put my ice cream outside on the windowsill and it froze in two hours. Then we ate all of it in one go.

I also found a great, quick ice-cream making activity for children – they get to make a bowl of ice cream each and then they can eat it. It can also be made with snow instead of ice. I think we will try that tomorrow.

p.s. here is Chris, just in case you need to make evaporated ice cream :