High Seas Adventures

Change is afoot

2011-12-04T20:37:00.000-08:00

If any of you are still out there waiting for me to add to my blog, here I am.

A lot has happened since August. We have moved house. I honestly thought I had found the house I would spend my life in, but then this house came up for auction (twice), and there were certain things that tempted us to it... actually really only one thing - the sea. So now we live on a coastal property, and if you walk 82 steps down from our deck, you get to the sea. You have to go at high tide, or you'll just find mud, but that's OK with me. The kids like the mud, the change is kind of interesting, and I quite like having to consult a tide chart when planning my day (or even my month).

So we can now invite people over "for a row" (if the tide is right). And, fabulously, we're in a cul-de-sac, so the kids can play out in the street with a number of neighbourhood kids. Our old street was far too busy for that (and it attracted boy racers). On the downside (and I think I might cry here), we've lost our mature fruit trees. This new property has a few - bananas that actually fruit, although unfortunately a rat or possum is eating them, and a fabulous grapevine that is actually inside our house in a sort of greenhousy-dining-room area, but we had so much more at the old place. Weep, weep. The only other downside is the loss of a big outside grass area. This section is a bit smaller and much steeper (as you get with coastal sections). The gardens are actually fabulous in their own way - lots of exotic plants which are meant to be of 'historic' interest even (I doubt anyone's interested). So it feels sort of tropical here - date palms and nikaus and bananas and an evergreen magnolia and a huge Moreton Bay fig - but there are also piles of weeds, and not very much to eat. Oh and there is a very very pretty climbing rose.

Other changes have happened too of course. Our house guests are still in NZ, but they're in our old house. We still see lots of them of course. And another big change has been going from a household in which one child reads fluently (and two don't) to a household in which two read fluently and the third is on the cusp of it. You might not think this would make a big difference, and perhaps most families don't notice this change much because it happens more slowly and it happens at school anyway, but when you are a home ed family and the reading-lightbulb-moment happens very suddenly, you certainly notice. Somehow, we have left "young childhood" behind. There is much less time spent playing with little animals and fairies in the doll's house, and much more spent in complete silence, on the bed, with nose in book.

Poor old Poz is the last one to learn to read. He is so so so so close. He is reading better than Daughter could 3 months ago. And yet her change has been so meteoric that he feels there is a gulf between them. Watch this space, though. He is trying so hard.

My ghastly skiing injury is NOT changing. After 3 1/2 months it is much improved but it feels very static. We are still going away sailing this summer, and I have found that I can get in and out of dinghies, so hopefully all be well. However, I am NOT patient. I am utterly sick of it.

At some point, I'll upload photos of the new house and of all the other things we've been doing.

I do want to write something more about our home ed journey sometime soon. Because it is going along so beautifully at the moment. Not just the reading. The whole shebang. But that will take more time than I have now.

Just some photos

2011-08-12T23:52:00.000-07:00

We tried to rationalise our shoe collection. We collect shoes.
Firstborn and I have been doing puzzles with these pentominoes. Apparently there are thousands of solutions (except for the 3 x 20 one - there are only two solutions for that one.)

This morning there were some beautiful spiderwebs in our ash tree out the dining room window in the fog.
I planted strawberries, parsley, silverbeet, lettuce, cauliflower, broccoli and celery.

I sewed this eagle shirt out of merino wool I already had. Pozz wanted a silhouette of an eagle on a light blue background, on a singlet which he could wear over the top of his black merino shirt (which I made two years ago and, yay, he still fits).

The Grandiflora Tree, by Shonagh Koea

2011-07-31T21:45:00.000-07:00

It is surprising how little information there is about Shonagh Koea on the internet. Apparently 'The Grandiflora Tree', her first novel, sold about 7000 copies, which is excellent for a New Zealand novel. (No chance of making a living out of it, I guess.)

Perhaps the reason for the lack of writing about her is that she wrote it well before people started writing book reviews on their blogs, but still, you would think she would have her own wikipedia entry. She doesn't. It is faintly possible that she deleted it herself.

After Husband read another of her novels, "Staying Home and Being Rotten", he said that he was quite surprised, because she was a New Zealand novelist, and he liked her. I felt the same. I don't go in for New Zealand literature in a big way. No, not even Katherine Mansfield, even though she is a relative.

So I had pretty high hopes for The Grandiflora Tree, but they weren't quite realised. It was kind of similar to "Staying Home and Being Rotten" but I liked the latter much more (as far as I can recall, 15 years later). I might read it again.

The first reason that The Grandiflora Tree annoyed me was that I felt like the author hadn't really experienced grief, and was making a very good guess at what grief feels like, but somehow getting it exactly wrong. So I googled her to find out whether my feeling was correct, and discovered, that in fact, Shonagh Koea did write this book after the death of her husband, so we have to accept that she knew all about grief. Not that I am equating the novelist with the narrator.

I guess we just have to come back to the platitude that "people grieve differently" - which is something that it is important to know - something that you often only learn the hard way, when your grief isn't how you thought it would be, thought it should be. So Koea's protagonist, Bernardette, wants to be left alone by well-meaning well-wishers who say the wrong thing. This is the exact opposite of what I wanted. I wanted people to ring me up and tell me that they didn't know what to say, but they felt like they needed to say something.

The problem is not so much that Bernardette grieved differently from me, or anyone else I know who has grieved, but that her grieving does not seem realistic. Of course, one should not assume that the novelist's aim was a realistic depiction of a grieving widow. The novel is quite stylised, and repetitive, almost chorus-like. The well-wishers pretty much all say the same (wrong) thing, which is, "you must be devastated". Or, "your life must suck". You can see why that would get annoying. There are one or two events in the novel in which the narrator is consoled by other people, but oddly, they are isolated events, which do not detract from the overall narrative flow, which is towards further despair and loneliness and hopelessness. For some reason Bernardette recognises that these few people have consoled her, and even thanks them, but she does not manage to make further contact with these people.

Instead, as the novel progresses, she delves back in time and remembers more of her relationship with the dead husband. It becomes obvious early on that he was a complete see-you-next-Tuesday, but worse and worse behaviour is revealed as the chapters go by. And one cannot help but wonder what exactly Bernardette is grieving for. The blurb actually describes this book as a love story, which is bizarre. The only explanation I can think of is that love stories might sell more copies. I guess you don't write "repetitive dirge" on the back of a paperback.

So yes, in sum, the book is about a woman who grieves in isolation and bitterness for a husband who was a heartless bore and whom she hated. And the husband is so boring that it is a pity so much of his diary is included in the novel, because unfortunately, we get to find out how boring he is for ourselves.

But there is more to it than that of course. I sound like I am describing a book that I really didn't like, but it is strangely readable all the same. Strangely it draws you back in. And there is almost an air of triumph about Bernardette's mad determination to turn away all well-wishers and be alone. I think it might be the triumph of being cleverer than the husband and the well-wishers. Of being somehow saner. Of seeing through the lies and the nonsense that we wrap death up in. So yeah, I kind of liked it.

At the same time, you almost have to be Russian to write a book this desolate. If you are going to go mad mourning the man who treated you like shit your whole life, best to be stuck in a shack in Siberia starving and freezing to death as well. References to being low on firewood don't have the same resonance in New Plymouth.

What is Shonagh Koea really like? Bullshit-free, we know that much. Perhaps that is why she is the only kiwi novelist for grown ups whom I like.

Full House

2011-07-19T19:07:00.000-07:00

We have a house full of kids at the moment. In addition to the usual complement, there is Sungoddess (aged 7) and Tornado (aged 9). They're here with their mother, one of the two women in my life whom I'd actually like for a wife. I think she was previously referred to on this blog as PLIF, for Poor Lonely Immigrant Friend. They've been here 3 weeks already.

Anyway, it kind of rocks to have another woman in the house. She gets up in the morning and makes coffee. She makes me a cup of tea in the evenings. These two acts on their own pretty much comprise all that I would ever want in a mate (although an income would also be nice, so I can keep homeschooling, but I've long learned to take that completely for granted). But she also takes turns cooking meals, cleaning up meals, sweeping the floor, and reinforcing me when I tell my kids that no they can't stay up late, have extra screen time, or start eating before the cook sits down. Man, I LOVE having another woman in the house.

Five kids can be noisy sometimes. But it's surprising how easy it all is really. The little girls have not had a single cross word between them, despite spending every waking moment together. The boys have had a little more trouble getting to know each other again (bit more of an age gap, and personality gap, to traverse) but now they seem to be back on their old terms. Tornado and Firstborn have spent pretty much the entire day on their skateboards in the courtyard.

I like having a full house. There's a lot of chaos, a lot of dirt, a lot of noise, a lot of strange babbling in a language which I am told is Flemish, but there's also a lot of energy, laughter, fun and friendship. And morning coffee. And evening tea. All you could really want out of life.

You must love God the most

2011-07-17T21:05:00.000-07:00

A friend of a friend commented recently that her son keeps telling her he loves her "more than God". She is trying to stop him from saying this. I guess it is heresy. Rather upsetting from your five year old.

It struck me that you are not going to get very far telling your five year old to love someone they've never seen, more than you. I mean, kids really love their mothers, even lousy ones. Their love is enormous, boundless, fathomless, fierce. It's hard to hold someone else up and say, "Hey, love him more!"

I feel a little bit sad for the kid being told to love someone. Love, by definition, must flow naturally. It's a bit like being told to kiss your grandmother when you don't want to. Only, you *can* kiss someone unwillingly and out of duty. You can't really love someone unwillingly and out of duty.

I wonder if this mummy also tells her child that she loves God more than she loves him. That would be hard for a child to understand. But this is what God demands: if you doubt me at all on that, you really need to go and re-read the part about Abraham and Isaac.

If I was raising my child as a Christian, I hope it would be all about joy and spontaneity and free choice, not about telling them who they must love, and in what order. I would present God's love as a love freely given, and which he hopes you will, in time, choose freely to return. (Of course, provided you don't die first - don't take too long about it.) But I have a dilemma here, because I think that this boy, who is already outwitting his mother's moral teachings, might be well on the way to a healthy, happy atheism, whereas a child raised in a subtler, kinder, more palatable religion, will take longer to spot the cracks in the wall. And I do think that the longer it takes you to shake off religion, the more painful it is. So much of your life is already invested in it.

Anyway, I don't try to get people to question their faith unless they actively approach me on the subject, so it's not like I actually plan to do anything here. I'm just musing. I actually remember my mother telling me I should love God the most. I think it bothered me a little, but basically I just ignored her. Deep down inside, there was a little bit of cognitive dissonance starting right there. Which didn't really stop until I become an atheist.

I think that's really the best thing about atheism. No more cognitive dissonance! It doesn't really work as a slogan, though, does it?

Clothing

2011-07-15T22:36:00.000-07:00

Ever since I visited the Middle East last year I've found myself drawn to wearing Persian-style clothing. It's kind of weird because I now feel under-dressed if my top doesn't come down to my thighs.

I don't feel that women should have to dress like this. But it is really comfortable and very habit-forming.

I just need to knit myself a really stylish headscarf.

The Time Machine Monologue

2011-05-20T16:17:00.001-07:00

Driving home from soccer today, my daughter began a conversation that she's had many times before. Actually, it's more of a monologue. A fugue, almost. Variations on an eternal theme.

How, if she could have any power, the power she'd like would be time travel.

How she'd use it to go back in time to find David just before he hopped in the plane.

How she'd warn him not to hop in the plane.

And she rehearses this plan over and over.

Then she began to wonder how he actually died. And because my daughter can be very young sometimes, she actually wondered whether people die in plane crashes because they are trapped in the plane and starve to death. No, sweetheart. And I tried to put it into as simple and non-graphic words as possible. Because I have read the autopsy report, and those words are burned into me forever, and I don't want them burned into her. So I just explained that his lungs were damaged in the crash and so he died.

Could people ever just get new lungs if their lungs were broken?

Well, incredibly, yes, if they happened to be in a world-class fabulous hospital at the moment that their lungs broke, but, well, he wasn't. He was in the remote wasteland that is Sudan. So, he died.

And suddenly I found myself wondering how I had managed to go seven years without ever really thinking about how he died. It was bad enough that he had died, that he was gone, that he missed out on so much life. Practically his kids' whole lives he had missed. He had never met any of my children. This was the big bad part, and the small matter of how he died was just one thing too much to think about. But here I was, seven years later, thinking about it while I drove along the road. And B------- Road has yellow lines painted practically all the way up it, so I was driving along, looking for a place to stop, because my eyes were all swimmy with tears, and I didn't want to be driving any more.

Finally we stopped. My daughter who is a sweet little soul felt pretty bad about "making mummy cry", so she asked if she could undo her seatbelt and come and hug me, and she did. And of course, sitting in my lap in the driver's seat, she began again, planning, how she is going to grow up, invent a time machine, go back in time, and warn David not to get on the plane.

How many of these conversations (monologues) have I endured? Right at that moment I did not want to endure a single one more, so I pointed out to her the obvious fact that she is never going to succeed in building her time machine, because if she had, David would never have died, and I wouldn't be sitting her crying right now.

And wouldn't you know it, it turns out that The Time Travel Paradox is completely beyond my seven year old daughter. I don't know if this makes her particularly stupid, or I am expecting too much of a seven year old, or perhaps her profound optimism prevents her from seeing the truth, but in her mind, going back and rescuing David before he gets on the plane is something that will happen in the future, and so, she still believes it might happen, and eventually she pretty much told me to stop trying to explain, because she'll just have to figure it out for herself one day, and she could see it was upsetting me that she didn't understand.

So that was it. I drove to the cafe where we always have breakfast (second breakfast in fact) with the male portion of the family, and hand over the car key to them so they can go off to rugby. I cried again in the cafe, upsetting the rest of my family in the meantime. The boys were particularly confused as to how I could be more upset on this day, which was not even David's birthday nor any special day, than I had been on the seventh anniversary of his death, which was a fortnight ago. As if it doesn't suck enough to be as sad as can be, and as horrified as if I had just found out, that my brother's lungs filled up with blood so that he could not breathe, as if I had heard and read these words and never allowed myself to listen to them or to see them before, I also realised that I was making my daughter feel terrible for making mummy cry and my sons feel confused and anxious because you never know when mum is going to start crying.

What else is there to do? There is not space enough in this world both for me to give vent to my grief and for me to raise the family I want to have. If I could act just for myself, I would fill the house with tears, I would tattoo my sorrow all over my body, I would change my name to Grief and close all the curtains and just look at photos all day. But there is so little space for sorrow in a child's life. Just a tiny piece now and again still threatens to be too much. There are lakes of tears that I have held back and still I have cried too much.

She is in her bedroom now, playing with her fairies, and I will never know if she is there because she doesn't want to be with me, or because she senses (with her lovely sensibility) that I want to be alone, or because, just perhaps, she really wants to play with her fairies. Soon I must go to her and show her I am OK now. I suppose I will never hear the interminable Time Machine Rescue monologue again. I suppose that is what I wanted. But I do know that I stuffed this one up.

Water for Elephants

2011-05-10T00:27:00.000-07:00

I went to see Water For Elephants the other night for mother's day.

It's been ages since I've been to the movies, and I always enjoy the experience far more than just renting a video. But pretty soon after the movie started, things were happening that really annoyed me.

Movies often annoy me, but this one was annoying in quite a different way from usual. I mean, movies are often stupid, but this was stupid in a different way. It was like the story was made up by a bright 14 year old who didn't know the way the world really works.

So in this movie, we were asked to believe, that when you're 2 hours away from being a vet, sitting your very final exam, your lecturer might call you out of the exam to tell you some bad news, and then you can never be a vet. No, you can't get an aegrotat pass. No, they don't wait until you've finished the exam, or give you a chance to re-sit. Even at a private university where your parents paid mega-dollars to get you your degree. Basically, you just have to leave town.

The movie continued in this surreal way for the next two hours. It would fatigue me to describe every painful time that I was unable to suspend disbelief, but they were numerous. Aside from this very intrusive flaw, there was also a confusion, I thought, about what this movie was actually meant to be about. Clearly, there was a theme of "animal welfare", explored through the treatment of a circus elephant which was beaten until it was too ill to perform. The bad guy, who beat the elephant, also beat his wife at times, even though she too was part of the "star act" of the circus which he owned. As my kids would say, he had anger management problems.

So, I guess so far you could say that the message was that it is bad to beat animals and people. OK, that's nice and simple. Only we were also meant to be considering the morally complexity of the fact that this is the Depression of the 1930s and there are people whose only chance of eating that day is if the animal performs in the circus. And the bad guy suggests that anyone who cares about animal welfare, hasn't seen a hungry human. So you sort of expect that this movie is going to explore this tension. But then, it doesn't. Like I said, the bad guy beats the elephant, not in order to get it to perform, but just because he has anger management problems. So we don't face those uncomfortable questions about when and how it's acceptable to make economic gain out of animals. We just get to feel outraged by a man beating an elephant for no sensible reason.

And that's pretty much as far as the movie takes us. Which doesn't surprise me now that I've heard the author of the book interviewed on National Radio. I haven't read the book, but judging by her conversation, I don't think she's thought much about this subject really either. Obviously, she thinks it's bad to beat elephants. But she thinks it's kind of cool that she once visited an ape that made her a cup of tea. So questions like, "Is captivity, by its very nature, wrong for some of the more intelligent species of animals?" pretty much sailed on past her. The tea sure tasted good though!

If you'll excuse the plot spoiler, read on. In the final scene of the movie, the big cats are freed (maliciously, it appears) and run amok amonst the circus crowds. Astonishingly, they don't eat anybody, despite being surrounded by meat. Indeed, one of them stands quietly by while the human characters enact their highly dramatic (but stationary) denouement. (Look carefully and you'll see the lioness on the right in the very last shot.) At this point my companion and I were convulsed by giggles. I'm sure this was not the intended reaction, but it was definitely the most enjoyable part of the movie.

2011-04-10T23:49:00.000-07:00

This is a "white elephant" post to update you on some of the interesting things happening around our place at the moment.

We've had a weird caterpillar emerge - the bamboo moth caterpillar. MAF tells us it is not trying to eradicate this insect. We must have thousands eating our bamboo. Wouldn't it be nice if it ate the whole thing, then died? I doubt it works that way though.

On a more positive note (indeed, positively exhilarating), we spotted a Blue Moon Butterfly!

We've been looking for these for years. They live in Australia but occasionally get blown across the Tasman - it's only the size of Europe after all.

Isn't it beautiful?

This year our garden has produced about 300 apples from the three trees. We went and stripped two of the three trees of their last apples. These are the ones that made it into the house. I think we'll juice some of them. This photo also documents our first feijoas. For those of you who have followed the saga of our barren feijoa trees, rejoice not. These fruit come from our new trees which we planted on the north side. The southern feijoa trees, which are now nearly eleven, are still barren.

We've also had an explosion of creativity in the house lately. The boy-child (he of the blond hair) likes to draw war scenes:

While the girl-child draws butterflies:

Given their parentage, we're just delighted the children can draw AT ALL.

Speaking of being pleased that my children could do something, I was quite chuffed when I heard my children saying something in unison, to realise that the reason that they were speaking in unison is that they were reading something together! Pozz doesn't often read anything voluntarily - not even street signs. But the sweet thing is that they can help each other a lot, because they're at about the same level.

And of course something that Pozz is absolutely wonderful at? Fishing. How does he get the patience? For the last 3 Sundays, he's gone out in the dinghy and caught dinner. And Monday's breakfast. He is truly in his element out there.

(I do still have a Firstborn son - he's just not here very much!)

Beauty

2011-04-08T16:04:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine provided me with this link to the Situationist blog. Please read it! It describes how the "Dove" brand markets itself as caring about "real beauty", not "commercialised beauty" like the rest of the beauty industry, and how deeply hypocritical and misleading Dove's "Campaign for Real Beauty" is.

One of the minor points made by the blogger is how very beautiful the child in Dove's "beauty shouldn't matter" movie is. For some reason I found this small point particularly powerful. Even when Dove is trying to make a point about the media's portrayal of unrealistic ideals of beauty, it cannot bear to choose an ordinary-looking child to star in its ad. (Oops, not 'ad' - apparently it's a 'movie'.) No, it chooses a fairy-like auburn-haired clear-eyed little nymph. Because we all know that those are the little girls who are going to have their self-esteem torn to shreds by our society's emphasis on beauty.

I have little to add to the article I've linked you to, but there was one minor point which came up in the comments. (Yes, I admit I read the comments, even though some of them are clangingly stupid as always.) Tamara wrote,

"And why does beauty matter so much for women anyway that it should be a topic for our daughters?"

I loved this.

I do not deny that there is an evolutionary basis for beauty. The young, slim, big-breasted, regular-featured woman is more likely to be fertile than the old (postmenopausal), the fat (perhaps already pregnant), the flat-chested (pre-pubescent?), the irregular (damaged?).

Having said that, culture moderates the effect of evolution in our lives. (An obvious example: we do not think it is right to commit adultery despite the fact that biology plays a role in the urge to cheat.)

And so, clearly, we have a choice in how our culture approaches beauty. We can reinforce the evolutionary preference for the beautiful, or we can encourage each other to value people for more worthy reasons.

One of the things I loved about having young children was their unconsciousness of beauty. I recall that when they first encountered the concept of women being "pretty", they all interpreted it as meaning that she was dressed in fine clothes. My eldest was at least 7 when he still believed this. His appreciation of the people around him was as blind to their physical appearance as if he had been, well, blind.

This was one area in which I encouraged my children's blindness. For the first few years of their lives, beauty was not a topic. However, my children live in the real world, and they have inevitably encountered the idea that some people value beauty, and value people in accordance with their beauty.

It is one thing to counter these ideas with constant reassurance, but I remember well how little I cared for my own mother's oft-repeated words - both that I was beautiful, and that real beauty is on the inside. Sure, mum. Only thing is, you're my mum. You would say that.

What I like better is the idea that caring about one's appearance is simply boring. I hope that my daughter chooses not to spend money on cosmetics because she is saving up for her next tramping trip, or new soccer boots, or piano lessons, or costumes for her next drama production. I hope that she doesn't waste hours looking nervously in the mirror because she's busy gardening, or reading the newspaper, or composing a song. I hope that she doesn't wear high-heeled shoes because they're annoying to run in, and she doesn't wear make up because it smudges annoyingly when you dive into the ocean unexpectedly on a beautiful April morning. Which is also a good reason to own plain, tog-like underwear, rather than the lacy sort.

Hmmm, I think I'm describing myself. Maybe I've got this one sussed already. All I need is for my kids to care as little about so-called "beauty" as their parents do.

There is another sort of beauty that I do care for. It's a beauty that isn't about how you look at all. It's about kindness, love, and truth. And that's the sort of beauty that I seek in my life. But that's a whole 'nother post.

My daughter is 7

2011-03-23T17:38:00.000-07:00

My daughter is 7.

I would like to say she has been a delight since the day she was born, but it's more like, "she's been a delight since she stopped threatening to die on us and we actually got to take her home".

Still, she's made up for the scares she gave us a million times over.

Our travels in Iran have obviously had a lasting effect on her. I wonder how many other little kiwi girls dress their mathletics avatar like this:

In preparation for her birthday party we badly needed to clean the house and my cleaning mojo kind of went out of control, and we started emptying out cupboards and scrubbing them. And yet again Daughter proved her worth as a tireless worker. Here is my kitchen in its worst moment, when she had emptied all the cupboards onto the bench:

(In case you are wondering why I'm putting this on my blog, it's partly because I've found that these are the photos you find surprisingly interesting in future years, when your house has undergone mysterious and unnoticed changes.)

She did have an ulterior motive for emptying the cupboards - she's wanted to play "let's sleep in the cupboard" for years.

I forgot to take a "Tidy Kitchen" photo so this is a couple of days later when it's started to get messy again:

After Daughter's birthday, we headed down to the local beach to clean up oysters. We spent a short time on Saturday and a long time on Sunday doing this. Again, Daughter worked tirelessly. Every time her grandmother suggested that she must surely be sick of it by now, she reassured us that she was loving every minute of collecting sharp and smelly oysters from the mud in the baking hot sun and she was quite happy to keep going.

She was also so excited to get this Spool Bunny craft kit which she loved making into a new pet. She has named it Sapphire and it goes to bed each night in its own little bed:

We so absolutely love this child to bits.

Seven years of bliss. Apart from the scaring her parents to death at the start part.

A day in the life

2011-03-20T20:49:00.000-07:00

So in case anyone is wondering what a day in the life of a home educator is like, I thought I'd describe ours. This is what our days are like when we're at home, but of course weekends are different and so are Tuesdays (drama, gym and piano lessons) and Thursdays (swimming) and of course any day that we have a special trip planned.

We mostly get up around 6.30 and all have breakfast together so we can spend some time with Firstborn before he catches the schoolbus at 7.30. Then before the others can escape from the table I get them to write in their diaries and do some maths. Sometimes Husband does Pozz's maths with him (which Pozz loves), other days I bring out the laptops and put them on mathletics.com. Then each child reads to me for about ten minutes and I figure that's about enough schoolwork for a 9yo and a 7yo, so we stop around 9am.

Then we have morning chores for about half an hour and I love the fact that when that's done, we know we have no more chores until about 5.30pm. Pozz often bakes something around this time too. We like to bake early in the day because we're always keen to get eating. We normally save something for Firstborn though.

So around ten a.m. we sit down with a cup of tea and our current read (Lord of the Rings, Book 3). We read for about an hour, and I often knit as well. Daughter draws or colours in while we read. Pozz mostly just listens. So around 11, we've kind of done most of the things we need to do for the day. In the afternoon, if we're not going out, then we might go next door for a swim in the neighbour's heated pool (joy!) or garden or hang out with the chickens or invite friends over or throw ourselves into some project. Often the kids just play while I get on with my own stuff. They play a lot of lego and a lot of fantasy play. Daughter practises piano at some point and Firstborn practises when he gets home.

At 5.30, one kid helps me cook while the other two fold the washing. We've recently switched from having no screen time on weekdays, to having "The Simpsons" every night (in exchange for less weekend screen time).

It probably sounds dead boring but actually I quite like our life at the mo.

Occasionally I remember that I'm meant to be teaching my kids "as regularly" as at school and I think about whether I'm doing that. It's true they only do 90 minutes of "school" in the morning (albeit lots of tailored, one-on-one instruction). But you've got to add to that an hour of reading aloud (literature), piano practice (music lessons), baking and cooking (home ec), lots and lots of conversations about anything and everything (science, history, geography, politics) and running around outside (PE). I think we cover it, and then some.

Well I guess I should say something

2011-03-16T02:15:00.000-07:00

It being March and all, and me not having blogged since 25 February...

I've just read my last post and reflected that I still feel exactly the same about having a kid at school. The main thing that has started to get to me though is the sheer time taken up by having one child gone for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. It's just too much. We feel like we hardly see him. And he doesn't have time to do anything.

A friend of mine said on facebook recently that her kids were driving her crazy. All I could think was, how different people are. I'm missing my one-child-at-school to pieces and her 3-children-at-school drive her crazy. She gets much less time with them than I get with mine, too (even with Firstborn).

Oh yeah the good news, having had parent-teacher interviews, is that he's doing really well at school, so I guess the teachers will think we must have been swotty homeschoolers. Clearly, unschooling makes you clever, because he's doing brilliantly despite having MISSED OUT on all those hours of essential schooling that all the other kids have been doing.

In other news, there have been massive earthquakes, but I'm sure you didn't come here to read about that.

And in other news in our family, hmmm well, not much happens really. Oh yeah, I've been sick as a dog for nearly 2 weeks, so that was quite chaotic with the house turning into a pigsty, kids cooking all the meals and doing all the washing and the dishes, too tired even to sit up and read Lord of the Rings to them so they ended up watching TV. Sea documentaries of course, on DVD. Not actual daytime TV.

I also did a 4 day tramp at Lake Waikarimoanna which I've deliberatedly misspelled so no one can google it and end up here all randomly. That was the start of getting sick, walking in the cold when I had a cold. Man it is cold there. And rainy. Pretty though.

News about the kids. Daughter turned 7, but her birthday was cancelled because of aforesaid sickness. She still got a couple of presents including some Disney colouring books which she is totally adoring. I need to show you a photo of how awesomely awful they are. Especially after she's coloured them all in fluorescent colours.

My daughter was totally OK with me graffiti'ing her colouring book with feminist slogans. She's awesome like that.

[Just realised you can't read it. So the one on the left said something like "Aurora often dreams about ensnaring a prince" and I changed it to "Aurora often dreams about instituting a liberal democracy when she inherits the Crown." And on the right it was something like "Aurora is thinking about how to look pretty while getting banged on her wedding night" so I changed it to "Aurora is thinking that the objectification of women is morally indefensible".]

Daughter is also really into learning the piano and practises about twice a day. She always asks my permission to practise. She's awesome like that.

Pozz and Daughter are both doing drama and they totally love it, as in, they want to run and get in the car early and are asking me the time all morning till it starts. This is the first time my kids have been like this about anything, other than Rainbow's End.

After drama we sit in this nice park with the other home ed families and have a picnic together, while the kids all run about like crazy in the trees. This is my favourite part of the day. And then we head off to gym with some of the other home ed families. The sucky part is that Pozz doesn't want to do gym so instead of me getting to knit and chat to other mums, I sit with the one who moans about how bored he is and how he wishes we could just drop Daughter off. But the cool part is that Daughter loves gym and I love that she is now old enough to enjoy her own stuff after years of being dragged to all sorts of things.

Speaking of being old enough, here she is BIKING TO HER FRIEND'S HOUSE. She was so cute about it too, saying, "Bye mum!" in that confident way that kind of makes you want to cry, because you know you've done your job of raising them all independent and all, but it means you're kind of out of a job. No more holding my hand tightly and fearfully. Off she goes.

I love how much she loves her bike too. We never walk to the shops anymore. She always bikes.

(By the way, my local shops have the most awesome name which makes them sound like a village in a Jane Austen novel. I don't like having to call them "the shops" in my blog because they're not just shops - they're also the library and the doctor's and stuff, but I don't want to put my location on my blog. Maybe I should just say "the village". Yeah. She bikes to the village.)

Pozz is really into fashion. He's trying to look like David Bowie. It's quite scary.

We're up to page 806 of Lord of the Rings. It's still really good.

On being a school mother again

2011-02-25T02:33:00.001-08:00

Somehow, after a while, you come to believe what everyone is telling you, no matter how obvious it is that you should know better.

After four years of our family being out of the education system, I had started to think differently about school.

For the first two or three years, I just didn't think about school. I was so happy with what we were doing that the thought didn't cross my mind. However, as time went by, I found that I seemed to be exposed to ever more stories of school. And these stories were almost universally positive.

I actually often joked that schools became perfect the day we left, but despite having this insight, I started to doubt myself, and to think that perhaps schools really were full of wonderful positive experiences. So many mothers, eyes shining, would be telling me about how this or that experience at school was "just fabulous". That was often the phrase. The art teacher, the trip, the camp, the cultural group. Just fabulous.

The other big one was "she absolutely loves school". I used to be suspicious of this. I would remember specific examples (quite numerous) of mothers announcing that their children love school, only to have the child tell me a day or so later that "I wish I was homeschooled". In fact, only a few weeks ago a father informed me that his children "have loved all their teachers", only to have his daughter interrupt with "No, I hated Miss X". (He responded, "No you didn't. You loved her.")

Somehow, despite these moments of obvious self-delusion from school-parents, over time, I began to wonder whether perhaps my children were missing out on opportunities to form loving bonds with wonderful, caring, passionate, involved teachers.

I really don't know what I was thinking. I mean, it's not like my kids had never been to school. Firstborn went for two years. Let me just reiterate the key points I learned from that experience, some of which are put here in his own words, which are burned on my memory so well that I think I'm pretty much quoting him verbatim:

1. "Mum, in all the time I was at school, I never learned a single thing."

2. "Mum, every single day that I've gone to school, I would rather have been at home."

3. The teacher is busy. Sometimes your kid vomits 3 times before she notices. This is not love. In either direction.

Four years later, we are having Attempt Number Two At School. Only in the meantime, we have had the opportunity to experience other ways of living, other means of education. When we return to school, it is like returning to New Zealand after a long time overseas. It looks like a foreign country, and once-familiar rituals now seem bizarre.

I can't believe that I started to think that maybe my kids were missing out on learning. School just isn't about learning. It's about busyness, and chaotic organisation, and bells. It's about movement and noise. Occasionally children do learn something, almost despite the system.

I can't believe that I started to think that maybe my kids were missing out on fun. Sure, if you are socially confident, lunchtime is fun. But it's 50 minutes. Even if you also enjoy the bus ride, morning tea time, and PE (which is a big 'if'), there are still hours each day when you are sitting around being bored silly. You have to listen to teachers droning on about things you already know, listen to other kids give their boring long wrong answers to questions you're not interested in, and copy down large amounts of information and instructions from blackboards. Some weird busy little kids enjoy all of this maybe. I'd guess the vast majority simply accept it as the way things have been since before they can remember, and which will never change. Observing it from the outside, it feels like an insulting and rude waste of other human beings' lifetimes.

I can't believe that I started to think that maybe my kids were missing out on positive relationships with teachers. Teachers are in a tough job and they have to use every means at their disposal of social control, including emotional manipulation, dishonest threats, and social humiliation - all of which work particularly well on children because they usually lack the life experience to see through it. You're lucky if a teacher eventually gets to know your kid well enough to see that this one is honest, well-meaning, and sensitive, and doesn't need a psychological sledgehammer to keep him/her in line. This kind of environment isn't the optimum one for developing mutual admiration and trust, even if there were the time for meaningful one-on-one interaction.

The fact is, my son is at school purely because of numbers. Only 1% of kiwi kids are homeschooled, and at first, it wasn't hard to find a few like-minded friends out of that 1% - and a few is all you need. But over the years those few have dropped off, to the point where there were not sufficient available suitable friends to be found. They were all at school.

It sucks that a child has to go to school to find all the other children. He doesn't want or need the huge time commitment that sucks up his life. (Don't even get me started on the homework - I might scream.) He doesn't want or need the disrespectful methods of behavioural control. He doesn't want or need the dumbed-down and boring compulsory "learning".

So that is how it is to be a school mother again. It's a little like having to hold your child down while they take blood. Seeing the necessity of it doesn't make it pleasant. And now I think that a lot of parents, faced with the daily necessity of it, have decided to convince themselves that it is "fabulous". But I also know a lot of parents who are more like me, and while they might have different reasons for their kid being at school - reasons as diverse as that they lack the confidence to teach themselves, or that they need the daycare so they can work - that doesn't mean they pretend it's better than it is.

My son has a difficult decision ahead of him. His long days of freedom are gone. No longer can he spend 12 hours straight making and editing a movie, or practise piano six times in an afternoon. He comes home to hear that his siblings finished their formal education by 9am and spent the day at the beach. All this for the sake of some friends and a bit of team sports. It's a very high price to pay.

Mercury Islands

2011-02-01T02:57:00.000-08:00

We spent a few days in the middle of January in the Mercury Islands. I wondered why we hadn't gone here before. It's much easier than you'd think. There's a psychological barrier about leaving the Gulf and going through Colville Channel, but the distances are short and you could go here in any sort of boat just by choosing a good weather window.

And the beaches, oh the beaches. Divine. Sweeping white sand, pohutukawa fringed. The water is exceptionally clear. One of my favourite moments was watching 4 dolphins swim right under me as I stood on the transom. They turned to look at me. Love it when they do that.

This bay is on the southwest corner of Great Mercury Island. After we left here, we sailed around Great Mercury and headed back to Barrier. The wind died so we ended up anchoring in a fairly exposed bay on the south side of Barrier. Great spot not mentioned in the cruising guide, just to the east of a wee island.

In the absence of TV, the children drew prolifically. Look at my two lefties. They also played 500, played Cranium, and just played.

The next day we sailed around to Tryphena. It is quite an underrated harbour. The shelter isn't great, but the beach is very pretty, and there is a place to tuck in in a sou'wester (which we got). Also, the store is the best place for groceries on Barrier. They even have organic and gluten free stuff.

Then we sailed to Blind Bay. Here is Poz on the helm. He does well. He's a great shipmate.

One of my favourite things about life on board is the evenings, when everyone is actually outside enjoying the soft warm light.

And here is Why I Hate Launchies. Yes, he's waterskiing right past a DIVE FLAG. Yes, he has no spotter! Unbelievable - but it happens all the time. We also spotted launchies taking their dogs ashore all over the place on conservation islands. I'm sure it's possible to do these things from a sailboat too but nobody seems to.

Anyway, that's my little moan over.

Next on our holiday came a big cyclone, from which we hid in Whangaparapara Harbour. I have to say it was a great place to hide from a hurricane. Nor'easters gusting in the sixties followed by sou'westers gusting in the fifties. You wouldn't think it would be good in sou'westers but it was so calm in there that if it hadn't been for the nowcasting we would have thought the wind wasn't there. We met people who were stuck in Tryphena and said it was horrible. So remember not to go there in a sou'wester.

During the cyclone we got to see a kidnapper who had just been arrested and was being moved onto the police launch. That made quite an impression on the kids. Lots of armed police with their guns too.

The next day was the most amazing fishing we've ever seen. The whole harbour went crazy with fish and the gannets were diving all over the place. I might post a short video we made of it.

And then, the calm after the storm. Ironically, we had to wait for enough wind for our homeward passage. The 38-mile passage ended up taking 7 hours, but at least we managed to keep sailing and with no horrible flogging of sails. In fact, it was very relaxing. Just not fast. This wasn't quite the end of our holiday, as we anchored at Moturekareka and, joy of joy for our children, reunited with their cousins that evening.

I'll describe the last few days of our holiday once I've uploaded pics.

Photos

2011-01-14T12:18:00.001-08:00

The back of Barrier

2011-01-14T12:03:00.001-08:00

At the beginning of our holiday we did hardly any sailing, instead just hanging about in the safe calm waters of the western side of Barrier. The 8 children played constantly and the adults sat on the beach reading books.

It was lovely, but I was starting to feel itchy for sailing. So a few days ago we said goodbye to our companions and set off on our own for the north of Barrier, in order to "go around the back". We had never been there before.

The first day we encountered an unexpected good easterly which took us up to the Needles at the north tip of Barrier and then south to Arid Island (Rakitu). We anchored in a tiny bay on the northwest tip of Arid Island. It was a very calm night and the next morning we rowed in the dinghy into the cave on the east side of the island, which was a really cool cave. One of us found it terrifying but the mother couldn't resist swimming in it. There were heaps of jellyfish - like swimming in jelly almost - but they're the non-stinging kind.

The wind backed to the northwest which meant it was coming right in the narrow mouth of the bay, so we motored across to beautiful Whangapoua Beach on the eastern side of Barrier, and spent the afternoon there. It was one of those truly amazing white sand beaches that you hear about on the east side of Barrier. The next morning the wind changed again - sou'east this time - so we went to Harotaonga Bay, three miles south, which was also beautiful. The next day the wind was forecast to change to nor'east, which was perfect for our planned sail to Great Mercury Island, thirty miles south. However, the forecast wind didn't come till 4pm. We set off at 10am and sailed on a southerly - quite a faint one. We sailed around the outside of Cuvier Island, which was really cool. Lighthouse and everything. By the time we got to Great Mercury, we had put out our headsail and wound it back in 3 times! The whole passage took nearly 8 hours. We did have some nice sailing though.

Now that we're here, I'm surprised how close the Mercs are to the mainland. It's nice to be in a new place, and it's nice to have done some sailing.

Great Barrier

2011-01-05T14:41:00.000-08:00

We've been at Great Barrier for about a week now. There's not much wind, so the only sailing we've done is on the passage over here. Since then we've anchored in 3 different places but with only a short motor between anchorages.

The first place we anchored was Whangaparapara Harbour, which we had never been to before but which we immediately loved. The next day we were very fortunate to have dolphins come into the harbour and spend the whole afternoon there. There were about twenty of them. At one point we rowed right past them and B jumped in the water and had 4 of them swim right under him, not two feet away. He had goggles on so would have seen them clearly. It was such a magical moment, that I actually had tears in my eyes. An hour or two later, the boys went off in the dinghy for another close encounter of the dolphin kind, and this time Pozz also managed to have them swim right up to him. I am so pleased for both of them. Again, I felt like I shouldn't do it, because I have done it before.

After 3 nights in Whangaparapara we decided the weather was so settled that it was a great chance to anchor in some more open places. We spent a night by Cliff Island, but there were too many mosquitoes, so now we are on the west of Rangihua Island, where there is a cool stony beach. Yesterday afternoon, the Cousins arrived, together with G11 and C5, so now we have 8 kids and 6 adults hanging out. It's pretty much been a party since then, although they were all pretty exhausted by the passage (motoring most of the way into lumpy seas) so everyone had an early night.

I can't believe how much time 11yo boys spend jumping in the water.

We're still reading Lord of the Rings. I've also read "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" by Jonathan Safran Foers and "Hear the Wind Blow" by Mary someone (about the US civil war) and Bill Bryson's "The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid" and now I'm onto Marilynne Robinson's "Gilead".

Our summer holiday begins

2010-12-29T01:27:00.000-08:00

We've been on our boat for just over 24 hours, but already it feels like so much has happened.

We arrived yesterday, in the rain, unpacked, and then rowed up the river to get groceries. (This way we avoided having to make two car trips to the boatyard.) We also bought some new stuff so we'd have our own set on the boat - frypan, coffee plunger, toothbrushes. The next morning we went back to get pillows. We got some new non-slip stuff glued on the cockpit floor, and then when the tide was in, we turned the boat round and floated off down the river.

Fortunately we had brought our portable bailing-child to bail out dinghies while underway (it pays to be under 25 kilos but still wonderfully hardworking and cooperative):

The portable bailer was extremely excited about this holiday. Partly because she was planning to JUMP OFF THE TRANSOM INTO THE SEA. With no lifejacket! So once we got down the river we found a fantastic bay, and it was warm and sunny (and very still), and we all put our togs on and... she jumped! I caught it on video camera, but I can't upload that many bytes, so you'll have to see a photo of her just before her second jump...

Firstborn dived...

As usual though, Pozz was actually the first in the water.

After an early dinner, we all had another round of swims and adventures. In fact Daughter set off in the kayak (which she can now point in the direction she wants, instead of using it at random), Pozz got in the sailing dinghy and Husband followed in the longboat. Then we played Cranium which we got for Christmas. It's the adult version, which means sometimes our six year old has to guess movies and songs she's never heard of, but that's kind of funny.

I'm reading Lord of the Rings aloud to the children, but when I'm too busy for that they listen to a Lemony Snicket audiobook. (They're up to The Penultimate Peril.) I'm also reading a Bill Bryson book and revising some coastal navigation. I'm not knitting anything at the moment, because, in my head, I am.... designing my first original lace shawl.... I'm so looking forward to getting started on that.

I miss my garden, the piano, online scrabble, friends... but I'm already going feral. After my swim today, I made my husband cut all my hair off. Feels great.

Oh, one other cute thing (other than the kids' huge excitement over this holiday). We've been playing Chinese whispers, but whenever it gets to Daughter, she changes it to, "Daddy is the kindest nicest person in the world". No matter what you put in, that's what comes out. Cute or what?

Sunny spring

2010-12-12T20:29:00.001-08:00

This spring has been the most bizarrely sunny, dry and summery ever. I am constantly having to water the garden, and I imagine farmers are tearing their hair out.

On the nice side, though, life's been a holiday.

This morning, I took the kids for a swim at our favourite secret spot, and Ben hurt himself so he and I couldn't swim. After dropping him at his grandmother's for some TLC, I returned to the swimming hole to get my gardening boots. I stood at the glistening green water, transfixed, for several long minutes before diving in. Boy, that water is warm and beautiful.

I like to swim out a little way and then pause in the deep water, looking at the city around me and marvelling that I live somewhere where clean and delicious water co-exists with a city of a million people. And yet I am cut off from the bustle and noise, enjoying delicious stillness and silence.

There is nothing like a solitary swim to fill up my heart with peace and joy. I was only in for a few minutes, but for the rest of the day, I feel salty and cool. I love that feeling of warming up afterwards. It's almost the best part.

Almost.

Garden log

2010-12-12T20:15:00.000-08:00

Just some boring pics to remember the state of the garden in December 2010.

This is our very lovely yellow zucchini which is fruiting nicely already.

Here is the main vege patch, which is actually dominated by two banana trees, the enormous grape vine, and cape gooseberries. We do still have some nice tomato plants, and small celery plants, silverbeet, and of course the ubiquitous parsley. And a strawberry, five years old and going strong.

In this photo I mainly wanted to capture the height of the flax in flower (hard to see but impressive once you do see it) and the even more impressive height of the magnificent kauri tree. I think this is the only one in the whole of LR bush that wasn't milled. I love it.

This year we are often eye-to-eye with tui feeding on our flax right outside our dining windows.

This is our northern orchard. Or that should be orchard-to-be, since all the plants are mere saplings, except for the banana mini-plantation. You'll note, too, that there seems to be something wrong with the mature banana trees. I'm so glad I transplanted some: if we do lose this lot, at least we have the others.

And the eastern part of the northern orchard: the tamarillo is truly dead (I have heard they're all dying hereabouts). But the plum and the apple are doing beautifully for such young trees, and the lemon, now that we're remembering to feed it, is taking off.

The southern orchard. More mature, but slower-growing, because the south bank is of course colder and darker. From left to right, apple, guava, plum, grapefruit, and tiny blueberry and feijoa. There are also a fig and another blueberry, out of sight.

Unexpected delights

2010-12-12T19:14:00.000-08:00

Sometimes the best moments happen when you least expect them.

This morning I was already sick of the grumping by ten in the morning, so when the children's lovely piano teacher proposed to take Daughter for a walk after her lesson, I left the boys (who had just banged into each other on the tramp, and hence were both grumpy and injured) to lie on their beds in their room, and took myself off for a morning coffee all by myself in the living room. Normally I like to read with them in their room - we call it the "mancave", but today I wanted some solitude.

After ten minutes, however, I needed some wool (which is kept in their room) so I went in to get it, and mentioned to Firstborn that I had been reading about stereopsis (ie the three dimensional vision that we get from having two eyes). I mentioned a relative who lacks stereopsis and they immediately wanted to know how he saw the world so I talked a bit about some of the clues that a monocular person has that enables him to still judge depth even though he cannot directly "see" it as we can.

Next thing I know, Firstborn is carrying out an experiment in which he is thrown a ball 15 times which he must catch with his right hand. For the first 15 throws, he can see normally; for the next 15, he covers his left eye with a piece of clothing, and then he tried 15 catches with his right eye covered. The result: 15 out of 15 with both eyes, 9 out of 15 with the left eye covered and 10 out of 15 with the right eye covered. I was impressed that he thought to include a "control" in his experiment, so we talked about that, and about one's hypothesis and conclusion. We also noticed that he actually improved a lot during the course of the 15 throws - a fascinating observation in itself. At the same time, Pozz is fascinated by my sketch of his chest of drawers which conveys a sense of depth using converging parallel lines. (He was charmed that the "further" vertical line looked the same length as the nearer one, but, measured with a pencil, was significantly shorter.)

So I started reading excerpts from my book to Firstborn (it is "The Mind's Eye", by Oliver Sacks). He suddenly very badly wanted to build a hyperstereoscope such as Dr Sacks describes making during his boyhood. I wanted one too! It seems such a device will enable you to see in "even better" stereovision, such as might be enjoyed by an alien with eyes a metre apart. (The closest thing on our planet is of course the hammerhead shark.) We were surprised not to find any instructions on how to make one on google. Dr Sacks only describes it as using "4 mirrors and a cardboard tube about a yard long". However, I think we have worked it out, so if you are googling "how to build a hyperstereoscope" I hope you made it here.

Basically, we think the device is like two periscopes, except that instead of holding it with the viewing lens above your eye, as you would in a submarine, you hold it with one viewer to the right of your eye and one to the left. Inside are two mirrors (in each "arm") angled at 45 degrees, as in a periscope, to transmit the image to each of your eyes.

So we are planning to get some mirrors, and an appropriate yard-long tube, and we'll get back to you. Apparently it is particularly good for viewing items on the horizon. The dome of a mosque, for example, which would normally appear flat, will swell into roundness. I can't wait.

In the meantime, I think we have covered physics, the scientific method, art (the discovery of how to draw in three dimensions during the Renaissance) and neurology, during what was meant to be my coffee break. Nice.

Plum tree

2010-12-03T23:48:00.001-08:00

Our plums are ripe early this year. We mulched and worm-tea'd. We have a good crop too.

Daughter's first attempt at a chapter book.

Microblogging

2010-11-26T01:53:00.000-08:00

I seem to be only capable of microblogging at the mo, so let's herd together some random facts, facebook-status-update style.

I always thought you could make fun of homeopathy by suggesting that people give their children homeopathic doses of poison. Since, after all, not a single molecule of the poison will be there, right? So it's safe. Only, umm.... what's the point?

Anyway I discovered today that I can't make fun of homeopathy this way because it is actually true. Belladonna is a homeopathic medicine. Don't worry, it can't hurt the little kiddies, because not a single molecule of the poison is actually found in the.... Oh man, where do I go with this?

The garden is chugging along quite nicely at the moment. It is an extremely dry and warm spring, so I'm having to water it a lot. The drought is helpful for getting rid of weeds though. I think I've got the weeds under the best control ever. However, my lawnmower man refuses to mow right to the edges like his predecessor, my fabulous lawnmower woman, used to. Perhaps it is time I learned to weedeat myself, as repeatedly asking him to mow right to the edge is getting tedious.

The extremely dry and warm weather meant that I had just the most fabulous swim at Brown's Bay with Pozz and Daughter today. Firstborn was at tennis. It surprises me that he doesn't complain about going to tennis while I go to the beach. I guess he's just different from me.

When Firstborn sneaks off to his room to read, I sneak off to join him. It's nice to just sit and read our separate books. I'm reading The Odyssey. He's reading trash mostly.

Pozz and Daughter and I finished our book of one hundred Greek myths. That was pretty nice. We're also up to Book 7 of the Series of Unfortunate Events - all on audio book which gives me a chance to do some knitting or listen in the car. Daughter reads to herself in bed now and is advancing rapidly. I tested her recently and her reading is ahead of her chronological age. The casual approach seems to work. Best of all, she loves it.

We went to Kiwibank to open accounts and it took nearly two hours. The children passed the time writing letters to Santa, since there was a large box labelled "Santa Mail" right outside the door of the tedious room where we spent our tedious two hours.

There was definitely a level of sarcasm in the ten year old's letters to Santa. The poor bank worker was trying to maintain the pretence that "you never know" and "it's important to believe". My kids were polite. She also complimented them on "thinking for themselves", which she said had led her to suspect they were homeschoolers. The irony escaped her.

Best part of Brown's Bay today was watching Pozz having such a nice time with his friend L9. The two 6yo siblings are trying to be part of this friendship and they are not excluded, but they don't really get it.

That's enough random recording of disjointed statements on sundry topics for one night.

Sweet moments

2010-11-15T01:57:00.000-08:00

Pozz got a new lego set for his birthday.

We've been watching a lot of MASH lately.

Daughter asked if she could be "nurse" when he made his lego set. Apparently that means she hands him the pieces while he constructs the set.

* * * * *

We're watching Hornblower on DVD. When the baddie, Simpson, reappears later in the episode, Daughter turns to me and says, "I wonder if he's realised yet that he shouldn't be mean to people."

I love that. Bad people are just people who haven't realised yet that you shouldn't be mean to people.

* * * * *

At Pozz's birthday party, he asked everyone to pause a moment just before singing happy birthday, to take note of the fact that it was his friend T4's birthday too. He loves sharing a birthday with T4.

* * * * *

Firstborn has started learning the piano. He practises about 5 times a day. It's GREAT.

* * * * *

At Pozz's birthday party I realised that he had all the kids playing "Greek Gods". How cool is that? Daughter likes to be Athene, while Pozz is the son of Poseidon. We actually read the first two chapters of Homer's Odyssey together, before Pozz decided he'd rather hear the adaptation. (The original is raaather slow - but Daughter still wanted more!)

Conventional wisdom

2010-11-11T02:44:00.000-08:00

I've recently been reading "Fooled by Randomness", in which the author observes that one of the disadvantages of his understanding of mathematics and the laws of probability is that it makes the people around him appear to be acting in a delusional manner.

Of course, this came across as quite funny: the idea that the people around you suddenly seem deluded as you yourself discover "the truth" seems unusual, unnerving, and silly. And yet, I am starting to think that it is quite a common experience. One becomes interested in a particular area of knowledge and begins to read books, research online, reflect, and learn. Often books lead to other books, as one's knowledge becomes refined - one might start with a general, "basic" book for wide readership, and move on to the more esoteric, technical works on the same subject. Eventually one reaches a point where one knows much more than the average person on the subject. Of course, one does not then purchase a t-shirt that says "Expert on Statistics and Probability" so in a sense, one is an undercover agent at this time. When the subject comes up in conversation, people spill their conventional wisdom to you without being aware that you are now a sleuth, or a market surveyor, or an undercover agent, dredging for "what the man on the street really thinks", in order to turn it over in your mind, not with contempt or disrespect, but with wonder and fascination.

And here's the rub: the man on the street, even if that man is your generally intelligent and thoughtful friend whom you deeply respect, is often so wrong as to be borderline delusional. The conventional wisdom suddenly seems so clearly self-contradictory and absurd, that it is a surprise to realise that this is what everyone believes. Everyone, that is, except those few who have become interested enough in the subject (and have had the time) to engage in careful and independent research. And how many people actually do that? On every subject that importantly affects our lives?

What also struck me is how this experience of one's friends and acquaintances seeming (almost) delusional is repeated in a number of different areas, until I wonder whether all "conventional wisdom" in pretty much all areas of human knowledge, is in fact delusional? How unsettling and bizarre!

Example: how children learn. Conventional wisdom has it that children learn when sitting still, preferably at a desk with pen in hand, filling in worksheets that are incrementally harder than those successfully completed yesterday. Regularity is key, so is starting young, and even sitting in the same chair in the same room at the same time of day as yesterday confers an advantage. The teacher of course must be professional trained and other students should be at the same age and ability level.

Delving into educational theory, one discovers that almost everything about this image is wrong. Sitting still is wrong for many children, especially at a desk. Some children cannot learn incrementally but must make bold leaps. Starting young often not only confers no advantage, but is in fact a positive disadvantage, even for an able child. Untrained, busy, unpaid parents teach better than professional teachers, and mixed-age learning situations offer advantages to both the older and the younger children. Learning in different settings and at varied times of day is optimal.

What I am presenting here is not simply two possible opinions: I am presenting "conventional wisdom" versus "the actual truth, as backed up by actual facts". Why are these two so at odds? Why do people cling to an unsupported and wrong theory for decades after clear evidence has established how very wrong it is?

Example 2: Nutrition. People are still carrying around a confused mishmash of theories about fats, protein, dairy, gluten, omega 3, antioxidants, and other buzzwords. The truth about nutrition is available to anyone who actually wants to research the area. I don't even want to get into it right now, but when you look at what people actually choose to eat, and compare it with their stated goals (often, to lose weight, or to avoid cancer or heart disease) well, I'm afraid it does come across as delusional!

Example 3: Science. People continue to misunderstand science and what it can do for their understanding of the world. They make vague, comforting comments about certain matters being "only a theory" or about science "not being incompatible with faith" or about it "not dealing in moral issues". A little investigation into what science can actually tell us will shatter all of these platitudes and lead to a new relationship between one's brain and the universe which, ironically, can best be described as a moment of revelation.

Example 4: Exercise. You really need to ask my husband about this. About why people get injuries when they exercise, and why they don't lose weight. It's SO OBVIOUS, if you actually do some dispassionate research on the topic. He often wonders why people exercise the way they do. The answer seems to be that people don't research the effectiveness of their exercise at all. Even though they hate to exercise, they would rather waste unpleasant hours doing so in a completely ineffective manner, than take the time to figure out how to exercise so that it actually worked. Similarly, they lose months of their lives to injuries which they could avoid with a simple understanding of biomechanics, at the same time throwing money at health professionals who simply do not and cannot help them. Delusional!

And now we have example 5: Statistics, probability, and investing your money. As the author of "Fooled by Randomness" established, the unexamined assumptions that people make, and their tendency to cherish any assumption that happens to be theirs, often leads to financial ruin. Surely the failure to take the time to understand mathematics as it applies to your financial investment - especially when you invest money for a living - is delusional.

Man, and I haven't even started in on homeopathy.

I suppose that some people reading this will say, "Oh but these things are all just your opinion". They're not though. The facts are out there. They exist in the world, and it is possible to go out and find them. When you find them you'll know you have "the facts" and not just "another opinion" because you'll have something that actually works. And it is satisfying to learn something and to know something. And then you get to think, in passing, about all the areas of knowledge which you have not yet researched, in which you still, like everyone else, rely on conventional wisdom. And that's humbling.

Friendship

2010-11-06T23:17:00.001-07:00

I like things alphabetical.

2010-10-30T23:27:00.000-07:00

See if you can figure out what two things are missing from this list.

secretary
doubt
muscle
handkerchief
love
halfpenny
gnome
honour
plait
(first missing word)
knife
salmon
mnemonic
autumn
leopard
psychopath
lacquer
forecastle
island
often
guard
(second missing word)
sword
bureaux
Pepysian
rendezvous

I did find words that I could put in the missing places, but I didn't like them much.

Spring blossoms

2010-10-25T01:38:00.000-07:00

Despite our neglect of the garden while tripping overseas, it's doing quite prettily.

The old-as-Firstborn feijoa trees that have to struggle round the south side of the house seem to have finally grown tall enough to get sun in winter. So now they are blossoming... will they fruit? Fingers crossed.

The grapefruit tree which took 7 years to fruit now produces beautifully. We've just finished last season's grapefruit and next year's blossoms are already making us promises.

This is the apple tree that came back from being chopped down at ground level when Daughter was a baby. Now it is ten feet high and produces about 70 apples. Our other two apple trees are also in blossom. I love apple blossoms. A lot.

Our grapevine is going mad and has grape buds everywhere. I just caaaaaan't waaaaaaait.....

The cape gooseberries seem to be always in bloom, but our new chicken - the one that lays green eggs - is too clever and has figured out how to get the fruit out of the lanterns. And she taught the other chickens. Well, I guess we still get to eat the gooseberries, in the form of beautiful healthy yokes.

I just pulled out the winter broccoli which had matured while we were travelling and which we have eaten since we got back. This one, however, had gone to seed, so I decided to keep it and harvest the seed. The flowers are also attracting lots of bees. We don't seem to have problems with having enough bees. Check out too the parsley - this is just a fraction of the parsley I have around at the moment. We have become callous, and pull out plants that annoy us for even the slightest reason.

Christmas plums - less than two months to go till we eat them!

Strawberries are small, having been almost smothered by weeds while we were away.

Mountain pawpaws. Daughter loves them.

Reading novels by my great-great-great-uncle and his lover

2010-10-24T12:01:00.000-07:00

When I was about 20 I discovered that my greatX3 uncle had written lots of novels which were read by everybody in my parents' generation and no one in mine. I promptly rushed out and got them from the library and read them all, and found that they were actually good, and I could see why a previous generation had been as glued to "The War of the Worlds" and "The Time Machine" as the present one is to "Twilight", and furthermore, I thought they were getting more bang for their buck, frankly, than we do.

Nonetheless, you can't change the march of time, and the fact is, that my g-3-uncle's books are not read (although Hollywood did recently make an awful blockbuster adaptation of War of the Worlds). Science fiction does tend to show its age more than other genres, although I felt that Wells' novels were not actually about science fiction, but about the human condition, like all good literature. Hence, still worth reading. But yes, I'm on my own here.

I must have encountered the fact that Wells, who was apparently not the nicest guy in his private life, had, while married to his second wife, fathered a son with the woman known as Dame Rebecca West (how ridiculous to be a dame), but for some reason, despite the fact that I was a rabid feminist at the time, I didn't follow up on this interesting lead, and find out more about her. The name Rebecca West was a mere shadow in my brain's unvisited corners, and I somehow had her confused with the novel "Rebecca" by Daphne du Maurier.

I saw that novel on a list of must-read books and read it while in Beijing, with a sense of finally having sorted out a source of tiny and peripheral confusion - like when you go on for years not quite sure how to spell or pronounce a word. (I could write more about what I thought of that novel, but I won't just now.) Then I realised several weeks ago that there was still another Rebecca whom I had not properly figured out, and looked up her best-known books on wikipedia, only to discover, with surprise, her connection with my family. An interesting echo is that her books also seem to have been widely read a generation or two ago, but are unheard-of today. At least, by me.

Rebecca West, whose real name was Cicily Fairfield, is immortalised surely by these words:

"I myself have never been able to find out what feminism is; I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute."

And was described by Time Magazine in 1947 as "indisputably the world's number one woman writer" and by the New Yorker in these terms:

"Rebecca West was one of the giants and will have a lasting place in English literature. No one in this century wrote more dazzling prose, or had more wit, or looked at the intricacies of human character and the ways of the world more intelligently."

And yet I hadn't heard of any of her books.

Well, that's all changed. Yesterday I read "The Return of the Soldier" which she wrote when she was 24. Within a few pages I was struck by the contrast between this novel and Hilary Mantel's widely acclaimed "A Change of Climate". [Spoiler alert! Contains plot details!] Both novels contain the death of a young child - a hidden death, in a sense - but in West's novel the death is hidden from one of the characters, while in Mantel's, it is hidden from us, the readers.

I have to admit to being quite exasperated with Mantel when finally I figured out that she had been holding back this information from us throughout most of her book - as if this long-delayed revelation, when it finally came, would "amaze the whole room". At risk of sounding dreadfully callous, the unspeakable horror of child abduction and murder has been done already - hasn't she read Ian McEwan? or The Lovely Bones? These are the bestsellers of only the past few years - it is not like she is resurrecting a theme that has fallen into disuse. In comparison, West simply opens her book with the dead child's mother standing in the disused nursery, drying her hair. It is as though she is saying, "Now we have established that there is a dead child, we can spend our novel exploring its implications, rather than having to wait tiresomely to be told what has been hinted at for one hundred pages."

(And yet "A Change of Climate" has been described as the finest work yet by one of Britain's finest writers. Well, I suppose critics will say anything. Don't get me wrong: Mantel's "Wolf Hall" is indisputably brilliant, and Husband informs me that another of her novels, "A Place of Greater Safety", is also brilliant, but unfortunately whenever he reads a novel he really really likes, he lends it to someone other than me, so I'm still waiting to read it.)

Now, there is also an enormous cultural divide between West's child, who died in, I think, 1911, and Mantel's, who died in, um, the 1970s or 1980s. I was prepared for this by having recently read Evelyn Waugh's novel "A Handful of Dust" which was written in 1934 and which also contained the death of the main characters' child. Both West and Waugh kill off the only, irreplaceable son and heir of their protagonists, and yet, while a deep sorrow, this loss is clearly secondary to the main concern of the book, which might be described as the tragic unravelling of a marriage.

In 2010 such priorities are unthinkable. Separation and divorce are commonplaces; our mantra is that "our children are the most important thing in our lives" and that, come what may, however our spouses may come and go, our relationships with our children "come first". Mantel's dead child is at the very centre of her novel, and while she is also describing a marriage ending, clearly the characters' first, greatest, and most enduring sorrow (and indeed, the deep hidden cause of the marriage breakdown) is the horrific loss of their child.

I am a child of my time, and I also feel that the death of one of my children would be a horror many magnitudes worse than the end of my marriage. And yet, I cannot help but feel that something is awry here, in literature if not in life. Perhaps it is that the love between parent and young child was never yet the stuff of great literature. It is too easy: they are darlings, light seems to shine from their sparkling eyes, their hair is the exact most beautiful shade of whatever colour it is, and when they open their mouths, out comes a stream of shockingly cute yet precociously intelligent words. Where is the conflict? Where the pain? Obviously the only things these cherubim can do worthy of creating enough human suffering to write a novel about, is to die. (Unless, of course, you are as clever and original as Lionel Shriver.) Even then, a parent's grief is too pure and simple for a novel: in order to explore people's darker sides, their machinations, their miscommunications, we have to return to the marriage breakdown theme - adult relationships again.

There is something infantile in our concern for our individual offspring which presents a greater tragedy than the death of any one of them. Terrified of "the worst", we purchase 5-star safety rated SUVs to ferry them about, don't allow them to walk unsupervised to the neighbour's, and become obsessed with the correct way to install the most expensive carseat. Meantime we close our minds to the proliferation of nuclear weapons, climate change, world overpopulation, and the suffering of children elsewhere in the world. The ironies are too obvious, and too numerous, to point out. I leave them with you.

Homeschool Camp

2010-10-22T03:53:00.000-07:00

We've just got back from homeschool camp.

Rotorua is a lot colder than our hometown. We froze all week, when we weren't in the hot pool.

All the same, the kids had a blast.

Pozz was quite good at archery. The bows didn't seem to disadvantage the lefthanded.

The smallest kids had a tug of war against the dads. Check out how hard Pozz and Daughter are trying. Check out Daughter's incredibly cute pink jeans. I wish I wasn't too grown up for pink jeans.

After a bit of personal trauma, Pozz actually did "the swoop", a swing where first of all your team mates winch you up to the top of the barn and then you are let go to swoop down almost to the floor. It looked scary, and apparently it was!

We took some time on the "free day" to visit Hell's Gate which is just opposite the camp. My daughter, a.k.a. the human sniffer dog, spent the entire time covering her nose in a futile attempt to block out the "Rotorua smell". She didn't understand why anybody would want to go and look at boiling mud pools. Clearly spoilt by her overseas adventures. Nothing impresses anymore....

... but then again, this is Miss Perpetually Happy And Easy To Please we're talking about here. So she was soon cheered by the chance to do some real live woodcarving. I have a nice shot of 6 homeschooled children all diligently carving wood but I'll stick to just putting my own children on the internet. Didn't they carve well though? Fooey to all those who speak of "fine motor skills issues" - clearly they just haven't found the right inspiring activity for The Boy before. (Firstborn isn't here because he was on the Horse Trek For Experienced Riders. Yes, I know he isn't really an experienced rider, but we know he can cope with wild Mongolian horses, so he would have been mortified to be put in the beginners' group.)

Daughter woke up on horse riding day with the words "Yay! I'm going horse riding today!"

Actually Daughter wakes up most mornings with "Yay! I'm doing [insert relevant activity] today!"

If there isn't anything specific planned, she'll just be delighted that it's morning.

She was by far the smallest horse rider, as opposed to those whose parents paid for them to sit on a horse while it was led round the barn. She was not the least bit afraid though.

That's her in the blue top heading off into the wild. And Pozz is on the whitish horse.

Clearly, when a child wants to learn something, lack of material is no obstacle. I had only packed one book to read to the children, an anthology of Greek myths. There were far too many words on each page and many words were far too hard. Nonetheless, Daughter went to bed every night with the book of Greek myths, and painstakingly spelled them out to herself.

At lunch, she spotted the number "75" on the bottom of her glass, and carefully spelled out the word "seventy-five" absolutely correctly. Even the bossy "e". Other times, she would just try to spell words that came into her head, such as the name of the child she was swimming in the pool with.

Pozz is totally living in the world of Greek mythology at the moment, but it doesn't extend to wanting to read them himself. It was quite cool though, how he could relate the Maori pantheon, as described at Hell's Gate, to the Greek one.

There are not many pictures of Firstborn, because he spend the week in a social whirl, hanging out with teenagers. Interestingly he didn't come away with any new real friends. For him it was all about the buzz of a group. When the inevitable mean guy tried to pick on him, he apparently just deflected it. I don't know where he gets the guts to do that, when he's ten, and they're fourteen. Of course, being able to keep up with pool and table tennis and real tennis, must help a little bit.

Pozz, on the other hand, hung out mostly with the one kid who he already knew and liked. And Daughter just thought all the other 6 and 5 and 4 year old girls were her new best friends. There's nothing so sweet as 6yo girls' sweet-natured play.

We finished our week of non-stop fun with a visit to the luge in Rotorua. This is Firstborn setting off on the advanced track.

And here we all are coming down in the gondola, on a perfect Rotorua spring morning.

And then we drove home, got caught in Auckland traffic, spent hours unpacking and doing washing and cleaning the house, went out for dinner, and watched Percy Jackson and The Lightning Thief on DVD so that Pozz could fully indulge his Greek myths obsession.

And now it's labour weekend - time to plant the garden.

Growing up

2010-10-03T20:28:00.000-07:00

When we took our children around Asia we hoped they would "grow up" a little on the trip. That was one of our major goals: that they mature as they encounter the great richness of experience the world has to offer them.

And they did, of course. At times, especially early on, we were disheartened by the realisation of how sheltered their lives had been, and consequently, how young they seemed at times. But as time went on, they really stepped up to the mark, and grew up.

(They also grew up literally - I hadn't expected them to need bigger shoes and trousers on a 3-month trip, but they did.)

However, one thing I didn't envisage was how different things would seem back home, as a result of my children having grown up so much. Somehow, I feel like I left home with "young children", and came back with "older children". The main difference is that I used to have 3 children who were all very happy to amuse themselves at home for the vast majority of the time. We did go out often, but I also liked to say that we were putting the "home" back into "home education", and that not having to rush out the door each morning was one of the blessings of the lifestyle we had chosen.

Daughter is still pretty much in this realm, but the boys both seem to have changed, Firstborn especially. Now, he seems bored and restless when he is at home. It is as if he has suddenly reached the age where he wants to go out into the world, and spending time at home is an occasional respite rather than his main way-of-being.

I am struggling to adapt. I am naturally a homebody, and we live in a home where there is lots to do. I could quite happily stay at home most of the time. One of my concerns about home education was that I didn't want to drive my children vast distances every day, both because of the environmental impact and because I didn't like the "taxi-driver" model of parenting.

If we lived in a hunter-gatherer tribe, quite clearly Firstborn would have reached the age where he wanted to join the able-bodied adults when they went out to hunt. Unfortunately, his dad works in an office, not a primaeval forest, and there really isn't much for an active adventurous kid to do there. So I am left with a soon-to-be adolescent still under his mother's wing. It isn't ideal.

Over the school holidays last week, Firstborn joined a school holiday tennis programme and absolutely loved 3 hours of active competitive sportsmanship at the start of each day. How I would love it if there was such a thing available more often. A sports academy for kids who received their academic education elsewhere would be just the thing for him. His academic needs are being fully met in the home, but with a younger brother who is not into sporting games, a sister who is much too young, a mother who has to force herself through even ten minutes of anything involving a ball, and a father who is seldom home in daylight, we are not providing him with enough sporting opportunities.

Term 4 is approaching and I am planning to do my best to offer more adventure and interest in the kids' lives. I don't believe in offering them endless "fun" - that's not my mission in life - but nor do I want them to be bored. So, I've signed Firstborn up for tennis, which is his new great passion, as well as summer soccer. All 3 will be doing swimming with the lovely B family, and Firstborn and Daughter are starting piano lessons. In addition, they'll keep going to Grandma's every Monday, we'll see the lovely JL once a week for movie-making, and we'll try to fit in geocaching on Mondays as well. Then there is drama on Tuesdays and I'm trying to find out about a martial art for Pozz. And then there'll be weekends away and playdates with friends and lots of spontaneous moments.

It sounds like a lot, doesn't it? Perhaps they'll start to appreciate their quiet moments at home. We'll see.

Books

2010-09-25T19:55:00.001-07:00

I thought I'd write a little update on our reading lately since I haven't really felt like blogging much. So this way, I don't neglect you entirely, while not boring you with my fairly ordinary life which I lack the inspiration to make interesting just now!

The kids have lately been extremely keen on the Skulduggery Pleasant series by Derek Landy. This has been pretty much totally against my philosophy of not reading my young children scary stuff that might give them nightmares. However, sometimes the love is just so great, it would be a mistake not to go with it. Pozz asked me to read the first one to him, and at first I thought I might try to do it when Daughter was at soccer, but it turned out she really wanted to hear it too, and for the next few months they pretty much lived the Skulduggery Pleasant series. The latest instalment came out a couple of weeks ago and we read it in long sessions and finished it in less than a week. It was pretty shocking at times, and I have to admit I skipped some of the more gruesome parts. But they didn't get nightmares. I guess the boys are a lot older than they used to be, and Daughter, well, she's just pretty indestructible most of the time.

So we took books 2, 3 and 4 with us travelling, and finished them before we left Turkey, and after that, Pozz discovered that the next best thing to having SP read out to him, was to make up his own version of it. So, that is how he started writing his 'novel'. Since his reading and writing skills are not up to it, I scribed for him, and we now have a 100+ page novel in electronic form. Husband is at pains to point out that it is no work of literary genius, but to me, the impressive part of it was the dedication, the perseverance, and the vision. OK, so there were a lot of similarities with the Skulduggery books that inspired the novel, but hey, it's not like he's trying to get it published, and there was still a lot of originality and creativity in the work that he did.

The next book that we read while travelling was White Fang by Jack London, which we bought in Tehran. It starts with a very readable chapter about a pair of Alaskan travellers being pursued by a hungry wolf pack. After that the novel gets a lot slower and, at times, kind of philosophical and expository and not very made-for-children. However, Daughter continued to love it to bits, so we kept reading. There are lots and lots of long words, but I thing she was buoyed along by her love of wolves and other Arctic creatures, and that pretty much goes for Pozz too. After all there was a wolverine in this story! We had to stop White Fang when Daughter went to Sweden with Husband, but we started it again on the TransSiberian Express and everyone managed to pick it up. And it does end as excitingly as it begins.

On the TransSiberian we also read "The Endless Steppe" by Esther Hautzig, which I had loved as a child. It was of course cool to be reading it in Siberia - like Esther, we experienced Siberia as an unexpectedly hot place. Unlike Esther, we did not stay long enough for that to change. Daughter and I loved it, while Pozz was less enthusiastic, and Firstborn spent half the time reading his own book, and didn't follow all of it. Firstborn read "The Tomorrow Code", a couple of Sherlock Holmes, and an Ian Ranking book that he didn't like.

I had a whole lot of other books that I planned to read the children while travelling, but we ended up having less time to read than I thought, and so we returned home without having even started "Angel on the Square" which I had thought we would have read before getting to St Petersburg. It's still on the waiting list. Instead, since returning home we have read the last Skulduggery Pleasant (number five), the latest Charlie Small (which the children have all kind of grown out of, but which we read for old times' sake), and a number of picture books and non-fiction and Greek myths.

The Greek myths are driven by Pozz who has a real interest in them. As usual, his interest is clearly delineated - he has no interest in Roman, Norse, or Persian myths. Greece or nothing, thank you. I am quite enjoying the break from a novel-length book.

The non-fiction centres on crocodilians (particularly gharials, though there's very little about them in the library) and wars. Again, both of these are Pozz's interests, but the others get into them too.

My own personal reading has been two books by Christiane Bird: "Neither East Nor West" which is about her travels as a solo American woman in Iran (with reminiscences of her childhood in pre-revolutionary Iran to add an extra dimension of interest), and "A Thousand Sighs, A Thousand Revolts" which is about Kurdistan, and which I've just started.

I found "Neither East Nor West" to be extraordinarily reminiscent of my own travels in Iran. Like me, the author was fascinated by the Kurds, and it seemed almost eerie when I learned that she had returned to write about the Kurds. That is what I would have done if I had been her. I'd love to travel in Iran and then write about it, except that I'd pretty much be writing exactly what she had. Like me, she was fascinated with the mis-portrayal of the Iranian people by the western media. Like me, she found the people amazingly gracious, civilised, and hospitable, and that they defied any attempt to classify them or pin them down. Like me, she was fascinated by the role of Islam in Iranian society, and the extent to which a people are defined by their religion. And like me, she came away wanting to know more about the Kurds. I think even more so than the Persians, the Kurds are mischaracterised by the media. There is something gracious and gentle and civilised about them which simply doesn't fit with their image as terrorists and peasants. And so every time I meet someone who tells me that northern Iraq (Iraqi Kurdistan) is actually a reasonably safe place to travel, I think to myself, hmmm, maybe, maybe.....

So I guess it would be fair to say I've been suffering from restlessness since returning to NZ. Part of me wants to go back to Iran, part of me is afraid that I couldn't possibly enjoy it as much second time around. And in any case, there are the practicalities of going back, and the fact that I don't have a skill that would make me employable there. I kind of wish I was a doctor or a nurse and I could go and work in a hospital there, soaking up the culture and the language. Or maybe I could set up some kind of English language school, except that then, I wouldn't learn Farsi. Anyway, this is really just a little escapist fantasy because my husband does actually have a job here, which he can't just go and relocate to another country. But it's nice to dream.

I think one of the biggest things that attracted me was the feeling of a more communal way of being which seemed to fit with the way I naturally am.

Anyway, that was a bit more than just the books we're reading. Pen ran away with me. Or keyboard. Or something.

Teeth and unschooling

2010-08-25T04:37:00.000-07:00

Of course you want to know all about my children's teeth.

Daughter still has all her baby teeth. She's been complaining about a sore lower jaw lately and my friend who knows tooth stuff told me that that will be her 6yo molars coming through. I'm quite surprised that a child of mine is getting 6yo molars on time, but anyway, I went off and told Daughter.

She was so excited. I'm getting new TEETH? Really? How many? Four? FOUR? It made her day.

I love the way things like that make her day.

Pozz likes to pull his teeth out as soon as he finds they are wiggly. I mean it. "Mum, I think my tooth is wiggly..... [LOUD, HORRIBLE CLICK]... Mum you owe me $2!". Lots of blood. It's revolting.

So we were all surprised when the baby tooth that was wiggly when we left NZ, made it all the way through Asia and back to NZ. The adult tooth has come all the way down behind it and wedged it into place at a freakish sideways angle. Pozz calls it his vampire tooth and refuses to wiggle it. I think it might stick around for some time.

Firstborn - well we are just happy when he gets no more fillings, poor child.

End of trivial tooth data.

Daughter has been making my day recently in her usual wonderful way. She found her knitting (which we didn't take with us overseas) and said, as though she had found candy, "MUM! Let's sit up on the couch together and have a knitting bee! RIGHT NOW!". So we did.

"Mum, knitting is just the best thing in the world. Knitting and gardening are such fun. The boys don't think they are fun but they are. I just love knitting. I just love the way that the wool feels warm on my hand while I'm knitting."

Isn't she perfect?

She did a similar rave the whole time we were gardening together yesterday too. And today. "Mum I try to just pull out one weed, but then I see another and I have to pull it out too, and next thing you know, I've been here ages. I just love gardening with you Mum."

She's just blissful, that's what she is. Even if you hated gardening, who couldn't be converted with this little person keeping you company? You should hear the excitement when she starts eating the parsley or the cape gooseberries - or anything.

I've been keeping a note of some of Pozz's questions, just so I can remember how intensely and uniquely he explores his world. So here's a quick cut+paste job on that:

If you painted something ultraviolet would it be invisible? Or would you be able to see through the paint? Which religion invented the swastika? And what does it mean in India?

If your bones were made of titanium, would you be really strong? If you didn't have bones, could you move at all? Do tentacles have muscle in them? What's the second least densely populated country in the world?

Are there ever any new atoms created? How does my body grow without creating new atoms?

What is the population of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland? Separately please and together. What are their official languages? How many people speak Portuguese? Which is the largest Spanish-speaking country? What are the world's most spoken and rarest languages, in order please? How many different languages are spoken in China?

How did Genghis Khan and Stalin die?

Can I bake an orange cake? Can I make caramel icing?

Can you tame a wolverine? What if you got it when it was a baby?

Meanwhile, Firstborn is keenly making lots of stop motion videos, and learning Mandarin.

I don't quite know how we can be so busy already, but we are. But in a good way.

Hoodie pics for Sarah

2010-08-20T03:39:00.001-07:00

Any chance to show off my knitting - here are the two hoodies I knitted my boys back in 2008, out of Knit2Together. At least I think it was that book, I'd better double-check ay? Quick check on ravelry - ah yes it's the Santa Cruz Hoodie.

Oh how nice it is to look at that photo and remember how close my boys were back then, and as I'm typing this, I'm being a very bad mummy and letting them stay up late (it is Friday, ladies) because I can hear them making a stop motion movie together and they are still so close and lovely.... and hey, don't you know all the best unschooling happens when they're meant to be in bed?

So anyway, the hoodie, Sarah: You'll see I only did the edging around the hood on Pozz's hoodie, because I'm not really into siblings dressing the same so it had to be a bit different. (But you see Firstborn really wanted one after he saw Pozz's.)

And here's a pic that I included because it also shows the awesome beanie that Firstborn knitted for Pozz, and the awesome beanie that Firstborn knitted for himself, and the awesome cardie that I knitted for Daughter. Awesome knitting all round, ay? And guess what? They all still wear all these things, so that's 3 winters and going strong.

Oh and this was the closest I could get to showing you the cool front pocket, but sorry, you can only see the top half of the cool front pocket, which Daughter covets badly. And Pozz has his eyes shut, but he's still totally gorgeous.

Anyway, there are still more posts coming from our giant clockwise circle around Asia.... honest....

Mongolia

2010-08-14T21:27:00.000-07:00

Our 5 days in Mongolia have ended. We had 3 days at a ranch in the north, followed by 2 days in Ulaanbaatar.

The highlight of the ranch was horseriding, but unfortunately, the promise of "all the horseriding you want" in the email which confirmed the booking, was not lived up to. We went only once in 3 days, and only for 2 hours. The ranch owners seem unable to find their horses, and overbooked their accommodation so that there were not enough to go around anyway. The good thing though was that Firstborn and Husband got to gallop across the Mongolian steppe. Firstborn absolutely loved it and was not frightened at all. He is the kind of kid who would just hop on a horse and gallop. Bit-by-bit lessons don't suit him, in any subject.

The Mongolian steppe is hme to many creatures quite alien to us kiwis. Husband saw a snake in the dunny, and I saw fogs leaping in dried puddles. The dragonflies and other flying insects were enormous, and cool. I enjoyed seeing horses, cows and goats roaming free, although it was not so cool when the horses couldn't be found, nor when one spotted possibly rabid and fierce roaming dogs.

There was very little else to do on the ranch, however, and while that might be the point for some city-weary travellers, it didn't quite fit with the promise of joining in at a working ranch. The work being done during our stay was not agricultural: building a pizza oven and making boxes for a mining company are both too boring and too skilled for volunteer labour. And the one sheltered, clean place to ahng out was generally blasted with loud music. So, all in all, it was an effort to have a good time there. But we read books, went for family walks, played cards, wrote, and knitted. It was, at the very least, an insight into life in rural Mongolia.

We caught the overnight train to Ulaanbaatar, and there we encountered Mongolian inefficiency on a more systematic scale. The train station does no sell train tickets. We had to hunt at length for the building that does. Oh, the big sign says Bank, but the tiny sign says Rail Ticket Office. Oh but it's shut. Come back later When you do, we'll tell you the trains are all full anyway, and your only option is a local train to the border town. Of course you have to find another building, also not at the train station. The train station has no room to sell tickets, what with all the space dedicated to selling flowers, sweets, newspapers, and "duty free shopping". In this completely unsignposted building, you queue for an hour, pushed by the people behind you, constantly battling with queue-jumpers, holding your sleeping daughter. Only to be told these trains are all full too. Magic.

The city is squalid, even though the litter levels are significantly better than Turkey. The traffic is outpaced by a tired, 6yo girl on foot, even at midday. And we have been warned of pickpockets and nazi graffiti (from the growing Mongolian nazi movement, believe it or not), of the unsmiling stares, of the air pollution. In this city, children flee violent homes and in the absence of a foster care system, end up living in the sewers, the only place warm enough to survive the dreadful Mongolian winters. But, I can't help but feel good. As a child, I found Ulaanbaatar on a map, and it represented to me the most remote place on earth. Now, I am here. The signs are in Cyrillic script, but this isn't Russia. The faces belong to the far east. The babies are incredibly, edibly cute.

And one of the reasons we made this trip was to introduce the children to their own privilege. Ulaanbaatar offers a crash course. A boy, aged 4 or 5, comes up to us, hand outstretched, aggressively demanding money. He is unbelievably filghty, and his shorts are falling down, revealing a lack of underpants. He steals Ben's water bottle. I rush to get it back, unable to explain my concern that he will catch a coldsore from it. (Ben is suffering from his first one.) A few minutes later this poor child comes and throws stones at us. The children are incredulous, but with pity, not outrage. Daughter is concerned that he cannot possibly cross roads safely without a parent, yet clearly, none is around.

We have lost all pretence of immersing ourselves in Mongolian cuisine and enter the Cafe Amsterdam for bacon and eggs (a mere NZD5 each) with delight. Outside it, we encounter a quadruple amputee begging on the streetside. We see him several more times. He appears to be gathering a reasonable amount of money, but in a county where they print 10 togrog notes (ie one NZ cent) it is hard to tell. We give him money and food. The children are deeply affected. Pozz says he is scary, Firstborn says it is kind of mean to call him that, and I can see that Pozz knows this, but is still deeply shocked by the sight of those short limbs. There is the shock at the condition itself, and then the shock that such an unfortunate man must also beg on the street, rain or shine. How does he get there?

It feels like the children have changeed. They have become more resourceful, disciplined, and self-contained. They play cards together, they walk for hours. When we take them somewhere they enjoy, such as Ulaanbaatar's military museum, they are clearly grateful. They communicate better with strangers (including some very strange strangers!). They hold their grizzles in for much longer. They give up their pleasures for others.

It is fair to say we have been a lot stricter with them, seeing the reality of life for children in all but the richest countries. The way some NZ families live seems, to be honest, like a fantasy made possible only by incredible privilege (even though those families are not wealthy and would not consider themselves to have any particular privileges). And yet, the children we meet for him self-determination is an unheard-of concept, and for whom discipline is a necessity from an early age, seem to have happier lives, with opportunities of all sorts opened up to them.

I believe there is no need to raise children with hatred, anger or shame. Children should not be left alone and frightened at young ages - whether on a street corner or at school. I certainly don't romanticist the lives of the poor. I tis the children of upcoming countries like Iran who seem to strike a balance between reality and hope.

We did see some smiling faces and outstretched hands in Ulaanbaatar. Our family attracts approval. Western children are clearly still a rarity there, although adult westerners are everywhere.

To me, the tragedy of Ulaanbaatar's poverty is that it co exists beside crass wealth. Foreigners are mining this country, the most sparsely populated on earth, with its pristine desert an dsteppe, and yet the Mongolians do not get enough of the flowing wealth to house and clothe their children. This is not a financial necessity. This is mismanagement. Someone is granting those mining licences without ensuring sufficient royalties are paid to clothe the children whose nation is being exploited. I would like to do something for the stone throwing dirty beggar child. But I feel helpless in the face of this alien and inscrutable country.

Green Siberia

2010-08-14T21:18:00.000-07:00

(Note: this post was written longhand in Siberia and is being uploaded now that we are back home in New Zealand.)

Wednesday 28 July 2010, 6pm

We are in the hydrofoil leaving Lake Baikal. We arrived early yesterday morning, stepping off the Trans Siberian Railway in Irkutsk, on the Angara River. At lunchtime we caught the hydrofoil 70km downriver to Listvyanka, and then along the coast of this enormous lake to Bolshie Koty, a tiny village where we had booked a simple wood cabin for the night.

The rest of my family didn't like it quite as much as I did, but I found it a magical place. The lake itself is flat and calm and a particularly pure shade of blue. Towards the horizon it becomes beautifully misty, especially to the north where the lake continues far out of sight - 600km north towards the Arctic, in fact.

The village itself is almost unspoilt rural Siberia. I say "almost" because one monstrous rich person's ugly mansion mars the beachfront, complete with fence down to the water. apart from that, the village has communal, run-down jetties, decrepit wooden bridges over its central stream, dirt tracks. Horses, cattle, dogs and chickens wander freely through the green lanes - they seem to be the only thing keeping down the luxuriant grass. A rusting old boat occupies prime position on the waterfront, and the houses are small and of unpainted wood. Yet it is pretty, the windows are adorned by traditional Siberian colourlly painted shutters, and the gardens of flowers and vegetables are flourishing. There are trees everywhere, the fences are low, the scale is human. Children, including ours, wander unsupervised, safe in the absence of cars, or any escape route for a would-be observer. This village is more accessible in winter than in summer: when the lake freezes, cars can drive over the ice to reach it from Listvyanka. In summer, only the daily boat allows access. There is no road.

The best thing though is the lake, visible from the entire village. We swam in it yesterday and today. Because the last winter was harsh, it was only 10 degrees - normally it reaches 18 in summer, despite being frozen as late as April. We saw fish swimming with us, and it felt quite special to see a horse drinking nearby as we swam. It was so scold that our feet burned, but it was bliss to warm up afterwards in the pleasant Siberian sun, feeling so clean. Such a contrast from our 3 relaxed days on the train, but at the same time, very relaxed. Daughter played on the beach, looking at stones and building a stone-castle in that fabulously self-amusing way some children have. Husband read "The World According to Garp", I knitted, and the boys wandered the village or played poker on a patch of grass.

There were many colourful butterflies everywhere we walked, and many Russians sunning themselves, only half dressed, although few braved Lake Baikal. We are glad we did, and not just because it apparently adds 20 years to one's life.

Belgium

2010-07-15T13:51:00.000-07:00

Here we are in Belgium. When our friends unexpectedly left New Zealand a year ago, Firstborn was sure he would never get to see his mate again. But I pointed out to him that of course we have to go to Germany from time to time to visit our family, and once we have gone all that way it would be stupid not to travel a few hours on the train to see our friends as well.

The short train ride turned into a very long train ride - we actually had to get a hotel voucher from the train company and spend a night in Cologne in a hotel, due to many of the trains being cancelled because of severe weather. But we woke up the next morning, had the fanciest breakfast ever, and set off at last to Belgium. Now there are ten of us living in a house that is just like those terraced houses in a Shirley Hughes book (which I have always thought look so groovy). Fortunately we do not feel crowded because everyone is at ease with everyone else. The Belgians are very welcoming. The existing friendships were of course renewed instantly and it feels like it has only been a week since we last saw each other, although it is actually a full year. But everyone also had to adjust to the man and girl who had this house to themselves before our friends moved in with them, who were strangers to us, and these two have been the most welcoming of all. Perhaps it is reasonable to expect this from an adult, but the little girl is only 8 and speaks no English, and yet she has taken this invasion of her home in her stride. She and Pozz had a wonderful play together tonight in her grandmother's swimming pool, despite the lack of any common language. In fact we have 3 eight year olds in this house, as well as 2 six year olds and a ten year old. We have to count them each time we get on and off buses and trains, but other than that it's all good.

There are wonderful gluten free foods in Germany and Belgium.

We go to Paris on Sunday.

Sprachst du Deutsch?

2010-07-11T00:16:00.000-07:00

The child in front of me is David's child. He has the quaint seriousness that David had as a child.

I have realised that I can either wait for him to learn English, or start speaking my appalling German to him. David died when he was 18 months old, and, unlike his brother, he is not bilingual.

"Was ist das?"

I point to a dark blue blanket.

"Deka."

What a weird word for blanket. In New Zealand it is a department store. Later I learn that it is actually "decke". Like little ships, Germans cover themselves with decks when they go to bed.

How do I ask what colour it is? "Blue," I say. (After all, the child does actually have far better English than I have German, it is just that he has the child's natural reticence about using it.)

"Blau. Dunkul blau." Then he points to something light blue. "Hell blau."

Awesome. He's teaching me the exact shade. Definitely his father's child. "Dunkul blau." I say. He shakes his head. My pronunciation is not up to scratch. Then, very slowly, "DUN-KUL..."

"Dunkul," I repeat. A slight nod. Approval. Phew.

"BLAU."

"Blau," I repeat. Carefully.

"HELLBLAU."

"Hellblau."

No, that's not it. The head shakes again. The eyes, hellblau themselves, are looking at me very intently. "HELL..."

"Hell..."

"...BLAU."

"...blau."

"HELLBLAU."

"Hellblau."

The nod of approval again. We move on. Braun. Grün. Schwartz. Weiß. Rot. Lila. Orange. Gelb. Some of these colours come back to me from third-form German, a deeply buried part of my brain.

If I want to speak to my younger nephew and his grandmother, I must learn German. Fortunately, it is quite fun. Firstborn points out to me some rules. If in doubt, just use the English word, but change "th" to "d". "Then" is "den". Also change "w" to "v" (only when pronouncing it) and "t" to "s". Thus, "water" is "Wasser". Gutter is "gusser". To eat is "essen".

Sometimes, German is softer than English. Eggs are eier. An egg is an eye. What a pretty word. But generally, you are safer to add in a "g" or a "ch" sound. I is "ich". Elbow is "ellenbogen". Rainbow, gorgeously, is "regenbogen". You need a G in every syllable apparently.

Then there are some words that are surprising. Sea and library are the French words - meer and Bibliotheque. Don't ask me why. "From" is pure Latin - ab. I think the reason that these Romantic inroads into the language are so surprising is because the rest of the time there is something hobbit-ish about German. I mean, any language that uses ß for ss, is bound to look like it should be scratched onto the outside of a cauldron inside a scary mediaeval fortress. It makes me wish my name was Melißa just so I could use that cool letter more. Apparently the German authorities have banned the letter ß in favour of the more modern "ss". ßtuff them I ßay! I'm going to uße it whenever I damn well pleaße! They do this though - man, theße people have ruleß for everything!

There is a good side to the constant regulation. You know how you can't go to the hot pools and just pay for two hours, you have to go for the whole day? Not in Deutschland. Here, the answer is very simple. You get a card when you go in and pay for the time you expect to be there for, and you have to put this card through a machine when you go out. If you stayed longer than you paid for, you have to pay more in order to get out alive. Aweßome. Look how restrained I am being here, not making a joke about the showers.

And then there is the fact that when you go to the Mt Albert wave pool, you have to keep half an egg (oops, I mean half an eye) on your belongings all the time in case someone steals your cellphone. The Germans of course have thought of a solution. You get a locker and the key to the locker is waterproof. You strap it to your wrist with an adjustable strap and then you leap in the water and enjoy your swim, knowing all your belongings are locked up. It's all perfect, until you go down the hydroslide and scrape a big gash out of your knee with that same key.

The problem is though, you see, as an adult, you're not expected to go down the hydroslides. I was certainly the only mother there. I did spot another woman going down once in the 3 hours we were there (and I was looking!) but she turned out to be English.

Bizarrely, even the German children seem to have absorbed a certain amount of conformity, and none of them wanted to leap off the diving board. I am not sure what it is there for. Firstborn says he saw some other children leaping off it. What I saw was my two kiwi sons, flipping and somersaulting and doing what I previously thought of as "what kids do", but which I will now think of as "what New Zealand kids do".

Most surprising of all to me was the fact that every single child at the hot pools, other than my own sons, was fat. It made me realise how much, in New Zealand, we still see childhood obesity as a Polynesian problem. The majority of white New Zealand children are still skinny, active kids. Not so in Germany. I guess there isn't a racial minority to carry this burden. So the German kids, well, to put it simply, they are all fat. The problem is so universal that I suspect everyone here has forgotten what children are supposed to look like. They probably think my children are sick or malnourished.

Sometimes you have to travel in order to see your own country. Now I see New Zealand as a country where at least some of the children are still a healthy weight. Yay for that. It also took Germany for me to realise that in New Zealand, you never see a white middle class woman smoking in front of her children. It is rare that she smokes at all but if she does, she does so in private.

Oh and I thought the ice creams in New Zealand were big, but you should see them here. They need names like "the Death Star" to do them justice. The Germans also put sugar into everything, even their mineral Waßer. Here they actually believe the American line that if you call sugar something else, like "fructose", it won't make you fat. Hell, call it something fancy enough and it becomes a health food!

We are here for one and a half more days. I haven't yet blogged half of my impressions of the place. The heat, the greenery, the flowers, the mediaeval buildings, will have to wait for another time. So will the blossoming friendships of the children. Ciao for now.

The lıttle thıngs

2010-07-01T11:54:00.000-07:00

Sometımes ıt's the lıttle thıngs about travellıng that you want to remember.

Crossıng the road. In Turkey ıt seems back to normal after the chaos of Iran, but I've heard travellers who have just got here from the west exclaımıng about how dangerous ıt ıs. In Iran, there appear to be no traffıc laws. People drıve eıther way down a one way street and red lıghts serve no purpose at all. Pedestrıan crossıngs are a waste of paınt. And yet people get across the road. They walk out, and the cars don't stop, but somehow they get across. Iranıans are very cıvılısed. They never run across the road, even when they have chosen a splıt-second gap between cars to get across a multılane street. There's obvıously a knack to ıt. At fırst, the only way to cross the street ıs to make sure you cross wıth an Iranıan, who must be closer to the traffıc than you are. But after a whıle, you realıse you can do ıt too.

The chıldren. In Iran you dıdn't see chıld labour, at least not untıl we got to Tabrız, whıch feels lıke part of Turkey. We also only encountered two beggars, both older women. In Turkey there are chıldren on street corners sellıng tıssues ın the hot sun, and sellıng the opportunıty to weıgh yourself on scales.

Eatıng dınner ın Dıyabakır, there ıs Kurdısh TV playıng ın the dıner. Apparently ıt ıs broadcast from Denmark. The Kurds want theır own TV channel to nurture theır language, but, they tell us, the Turkısh government wıll not allow ıt. There ıs vıolent footage playıng. Husband starts to explaın to Pozz what a molotov cocktaıl ıs. He stıcks a paper napkın ın a plastıc water bottle to demonstrate. The restaurateur comes over and tells us that ıf we want to see the damage caused by molotov cocktaıls, just look out the wındow over there at the burn marks on the bank. OK. So we all go and have a look. Hmmmm. We have already decıded to hıre a car as people are blowıng up buses ın thıs part of the world. We know there are hundreds of buses ın Turkey, but we don't want to spend the whole bus rıde waıtıng for the boom. So anyway, we sıt back down at the table, smılıng polıtely, and the restaurateur decıdes to gıve us a lıve demonstratıon. He pulls out hıs cıgarette lıghter, lıghts the paper napkın, and hurls the flamıng bottle across the room. It hıts one of hıs staff. Everyone collapses ın gales of laughter. Includıng us. I guess you had to be there.

I keep seeıng people who remınd me of people. Fırst our hotelıer ın Mardın, who looked lıke my grandfather, and seemed to know only one Englısh word, 'money', whıch he saıd to us whenever he saw us. He even asked Pozz for money when Pozz slıpped out of the room to go to the toılet. In the next cıty, Dıyabakır, I ran ınto a cheap lookıng hotel and met my other grandfather, the nıce one, who offered me a cıgarette whıle I was lookıng around the hotel. Sıxty lıra a nıght (about NZD55). I decıde we can cope wıth the communal toılets. (The chıldren do not feel the same.) Anyway, my nıce grandfather follows hıs offer of cıgarettes wıth plenty of free chaı, endlessly replenıshed cold water (whıch ıs very welcome), and free food for the chıldren. He was great.

We catch a bus ın İstanbul and Husband's grandfather sıts down besıde me. Unlıke my grandparents, thıs one ıs alıve and kıckıng ın Auckland so my chıldren know hım and I am able to ask them ıf they see the resemblance too? Yes, they had all thought the same. Just lıke the real one, thıs one ıs polıte and solıcıtous and trıes to offer hıs seat to Daughter, who ıs on my knee.

But the most ımpressıve doppelganger was surely George Clooney. Dıd you know George Clooney works at a restaurant ın İstanbul? Well, at least, he looked so ıncredıbly lıke hım that I actually thought for a moment that Husband had spotted George Clooney wanderıng around İstanbul and had somehow engaged hım ın conversatıon. Then when I realısed he was just a lookalıke, I couldn't stop laughıng for about fıve mınutes. Apparently he gets thıs all the tıme. The guy should go to Hollywood and get work as a body double.

In Dıyabakır Husband's mobıle phone was stolen. My husband has a penchant for catchıng thıeves, so he chased the guy who had grabbed the phone out of hıs hand, and caught up to hım too. However, when the thıef pulled a knıfe, Husband decıded ıt was prudent to walk away. Later that day, we went back to vısıt the scene of the crıme. Suddenly shopkeepers were crowdıng around us. They all shut theır shops and got together to confer over what could be done. They seemed to have some sort of plan, but we dıdn,t speak enough Turkısh to know what ıt was. They dıdn't speak a word of Englısh. So ınstead, they decıded to shower us wıth free food and drınk, to make amends for the dıshonesty of theır countryman. And they all apologısed to us sıncerely on hıs behalf. The ırony ıs that the ı-phone had cracked glass. Husband has another one, and only brought thıs broken one along as a spare. I wonder what the thıef thought of my husband pursuıng hım so relentlessly for the sake of a broken phone.

We leave İstanbul tomorrow. Tomorrow wıll be a wholly dıfferent chapter ın our journey. We wıll be wıth famıly and ın a country where the language ıs at least vaguely famılıar and thıngs are much more lıke NZ. They mıght even understand concepts lıke 'vegetarıan'. I'll keep you posted.

In other news, Pozz ıs wrıtıng a novel. Each nıght we wrıte about half a chapter. I have to wrıte ıt down for hım. Daughter ıs wrıtıng her own novel. The chıldren are also playıng cards together quıte a lot.

Yesterday we went to the Rahmı M Koç museum whıch was a tram-and-bus-rıde away, but clearly worth ıt, as the kıds all wanted to go back today. Pozz was partıcularly ınto the dıfferent types of vıntage cars whıch were on dısplay. Daughter lıked the old traıns.

Reverse culture shock

2010-06-29T11:16:00.000-07:00

Hasankeyf, where people have lived in caves for 4000 years - and still do.

Some of the caves. It is impossible to capture them all in one photo - there are thousands of them.

Swimming in the Tigris river. The kids loved the fast flowing water. The next day we swam in another place where there were lots of frogs. Ben nearly caught one.

A huge bird's nest atop a prayer tower.

A palace in the hill-fortress city of Mardin.

The view from the Mardin palace. In ancient times the city was fed by the fertile plains of Mesopotamia which spread out to the south of it, as far as the eye can see.

Daughter's sandals finally broke in Diyarbakir.

Tea in our hotel in Diyarbakir. It cost only 60 lira, and the host was a true gentleman who plied us with tea and endless cold water.

Inside the magnificent Blue Mosque in Istanbul.

Outside the Blue Mosque. I think it looks like a giant crab.

The Poker Table at Cordial House in Istanbul.

For many people, Istanbul ıs as far east as they get. In fact, they are delıghted to get so far. Italy ıs the standard, Greece ıs a bonus, Istanbul ıs the ultımate destınatıon.

We're a bıt dıfferent, of course. We started ın NZ, so we were always headıng ın the opposıte dırectıon from everyone else. Even the Lonely Planet guıdebook assumes you are headıng east ın Iran. If you're headıng west, you read the book backwards.

So when we reach Istanbul, we are ın the peculıar posıtıon of notıcıng how western ıt ıs, whıle observıng throngs of tourısts who are evıdently delıghted at havıng fınally reached 'the East'.

Technıcally, thıs cıty does straddle Europe and Asıa. Its western suburbs are ın Europe and ıts eastern suburbs are ın Asıa. They are dıvıded by the Marmara Sea. Of course, changes are never so abrupt.

But comıng to Istanbul today from the east, the change dıd seem abrupt. The receptıonıst at the hostel actually spoke Englısh. No more 'kaç para besh kışı? bır oda? ıkı oda?' (that's very poor Turkısh for 'how much for 5 people? One room or two?'

Then we went up to our rooms and when I ducked ınto the communal bathroom I found myself lookıng for somethıng that wasn't there: the Asıan toılet. Then there was another lıttle shock as I asked myself, why was I lookıng for the Asıan toılet? It's true: 3 of us have grown to prefer them. I'll let Daughter explaın why when we get back!

I realıse ıt's a bıt pretentıous to claım that one has 'become a local' after a month of travel. Of course we haven't. The language stıll baffles us. The culture stıll baffles us. But one absorbs more than one realıses. There are thıngs that I lıke about Turkey and Iran that we don't have ın New Zealand, that bızarrely western natıon whıch ıs ın fact sıtuated ın the far east. But ıt ıs weırd to come to a famılıarly western place and realıse that you mıss the east.

Here, ın Istanbul, there are women walkıng around ın shorts. There are men walkıng around ın shorts. There are women wıth sleeveless tops. There are young people dressed ın varıous versıons of western youth counterculture - Goths, transvestıtes, punks. Suddenly you see what a shock they are to eastern eyes. Strange to say, we would all look a bıt more attractıve ıf we covered up a bıt more of our pasty flesh. I guess that ısn't really a surprıse to anyone.

We went to the Blue Mosque today, whıch was sımply amazıng, even ıf you,ve already seen a lot of mosques. But after Iran, ıt was quıte a surprıse to me to see the dress code sımply ıgnored by at least half of the western vısıtors. Wearıng my hıjab rather than a borrowed blue veıl lıke every other western woman, I wondered whether I perplexed anyone who trıed to fıgure out where I was from, and what faıth I belonged to. Thıs cıty ıs full of blue-eyes Muslıms, but they don't normally have a blond 8yo son and they don't dress a boy that age ın shorts. And there are plenty of Turkısh women dressed lıke waıtresses ın strıp clubs, only wıth more makeup.

What else ıs western about Istanbul? They've somehow hıdden the chıld labour and the rubbısh, unlıke everywhere else ın Turkey. (Iran, ıncıdentally, dıd not seem to have chıld labour, nor as much rubbısh.) Everyone speaks enough Englısh for you to be able to buy thıngs from them wıthout needıng Turkısh. (I speak Turkısh anyway.) People stand outsıde theır restaurants tryıng to entıce you ın. (Actually they do thıs throughout Turkey, but ıt feels more frıendly and personal elsewhere.) They have traffıc lıghts whıch people actually obey. (But you stıll need to keep your wıts about you, especıally near the lıghtnıng-fast trams.) And we're ın the fırst youth hostel of our trıp. (But it's more expensıve than many of our 'hotels'.)

A bıg thank you to Rachael who recommended thıs hostel. We're enjoyıng the common room, as promısed.

Mountaınous Turkey

2010-06-19T11:53:00.000-07:00

The mountains of north eastern Turkey. They become higher and more rugged as one approaches the borders of Armenia and Georgia.

Biblical Mt Ararat. The Bible records only the consonants RRT. Here the mountain is known as Urartu.

The children look down on the 16th century Ishak Pasha Palace, from a fourth century fortress higher up the mountain. This is close to the Iranian border.

Daughter in the dining hall of the Ishak Pasha Palace. She was delighted to get a chance to wear her woollen manteau - it was far too hot in Iran, but in the mountains of Turkey it was much cooler.

A huge dam being constructed in the Turkish mountains.

In the last two days we have travelled ınto mountaınous Turkey. Eastern Turkey borders Syrıa, Iraq, Iran, Azerbaıjan, Armenıa and Georgıa. That's a lot of countrıes! Two days ago we stood at the sıde of a meteor crater. It was so close to the Iranıan border that we had to surrender our passports to go and look at ıt. Then we drove past the Armenıan border area, whıch was a hıghly mılıtarısed area, at least by our kıwı never-seen-a-land-border before standards, and ınto the area that borders Georgıa. We reached the Sahara natıonal park. Unlıke ıts namesake ın Afrıca, the Sahara natıonal park ıs mountaınous, cold, raıny, green, fertıle. We just clımbed hıgher and hıgher. Yesterday we drove a lıttle too far. It was hard on the kıds to drıve for hours (although much easıer than when they were a few years younger) and we ended up drıvıng ın the dark towards a town whıch we hoped would have a hotel. Soon ıt was pourıng wıth raın too. We saw a 'hotel' sıgn but ıt was quıte expensıve. We drove around lookıng for another, to no avaıl. So we got 20% off the prıce and stayed ın 3-star luxury. (Although ıt seems that thıs part of the world has dırty worn carpets no matter how much you pay for the room, but stıll, ıt was excıtıng to have a nıce toılet for the fırst tıme ın weeks!)

The next mornıng, by daylıght, we dıscovered that the claım that there were no other hotels ın Ardahan was a lıe. Never mınd. We also dıscovered a castle. It was awesome. I suspect castles ın Europe are not lıke thıs. I suspect ın Europe you pay for admıssıon, and there ıs at least a sıgn ın Englısh and perhaps a toılet. In Turkey, you just wander ın. The place looks 500-1000 years old, but how would you know? There was not as much rubbısh as ın every other tourıst sıte ın Turkey (the day before, the wonderful Ishak Pasha palace had been strewn wıth all manner of revoltıng lıtter), but ıt was overgrown wıth weeds and lookıng basıcally lıke no one ın Turkey even remembered ıt exısted. As we looked around, the sky thundered and lıghtnıng flashed. Just as we were leavıng, I took a photo of the Turkısh sıgn ın the hope that one day I mıght fınd out what thıs castle was called by usıng my dıctıonary to translate the sıgn. Less than a second after I took the photo, the sıgn fell off the wall at me ın a gust of wınd, and raın started pourıng down! I ducked out of the way and the sıgn smashed on the concrete. We got ın the car just ın tıme, and set off for the next town, Şavşat.

We never got there. The mountaıns clımbed hıgher and hıgher, and when we spotted snow besıde the road we stopped to play ın ıt. After all, seeıng snow was top of Pozz's wısh lıst for the trıp! Besıde the snow were some shepherds' shelters - ancıent structures made of stone, wıth tımber holdıng up the stone rooves and then earth on top and grass growıng on the rooves. The tımber had no naıls, but had been carefully shaped to fıt together. The stones had no mortar, but also seemed to hold together sımply by beıng well-fıtted.

Anyway, we contınued on, clımbıng hıgher and hıgher, and found the Sahara Natıonal Park. I was just sayıng that I wıshed there was somewhere to stay ın these mountaıns when we rounded the corner and found a motel. It ıs quıte expensıve, but the settıng ıs perfect. The owners' chıldren are a boy aged 10 and a gırl aged 4. They are tryıng to play wıth the kıds despıte the language barrıer. There are cattle on the roads all over the place here, not to mentıon geese, chıckens, donkeys and horses. It's the fırst tıme I,ve seen a herder tendıng a whole flock (herd?) of horses as opposed to just one horse at the back of a herd of sheep. Why would you keep a whole herd (flock?) of horses here? Pozz was horrıfıed at the suggestıon that they eat them, lıke the French.

We walked ın the natıonal park ın the afternoon. Beautıful vıews of ever more rugged mountaıns. Not sure what we'll do tomorrow. I quıte lıke ıt here!

The meteor crater on the Iranian border.

A family who invited us to drink cay (tea) with them in Digor, a town in mountainous Turkey. There is a metre of snow here in winter. In summer, the garden was full of vegetables and fruit. Even the pink flowers are used to make soap and tea.

The view of the Black Sea from our hotel window. We thought it would be very salty, like the other inland seas we have encountered. But it drains to the Mediterranean, and so it is in fact fresh, like a lake. This was one of the few hotels that seem to acknowledge that there is a beautiful sea right there beside the highway.

Sumela Monastery. Built only a century or two after Christ's lifetime, it seems to hang off a sheer cliff. It was occupied until 1923. Despite a millennium and a half of Muslim rule, the Christians who lived here were not persecuted, as indeed they do not seem to be in the Islamic world. The Christian iconography was almost shocking after weeks of seeing only Islamic art.

Another abandoned Turkish castle. Nobody else was visiting. There was no sign. There were only some children who gave us wild flowers. We gave them coins. They were shy - surely they must speak either Turkish or Kurdish, but we tried both to no effect! The smallest was only about two at the most, but she seemed to be out on the mountain with only an 8yo to care for her. Such is life.

Leavıng Iran (wrıtten yesterday)

2010-06-17T00:49:00.000-07:00

We have just crossed the border ınto Turkey. I am sorry to leave Iranç Such a gracıous, hospıtable country. But already we had left Farsı behınd, wıth regret. We encountered a new language ın Tabrız, and ıt ıs so much more foreıgn to us than Farsı. At least, however, ıt uses the Roman alphabet.

We have no guıdebook or dıctıonary, so those are top of the lıst of necessary purchases. Fortunately we now have some Turkısh lıra.

There ıs an ınstant change. Gone are the ancıent golden brıck buıldıngs. Now we have colourful Turkısh houses whıch look mıllennıa younger, but stıll old. Quaınt, even. THere ıs a south Korean woman on thıs bus wıth two male companıons. SHe speaks good Turkısh and a lıttle Englısh. When we got back on the bus on the Turkısh sıdeö her manqua was gone and we saw long black haır. Shoutıng and smılıng, she gestured to me to remove my headscarf. It was a great moment. The Muslım women kept theır scarves onö but turned to me wıth frıendly smıles. (Later thıs woman helped us to fınd a hotel and negotıate the prıce down very low. SHe was awesome!)

We,ve been on the bus for 4 hours already. Stopped most of the tıme, ıt seems. Thankfully our water ıs stıll cold as we froze ıt solıd overnıght. It,s a lıttle cooler here but the bus stıll heats up wherever we stop. The aırcon ısnt that strong anyway.

I,ve nearly fınıshed the last Skulduggery pleasant book. Daughter and Pozz are doıng pretty well at entertaınıng themselves on thıs 8 hour rıde, whıle Husband and Fırstborn play endless chess. Fırstborn has yet to beat eıther parent but I suspect my days are numbered,

I wıll mıss Iran. I wısh we had stayed ın SHıraz and Yazd longerç Perhaps ıt ıs just that I loved beıng treated lıke royaltyç After 5 mınutes of conversatıon, 'you, guest? My house? Make me very happy.' Or as they saıd goodbye, 'I hope you have a very good tıme ın Iran and a very happy and healthy lıfe'. Beautıful.

IT ıs the westerners who are the barbarıans after all.

We were not once scammed. THe offers to show us 'beautıful vıew, not ın lonely planet' were all real. THe young man who took us around the bus statıon, fındıng us tıckets, translatıng ın the hot sun, really was just beıng helpful.

As we moved north we drew less attentıon, but stıll, ın Orumıyeh last nıghti a young man was almost ın tears of joy that we would come to vısıt hıs town. Never dıd anyo9ne tell me to cover up my haır betterç NEver dıd anyone say anythıng the least bıt unfrıendly. Taxı drıvers told us the rıde was free (we knew to ınsıst on payıng - ıt ıs an Iranıan custom to say thıs.) In Tehran, a stranger at the next table paıd for our breakfast, and when we objected, laughıngly told us to 'get out of here!'.

In Esfahan I sat o the grass ın the town square ın the evenıng wıth Daughter and Pozz, whıle Husband and Fırstborn played soccer wıth local teenagers. Wıth my husband gone, women approached me ın endless successıon. One was an Englı8sh teacher (we,ve met at least 8 of these) but some spoke no Englıshö so I spoke my pıdgın Farsı, and poınted - 'son 8, other son 10, daughter 6'. The constant reply, 'your chıldren are very beautıful'. Surprısıngly often, 'are they all your chıldren?' It seems one or two chıldren are normal ın Iran.

If you dont understand, just say 'New Zealand', because that,s always the fırst questıon. THeır guesses are comıcal - Deutsch? Russ? Ukraıne? Tadzhıkstan? I have no ıdea what people from Tadzhıkstan even look lıke, except that apparently, they look lıke us!

The overnıght traın from Esfahan to Tehran was crampedç Teahra was as congested and polluted as they say, and the heat really got to me, though I dıd enjoy seeıng just how far women stretch the hıjab rules there. (Heavy make up, tıght manteau, rusarıe perched on the back of the head wıth plenty of bleached haır booffed up ın front of ıt). And the overnıght traın from Tehran to Tabrız was a treat. Dınner for USD3, tea laıd on (we are addıcted to tea, wıthout mılk, by now), much more spacıous. THe bus from Tabrız to Orumıyeh took us over the huge, salty LAke Orumıyeh. The water was red and the beach was pure salt. The brıdge was quıte a marvel - ıt crosses an enormous stretch.

Today we leave the cıty of Van to drıve to the Black Sea ın a rental car. There mıght not be much ınternet but ıt,s a safe, beautıful and lıttle*-vısıted part of otherwıse tourısty Turkey. Catch you when I can.

Learning while travelling

2010-06-10T23:23:00.000-07:00

As you know, I'm very interested in education.

So it is interesting to me to observe how the children learn while travelling.

Sometimes, it is the rich experiences that lead to enhanced learning.

But other times, it is the lack of the usual resources, that creates new opportunities.

We have spent quite a lot of time travelling in the last few days, squashed in the back of taxis. And after some time of being bored, my children all discovered that it is quite possible to play with your hands.

You can play peaknuckle, and you can make up new rhymes to play peaknuckle with.

Daughter wanted to ask when we would get to camel riding.

"Double-u E N - how do you spell 'are'?" As she speaks, she puts up a finger for each letter.

Me: "A R E"

DAughter: "W E N, A R E, W E, G O I N, T O, G E T, T O, C A M... how do you spell camel?"

Me: "C A M E L"

Daughter: "W E N, A R E, W E , G O I N, T O , G E T, TO, C A M E L, R I O N?"

Well I don't know how she got an "O" out of "riding", but that was close enough.

You see, you can learn to spell with no book, pen or paper, just using your fingers, in the middle of the Iranian desert, on the way to camel riding.

Learning of a different sort happened for poor old Pozz. He has been asking me to dye his hair black for a few days now. Poor child. He gets his hair ruffled, he gets picked up, he gets spoken to in lightning-fast Parsi. He forces a smile onto his face, shakes hands, and says the first thing that springs to his mind, which is often "khoda hafez" - goodbye - perhaps it means "please go away!"

Last night some people came over and asked us for a photo. This is quite normal - happens several times a day. But this time, they didn't want a photo of us. Just Pozz. Poor old Pozz. It was hours past his dinnertime - indeed, it was past his bedtime. He had carried a heavy pack through the city of Esfahan in the worst heat of the afternoon. He was upset with the world. And suddenly, these people want just him, to stand up on a platform, while they photograph him. And they want him to smile.

You could see it was hard for him. I was wishing Daughter's hair was just a little blonder, so they would pick on (oops, I mean, dote on) her instead. But he did it. He stood up, and he smiled at the cameras. Click, click, click, click, click.

Learning while travelling.

Half the world

2010-06-10T10:46:00.000-07:00

The city of Esfahan has been described as "half the world".

It seemed silly to describe anything that way, until we got here. Now, it doesn't seem silly anymore.

We have been wandering around Imam Square in the cool of the evening. The place is thronging with families. Thanks to Islamic law, there are no drunks, and no 'places of ill repute'. In fact, when we walked in to the restaurant where we ate tonight, sitting on Persian carpets under the stars, we were a little nonplussed by the sight of a number of men praying in the restaurant, which is not the kind of quiet still moment that you are used to if you live in a Christian country.

But I am getting ahead of myself. I have yet to describe Garmeh, where we just spent 3 days in the desert heat. They told us that "Garmeh" means hot - and it's true - I checked it in our Farsi phrasebook. But what Garmeh is, first and foremost, is an amazing oasis rising suddenly and lushly and greenly out of endless bleak golden desert. Later, I will add the journal entry that I have already written to describe Garmeh.

This morning we took a "taxi" from Garmeh to Na'in. A taxi seems to be, in Iran, any car that is willing to drive you from one town to the next, for less than it costs to get to the airport back home. So we were driven for 2 1/2 hours, for US$35. Or, to make it sound really expensive, 350,000 rials. Yes, a rial is a very small unit of currency.

We had lunch in Na'in and then caught another taxi to the bus terminal (you just say it as though you are French: terminal minibus, emphasis on the last syllable). A bus was just leaving for Esfahan. We could have caught another taxi for about US$15, but the bus was only $1 each, and we wanted to experience an Iranian busride. I am so glad we did.

I sat behind two Iranian boys who were clearly instantly captivated by Firstborn and Pozz. They tried to engage them in conversation, but suffered from lack of a mutual language. Firstborn has been diligently learning Farsi words, but that didn't stop Hassan and Hussein's words from sounding like a meaningless avalanche of sound. I did somewhat better, and managed to converse with them for the next hour. Farsi phrasebook in hand, I didn't attempt to form full sentences, but just blurted out individual words. They were asking me about my hijab so I managed "I sew hijab". I could tell them that my daughter (dokhtar - almost the same word) was 6 and my sons were 10 and 8. Oops, they were actually asking their names. No, my sons are not called "dah" and "hasht". Gales of laughter all round.

I asked them if they were brothers and then how old they were. Fourteen. And you? Gales of laughter again. Oh, right, you really are identical twins, I just thought that you looked very alike. So, I guess that makes you both 14.

I have a photo of Hassan. I'm sad that I don't have one of Hussein. Although of course, they did look exactly the same. And Hussein kept trying to trick me that he was Hassan. It is still possible that my photo is actually of Hussein. Still, I only have a photo of one of them.

I wish we were catching more buses. My Farsi took a huge leap on that bus.

Anyway, we are in Esfahan. Half the world. I will try to download some photos for you. The climate is milder here - at Garmeh it was 32 degrees by 9 o'clock in the morning. The thermometer read 48 degrees in the afternoon, but that was in the sun.

Imam Square, as I said, is thronging with families. It is the most amazing, lavish, beautiful, serene place I have ever been. The square is huge, with a stunningly beautiful mosque at one end, and a huge fountain in the centre. At dusk, swallows gather in the deep blue sky. People walk by - "welcome to this country! Keshvar?". By now we know what 'keshvar' means - country? - but even before that, it was a safe bet to just say "Newziland" to the first question we were asked. Next comes, "how do you like Iran?" and then of course a handshake.

I might try to upload photos tomorrow.

I miss you all!

Iran

2010-06-06T06:54:00.000-07:00

We are in Iran. We are in Persia. The most ancient country in the world.

We are in the city of Yazd, a desert oasis city. It is hot, but dry, and surprisingly beautiful gardens sprout from carefully walled squares in public places.

The people are overwhelmingly hospitable.Everywhere we go, passersby call out "hello!", grinning with genuine delight. Some call out all their English in one go, "Hello Mr! Hello Mrs! How are you what time is it have a good day!" Then they shake our hands. If their English is better,they invite us to their homes. If their English ispoor, they grab a phone and call someone who speaks better English to help us out with our enquiry. They give the children lollies and drinks, pat Daughter on the head, shake Firstborn's hand, pick Pozz up. "Welcome to Shiraz!"

The women are incredibly stylish, if somewhat overdressedfor the climate. Sometimes, amazingly blue or green eyes stare out at us from improbably dark faces. The buildings are ancient, so ancient. Coca cola is 40 cents a can. There are motorbikes everywhere, and crossing the road is a dice with death. Indeed, motorbikes are often to be found on the footpath.

We are in the Zoroastrian capital, a religion most notable for its method of disposal of the dead - bones are picked clean by vultures before being interred. Not sure if we want to go and see that sight or not! We are planning on some camel rides, and soon, we are going to go even deeper into the desert.

We have been to Persepolis, a 5000 year old capital of the Persian Empire, which Cyrus the Great and Darius the Great established, before it was sacked by Alexander the Great.I think there were too many Greats in that sentence.

That's all I've got time for, sorry.

Three more sleeps

2010-05-29T01:11:00.000-07:00

Three more sleeps before we leave on our big overseas adventure. Or should that be "overland adventure", as we will mostly be travelling overland? There will be lots of trains.

I like trains.

You haven't heard much from me, because we've all had a ghastly tummy bug, just as I was getting over my sinus surgery. I never dreamed I'd go six weeks barely touching coffee, chocolate, or dairy products, but I just haven't felt like them. (Actually, this has happened before, when I was pregnant, but your memory of pregnancy fades, you see, which is why people have more than one baby.)

So we are in a huge rush to get out of the country, especially because we are renting out our house. Good for the budget but not the stress levels.

I hope I can keep up the blog while overseas. Not quite sure how.

Rose is a rose shawl

2010-05-23T01:28:00.001-07:00

In March I completed my "Rose is a rose" shawl which I am only just uploading to my blog, due to my having lost the photos on my computer for quite a long time.

The words around the border say "A ROSE IS A ROSE IS A ROSE IS A ROSE..."... being circular they say this forever.

This is from a Gertrude Stein poem. I thought it kind of fitted, for me.

A wedding and a miscarriage

2010-05-14T04:40:00.000-07:00

Recently I recalled the bizarre, disjointed memory of going to a wedding 7 years ago, while also having my second miscarriage.

However, it came back to me, vividly, what it was like to be at a wedding, where everyone was happy, and partying, and wearing their best clothes, and to be smiling and clapping and listening to speeches, but realising you wouldn't be dancing and getting drunk that night. No, you would just be going through the motions, because some days are just not your day.

In fact that is just what life is like sometimes. There is the bride, beautiful and immaculately dressed in white. There is her bridesmaid, her identical twin, so I think it's OK to say that she was just as beautiful. Everyone having fun. Your job is not to ruin the big day, by mentioning anything about what is happening to you. Your job is to take painkillers and make frequent discreet trips to the toilet, and have an early night.

Getting married is seen as a coming-of-age. But what being a grown up is really about, is plastering a smile on your face, at someone else's wedding.

What's going on in my life

2010-05-09T22:07:00.000-07:00

Since my last post about having sinus surgery, I have continued to recover extreeeeemely slowly from my sinus surgery.

It has really been quite awful and revolting and I really wish I could just feel normal, but the fact is, that I still don't. It will be 3 weeks tomorrow since the surgery, and while I feel a lot better, I am still very tired and lethargic and not enjoying food. My daily coffee is a thing of the past, and chocolate leaves me cold too. I felt so bad I just about took a pregnancy test, and that is *really* saying something.

In other news, I have been trying to plan a 2 1/2 month overseas trip, and not your usual run of the mill one, but one involving difficult, untouristy countries like Iran, Russia, Mongolia and China, and non-standard transport options (ie trains not planes). So that has been quite a headache at times, but I won't bore you with the details. I'm hoping to blog while travelling, but I don't think we'll be taking a laptop, so it will only be when we can find an internet cafe, and even then it might not be a huge priority for me.

So, our plan is to leave on 1 June, and spend a month travelling through Iran and Turkey. In Iran, I have to wear the full hijab, which would be quite funny, were it not for the fact that it will be high summer and so it will just be horribly hot and we might end up rushing to Turkey so that I can at least dress sensibly. If I can bear the heat though, I think Iran will be amazing.

Then we go to Germany for the touristy part of our trip: visiting our family in Germany, going to Legoland with them, and then going to castles in the mountains around where they live, and that sort of thing. Yes, you can see I'm leaving this part up to my sister in law! And then we go to visit Poor Lonely Immigrant Friend, who is no longer Poor Lonely Immigrant Friend, but rather, Happy Back In Belgium Friend. So I am leaving it to her to organise us around Belgium.

And then, in late July, we fly to St Petersburg, and see St Petersburg and Moscow and then hop on the Trans Siberian Express and go to Lake Baikal. Lake Baikal, woohoo! I've wanted to go there, like, forever. Biggest, deepest lake in the world apparently, with the only freshwater seals in the world, and so clear that when you dive in you get vertigo, if you are brave enough to dive in a lake that's freezing cold even in summer (it's still frozen solid in late April), which of course, I am.

And then on to a Mongolian ranch, for some genuine remoteness, and sleeping in a ger. And then on to Beijing, to see what Husband calls "The New York of the 21st Century", although I prefer to call it "Beijing".

In the meantime, Firstborn is continuing with his passion for making movies, Pozz is still into Star Wars, Daughter is still into her animals. Firstborn also likes jumping on the tramp a lot. Firstborn and Daughter are playing soccer this winter and that's going well. Pozz bakes a cake with S8 down the road each Saturday. The children are all madly into the "Skulduggery Pleasant" series by Derek Landy, even though it is quite scary, with torture and stuff. Firstborn is madly working his way through book after book and often desperate to go to the library. Daughter gets up early in the morning and find something in the lego instruction manual to make and makes it quietly while we're all asleep. So yeah, lots of good stuff. We are seeing lots of the L family. And yesterday was my birthday, and mothers' day, which was actually hideous, but well, I try not to moan on this blog, so I'll just leave that to your imagination.

And Husband's grandmother had her 99th birthday party on Saturday, which is pretty cool.

So now you know all our news and there isn't much more to say.

Literacy

2010-04-22T23:13:00.000-07:00

It is with caution that I write about our children's journey to literacy.

The reason for my caution is that one of my children is "behind" the "expected standard" for his age group in this area.

There is an expectation, when you home educate, that your children will do better than children in school. If not, after all, wouldn't they be better off in school?

I'm being facetious of course: it does not follow that a home educated child who is below the 50th centile would be above the 50th centile if he or she were at school. Obviously, half of all schoolchildren are below the 50th centile too.

That is why the law requires that home educated children be taught as well as at school - not that each of them learn as well as at school. It would be very difficult to assess how well an individual child "would learn if at school" without actually sending him or her.

A clearer picture emerges, however, if we look at home educated children as a group compared with school children as a group. It is well established that, as a group, home educated children do better than schooled children - academically and socially. Those are two broad areas, since you could divide "academics" into, let's say, 8 areas, and socialisation into several areas too (moral development, understanding social norms, manners, emotional health, etc). Obviously, there is a difference between the broad statement that home educated children do better than schooled children, and the idea that every home educated child does better than the average schooled child in every area. That would be a much more difficult standard to meet.

So, teaching a child just as well doesn't mean he will achieve just as well. Some children are more proficient than others, whether in certain areas or overall. Some children have specific learning disabilities. Some are on a different timetable - like Einstein, they appear "slow", but when they do blossom, they overtake their peers. Some children are busy learning other things. Perhaps other academic things, or perhaps, they are busy learning things not valued by our education system, but important to their families - things like how to nurse a sick relative, how to be self-reliant, how to play creatively.

These, after all, are some of the very reasons we home educate. So the fact that a home educated child is "behind" in a particular area is not a reason to send the child to school, but in fact, a very good reason why the child is at home.

So it is in the case of my 8yo, who is just starting to read. He has certainly been busy with other things - over the last few years he has been passionate about a number of different things, but one of them hasn't been "learning to read independently". He has been passionate about a number of animals - sea creatures, birds, insects and spiders, foxes. He has been passionate about mathematics. He has been passionate about Star Wars. And, to tell the truth, he has been passionate about books. He loves books, loves being read to, loves looking at books himself - he does this every day. He just hasn't felt the need to decode the text. A lot of the time, there is someone else nearby who can decode it for him. And my normally polite little boy is known for crying out, when a read aloud session is interrupted, "Read!" How I love that one-syllable command. The passion in it. The urgency.

In fact, until he turned 8, Pozz was quite clear about the fact that he did not want to learn to read. He knew the alphabet, and could read his name and his siblings' names, and maybe 3 or 4 other words. That was it, and it hadn't really changed in several years.

Then, only a few months ago, he announced that he did want to learn to read. And by this time, I had enough confidence in child-led learning, that I did not scream "halleluia" and rush out and buy a curriculum. No, I asked him how he wanted to learn. We made a plan. Half an hour a day. He hoped this would have him reading by the age of 11. I told him I was pretty sure he'd get there much sooner.

So, for the last few months, interrupted by lots of exciting travel and other events, we have put in half an hour most days. We did the free trial of an online learn-to-read programme and, after two weeks of him loving it, agreed that he would sign up with it, along with Daughter. And now, every day, he does one lesson on the online programme, and reads a book to me. In addition, as always, I read to him and the others.

Meanwhile, his sister, who is just-turned-six, is keeping pace with him. A week ago I would have said he was fractionally ahead; now I'm not so sure. Unlike him, she tries to decode words all around her - the slogan on a t-shirt, food labels, road signs. Unlike him, she tries to write things down. Amusingly, she has started a diary, in which she writes the date and time, and then, the next day, the date and time. She hasn't quite grasped the usual purpose of a diary, ie, that of recording an actual event for posterity. Today's entry was a little more elaborate, though: it reads "Friday 23 of April 2010 9.30 this wos the time wen i strtd to rite this". That's it. Still a little self-referential.

(For interest's sake, I'll note that if I hadn't helped her with the spelling, she would have written "Frida 23 of Aprl 2010 9.30 this wos the tim wen i strtd to rite this". Not too bad really. I went for giving her the occasional clue without bogging her down with perfect spelling.)

I think it's the first sentence she's wanted to spell out herself. She is leaping ahead. She also likes reading picture books out to us. She read us "The Very Hungry Caterpillar", and I caught Pozz looking a bit down in the dumps about it. I got him to read it to me in private, and he realised he could read it as well as she could. He told me he hates reading, but he wants to learn to read.

I feel for him. He is having to be so patient, and he feels bad that he can't read. But he is getting there.

In the last week I've seen two schooled children aged 5 and 10, reading aloud. The 5yo could read better than the 10yo. They both attend the same school. In comparison, the difference in the ages at which Pozz and Daughter are learning to read is really not that great. And I'm not even trying to standardise my children.

The upshot is that I am happy with Pozz's journey to literacy. Although it is slow, I do not feel that it could be rushed. I am now pretty sure that he is dyslexic. Observing how difficult he finds the printed word, I can see that he just thinks differently from others. Learning to read will be a huge achievement for him, and the danger is discouragement and boredom.

I am sharing this information because I believe there might be others out there whose children are not learning to read at the expected age. This story does not have an ending yet. I'll keep you posted.

Surgery

2010-04-22T00:34:00.000-07:00

I had sinus surgery on Tuesday.

One advantage of having done my sailing trip is that I knew that going under the knife would be a doddle in comparison.

But it was not very much fun.

I'm still feeling nauseated and headachy. The kids have been farmed out to various people. I hope they're having a good time, because I'm not!

I'm looking forward to getting our family back to "normal". Whatever that is.

I saved up Lionel Shriver's "So Much For That" as a special treat read. Because she does write so well. Unfortunately, this particular novel is all about surgery and how awful our bodies feel afterwards. So much for escapism. To be honest, I still found it unputdownable. Just not very cheering.

The boys do "The Three Passes"

2010-04-22T00:08:00.000-07:00

My boys are fabulously adventuresome.

On this tramp, their longest day was 11 1/2 hours.

That's some stamina, when you're 8 and 9 (and 37).

Getting stung by nettles is a point of pride, especially when they're native New Zealand ones. (I didn't even know we had native nettles.)

Big brother, little brother.

Wouldn't you be proud of getting here when you're 8? And you used to be unable to make it to playcentre without "breaking your leg"?

Big brother, little brother, again.

A rare sunny moment.

Snow always makes Pozz happy.

Crossing dangerous rivers amid piles of ice and glaciers always makes Firstborn happy.

My week with Daughter

2010-04-10T03:18:00.000-07:00

I am writing this on the 10th of April, but it actually describes the week from Monday 29th March to Sunday 4th April.

On Monday Husband, Firstborn and Pozz set off for a week's tramping in Arthur's Pass. I felt a bit nervous about this because my husband was taking a 9yo and an 8yo across three mountain passes, one of which has permanent ice. And I had only just had ten days without my kids and now I had to have another week without two of them. It felt weird.

Anyway, as part of my blog catch-up project I'll put up photos from their trip (far better than photos of mine) later, but tonight I just want to record my week with Daughter.

I haven't really had only one child (as opposed to a baby) before. Pozz was on the way when Firstborn was ten months old so when he was born Firstborn was still really a baby - although I thought he was very grown up at the time. I wondered what it would be like with just one child. A six year old. Would she drive me mad with her non-stop talking?

It was bliss. It turns out that non-stop talking is only a pain when it goes over the top of other children's non-stop talking. Also, when she's heard the first time, she actually only says things once. We hadn't actually known this before because for the first six years of her life, Daughter repeated everything until somebody responded to her. She didn't even pause between repetitions. She just went nonstop over and over until someone gave her an unequivocal indication that she had actually been heard by at least one person.

Poor child.

In the car on the way home from dropping the boys off, I gave her my watch and taught her all about time. Possibly she could have gone on another 6 years without learning this if she hadn't got me to herself for a week. Phew, that was a narrow miss. Now she knows that there are 24 hours in a day, roughly half spent in darkness, that there are two 12 o'clocks (and two everything-else-o'clocks). That sunrise and sunset are both, roughly, 6 o'clock. That should do her for a few years yet.

We drove to my mother's house and then my sister's for dinner. We promised Daughter a movie, and then we forgot because I was busy telling my mum and sis about my Big Sailing Trip. Around 8.30 Daughter reminded us of the movie, and we realised she had spent the last two hours quietly listening to adult conversation, barely speaking or wriggling. I told her we would put on a movie when we got home. I realised that she *never* picks the movies that we watch, and she has been wanting to watch Willow for a Very Long Time. Quietly, without anyone really realising she wanted it. So I put it on when we got home, thinking she'd fall asleep. She didn't. I did.

The next day we went and spent the day with our friends L and J11 and A7 and T3. Daughter spent the day, as usual, in A7's room, playing in perfect bliss.

On Wednesday I felt a little bad about spending a whole day just hanging out having fun (I don't know why really when I look back on it) so Daughter and I cleaned the house all morning, which was still in a state of chaos from before the menfolk left. As usual, Daughter was a delight throughout, a cheerful and enthusiastic companion in the most boring of tasks. That afternoon the L family came over again and we kept A7 for the night. The next day Daughter and A7 played happily until 3pm when I finally made it over to L's house to return her daughter to her and, oh yeah, stay for dinner and lemon meringue pie. Yum!

On Friday I invited Daughter to garden with me because the garden has suffered gross neglect with all the holidaying we've been doing. For the next 3 hours, Miss Perfect pulled out weeds with me, with enthusiasm and love. She is full of sincere compliments, hoping she will one day know as much as I do in the garden (I think she already does), reminding me a million times that when I said convolvulus I really meant morning glory, and hungering as ever after knowledge. Did I mention that she is just a piece of bliss who I wish could accompany me every moment for the remainder of my life? Does she really have to grow up and move out? OK, so she wants to be a paleontologist, but couldn't we go fossil hunting together?

On Saturday, she continued her quest to be Positively The Easiest Child Every Raised, by coming with me on a family working bee which involved more gardening, painting, making concrete, and sawing gib board, from 8.30am until 1pm, to which her attitude was, of course, "I love every minute of this, do we really have to stop for morning tea?" But of course she loved morning tea too. I had a treat planned for both of us though: we were within shouting distance of the hot pools, complete with massive hydroslide. We headed there for the afternoon.

I think it's fair to say I am too old to enjoy hydroslides and hot pools, so, while Daughter enjoyed herself thoroughly, I enjoyed watching her enjoy herself. She declared herself not scared of the enormous, frankly terrifying hydroslide, and went down 12 times, accompanied by a somewhat less intrepid mother. In between times she frolicked in the pool like a sweet little lamb. Not that they frolic in hot pools, normally, I imagine. But, well, they do frolic. You get the idea.

I loved seeing her so happy. Afterwards we went to my mother's for dinner, as well as a nanna-and-granddaughter craft session which I happily slept through. I drove home feeling a little guilty that I hadn't got my perfect daughter any easter eggs. She of course was deliriously happy with the ones delivered by grandmothers and didn't even notice any deficit.

Oh yeah, on Sunday, she had an argument with the lovely A7, and rang up and apologised, which is possibly the bravest thing she's ever done. So, in summary, I do actually love her to bits. And I'm not even going to say sorry for being so sickeningly blind to her faults, because I'm not. She talks too much, but only when no one is listening, and her fears of spiders is sometimes exasperating. Other than that she is ***perfect***. And I'm just amazingly lucky to share my life with her.

The long version of "my subantarctic adventure"

2010-04-10T03:17:00.001-07:00

My husband is watching an R18 movie, and I just can't stand R18 movies, because I am a sensitive wee chicken. So I am going to take the opportunity to blog instead, and block out all the sinister violence with some sailing reminiscences.

So, this is the long version.

For those of you who don't know, this wasn't some "sail during the day and then drop the anchor at night and we'll all have a nap" kind of a sailing trip. Not that there is anything wrong with that. But this was the full "sail all day and all night" kind of sailing trip, in the Southern Ocean which is known as the roughest in the world.

So, I flew down to Invercargill on 13 March. On arrival I was informed we weren't leaving till Monday 15 March which bummed me out because I was damn nervous about leaving and wanted to get it over with! But there was a 45-knot gale blowing so that was that. By Monday the wind had abated to 35 knots, which is the sort of wind that in other parts of the world you stay in port for, but in the Southern Ocean it's about as good as it gets so we left.

So, on Monday morning we were joined by our passengers: E who was leading the expedition and the only woman among the passengers, M who seemed to be the bird expert, D who had worked with birds too, and S who was painting the hut and building boardwalks. They had all been offshore on yachts before but none of them liked it and I was warned they wouldn't stir from their bunks. In fact apparently none of the passengers ever likes the trip. So, hmmm, that made me feel great about what I was taking on here.

So anyway, we had a safety briefing - what to do if the ship catches fire, if you have to abandon ship, if we all die of carbon monoxide poisoning - just what I needed in my state of high anxiety. Then we left. The Skipper got me to take the wheel. At first I thought he was joking because our boat has a tiller and I told him I'd wheel-steered for a grand total of ten minutes. In retrospect I am very glad I had something to do which stopped me from freaking out, not to mention that of course I learned how to wheel-steer over the next couple of hours. I still prefer tillers.

I found it hard steering out of Bluff Harbour, which was like a washing machine. Finally the Skipper pointed out that we had 2-3 knots of tide against us so that was why it felt like the bow was being pushed off course constantly. I steered for two hours, which also protected me against seasickness. I also had an ear patch. After two hours, though, I was tired, and the skipper sent me downstairs for a nap. At 3.50pm I was woken for my first watch. This was how it was for the next week - every 3.50pm I was called up to stand watch from 4pm to 8pm, and every morning I was called at 3.50 am to stand watch from 4am to 8am.

I was surprised I had fallen asleep but apparently this is how it is at sea - everyone sleeps the first couple of days. And I hadn't been seasick. But I couldn't believe I was about to be left in control of the ship while everyone else slept. We were on autohelm so I just had to keep an eye out for other boats, and also watch the radar for other boats. Apart from that I only needed to do something if the wind changed direction, or dropped or increased markedly, or anything else weird happened, in which case I could always wake the skipper if I didn't know what to do. It was pretty straightforward to adjust the headsails or alter course slightly without leaving the cockpit but if more than that was needed I could just wake the skipper, or ask the mate if he was awake.

I had already figured out that the mate was a great person to have on board. I hadn't met him before, but he was very patient with all my stupid questions and in fact I had to stop him just doing everything himself that I was meant to do. That night as I was on watch I discovered something even better about him. He never gets seasick. That means that from day one on board, he cooks. And he cooks well. I have *never* enjoyed dinner as much in my life as I did on this sailing trip. Every night, while I was on watch, he made dinner and passed it up into the wheelhouse. Every meal was hot and sustaining and delicious. I think I spent my whole watch waiting for it, smelling it cooking, and then, most blissful of all, eating it.

I suppose if I had been properly seasick I wouldn't have wanted it but if you can possibly eat when seasick, and keep it down, it does wonders for you. The passengers were all-but-one in their bunks as predicted, and some of them were not keeping food down, so I guess I was lucky. I did find it hard to look at the sea through the wheelhouse and felt much better when I went outside even though it was damn cold and windy.

I also remember being scared at the sight of the huge waves - 4-5 metres tall I think. But I also saw that the yacht could handle them. At the end of my watch I perhaps felt a tiny bit less scared. I had been gaping at the beautiful albatrosses and some dolphins had cavorted alongside the boat for a couple of hours, which helped to take my mind off my fears. But I still knew I had to do a night watch. All by myself, in the dark. I realised how much I liked having D sit up in the wheelhouse just for someone to talk to. No such luck at 4am. And it would be dark - with no horizon to stare at I was sure I would get seasick.

The mate woke me for my watch and I stumbled up on deck. But somehow once I was up there it wasn't so bad. The stars were out and the mast, swaying under the Milky Way, with the friendly little windex lit up, cheered me up. The crazy motion of the boat that seemed so violent below decks, at least seemed more logical and regular up here. After an hour or so the stars disappeared and I did feel sick and scared. When would the sun come up? It was 3 long hours before a cold and cheerless day dawned. After only about 300 more years my watch ended and I stumbled gratefully down to bed.

The next day was very like the first. When off watch, I only wanted to lie in my bunk, and the thought of reading or preparing food or anything else still made me feel sick, but I did manage to eat a bit in the morning and then another wonderful dinner, and could actually face doing the dishes that night. When I woke at 4am I realised I had been aware of even more violent motion during my sleep, and sure enough, it was blowing over 50 knots.

These must have been big waves, but I couldn't see them. I started to feel better at the thought that these would probably be the biggest seas of the trip, and we were doing fine. There were still some challenges ahead - on the way back we would be heading into the seas, not moving with them. And there was still the difficult landing at the island, which has no sheltered landing place. But I was starting to feel better.

The next day was the same again. Another sleep between about 8am and noon, then eating some plain food, then my watch, the beautiful dinner from the mate, doing the dishes, falling gratefully into my bunk. One more 4am watch, back to bed from 8am till noon, and the excitement of knowing that we would reach the island that afternoon. When I came onto my afternoon watch the mate had been hand-steering because the boat handled better that way with a big following sea. So I had another stint at hand-steering for several hours as we approached the Antipodes Islands. I strained to see them, but for a long time saw nothing, and then suddenly they were there, high, black and sinister on the horizon. Islands to be shipwrecked on.

We sailed down the coast as the seas behind us became increasingly mean because we were in shallow waters, but then, all of a sudden we were in the lee of the island, dropping the sails in calm water. There was still a big swell, but it was just a swell, a curve-around-the-island groundswell, with no teeth to it. And there was a constant screaming sound, which I took several minutes to identify as the squawking of penguins. And then there was flipping and flopping in the water. Not dolphins. Seals. They were all around us.

It was awesome.

We anchored in Stella Bay. The passengers emerged from their torpor and we all ate dinner together and then hit the hay. We knew we had a big day ahead of us. The landing can only be achieved in southwest winds and at low tide. Such conditions were forecast for the following morning, so we were hopeful that we could unload our passengers and cargo. After that, we would head home straight away.

So in the morning we put together the inflatable and then motored round to Anchorage Bay. The skipper went over to look at the conditions at the landing point, and came back and said the landing was on. Next thing I was washing my seaboots in disinfectant so that I wouldn't introduce harmful organisms to the island, and hopping into the inflatable, with buckets of food all around me. I couldn't believe the abundance of life everywhere. The penguin colony was literally "standing room only", and the seals were just as jam-packed.

The next picture shows you how the skipper had to drive the dinghy up to the reef and then we had to jump out onto the reef and unload gear. What you can't see is that the sea washed over this reef throughout, so that we often had to stand on the cargo to stop it washing away, until we could take it to higher ground. We only lost one bundle of timber though, which was pretty good considering how much we unloaded.

So the next picture shows the passeners' personal gear and the food, all kept in buckets, for 8 weeks, as well as their communications gear and so on. However, most of the time unloading was spent on the timber which was to be used to build boardwalks through the muddy boggy tussocky island. You see, it is a high island with a plateau on top. You have to climb up cliffs to get to the plateau and then it is kind of flat. That's why we landed in the middle of seals and penguins - there's nowhere else you can get up.

We had to make lots of noise to scare the seals away. I'm the kind of person who is scared of cows so I was surprised that I didn't find this too bad even when they sort roared at me and looked like they were about to attack, which was not entirely out of the question. I was so busy scaring them off that I didn't get any good photos.

So then E and I went up to the top of the island to check that the hut was actually still there before we abandoned them on the island for the next 8 weeks. I felt so lucky to be up there. I saw an Antipodes Island parakeet, which is only found on the Antipodes, and which is incredibly tame and was only two metres away. And I have already posted my hut photos, but let me add this one, which says something like "visited by [someone] - 15 Feb 1894". And that's pretty historical and awesome really.

Finally, I was picked up and we had to take the inflatable apart and stow it and then leave. I wasn't very happy about the fact that huge gusts were coming down off the island, and while I know all about williwaws, it was pretty obvious that there was a big wind out there and we were about to head into it. For, um, 3 days.

And it was pretty awful at first. We were in shallow and crazy seas and trying to point into them, and green water was sweeping the boat from bow to stern and coming down off the wheelhouse and just dousing us, as though someone just emptied a monsoon bucket over your head. And we were busy adjusting sails and everything. And yet again, I was thinking, "I have to be on solo watch in this?"

But again it turned out OK. The wind abated, and we got into deeper seas, and we were making our way home. We had to motor sail, but that was OK. We were making the miles. And so it went on for two days. And then the wind went northerly and I began to hope we could turn the engine off, but the skipper said that we had to get home because a big front was coming through, so it had to stay on. But then the wind came even further round and suddenly we were sailing. It was beautiful. It felt like we were sailing to Tonga in the Pacific, only there were still albatrosses all over the place. I was loving it.

This went on all day and all night and on my morning watch, the wind just gradually came up from 15 knots to 25. At 7.30am we were only 80 miles from Bluff. Then, suddenly, everything changed.

In a moment, the wind was blowing from dead ahead and the seas were strange and lumpy and confused. The skipper and mate were on deck in an instant. The wind was suddenly at 35 knots and I went on deck and reefed the main, glad I had paid attention in port when taught how to do this. Ten minutes later the wind reached 45 knots and I went back up to drop the main with the mate. Ten minutes later it was blowing 55 knots, then suddenly it was gusting 75 knots.

It was like a different world. The sun looked all wrong, dirty and yellow and cheerless. The sky was blue, for the first time on the trip. I would rather it had been squally. The sea was a dirty light aqua colour, and above it was what looked like horizontal rain, but was not rain. It was bits of the sea, picked up by the phenomenal wind and flung horizontally through the air, so that you couldn't look over the wheelhouse without being hit in the eye with speeding bullets of salt water. Our strong little yacht, though, kept pounding into it. The only thing was, we weren't actually getting anywhere. We were staying in exactly the same place.

I was scared again, and very annoyed because we had seemed so close to home, and now, we didn't even know if we could make our flights. But I must have also been exhausted, because around 9.30 am I asked the skipper if I could go below, and immediately, I fell asleep. I kept thinking that the English sailing guide I'd been reading the day before described anything over 60 knots as "survival conditions". Yet we were still beating into this wind. Our yacht was quite a strong little yacht.

When I went on watch that afternoon I was quite surprised the the mainsail was back up, although triple reefed. The wind strengthened during my watch back up to 60 knots or more. I was quite nervous that it would tear because I knew it was an old main, and then it did tear. This totally freaked me out, partly because it meant I had to go back on the foredeck while beating into 60 knots to try to tie up a flogging torn mainsail, and party because I couldn't imagine how we would keep going into that wind without a steadying main. Well, no one wants to be at sea with a torn main. And there had been a slight issue with the engine. What if we lost our main and our engine? And I felt bad that it happened on my watch.

We were relying on our engine now to get us home. We dropped from around 4 knots to only two. When I went to bed at 8pm we were still 50 miles from home, and in the last 12 hours we had only made 30 miles. And I couldn't see what would change.

At midnight, however, I woke and found that we were now only 30 miles from home. I went back to bed with a surge of excitement. We were getting there! The next thing I knew, the skipper was calling me. "We're coming into Bluff Harbour". I looked at my watch and saw that they had let me sleep another hour. It was nearly 5am, and for the first time in a week, the boat was steady.

I came up on deck and saw the lights of the town. We were home.

Subantarctic adventure

2010-04-01T14:05:00.000-07:00

Something has made it difficult for me to put my subantarctic sailing adventure into words, so, in case anyone out there is still reading this blog, I can at least give you some photos:

This is the craft that made the journey: a 50-foot steel yacht designed and built for Antarctic conditions. Everything on her is shipshape and snug, and conditions that would be an emergency for many other boats are just another day's work for her.

Although albatrosses were our constant companions during the entire voyage, I found it difficult to photograph them with my slightly-time-delayed camera on a rocking boat. They fly so fast I had to point the camera in the position that I thought they would be when the shot was taken! This was the best photo I got.

What I learned about albatrosses: yes they do land on the enormous waves, yes they do sleep during the 5 years they spend away from land after their very first flight, and they can sleep both on the water and on the wing. They land in a very delicate way, putting legs out tentatively first, then suddenly looking like an enormous contented duck sitting calmly on the water. In flight they are fast, graceful and supremely efficient. You can watch for a long time, unsuccessfully, for a single flap of those huge wings.

The view through my porthole above my bunk. Actually sometimes it was entirely underwater, when the greyness of the weather suddenly transformed into a beautiful clear blue, but, well, it's that time-delay thing on the camera again - I couldn't quite capture it.

At first, the idea of looking outside at the constantly shifting view was unbearable, but as seasickness abated I came to like the view.

And then, after 3 1/2 long hard days, we got there.

I did some hand-steering as we approach the Antipodes, because we had a big following sea, and it did keep us on course a bit better than the autohelm, and make it slightly more comfortable for those on board - as well as giving me good practice of course.

Our yacht in her "anchorage". You have to use inverted commas when you're in an open bay in the Southern Ocean. In the foreground, one of the scientists unloading gear - it took them more than a full day because of all the timber they were offloading.

Here is a close up of one of the erect-crested penguins, the most common type of penguin on the island. We walked right through a colony of penguins as well as one of seals. It was truly "standing room only" and we had to scare the seals off for fear that they would bite us - they can be aggressive and their bites are really nasty. The penguins were aggressive too but it's not such a worry when they are toothless and only knee-high.

Leeward Island, upon which, apparently, no one has ever set foot.

And then, lucky me, I got to go up to the top of the island and visit the Antipodes Hut and the Castaway Hut. My tramping friends and I generally take a photo by each hut we stay in as a record that "We Got There!", but I don't think I'll ever get one more remote than this! I did not stay at the hut, but it was pretty cool just to get there.

I also got to see inside the Castaway Hut, built over 100 years ago. There was writing on the walls from the 1800s from visiting sailors who wanted to record their stop at the island.

More sobering was this memorial to Gerry Clark and his crewman Roger Sale who disappeared from these islands when their yacht, the Totorore was wrecked. Only small amounts of the wreckage was ever found and it is thought that possibly the boat was blown up by a propane gas explosion while at anchor. However, given the unforgiving nature of the anchorage, anything is possible really.

Gerry Clark was a hero to many, including Husband and me, who dreamed of adventure in the subantarctic. His book, "The Totorore Voyage", describes his brave circumnavigation of Antarctica in the 1980s. Both Husband and I had read it before the sad news reached us in 1999 of the wreck of the Totorore. The fact that Totorore was wrecked at Antipodes Island haunted me during the voyage.

As we were leaving Antipodes Island, the skipper took me over to this cave, Remarkable Cave, in the dinghy. It's in Anchorage Bay just near Perpendicular Head, and it is remarkable.

For photos of the journey home, just have another look at the photos of the journey there. Because all we saw, quite honestly, was seabirds, sea, and sky.

Finally my blog deserves its name

2010-03-11T21:34:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow, I am flying to Invercargill, from whence I will be picked up and driven to Bluff, to join the crew of a sailing vessel, which will then set sail for the Antipodes Islands, 800 kilometres south east of Bluff.

It is a subantarctic island, so quite possibly the nearest I will ever get to visiting Antarctica. I will be a crew member, with my own watches (4 hours on, 8 hours off), plus a share in cooking duties. Our purpose is to deliver 3 scientists to the islands where they will stay for 8 weeks, doing their sciencey thing. Then we turn around and sail back.

It will truly be the high seas.

So, you won't hear from me for ten days or so.

I might not even get to set foot on land, but I have a hope that I will get to swim in the subantarctic ocean, and I will try to get photos, to go with the ones of me swimming in the Arctic Ocean in 1998. Evidently I don't get any saner with passing years.

Fast forward learning, aka, the parts of a leaf

2010-03-10T00:39:00.000-08:00

It's funny how things come together sometimes.

After going through a period of doubt, the last few days have reaffirmed my confidence in the path our family are taking.

I went away for the weekend with my wonderful playcentre friends, all of whom have children in school, although one is going to home educate in the near future, for at least a few terms. It struck me over the weekend just how different my kids' childhoods are from their children's. One of the chief differences was how busy their kids are. They have full schedules, with lots of wonderful opportunities to do wonderful enriching things. I was struck with the fact that loving parents can choose such different lifestyles. They must believe, surely, that our simple life, with lots of opportunities for free play, familiar surroundings, and quiet reflection, involves "missing out" on all the activities that their children do.

And I do think it's healthy, when you encounter a point of view so different from your own, to examine it, and try to get inside it, and really make sure that you're happy with your own point of view. So, that's what I was thinking about as I got home.

And what I saw over the next few days was three children who have active, enquiring minds, who are learning, and who love to learn. It's almost as if my children staged a learnathon for me just to reassure me that things are happening in their minds, albeit less externally obviously than all those after-school extra-curricular activities.

When you picture a child at school, and your children aren't, sometimes you forget the reasons you chose this path in the first place, and you picture a classroom full of children gazing with wonder while their teacher enumerates the parts of a leaf. But then you have to remember how you felt when your teacher told you the parts of a leaf. How you probably got taught this 3 times over the years, and each time it seemed like a particularly pointless piece of information.

At least, I remember distinctly feeling this way about the parts of a leaf, each of the 3 times that I was taught the subject at school. And I was a child who generally was interested in everything.

I thought about this because there was a recent article about homeschooling in a local magazine, featuring a friend of mine, who is a lovely woman, who is no doubt doing a great job of educating her children, but who is not an unschooler, and so, she was depicted in the magazine teaching her two young boys the parts of a leaf. Indeed, this picture graced the cover of the magazine.

I looked at the parts of a leaf, including the bit that turns the leaf's upper side towards the sun, and I thought, that really is quite interesting. I was so bored in school by this subject, that I avoided it for years.

Fast forward to this evening. The children are skateboarding and biking around the courtyard, as they so often do, and I come outside to water the plants. Firstborn tells me I shouldn't water the plants in bright sunshine. "Why is that Mum?"

I repeat the theory I've heard - that it opens the stomata, causing the plant to actually lose water. I get lost in my incomplete knowledge and comment that I've never googled it so I don't really know. I go inside and google it. I come back out and explain to Firstborn that it's apparently an old wives' tale, although it is true that you lose less water to evaporation if you water at dawn or dusk. And that flowers grown "for show" can get spots if you water them in bright sunshine. And then I make some throwaway comment about photosynthesis and stomata.

Firstborn asks me to explain. What is photosynthesis exactly? I explain as he skateboards around me in endless circles. He tells me several times I have to make it more basic ("tell me like I'm a 3 year old"), but what he really means is that he needs to know all the background. He doesn't want to hear about photosynthesis before he's refreshed his memory about air being made up of about 79% nitrogen and 20% oxygen and 1% argon and only about 350ppm carbon dioxide. He wants to clarify at the same time what phosphorus and nitrogen are, how plants use them, and where they get them from. Then we get back on to photosynthesis, but hang on a minute mum, what is light exactly? And why does it make chemical reactions happen when it hits a plant? And "I can't understand all this while I'm skateboarding, let's go inside and sit on the couch."

We sit on the couch for twenty minutes - we're due to go out after that - so we have to hurry, but basically I cram months of physics, chemistry and biology into his brain in the next twenty minutes. Or rather, he sucks it out of my brain and into his. What molecules do when they heat up. Why carbon atoms form long chains. Why certain atoms like to join together into molecules.

He is actually, genuinely, overcome with wonder at this process. Photosynthesis, which has made all of the trees in the forest over there, and all of the wood that this house is made of. All from sunlight. How amazing that human beings figured out how all of this happened, and we can tell our children.

It is only one of many examples of the children sparking off each other and me and themselves and wanting to know something. Yesterday during lunch Pozz asked four questions on four distinct subjects that we had to ask google to answer. (The only one I remember now was, are ligers real, and if so, can I see a picture of one please?) He also set about teaching Daughter how to divide, and she successfully divided 10 imaginary lollies among 4 people (after giving everyone two each, you cut the remaining two in half, and give each person one more half).

Another thing that's been going nicely lately is that we've been doing things together. One might think it would be automatic when you're home educating. After all, when children are toddlers, you can't do anything without "help". But when they get older, you have to make a conscious effort to do things together. So, lately, we've cleaned up the courtyard together (a formidable job when the weeds get long), and we've cleaned up the garden because the lawnmower lady was here, and we've built lego together, and a few other things like that.

So, yeah, it's going quite swimmingly really. Nice that.

Things my daughter has learned lately

2010-02-19T10:36:00.000-08:00

I thought I would record some of Daughter's recent learning.

We went to the Museum a few weeks ago and spent some time in the prehistorical animals section. Daughter was fascinated by the skeletons of dinosaurs and moas. We looked carefully at the mock-up they have made of the layers of soil/rock, looked at in cross section, showing where fossils were found. And then a friend lent me a documentary about Charles Darwin which showed teenagers finding fossils at a beach.

Suddenly Daughter was passionate about fossils. She is no longer going to be a farmer when she grows up; she is going to be a paleontologist. We found several books at the library about it. She has pored over them all already, and I am just starting to read her one of them.

A boy at our home educators' art class told us that his big brother was really into fossils at one time, and that he went on "a really long car ride" to dig for fossils. I'm planning to catch his mother at drop-off time and ask all about it. That's something I'd really like to do too, and I'm sure the boys would be keen. I'll have to make sure they know in advance that we will *not* find a complete T rex skeleton in the first 5 minutes (or indeed, at all!).

Of course, her interest in fossils is promoting her literacy. All of those lovely long words - she is daunted by them at all.

On the subject of literacy, I am reading Margaret Mahy's "Maddigan's Quest" to the children at present. I suspect it is "intended" for older children, but she is understanding and enjoying it. I read it for about an hour a day, and quite often, she and Pozz go off and "play Maddigan's Quest" afterwards.

Recently when I have opened the page she has started pointing out words she knows - "and", "the", "me", "Garland" (the protagonist). Pozz asked me to write down the names of characters and places in the book for him. I wrote them on the back of business cards while we were waiting for dinner in a restaurant, and handed them to Pozz and Daughter, who raced to read them.

One of the themes of the book is time travel. It's interesting watching the children grapple with the confusions and contradictions of time travel. The thing it reminds me of most, actually, is trying to understand university-level physics. Perhaps our only chance of ever getting a handle on Einstein's general theory of relativity is if we start grappling with these concepts as young children.

Usually after we've finished reading Maddigan's Quest, Pozz and Daughter do an online reading programme (readingeggs.com) while Firstborn practises the guitar. It's a phonics programme, and I tend to favour a whole-language approach, but, they like it, and thus, they learn from it. At some point in the afternoon, I sit down with the two younger ones and they will read simple books to me, or I to them, or a bit of both.

The other day I found some flash cards my mother had made a year or two ago and showed them to Daughter. She enjoyed making sentences out of them. Another example of something I wouldn't tend to choose turning out to be helpful - although I wasn't using them as "flash" cards as such.

Daughter is constantly doing things that improve her mathematical and spatial thinking, such as jigsaw puzzles and lego, so it shouldn't really surprise me that her numeracy has leapt ahead recently. I overheard a conversation with her friend A7 about maths. "I can do one plus one is two and two plus two is four and four plus four is eight and ten plus ten is twenty," I heard Daughter say. "And eleven plus eleven is 22 and 12 plus 12 is 24."

Those last two were new to me. I asked her how she knew that, thinking it might just be a memorised fact picked up from a brother. "I guessed."

"How did you guess?"

"Because I thought it must be two more."

"Well, you might call that guessing, but I call that very good figuring out!"

She went on to do 13 + 13, all the way up to 23 + 23, where she began to get confused.

She clearly was finding it deeply satisfying to manipulate these numbers in her head.

Often she wants to do her maths book in bed at night. I've been steering her away from it because I don't think she thinks clearly when she's tired, and she gets easily frustrated. Instead she does drawing in bed and we do less frequent, but more effective, sessions of maths during the day.

She's also been trying to read all sorts of things lately. At a cafe this morning it was "grace" on the napkin and "eggs on toast" and "hot" and "cold" on the menu. She is always triumphant when she succeeds. One of the things that happens when a child learns to read is that they learn all sorts of things about the world that weren't apparent to them before. By decoding "hot" and "cold" she figured out that "the blackboard on the left is the drinks menu". By decoding "eggs on toast" she figured out that they cost $9.90. Now she knows that information is available to her without having to ask her parents. It's a positive feedback loop that keeps her feeling excited and confident about her literacy journey.

A sweet friendship

2010-02-18T01:58:00.000-08:00

Daughter first met A7 properly back in May 2009, when we went to visit my mate L in the bach next door to the one I grew up in.

Last September L and her kids moved to live nearby and we started to see quite a lot of them.

Of course, we didn't see much of them over summer, but we've seen heaps of each other since then.

Gradually, Daughter and A7 have become absolutely besotted with each other.

There's an 18 month age gap - it doesn't seem to matter.

We often get up in the morning to Daughter saying, "Can I see A today? When can I next see A?"

On Monday, Daughter spent 8 hours with A. Apparently they spent 8 hours in A's room and only came out for morning tea and lunch.

When I told Daughter it was time to go she asked if she could have a little bit more time please.

They've never had a cross word between them.

They make absolutely piles of mess.

It's quite magical really.

Contrasts

2010-02-13T12:12:00.000-08:00

Two days ago I took the boys to a get-together for older boys (10 to 14) who are not in school. Since Firstborn is only six weeks short of ten, and we were personally invited, we went. I thought, however, that Pozz and Daughter would stick with the mothers and the other younger siblings if the big boys went outside to play.

When we arrived there were already about eight big boys playing at the skate park near our host's house. We didn't see anyone we knew so we went on to the house. One 12yo boy was in the house and his mother said to me, "X will take your boys to where the other boys are playing." So I said, "Oh, thanks X, hey, boys, remember X?" - they probably didn't - "he'll take you up to where the boys are playing."

To my surprise, they went.

To my surprise, they stayed, even though they really only knew one boy there, and everyone was older than Firstborn and *much* older than Pozz.

They had a great time. Nobody was picked on, nobody felt like they "didn't know anyone", and nobody felt like "I'm too little and they're ignoring me".

Firstborn tore his pants open and got a graze that is now infected, but, well, that's life, especially when you're nine and determined to keep up with older boys at a skate park.

The following day, we were at a cafe with Pozz and we invited him to go and choose a slice of cake to eat. Several minutes later, he announced that he didn't think he wanted anything. I looked up and saw he was fighting back tears. "Pozz, would you like me to order something for you?"

"Yes please mummy." As we went up to the counter, he urgently whispered in my ear, "Mummy, please don't tell them that I was too shy to order myself."

He is a man of mystery, old Pozz. A man of contrasts.

Yesterday also, I took a bouquet of flowers to our neighbour whose husband died on Monday. Pozz came with me for the walk, and we had planned to just leave them on the doorstep, but we ended up going in for a cup of tea. The child of the house, Pozz's friend, was out. Any other child would have, at that stage, accepted my suggestion that he run home, or that he play with the stacks of toys available. But Pozz sat beside me, and then put his head on my knee and lay quietly, listening intently to every word of the very adult conversation about death that followed.

Ironically, he had been the one who had been so curious about it, and now he had more information than I think he wanted. That is what happens when you sit very quiet and still and listen to grown ups.

My next mission for the day was to bring a baby kimono that I had knitted to my other neighbour who has just become a grandmother. And I found myself thinking how life was beginning and ending all around me. On Tuesday I helped a friend make icing-sugar roses for her brother's wedding. I've also been knitting a small household item to give to a friend whose marriage just ended. On Saturday I took flowers to the bereaved. And tomorrow I will take knitting for a baby.

πάντα χωρεῖ καὶ οὐδὲν μένει
Panta chōrei kai ouden menei
Everything changes and nothing remains still.

A great big about face

2010-02-09T03:07:00.000-08:00

Well I would just like to do a great big about face on my previous posts.

Not that I think I ever really explained quite how I was feeling.

But anyway.

Today we had the best sort of day. Actually if my whole life was like this I would feel quite self-indulgent. We had just enough time to have breakfast, do the chores and read a bit of "Maddigan's Quest" before our first lot of guests arrived. We had a yummy lunch together and the kids just played. Then the next lot of friends arrived. Afternoon tea, honeydew melon, more playing. More friends arrived. Twelve kids now, all unschooled, aged from 3 to 13, not a cross word all day. We headed down to the beach where the water was incredibly, if not shockingly, warm. We wallowed in the shallows like crocodiles.

You just don't even start to cool off when the water is that warm. We actually used the freshwater shower afterwards, mostly just to try to feel cold.

Went home for a quick tidy up and dinner and then as soon as Husband was home, I took off round to a friend's house, to help her make roses for her brother's wedding. Those are the sort of roses that are made out of some sort of sugary dough and go on cakes and stuff. They look beautiful.

I'm shattered, and Firstborn has One Day School tomorrow. I suspect it will have to be pretty smashing to live up to days like today.

Suddenly we feel in demand and like we have *too many* social invitations. Which is, we now know, a privileged way to feel.

I promise not to complain ever again about how often you need to clean the toilet when the house is thronging with children.

A few days on

2010-02-03T00:13:00.000-08:00

So, a few days on from my last post, how am I feeling, and what am I thinking?

The main thing that I have realised is that we had an amazingly good run for a few years, which meant that I didn't have many, or indeed, *any* problems regarding the decision to quit school. The boys were so delighted not to have to go to school anymore. The children had a blessed life.

Then we lost some of our blessings and we felt that loss keenly. Instead of saying that "we don't need school to have lots of friends" we felt that school might just be the place to find the friends we suddenly did need - after all, that seemed to be where all the other children were!

When I say "we", I'm meaning me-and-the-kids. It's hard to separate the two. I know some people claim to be too cool to worry about whether their children have a social life, because apparently our parents' generation never worried about it, so we shouldn't either, but I can't help but care about my kids' happiness. And I like to have friends whose kids can play with my kids - it's not so much fun if the relationship doesn't work for both generations at once.

We have tried to find new friends within the home ed community - because schoolchildren are so darned tied up with their afterschool activities - but despite "promising leads", there isn't of course an instant replacement for an old friend.

Anyway, the point I'm getting to is, that I've realised that I have to choose between two sets of problems - problems with sticking with home ed and problems with children going to school. And when I put it that way I do think that home ed offers much smaller problems with better solutions. I'm just kind of still mourning the fact that for a while there we didn't have problems!

I told a friend some of the problems last night - she had already read my previous blog post - and she said that some of these problems she has exactly with her son despite the fact that he's in school. And then she outlined some other problems that I don't have... which gave me a new perspective on it.

And then there are your lovely comments.

So, here is where I've got to:

Problem 1. The kids are not "important enough" to their friends because their friends live in a busy social whirl.

My kids have one family in particular who I think is going to break their hearts at some stage by simply being too busy for them. I've sensed this coming on for ages - they get dropped if something more exciting is on offer (though they still have an absolutely lovely time when they do get together) and the parents don't seem to have a problem with treating my kids as the back-up for boring days.

The thing is, you can't win this game by joining in. You can't say "well, I'll just have lots of other new friends who I think are more exciting than you" - unless that's really who you want to be. So I guess this is one case where I just have to watch my kids learn a painful lesson about friendship and "status". And quietly cultivate some more enduring friendships.

I guess I also feel that these more enduring friendships are more readily available in the home ed community. School might offer more friends but it also offers more opportunity to be dumped by your friends because there are so many other potential friends on offer.

2. The kids are marking time and not learning a lot.

Funny how a couple of days of actually watching the kids changes my perceptions. Pozz has asked me to read him "Maddigan's Quest" and he and Florence sat spellbound while I read for nearly an hour - in fact I read to them today for over two hours in total. Pozz also read to me [Rose does a little dance of joy]. Firstborn was madly researching Sim City on the internet - found a youtube clip about it to convince me that "it really will be educational for me mum, see I have to budget and plan and..." ... then he converts the US price to NZ dollars. We continue to have these wonderful conversations where he asks me, or Husband, a question about, say, gravity, or the immune system, or the French Revolution, and we end up talking for ages and ages.

Plus I remembered that they actually spent all that time on mathletics last year and some of the wonderful things that Firstborn was doing with video cameras and computer software. It's not surprising really that their academic learning took second place to sailing and swimming and rowing over summer.

3. Finding the joy.

We walked down to our swimming spot yesterday and today and Daughter and I swam out to our special rock. Not so long ago she would cling desperately to my neck in the sea even though she's confident in the pool. Today she plunged in off the rock (with her lifejacket on) and swam back to the beach - only about 30 metres but it was amazing to see her determinedly dog-paddling, unphased by the choppy waves. Meanwhile Pozz jumped off the very top of the rock. It's hard to describe how much older he seems when he does things like this. He just seems right and confident in himself. It's lovely.

I asked Firstborn if he'd rather be in school. "There's NO WAY I'm going to school this year when we're meant to be going overseas," he replied. He still wants to go to intermediate next year, so he can see his cousin and his mate J "every day". I've explained to him that he has about a one in four chance of being accepted into this particular intermediate since it is out of zone and runs on a ballot system. Unfortunately he always believes that any odds will always go in his favour (his life to date has only confirmed this view). He did suggest that if he doesn't get accepted he'll just go on being out of school. But I'm hoping he won't be too gutted if that happens. After all, he will go on imagining some kind of idealised intermediate school experience - whereas if he got in, he could well decide that it's a bore and leave.

I guess the thing I have been finding hard to adjust to is the sense that, instead of being quietly confident that my kids will never go to school, now I have a lot of uncertainty about it. I expect Firstborn will go at some stage, but whether for a week or forever I don't know. I'd kind of rather know, regardless! And that creates all kinds of other uncertainties - how will it be for Pozz if his brother decides to go away from him all day and go to school? Of course, thanks to the bizarre institution known as intermediate school, they wouldn't actually be able to attend the same school as each other for the next 4 years.

Did I mention that I loathe intermediate school? I mean, even people who embrace the school system in general tend to comment that intermediate school is a waste of time at best. If you had to choose one school not to attend, wouldn't it be intermediate?

I do think if he goes to school, and stays, it will still feel different from how it did before. Instead of me beating myself up about the bullying and the misery I will just be able to remind myself that if he didn't want to be there, he wouldn't go.

Then again there is the fact that the reason he wants to go to school is such a sucky one. Because he doesn't want to be different. Even though he knows that the other kids are making such a big deal of him not going to school because they are envious, he'd still rather be the same as everyone else. And the tragedy is, that school is the very place that makes Firstborn's differences from other kids stand out the most. Another year, bump him up yet another class, and he still needs to be in a separate reading and maths group because no one else is at his level - and the only reason this might change is if he learns, as his mother did, to give wrong answers on purpose, in order to fit in. How will I even know if this is happening?

Anyway, I've digressed a bit. What I really wanted to say is that I'm still just aiming to enjoy each day with my kids, because none of us know what the future holds.

But I still feel like I'll no longer be 100% sure. Just "on balance" sure that it is the right choice, but no longer able to say that I can't see a single advantage in going to school.

Horrible doubts

2010-02-01T01:49:00.000-08:00

After years of happy and school-free life, we have had a hard few months and I am having serious speed wobbles about our decision to keep our children home.

The thing is, that it is not like I think that school is a fabulous place. It is just that it is bloody hard to do something that is not "the done thing" and to always feel like a minority.

I have noticed some characteristics of schoolchildren which, while I don't exactly want them for my kids, do seem to make life easier.

For example, schoolkids seem to appreciate that their parents are nicer to them than most other adults. I don't mean that teachers are horrible to them, just that most kids probably know that it's your parents, not your teacher, who will buy you an ice cream or let you stay up late at night. I think my kids don't have much of a grip on reality on this particular point. I think it is a crazy idea that you would expose your kids to less-than-loving treatment in order to make them love you more (and I don't just mean schools here - I am also thinking of any situation where they deal with another adult, like, for example, a swimming teacher, or a playdate). At the same time, it's not fun to realise that your kids have pretty unrealistic expectations about what the world owes them. A lot of parents don't really have to enforce many boundaries with their kids because school "knocks them into shape" for them. That is *not* what I want at all for my kids, but when their friends have pushover parents, it is harder for me to draw the line with mine. And I do believe in drawing some lines. Not just whenever it pleases me, but when I think it really needs to be done.

Sometimes I also wonder whether schoolkids really value their free time, whereas my kids have so much free time that they moan about being bored. They didn't use to do this so I'm not quite sure what's gone wrong here. Again, it doesn't seem to me like the right solution to tie up a lot of their time so that they value their free time more.

Then there is the fact that schoolkids seem so self-contained and independent. They go away from their parents for days at a time to pursue their own personal self-fulfilment or social lives. My kids are not this independent. They get lonely and lost if they're off on their own for too long (although this varies). Again, I don't exactly think that this is what I want. I think I'd be sad if my kids seemed too entirely self-contained at their age. I like to feel that we're a close-knit family and we need each other. But it is difficult when my kids are varying from the norm. Their friends who go to school have lots of friends and live in a busy social whirl. My kids want fewer, but deeper, friendships. It is hard to find them when other kids are so used to a different level of friendship. I can only imagine this getting worse in the teenage years when I expect lots of people measure their success by the number of friends that they have on facebook rather than how many people they can truly count on.

Perhaps my kids' more discerning attitude to "who is a real friend" will save them from many a painful romantic relationship later on. They sure have a lot more judgement about whether somebody else gives two hoots about them, than I did at their age, when I hung around with selfish and shallow people just for the sake of having a friend. But I also worry that they're just too fussy and unforgiving.

Then there is the sports thing. Firstborn used to be really fast at running and great at soccer when he played it every lunchtime. Since he stopped, he has lost his edge in both of these skills. The thing is, that I see most kids at school losing their flexibility and putting on weight as a result of all that sitting still. And I remember that Firstborn spent a lot of his last 3 months at school honing his running skills by running away from bullies. But that doesn't stop me from wishing he had more chance to play soccer with a bunch of mates. It would be easier if all the other kids weren't at school and with fully-booked-schedules-of-after-school-activities.

And then there is the difficulty that Firstborn has had finding friends to fill the void left by his best friends all moving away last September. One can't help but feel that at school he would have plenty of potential friends to choose between. I know that it is possible to be lonely at school. I remember that when Firstborn was moved up a year, he found it challenging socially. But when your child is lonely and not at school, it is easy to imagine that school would provide an instant solution with 15 or 20 lovely friends on tap whenever he wanted. And you forget that you have no control over who those friends are or what they get up to together.

And then, Firstborn isn't exactly reading wonderful books, powering ahead in maths, or passionately learning about anything else at the moment. One feels a little like he is marking time.

Then when I picture my 3 children actually heading off for school tomorrow morning, I think to myself, what the hell would I do with my life if that happened?

It's unlikely to, of course. Pozz is pretty clear that he does NOT want to go to school. I don't know for sure that he'd be miserable there, but I'd be pretty astonished if he wasn't. And Daughter is way too little for school.

So, um, that's my doubt-filled start to the unschool year for you. This time last year I was dancing on the moon about the fact that we were going swimming every day while everyone else went to school. It's horrible not to feel the same this year.

Fantastic Mr Fox

2010-02-01T01:38:00.000-08:00

Husband wanted to take Daughter to see Fantastic Mr Fox, and we ended up all going, because it was a holiday, and we'd spent most of the day tidying the house, so we decided to bus into town together.

I really liked this movie visually. It was done with puppets and the way they moved was really funny. I could really see it appealing to young children.

However, it seems that everybody nowadays thinks it is simply to boring for words to turn a book into a movie. You have to turn the plot inside out at the same time. So instead of 4 little foxes, we had just one fox cub, a sulky teenager, and a cousin who had come to stay with the fox family. There followed lots of cousinly rivalry, which was barely distinguishable from the loveless sibling rivalry which characterises almost every Hollywood movie made in the last 15 years (latest example: "Where The Wild Things Are").

I mean, will they *ever* make a movie in which brothers and sisters are simply good and loyal friends? Perhaps loyalty is simply boring on screen - they dispensed with it entirely in the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy, despite the fact that it is a central theme of the books.

But I digress.

Roald Dahl's "Fantastic Mr Fox" has a fantastic plot which didn't need to be changed. It is even violent and gross, so you wouldn't think Hollywood would crave so badly to change it. However, they changed it anyway. They put in violent shoot-outs and scary bits as if they had completely forgotten their target audience and were writing another mindless teen action flick. My main beef with it, however, was that there simply wasn't a sense of right and wrong. I mean, I guess you could say the same of the original, since the book's hero goes around stealing chickens and ducks. But Dahl's Mr Fox has honour. He wouldn't lie to his wife and son and betray them in favour of his nephew just because his nephew is cooler.

In trying to please everyone, they ended up pleasing no one. Or at least, not me.

More photos added

2010-01-31T03:16:00.000-08:00

For those of you who read my blog frequently, I've added some more photos to some of our holiday posts, starting here: our adventure begins.

And some in later posts, particularly at the poor knights islands where Husband took some lovely shots.

Creepy schoolteacher

2010-01-31T03:05:00.000-08:00

So, there is a primary school teacher somewhere on the shore apparently who was "grooming" boys for sexual activity. He has not been named and is apparently still employed. (I have no idea how this can be, but I often find the world a crazy place.)

There are about 50 primary schools on the shore and only one or two male teachers at each school.

Do I think it is fair that the other 50 to 100 male teachers are under suspicion? Of course not.

Would a one-in-50 to one-in-100 risk that my child's teacher was the creepy one be acceptable to me as a parent? Of course not.

Am I glad that I'm not sending my kids to school the day after tomorrow with fingers crossed that one of my children will not be assigned to this guy's class?

I'm ecstatic.

After all, this is just the one guy we know about.

* * * * *

There was an article in the paper today entitled "Lessons for Parents Before School Starts", advising us morons (aka parents) of the 5 top things we need to do before sending our darlings off to school on Tuesday. Things like, you know, sort out your child's lunch. The child you've been feeding since birth. Somehow they've survived 5 years already.

Item 5 was my favourite: get a book on bullying.

Is this "just in case of the highly unlikely event that they suffer some minor bullying" or is it "because we know that bullying at school is pretty much a certainty"?

I'd like to add an item 6:

Get a book on what to do if your teacher is a paedophile.

"Something wicked this way comes..."

2010-01-26T01:26:00.000-08:00

We have had a sudden craze for Shakespeare in this house.

We had a go at watching the first few scenes of Macbeth on youtube, which was pronounced to be unbearably boring. Fortunately Pozz was not put off, and somehow managed to find (at the library) an adaptation of Macbeth into a sort of picture book, which I read to him yesterday and today.

A few years ago I would have avoided reading the kids anything with such horrible murders in it. However, they seem to be at the point where they are really fascinated by it. They want to get their heads around the idea of murdering for personal gain and then suffering terrible regrets. The morality of the play is impeccable, after all: don't murder, even for the biggest prize you could get in eleventh-century Scotland, because you'll suffer for it.

Since we don't live in the sort of city where you can just look up where the nearest performance of Macbeth is, I instead took them today to an adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream. It is funny, that I also am not into adaptations at all, as a rule. But I have relaxed a bit recently. I can't help but think that the important thing is that they are enjoying Shakespeare. Since I know lots of people who have never enjoyed Shakespeare, I am happy that my kids are enjoying him. And Firstborn has quietly taken off with my copy of The Complete Works and read bits of it.

I'm trying to get hold of a copy of Much Ado About Nothing, but needless to say, neither of the video shops within walking distance stocks it. But we'll get there one way or another. And I've ordered Charles and Mary Lamb's "Tales from Shakespeare" from the library, which is a classic in its own right - I think it's even listed at amblesideonline - so there, I am still doing Charlotte Mason after all!

I also took my niece and nephew to A Midsummer Night's Dream. Seven characters were played by 3 actors. Most of the children didn't notice. Another bonus was rushing around the museum for several hours afterwards. Followed by a swim.

The children have so many questions. What did Shakespeare die of? How long ago did he live? Was Macbeth a real guy? Did he really murder the king? How did Banquo's son become king when Malcolm is crowned at the end of the play? What are Shakespeare's most famous plays?

And it is sweet to overhear them reciting the lines. Firstborn must have said six times this afternoon, "something wicked this way comes". It is a deliciously scary line, and the sounds in it are just right too.

I continue my war on annoyingly crazy people

2010-01-25T02:41:00.000-08:00

Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to give you an example of another annoyingly crazy person with whom I have to share a planet.

Shortly before Christmas, this woman, whom I have known for several years, started a conversation with me by commenting that I didn't look like I'd had 3 children. (This must have been before I put on the lovely big EIGHT KILOS that are finally making me a bit more rounded and soft than I was last year!) Anyway, in fairness I pointed out, since she has also had 3 children, that one of my babies was only 900g. This was a MISTAKE, as it led to a conversation about how I gave birth at 6 months and one week's gestation, had 3 surgical operations over the next 3 months while my daughter languished in ICU, having blood transfusions and lumbar punctures and a hole in her heart, while my brother went to Africa and died.

Well, it would all probably have been OK if I hadn't mentioned my brother. Now I feel like I just opened myself up to her next comment.

You see, she explained to me that she knew something that I evidently had somehow managed to live 36 years in ignorance of. She presented this to me as a fact, the way you'd tell someone that you've been to Bolivia and the women all wear bowler hats there (which apparently is true).

What did she know? Well, apparently I CHOSE all of these things to happen. I chose them because I wanted to be a real martyr and put myself through a whole bunch of heartache so that I could grow spiritually and become a more enlightened being.

And apparently it was a bit risky of me really because the Council (presumably not the North Shore City Council but some kind of spiritual, otherworldly bureaucracy that concerns itself with "personal growth" rather than asphalt and pest plants) would have warned me against taking on so many difficulties at once, and by defying the Council's wisdom I put myself at risk of committing suicide which is like sliding down a great big snake on the big Snakes and Ladders Board of Eternal Life and Enlightenment, right back to zero.

OK, so she didn't actually say "the big Snakes and Ladders Board of Eternal Life and Enlightenment". But the rest, she really did say, honest.

It is so interesting to learn that I chose for my brother to die in order for me to learn through the grieving process. Presumably he also chose a life in which he died and left his young sons orphaned and his wife widowed so that they could all be spiritually enlightened.

As soon as I die I will, presumably, remember all of this, and say to myself, "You dingbat, Rose, here you've been struggling with all this sorrow all these decades, and you actually chose this, and should have been dancing with excitement as pain layered on top of pain at the rare opportunity to grow spiritually!"

I wonder whether it has rather stuffed things up for us all that somebody has found out about this Council and brought knowledge of it to us here on boring old Earth. Since I am now feeling excited and joyful instead of horrified and sorrowful about all the painful and tragic events in my life, presumably I cannot grow spiritually from them anymore.

Truly, atheism is a beautiful thing, and reason one of life's most delightful gifts.

More about autism

2010-01-24T02:07:00.001-08:00

Out of a sort of horrified fascination, I continued to read the weird book by Celebrity Autism Mom Jenny MacCarthy.

It doesn't particularly surprise me that the United States offers the career option "become a celebrity autism mom", but you have to admit that it is classy that she really is an ex-playboy bunny who has also made a crust by being photographed on the toilet and surrounded by her own (fake) menstrual blood. I mean, America has class, giving us a Celebrity Autism Mom like that.

Another lovely thing about this book is that the front cover has a picture of Blond and Beautiful Jenny with her son, along with various other celebrity autism moms, most of whom are also lookers. I'm no good at descriptions so you'll just have to take it on faith that you can get quite a lot of enjoyment just out of studying the beautiful and smiling faces on the cover of this book.

But the real treat is inside. As I was reading this book, I was remembering Ben Goldacre's "Bad Science", which was a rare delight, the product of an incisive and disciplined mind, as well as being extremely funny. I have also recently read Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything", which is a sort of rough guide to "everything you might have learned in high school science if the curriculum was what it should be and your teacher was a gifted entertainer". Despite the usefulness of Bryson's book, if I had to choose ONE science book that I would force you to read, it would actually be Ben Goldacre's. Because Bryson's contains a lot of cool science, but Goldacre's book actually describes WHY WE ALL NEED TO LEARN HOW TO THINK INTELLIGENTLY IF WE'RE NOT GOING TO GO AROUND KILLING PEOPLE.

So, back to Jenny. Well, you will understand that it is high praise indeed when I say that Jenny's book is worthy of being a companion volume to "Bad Science". The two books really need to be read together if you are to understand the modern age, and indeed, the condition of being human. And if Goldacre's brilliant wit makes you, at times, feel small in comparison, then MacCarthy's unintentional hilarity will bring you right back up to size.

Jenny's book is not a science book. There is in fact no explanation of why she believes vaccines cause autism, how they might do so, and whether children ought to be vaccinated or not. I thought there might even be a discussion of what you do if your child catches a vaccine-preventable disease (such as tetanus, in which the last thing your child will hear is his or her backbone breaking from the strength of those spasms - what a thrill). Jenny says quite early on that she does not need science, because she has her son. She can look into his eyes and just know things, you see. In fact, she does not need to look into his eyes. Jenny just knows things about autism. At just the right juncture in her life, knowledge will flow into her that will enable her to become, and then continue to be, a Celebrity Autism Mom.

There may not be a lot of (or any) science in "Mother Warriors", but there is a lot of screaming. Screaming is perhaps an adequate replacement for science to some people. Especially when it is one's maternal instinct that is screaming. Jenny's instinct screams a lot. She tells us there are a lot of mothers all over America screaming over autism. One wonders if they would achieve more if they calmed down.

Jenny has an interesting opinion of doctors. When children in her book are critically ill, medical staff seem to be uniformly impersonal, hostile, deceptive. This is in marked contrast to my own experience, which is that medical staff are amazingly humane and considerate and kind and humble when one's child's life is in danger. Still, far be it from me to argue from mere personal experience. Perhaps cruelty is the norm among American people who choose to pursue a career in attempting to save the lives of sick children. And it may well be that Jenny's negative experience stems from her tendency to, well, scream. In fact at one point she describes screaming at her son while he is in a coma in hospital, for an hour, a noise which could be heard all over the hospital floor, where no doubt it was appreciated by all the other sick children and their families. Curiously, however, on this one occasion, medical personnel are nice to her and tell her that her non-stop screaming appears to have healed her son. They're fickle, those cruel and deceptive medical people. Scream enough, and even they will sense your special warrior status.

One curious thing about this book is that it contains remarkably little of Jenny's son. I mean, you would think that a solo mother who says she is 100% dedicated to fixing her son's autism to the exclusion of all else, would spend a little more time with her child. It is hard to tell whether he is with her on her many travels to appear on talk shows and the like (she makes it clear at one point that he is not, but is later silent on the point). It is not really that she is protecting his privacy - she's quite happy to go into intimate and appalling detail about the bowel movements of children who are clearly identified by name and photograph. It's just that this is a story about her. Pages go on without reference to the child at all.

Another delight is the occasional reference to her own celebrity, which one assumes got past the editors somehow or other. She makes passing reference to her "fan demographic" and confesses to wishing, *as a little girl*, that she will one day be on Diane Sawyer's talk show. How fortunate for her that she was able to realise this wish, by having a son with autism, and realising that it was caused by vaccines.

Scientific observers have noted that MacCarthy's son's medical condition seems more likely to be some other condition (Heffner-Klandau? my memory is terrible), which is often misdiagnosed as autism and from which recovery does occur. She addresses this rather circumspectly, with the devastating logic that being told your child never had autism because, among other reasons, his recovery seems otherwise so unlikely is just the sort of thing doctors would make up to cover up the fact that autism is caused by vaccines. Got it? Good. But here's the sad part: she parades false hope to millions of parents who are devastated by their child's diagnosis of autism. And then she tells them how to spend their money to heal their child's autism. You would not believe how many different therapies are suggested in this book - mostly simply by mentioning that they worked for this or that "warrior mother" - that way she need never claim that they *will* work for your child. By the time you had finished working your way through them, or had run out of money, your child would have grown up. And given that autism does tend to become less apparently severe as children grow up, you could well believe that one of those things you did along the way was "what really started to make the difference". And then you recommend it to every other parent of an autistic child.

Now, let me make it clear: I am not suggesting that none of these treatments work. Christ, for all I know, vaccines DO cause autism, although it seems about as likely as that autism is caused by sleeping with your feet facing north. All I am saying is that this book provides no evidence of anything.

It should be compulsory reading.

Powerful angst

2010-01-22T11:33:00.000-08:00

Man oh man, I am in the grip of a powerful angst at the moment.

I lay in bed last night thinking, "What am I doing? What do I want to do?" and there wasn't any answer.

I am sick of living in my house. I want to live in a really small place, ie a boat. Even our boat felt unnecessarily big, so you can imagine how wastefully big the house seems. It's just all this space, filled with crap, that gets messy and I have to clean. Man, I'm even repeating myself here.

But it is typical of me really to assert some sort of elevated philosophical emotion and then express it in terms of not wanting to clean the house. There is more, honestly.

A friend lent me a book which she has also lent to another friend of mine and both of these people think I really should read this book. The book is called "Mother Warriors: A Nation of Parents Healing Autism Against All Odds" and it is a bunch of stupid crap. Now, this worries me. My friends are not stupid people. But somehow, they have come to believe that vaccines cause autism. Surely several centuries ago there was someone like me tearing her hair out and saying, "No, raindrops do not turn into earthworms! The rain floods the worms' homes and that is why we see them after heavy rain!" (Because apparently, people really did use to believe that raindrops turned into earthworms.)

So, anyway, I was lying in bed last night telling my husband about these friends of mine and how they believe a book written by a PLAYBOY BUNNY (no, I'm not kidding, as well as vaccines-cause-autism campaigner, Jenny McCarthy is also a playboy bunny), and reflecting, that he really is just about the only sane person I know. Just about. So many of my friends believe in religion, and I spend a lot of time trying to reconcile this with the fact that they are my friends. I'm serious. I think to myself, well, I used to believe, so I should be able to respect people who still believe. The fact remains though, I was twelve. The fact remains though, that you try to have a discussion with a religious person about anything rational, and at some time, you start to say some fairly basic, fundamental things, like, "well, surely the way that we know things is that we encounter them with our senses", and you hit up against a brick wall. Because these people know things because they *just know them*. And these people are capable of saying that muslims and psychics and imaginative five year olds playing dragon games are all of course *wrong* when they *just know things*, but "I am not wrong when I *just know things* because I am *right* and therefore God is real". And so there is no point in carrying out any attempt to be factual or objective or enquiring about anything, because if God does exist, then the most important thing in the universe defies scientific enquiry, so why would you bother with it?

And so these people live their lives in a pervasive state of error. They have ruled out, ab initio, the one thing that could enable them to lift the veil from their lives, and see the world as it really is. They have no interest in the one thing that would allow them to discover the amazingness and surprisingness and beautifulness and mindbogglingness of the world as revealed by simple, step by step enquiry using our five senses and our BRAINS. And my problem is that I share a planet with these people.

To the point where it is a rare thing to meet someone who is *not* deluded and irrational. And when you do occasionally meet someone who doesn't believe in "God", it turns out later that they actually believe in new age spirituality, reincarnation, homeopathy, or that vaccines cause autism.

And my problem is that I share a planet with these people.

It isn't that I dislike these people. If I did, I probably wouldn't have a problem with them. The fact is that I am friends with a lot of them and I really like them. That is why I feel so sorry for them that they live in such a cloud of ignorance. That is why I feel so uncomfortable when somebody I don't even particularly like much points out that my friends manifest the same characteristic that gets people committed - they believe in someone who isn't there. They even hear voices. And I find myself talking to this guy I don't like much and thinking, oh dear, I might not like him, but he's SANE, and my friends AREN'T.

"Oh, but isn't it important to believe in something?"

No, it isn't. It really isn't.

I don't know why I am bothering to present arguments here, because the fact is that this subject has been argued millions, perhaps billions, of times, and the deluded among my lovely friends have heard all of these arguments and still believe. All I am really trying to say is that it deeply, deeply bothers me that most people live their lives surrounded by deeply wrong and unexamined assumptions and beliefs, and that this, to me, appears to rob meaning from their lives.

A big downer

2010-01-17T19:25:00.000-08:00

I know that everyone wishes they could stay on holiday. And I know that I have it luckier than most, since I'm not actually going "back to work", but just continuing the gentle rhythm of my existence.

That doesn't make it any easier to get off our beautiful boat and head back to the city and another year of Life In The Suburbs. Somehow, I feel like I have done my restful quiet at-home-with-toddlers years and it is time for new adventures. Unfortunately my body doesn't quite agree with me and is still in the habit of sending me to bed for days at a time, useless for anything except moaning and self-pity.

We sat down and made a family plan for the year this morning - everything from "the big overseas trip that does not involve sailing" (which I am hoping my sinuses will be good enough to let me do) to the mundane day-to-day stuff. It is all good stuff, but really, it's only the trip that has me fired up.

Actually I think what is really getting me down is that everything feels like a mess and I'm not quite up to throwing myself into cleaning it all up. Our house and section just seem so enormous to live in and I'm not quite sure how my job ended up being "property manager" for a place where the weeds grow so prolifically. I do like gardening, but I hate housework, and in both cases, I feel like I just do the same job over and over again, when surely I'd be much better at, say, cutting-edge scientific research, or writing legal opinions. (I do like the mummy part of my life though.)

I was at the shops and the signs were all saying "Are you ready for school?" I remember how depressing I used to find that - school or work starting just as summer really heated up. At least I am spared that, but really, all I've wanted, all my life, is to take a summer holiday in February, and do you know what? I have never once done it.

I am pining for adventure. I apologise for moaning, but there you have it.

To avoid this post being a complete wallow, may I add:

1. Bon Accord Harbour is simply glorious.

2. We got home to houseguests - the lovely V (formerly my wife, but alas no more) and her family. We did not see nearly enough of them - I'm not sure if that's possible - but what we did have was lovely.

3. My antibiotics are working slowly so at least I am a lot better than I was at my worst.

4. Although our garden looks scraggy, it is still producing pumpkins, grapes, apples (ready to eat now), cucumber, courgettes, silverbeet, parsley, strawberries, tomatoes, beans and corn.

Mimiwhangata

2010-01-11T22:06:00.000-08:00

We are in the most beautiful place, Mimiwhangata. We have not been here since 2006.

We sailed down from Whangamumu today, in the weirdest most changeable winds that we've seen for ages. At times, we could see wind, we were in choppy water (not just groundswell but wind waves), but there was no wind where we were. At times there were 20 knots. Most of the time there was much less. It seemed like a long sail although I suppose it's only about 15 miles.

I've been feeling horrible so Husband did most of the sailing while I lazed around feeling sorry for myself.

Now that we are here in Mimiwhangata, I am determined to get better before we leave, because the water is so beautiful, and clear, that I can't bear not to swim in it.

In the meantime, though, I've been reading "Brideshead Revisited" (having finished Lionel Shriver's "A Perfectly Good Family". I'm in no mood for a book review. I will say that having people get it on crossing the Atlantic while everyone else is seasick is a much-copied device (I'm sure Fay Weldon used it) but I suspect Evelyn Waugh's version is the original.

Guess what Evelyn Waugh's first wife was called? Evelyn. Apparently.

I feel a sense of loss as we approach Auckland again. Already I am making those decisions that speak of non-renewal - our food runs low, but we don't need to restock, our sheets need washing, but there's no point at this stage. I still have a dream alternative-reality in which we never return. In that universe, I wash the sheets by hand, and we take the dinghy over to Oakura to buy things in tins.

What do I look forward to in Auckland? Friends and loved ones, the garden. The chickens. Easy availability of a doctor to help me fix my goddamned sinuses again. Online scrabble. That's about it really.

You might think I would look forward to mains power, hot showers, unlimited water, a washing machine, a steady floor beneath my feet, but I don't care about any of that.

Jan 10th

2010-01-09T22:54:00.000-08:00

I don't know why I put myself through this but I am once again trying to upload a post from Whangamumu.

Not a lot to report really. I have had sinusitis all holiday, but it's got worse lately and so I haven't even felt like swimming. We watched the tall ships race in Russell yesterday and then went to the hangi at the Russell Boat Club. The food was good, by hangi standards, but apart from that I don't think any of us particularly enjoyed ourselves. Today we decided to stay in Russell. Then we decided it would be nicer to anchor off an island, so we set off for Urupukapuka Island. Then we decided that since we had the sails up, there was no point only going a few miles, so we ended up sailing round Cape Brett and back to Whangamumu.

Just in the last half hour, the wind suddenly came up and was (I think) gusting 35 knots as forecast. We hit 10.6 knots going into the harbour entrance. Husband is quite keen to sail till the last moment so we only had our engine on for about two minutes.

I really feel like a rest day, but it seems that tomorrow the wind is good to sail to Great Barrier. And I would really like to go to Great Barrier.

And I am nearly 10 kg fatter than I was a year ago. Which is good.

Deep Water Cove

2010-01-07T00:28:00.000-08:00

This is a very quick update, since I do have a connection right now, albeit slow.

Today we sailed from Whangamumu to Deep Water Cove.

However, before we left, we went for an explore around Whangamumu, and found a place which I hereby name Hideaway Cove. It was such a perfect little spot - a very narrow little inlet in which you could very easily hide a dinghy or even a small yacht, if you were a pirate.

I got stung by a wasp on my bum, through my togs.

On the sail around Cape Brett we had no wind, and caught no fish. So that was annoying.

When we got here, Pozz and I jumped off at the bow and swam to the stern. That was the first time that Pozz had swum the length of the boat. His swimming is coming along so nicely. Then he and I swam to shore together, but he held on to me for help.

We have still not caught any fish, because nobody can bear to kill them unless they are oversize with a little bit to spare, so we have thrown back several marginal ones. Pozz is getting frantic.

Whangamumu 6 January

2010-01-07T00:24:00.000-08:00

Today started with a horrible bump in the night. Firstborn had fallen out of his bunk, after I stupidly agreed to him not having the lee cloth up. Husband and I were quite freaked out over whether he might be concussed, but he seemed not to be (he even remembered falling). Today he has an awful black eye.

I don't know whether it is being woken at night that does it, but when we woke up at 8.30am we were horribly, horribly tired and could hardly bear to get up. We had a slow start to the day. The kids played creationary (including Cousin T who stayed over) and then Husband took them for a bushwalk while I did some boat cleaning and maintenance, which took absolutely ages and was very frustrating. I was hoping I'd get really hot and then have a glorious swim, but I didn't, so as soon as I jumped in the water afterwards, I was freezing cold.

Hmmm, all of this sounds pretty awful, but actually we had an amazingly good day. Last night, Daughter learned to knit. I had held out for as long as I could, and she had started to comment that "it really is about time that I learned to knit", so I consented to my mother buying her knitting needles for Christmas, and wool, and we took them away with us. I cast on 26 stitches on 4.5mm needles, and sat her on my knee, and started.

By the end of the row she was knitting independently. This morning she asked if she could do more knitting, and did two more rows and not only did I not need to help, but I could pick up my own knitting and knit alongside her. Bliss! Mother and daughter knitting sessions! She is in fact the youngest child I have ever taught to knit. Yet she has managed it perfectly well and furthermore, she likes it. Woohoo! (Note to Sarah: I followed your suggestion and taught her the continental method since she is lefthanded. It worked really well.)

So anyway, this afternoon we set off to go snorkelling with The Cousins, but somehow, despite the fact that this bay is as small and perfect as a wineglass, we missed them, and ended up going out to the end of the peninsula in our dinghy and anchoring just off the rocks.

There followed an hour-long failed attempt to catch dinner. Which sounds like a downer, doesn't it? But it wasn't. It was amazing. We were in such a beautiful spot. We in fact caught seven fish (4 snapper, a pigfish, a parrotfish and a yellow eel), but threw them all back. The entire time, schools of maomao and snapper were boiling up around us. We had planned to snorkel but there wasn't any need when you could just watch the fish from the dinghy. Hordes of them. Droves. Swirling all around the boat and all but jumping in it. Finally as we were packing up I decided to slip in the water for a snorkel. Now, as I'm sure you know, I've had many a skinny dip, but never before have I had a nude snorkel. I felt rather ridiculous, but I knew I'd be freezing if I sat in the dinghy all the way back in wet underwear, so I ditched it, and slipped over the side wearing only a snorkel. Funnily enough there had been several yachts pass us just before that, but no one went by during my skinny-snorkel. Thank goodness. Climbing back in a dinghy naked is not dignified!

It was an awesome snorkel though. Daughter and I had had such a lovely time sitting in the dinghy watching the menfolk fish and talking about their catches, while I told her "How Maui Fished Up the North Island" and "How Maui Caught The Sun" and sang "Anchor Me" and "Louisiana" and "Moses Went Down to the River". It was a spot I could have just sat in forever. But I couldn't leave that rocky outcrop without snorkelling around it, seeing the teeming fish and the unfortunately too-common kina.

And then we went back to our boat and Husband went over to tell the Australians on the beach, nicely, that they should put their fire out, and then after dinner and about 300,000 more dishes, we played another game of Cluedo. Firstborn adores this game. He doesn't even mind that I've beaten him both times. (I know, I'm the nasty sort of mother who beats her son, but only because her husband is also playing and she has to beat him!)

Now it is very late and I am saving this post to upload later. Because one of Whangamumu's many perfections is that it has no internet access.

Whangamumu party

2010-01-07T00:22:00.000-08:00

Revisiting all the same spots as last year, I start to worry that the blog is getting repetitive. Last year my post entitled "Whangamumu Dreaming" was a sleepy fantasy about an undiscovered idyll. What can have changed in a year?

Nothing, of course, and yet, the feeling here is very different this year. There are 30 boats in here - last time we had it to ourselves. Instead of heading up to the magic waterfall on our own, we went with The Cousins. We also have two of The Cousins on our boat tonight for a sleepover, and have just finished a game of Cluedo (Miss Scarlett in the observatory, with the candlestick). So, this year it's "Whangamumu Party".

It still feels, however, as though we are partying in the presence of gods we daren't wake. The abandoned whaling station is indifferent to the children climbing on the vast concrete structures, through which huge trees grow. The Most Perfect Swimming Pool in the world is as black and deep and still as ever. Whangamumu knows that these boats will all leave it to its eternal dream, soon enough.

But I'm jumping ahead of myself (and your confusion won't be helped by the fact that this post won't be uploaded until I don't-know-when). It's January 5th, and we sailed up here to Whangamumu from Whangaruru this afternoon.

We had spent two nights at Whangaruru. The first in the upper reaches, and the second at Barfight Bay. Pozz named it that last year, although of course it has its proper name, which the owner of the land told us when we met her last year, but it's hard to remember. We went to say hello to the owner again this year but she wasn't there, so we met some of the extensive whanau instead.

Last night at Whangaruru we also met another family sailing with 3 children. Theirs were aged 10, 8 and 5, and they know The Cousins from sailing school, so we ended up sharing a bottle of wine on the beach while our 9 children played happily until long past dinnertime and even past bedtime. The Three Big Boys took the dinghy out to our boat to do bombs. They have a penchant for skinny dipping, so the Aunt managed to capture some footage on her video camera to store away for their 21sts. Meanwhile, the younger 6 built a fort on the beach, and it was really cool, so hopefully when you read this post, you'll get to see some groovy pictures of it. And yes, those are cow bones in the fort. We had an uncomfortable moment or two since the beach is on the site of an urupa, but luckily the size of the bones indicated bovine origins.

The next morning we returned to the beach and watched the children trying to rescue their fort from the incoming tide. Surely a timeless human activity.

We also had a visit from some bottlenosed dolphins when we were in the upper reaches of Whangaruru.

And we played Creationary.

We have hardly any stuff on our boat. We couldn't fit much in on our car-and-trailer even though we borrowed another car. And I really like it. My time, as well as my space, feels so uncluttered. It is irritating not to have a cheese grater, but, it's kind of worth it.

More paradise

2010-01-03T02:28:00.000-08:00

More paradise

When my daughter announces 3 days in a row that this is her "best day ever", it makes people smile. But when an adult behaves similarly, we tend to think they're a bit simple.

So I apologise in advance for the "best day ever" tone of many of my posts - feel free to regard me as mentally impaired.

I'm updating two days at once. Yesterday, we sailed to the Poor Knights Islands. As you will know if you read this blog last year, it is a world-renowned marine reserve and dive spot, so I am at least not alone in calling it paradise.

We sailed out there under a beautiful nor'wester, making a good 8 knots, but this same breeze made our usual spot - Nursery Cove - untenable. Instead we anchored under Archway Island. Anchoring at the Poor Knights is a bit of a palaver. It's tricky to find a spot with less than 40 metres of depth, and anchors are easily fouled. When you add in the fact that it's none too sheltered and you might have to leave in a hurry, well, it gets complicated. We buoyed the anchor in case we needed to ditch it and come back for it later. We lost count of how many metres of chain we had out.

But the spot we were in was peerless. From our boat we could see no fewer than 3 archways through which it was possible to take a boat (a photo will be uploaded when I next have a good enough connection). We took the dinghy through the smallest one. Then we dropped the dinghy anchor and took turns snorkelling.

Daughter had snorkelled for about 3 panic-stricken minutes last year. This year I hoped she would cope better as she is normally quite happy in water over her head with only a noodle or a flutterboard to keep her up - not to mention that she can so-nearly-almost-swim anyway. She coped a little better but still, it was hard to say if she really enjoyed it - although she did hop back in for a second go - and did rave about how beautiful it was underwater (but see previous note on how *everything* in Daughter's life is wonderful. It made me reflect again how surprising it was that Pozz, when younger than her (just 5, whereas she is nearly 6) had hopped overboard for the first time in his life and snorkelled here, 3 years ago. He held his father's shoulder with absolute faith and stuck in mask in the water and just loved it. It's funny, I think of him as timid, yet he actually does his fair share of jumping in feet first - literally.

So the 3 boys had a turn together - quite a short turn, since the water is very cold at the Poor Knights! Finally I got in, having already ditched my wetsuit in disgust. This wetsuit I wore ten years ago when SIX MONTHS PREGNANT, but now it makes me feel claustrophobic to the point of physical sickness! So I must be fatter than I was. Anyway, there is something beautiful about the short precious moments in cold water, right on your skin, unmediated by wetsuit. I swam into the arch-cave we had dinghied through. I could see this weird ball of seaweed or something about halfway through. As I got nearer, I realised with a chill of fear that it was a solid ball of fish. Blue maomao, more than a metre across and so thick that they looked like a physical shape. If you've seen Finding Nemo you'll know what I mean, and it isn't often that real life gets compared with one of the more unrealistic scenes in an animated children's movie.

I don't know why it was scary. Animals behaving weirdly just are scary. So I swam away, but did send Husband in for a look, since I know he isn't such a wuss.

Another thing you can't miss at the Poor Knights is the birdsong. It was one of the first things we noticed, even with the engine on, when we were anchoring. And overnight, one of the seabirds - a shearwater we think - came and visited Husband in the cockpit, where he was sleeping in case the wind came up and we had to slip away in a hurry. He called me up to see it. It was surprisingly big and we thought at first it was a blue penguin. It had climbed right into the cokpit locker! Like every other night on our trip, the moon has been full and bright and the evening was incredibly beautiful.

The next morning we had another quick snorkel before setting sail for Whangaruru because a big blow was forecast. For the first time ever we got to sail up the east coast of the Poor Knights - rugged and beautiful. Then we had a nice 2-3 hour sail to Whangaruru. We anchored in Oakura Bay near the entrance, and the boys and I swam ashore while Husband and Daughter took the dinghy. We visited the shop and found fresh fruit - nectarines! What a bonus - fresh fruit in northland coastal towns is virtually non-existent. But it seems the blow is going to be big and we couldn't stay overnight, so we relocated to the upper reaches of Whangaruru. The Cousins have turned up here too and are anchored beside us.

Unfortunately Firstborn is not feeling good - I hope we are not going to have a repeat of last summer's vomiting bug.

Now, to see if this will upload - my battery is down to 6%!

Happy new year 2010

2010-01-01T01:51:00.000-08:00

A very quick update

We spent New Year's Eve and New Year's Day at the family land.

The two big boys (Firstborn and Cousin T) stayed up till midnight so that they could be in the water at the moment the year changed over. Firstborn decided at ten to twelve he was too tired and would just go to bed. But his dad got him down to the beach, and with 30 seconds to go he made a running dash for the water.

It was a special moment for me. Ten years ago Husband and I saw in the new millennium at Marble Bay in the far north. At the stroke of midnight, we were in the water, in the pitch black - waves hitting us without warning. In my belly was the not-yet-Firstborn.

Firstborn loves this story.

Also swimming were Cousin T, Husband's cousin L and her partner M. Not swimming were my brother-and-sister-in-law T and K, my parents in law, and the other 4 children who were all in bed. The other brother-and-sister-in-law were back in the city for the night at a fortieth.

Today Firstborn and I had an early morning visit to the beach. Glorious sunshine and a full tide. We swam again, lay around on the beach talking about his latest Susan Cooper book, William Shakespeare, and why no one says "thou art" anymore. And this afternoon I had a nap in a hammock slung from a pohutukawa tree.

Beats going up the mast.

Our second day of adventuring

2009-12-29T19:03:00.000-08:00

I'm uploading this at the same time as my previous post, since we are now snugly anchored in a wee harbour near our family section. I was hoping to upload photos, but my mobile internet connection has other plans, so you can consider yourselves lucky to get this one!

I keep thinking about the word "adventure". Adventure is very much what I'm in the mood for - and I'm really enjoying seeing how excited our 3 little adventurers are. Even just moseying down the river on our first day, they were bursting with excitement.

We have had another beautiful and adventurous day. In the morning we went back into the beautiful and wild beach that we visited yesterday evening. This time there were more people on it - surfing, bodysurfing and fishing from the beach - but the southern alcove that we anchored at was still ours alone. Pozz became desperate to do some fishing so when we got back to our boat, Pozz and Husband had a short attempt at fishing, but nothing was biting, and Firstborn was keen to get to The Cousins, so we soon called it a day and set sail again.

We only had to sail 14 miles, and it was a perfect reaching breeze (forecast to gust 40 knots, but I think only about 25). So we just put the genoa out and had a cruisy two-hour sail, giving Firstborn a turn at helming, cooking up some falafels, and emitting the odd swear word as we tried to put the mainsail cover on while underway. Now that we are here, Husband has taken the children away to see The Cousins, so I am alone on board. It is sunny and warm and quiet and I might go for a swim in a mo, or I might just sit and read my Lionel Shriver book and eat chocolate....

Our adventure begins

2009-12-29T18:49:00.001-08:00

(This is the only photo you're getting, because the others just won't upload!)

It is 6.30 am and I am writing this even though I cannot upload it, because we are anchored behind an enormous piece of rock - a mountain - that obscures all radio and cellphone signals.

I just want to put it in writing anyway. It is amazing how we have suddenly switched from "holiday not started yet" to "well and truly adventuring".

On the 27th we packed up our house and drove up to our boat and unpacked onto the boat. The children were very excited to be on the boat, even though it was tied to a wharf up a river.

The next day we went into the local town and bought last-minute supplies while waiting for the tide to turn. In the afternoon, we headed down the river to the harbour and found a beautiful spot to anchor.

It sure felt like our holiday had started. It was hot going down the river and we anchored in beautiful clear water and, of course, jumped straight in. We had another swim the next morning.

But we still hadn't actually sailed anywhere yet. So yesterday morning we got the boat ready for sailing, and the dinghies on deck, and at 1.30 we set off. We had no particular destination in mind, because the weather forecast was pretty non-committal.

At first we were going downwind, doing 6 knots under main alone and then 7 knots with the genoa out. We turned a corner at the base of Kawau and did a steady 8 knots along the back of Kawau. Then when we got to the north passage, we realised how much wind shelter Kawau affords, as we hit 10 knots in the gusts, and flew along over the next few hours, past Takatu Point, Cape Rodney and Bream Tail. The Hen and Chicks loomed invitingly ahead of us. But where were we going to anchor?

The problem was that the wind was nor'west but forecast to turn sou'west - and rise to 30 knots. The Hen and Chicks both offer lovely southern anchorages and lovely northern anchorages, but not one anchorage that does for both. So we consulted the chart again and spotted a little nook where we could tuck in, just past Whangarei Heads.

We had sailed past this spot many times. We've admired the beautiful long white-sand surf beach, Ocean Beach. We know that our friend T holidays here with her family (although we have little chance of finding her). But we've always sailed outside the Bream Islands before (as you would), so we never realised quite how gorgeous it was. Today we sailed inside the Bream Islands, and found ourselves in paradise.

We took the tiny dinghy, Humphree, into the beach with us. Daughter was frightened when she saw the surf we planned to land in. Husband offered to drop us at the rocks, which formed a partial shelter, and then beach the dinghy on his own. But a frightened little voice announced that she was going "wherever daddy goes", so he dropped me and the boys at the rocks and we met him on the beautiful squeaky white sand.

Pozz was overwhelmed with the beauty of the place. Scarcely had we touched the rock than he announced that the was the best place he had EVER been, and when we left, he cried.

We're hoping to go back to shore this morning, before we head up the coast for our safe harbour, while that 30-knot sou'wester blows through.

Later, I finally got to add some of our photos:

We're on the high seas again

2009-12-27T11:29:00.000-08:00

Woohoo!

Well, actually, we're up a river, tied to a wharf, waiting for the tide to turn.

But still.... woohoo!

I'm just going to go in and change the title of the blog. Barefoot schmearfoot.

I'd like to remember...

The swim on Christmas day. I took Daughter out to the E by swimming with her on my back. Pozz and Firstborn swam for nearly an hour with cousin T and friend J, pushing each other off the raft, just like their fathers used to push each other off the skids.

Now, we're back on our boat. The tide turns late afternoon, so we have some time to explore the river in our dinghy, play Creationary (our new favourite game), and update the blog.

"Are you on holiday?"

2009-12-22T01:58:00.000-08:00

At around this time of year the school-free mama gets asked repeatedly questions along the lines of, "So, are you letting your kids have a holiday too, or do they just keep working all the time?"

I'm so tempted to say, "Oh, we cut back to about 8 hours a day during January."

If I had been asked yesterday I could have replied, "Actually they had a long biology lecture this morning on the difference between meiosis and mitosis."

It started with Pozz asking:

"If a man and a woman had a baby, and there was a clone of the man and a clone of the woman and the clones also had a baby, would the babies be the same?"

We ended with "why the shortness of the Y chromosome makes boys more vulnerable to heritable diseases, and how this affected the history of Europe". Complete with my cartoonish drawings of the Russian imperial family and evil Rasputin. I tried to give Rasputin angry eyebrows. Pozz asked me if Rasputin was Chinese.

It's unusual for Pozz to tolerate being lectured and even having diagrams drawn to aid his understanding.

This morning a friend took the boys geocaching. Firstborn, aka The Electronic Midas, got my old (OLD) dictaphone working and took it with him, because no bushwalk is complete without a dictaphone and a GPS. This afternoon we had yet another swim in the neighbour's pool.

And this evening we read the most exciting part of "Chimneys of Green Knowe". The children were riveted. It's a fantastic book.

You can lead a horse to water...

2009-12-20T01:18:00.000-08:00

I decided to get Daughter's exemption written early so that I didn't do the rush-job that I did for her brothers.

I got stuck trying to describe "regularity" and sought some help from the radical unschoolers.

There followed quite a meaty discussion on the nature of learning and teaching, and one of the questions in the back of my mind the last few weeks has finally been answered.

I've been confused by some unschoolers saying that they "don't teach" their children. On the one hand, I would agree that children don't need nearly as much teaching as most people assume. On the other hand, I don't like the idea that unschooling is all about doing nothing and leaving kids to their own devices.

So, one person in particular suggested that we need a new, broader, more unschooly version of what teaching is - and pointed out that some of the concepts being adopted in early childhood education can be useful here. Teaching can be about providing an opportunity, responding to a question, choosing not to disturb, joining a conversation. It's not that unschooling parents don't teach - they just do it very differently.

I liked it. She was describing how we can facilitate our children's learning without force-feeding it to them. It's not that I hadn't already been doing this, just that I hadn't, up until now, been very good at describing what we do as "teaching".

I ended up not only altering my description of "regularity" but also changing my description of "curriculum coverage for the first year". In terms of "regularity" I now simply state that Daughter learns all of the time that she is awake, and we expect this to continue. In the section on "curriculum coverage", I have removed any descriptions of what Daughter has learned, so that I now only describe the teaching that is offered . I'm really happy with this - it feels like less of an invasion of her privacy, and puts less pressure on her (even in my mind) to live up to any particular learning outcomes.

It's a bit of an artificial distinction, when my teaching is of course led by her interests, so it is hard to describe it in isolation. But I'm happy with what I've done. It's also reminded me of Oliver Van de Mille's advice to stop worrying about learning and just think about good teaching. After all, I can only teach, I can't make my children learn.

Meanwhile...

Today Husband took the boys out Christmas shopping and Daughter and I hung out at home. She played with the wooden train track for most of the day. I had to entice her away to eat lunch. She suggested that I ought to knit for a while so we could chat while she played. How sweet. I sat and knat but most of the time she was still talking to herself. She was trying to read the names on the bottom of the trains and asking me what a tender is. She is trying to read everything in sight at the moment. Finally she came out into the garden with me, and Pozz joined us too, to attack jasmine and bamboo. Later Pozz came back to chat to me and gave me a half-hour long description of lego star wars. I refuse to feel guilty for only pretending to listen - I do need to stay sane in order to be a good mother to him!

Daughter and I were both delighted to find some rose bushes in our garden. No idea how they got there actually. We had already found a wild rose on our driveway, but now we also have a peach-coloured one, and a tiny new pink one, on our north bank. And I was also quite pleased with my honeysuckle extermination drive and my convolvulus extermination drive.

Firstborn went to visit his friend Z. The rest of the time his nose was in a book.

After dinner we sang Christmas carols. The kids know I'm a sucker for "just one more".

Now they're in bed and I am, yet again, too shattered to think about wrapping presents. I guess it'll be a Christmas Eve thing.

Daughter playing again

2009-12-15T15:48:00.000-08:00

I was watching Daughter play again today.

When we got a blue rug I hoped the children would treat it as the ocean, and I love it when they do. This morning Daughter has two giraffes and two women, about three inches high. One of the women got stuck in water that was over her head. The giraffes set out to rescue her. As they set off from the beach (the wooden floor at the edge of the rug), Daughter provided a running commentary to tell us how deep the water was. It got to the point where the giraffes had to walk on tippy toes!

I loved listening to her narrative. She puts it in the past tense as if it is a story book.

The girl jumped into the sea. She swam and swam. That night, the girl was getting ready for dinner. Then she saw some beautiful shiny but red [something]. She swam over.

I can only catch snippets. When the characters speak, she does voices. Often they have a slightly upper class English lilt.

It's funny to recognise elements of her real life in her play. The interest in the depth of water is very relevant to her. She is swimming in the neighbour's pool a lot and challenging herself to jump in deeper and deeper.

Right now I can hear:

"How long have you been swimming?"

"Oh, I just learned to swim."

It was a dangerous place to swim.

Now she is actually living out the character's experience - while holding the little woman-figure in her hand, she is gulping and puffing as if finding it difficult to swim. One of her women is an Amazon warrior, the other a Pocahontas-inspired figure with a baby on her back.

Then she starts to sing. "Ga-la-la. Ga-la-lac." She is so melodious - I often hear little beautiful consonants sung over and over. "Lu-la-lu-lu-lu. Lu-la-lu-lu-lu."

"That was dangerous. Now come with me. On my back."

I held onto her back and I held on tight.

Daughter takes a huge gulp of air, and the woman dives into the blue rug.

It's so beautiful, so unending, so eternal. Now her little woman is going into a lego house, and she pauses to repair some of the roof. She is drifting seamlessly between dialogue (with the English accent) and singing to herself.

A friend recently commented about homeschoolers that, "Some of them, it's the parents who can't cope with the children being at school, but the children actually would cope at school."

I couldn't think where to start - so many weird assumptions in that statement.

All I really needed to say was, "Who would send their child to school just because the child would cope?"

I expect Daughter would "cope" at school - although one could never be sure.

But I didn't bring her into the world in order that she would cope. Her name means "may she flourish". We want her to thrive and flourish and blossom, and for that, you need the best soil.

Where the wild things are

2009-12-14T23:17:00.000-08:00

At playcentre we used to write running records, where you record (in minute detail) everything a child does, so you can analyse it later in order to know the child better and plan better for him or her.

Fortunately I am a touch typist, as it is difficult to keep up when the child starts talking (and Daughter never stops!)

So here is a running record of Daughter pretend-reading "Where the Wild Things Are" to herself.

There are times when a young child will have a book word-perfect, but while impressive, that is hardly worth copying out, as you will just end up with a transcript of the book. This is a book that Daughter doesn't know well, and her comments are about the movie version which she saw last Friday. It's interesting to hear her comparing the the movie and the book, and then return to pretend-reading. She also makes other comments on the book (eg about the characters' feet). Occasionally she spells out a word, although mostly she's just happy to paraphrase from memory.

I wanted to record this because Daughter and Pozz do this every day. They do this all the time. They pretend-read books they know well and books they don't know at all. And it's funny to think, that for the first however-many years of their lives, this IS how they experience books.

Also, this is the first time I've heard actual reading intrude on pretend-reading. I expect a year from now, Daughter's experience of this book will be much more literal.

I came in part-way through:

All around him was the darkness of the sky. His bedroom had turned into a jungle.

He was frightened and an animal came. Then came KW and there came Carol and there came Judith and there came Ira, showing their terrible claws and gnashing their terrible teeth and rolling their terrible eyes and roaring their terrible roars.

"BE STILL" and they were still. And then Carol bowed down to the king.

KW looked sad, someone else looked sad. The bird guy with something weird's feet. KW should switch her feet around! Some people have their bodies exactly looking wrong.

LET THE WILD RUMPUS START. There are some people who are not in this. That guy and that guy and that guy.

They jumped up and down. KW should switch her feet again. That guy should switch his feet again. That guy should switch his feet. That guy shouldn't switch his feet.

He said, "BE S... S.... STOP" Max said. and SSS EEEE nnnnt them to the... the... b..e..d.

They gnashed their terrible teeth and they showed their terrible claws and they rolled their terrible eyes and they roared their terrible roars, and they said please don't go, we'll eat you up, we love you so.

He sailed in and out. He smelt good food from miles away. When he finally got home his supper was waiting for him, still hot.

THE END.