July is Penguin Month!

In the spirit of keeping my child entertained, I have put a whole heap of new things on her shelves this month.  Most of them are Montessori-inspired - largely because she keeps telling me to make her "jobs like I used to do," and also because she likes to have a choice of things to do.  I do still very much enjoy the Montessori-style activities, especially when I can see how much Niamh loves to do them.  I suspect our learning style will end up a bit ecclectic, at least in the early years.

Anyway, here's what we have to play with:

Sticker number matching.  She loves these foam number stickers (and we also have letters and animals), and rather than just allowing her to plaster the house (which she was doing), I came up with this little number matching game.  It's not about number recognition (though she does ask and recognise the numbers) but more about making the correct match with the stickers provided.

And here's her trying it out (Mess?  What mess?):

 A spooning activity:

 A tonging and colour separation activity:

Very Montessori - introduction to decimal system golden beads:

Glass bead pattern and shape matching (this one is a big hit - especially when we made penguin shapes out of them!)

We also have play dough, stacking boxes, lego, wooden food and cutlery sets, wooden blocks and a whole heap of other things.  We also tried cutting an orange and squeezing our own juice today using a hand-juicer.  She barely ended up with a mouthful, but she had fun, so I'm sure it'll be something she'll ask to do again (in fact, she already has...but 3 oranges is probably enough for one day!).

Oh!  I nearly forgot about Penguin Month.  Each month, we are going to look at a specific topic (we even have a little box...I will take a photo and post it later).  This month is...surprise surprise...penguin month!  We have already made a world map showing where penguins live (I'll post a photo later), made penguin play dough shapes, and of course, there is this month's sensory tub:

In this tub are:

- White, black and yellow pompoms (looks a bit like a penguin colony on snow)
- 8 penguin buttons
- 3 ice blue and 1 glittery "snow flakes" (pompoms)
- penguin food (fish, squid and krill made out of clear plastic and silver pen)
- ice cubes and water droplets (glass beads)
- sticker spelling game - she needs to find, match and make the words "egg," "chick," and "penguin"
   using the foam stickers in the tub
- photos of a penguin egg, chick and adult penguin


Here's what it looks like all crammed in:

Doing the penguin sticker spelling:

We are heading off to the museum tomorrow to see a dinosaur puppet show, which I am hoping she will enjoy (even though it's not penguins).

What's Been Happening?

What has been happening?  Not much.  Well, lots and lots of not much, which - if you know what I mean - may be translated as "heaps of stuff, none of which I can specifically recall, or that seems especially relevant."

So I'll update in pictures, cos they're pretty and have, you know, colours n stuff.

Niamh has specifically been asking for "jobs" to do, lately (as in Montessori activities), so I have been obliging by coming up with a whole heap.  It's amazing how timely her request is, since she would have been starting school, if we'd kept her enrolled at the local Montessori.  I am still very much on the "unschooling" pathway, but I figure if she's asking for Montessori-type things to do, then I am merely making good on her requests.

A sticker matching activity (pardon the mess on the floor - created when she up-ended a jar of animal stickers while doing the activity I made for her).  She has to match the numbers written on each card, using her foam number stickers.

A close-up of the activity components,  The cards and the little pink bowl of stickers all pack away in the wooden box:

Niamh has been asking about the days of the week etc lately, so we made a calendar:

A traditional Montessori job - the hanging bead stair (except in our house, Niamh teaches the duck toys how to do it...)

Some free time at the park in between rain, rain, rain:

Making numbers up to 19:

Going to Penguin Island on a boat:

And so much more.

Can't believe my little baby is going to be 3 in just a few short weeks.

Sleep Tight, Zep

Today, we put to sleep our Labrador Retriever, Zep.

You were a big, stupid, gentle soul, and we loved you.  Good night, and sleep tight, boof.  We'll see you again one day soon.  xx

Trust

Today's musing is about trust - sparked by a wonderful little unschooling incident which reminded me why it is so important to TRUST that learning will always ...no...is always happening for your child.

Niamh has been really into the Happy Feet movies, lately.  I think I know them both off by heart, including all the songs, and most of the dance moves.  She does too, although her versions of the songs are as detailed as her comprehenion of the words she thinks she hears - and thus are 95% wrong, and endearing beyond belief.  I spend half the movie hiding around the corner with my fist shoved in my mouth while she sings her own versions of the songs, loudly and proudly as any two year old can.

As any mother who has been forced to watch and/or listen to countless repeat performances of any G rated movie, however, no matter how much you enjoyed it the first time (or even first four or five times), I must admit to a teeeeeeensy bit of resignation every time she requests it be played.  And by "resignation," I of course refer to the kind of resignation that prompts one to go to the shed, retrieve any item designed to pulverise and smash the heavy end of said tool repeatedly on the offending receptacle of entertainment.

 Anyway.  In a rare lull during repeats last week, I managed to drag Niamh away from the tv and to the shops, where she promptly found - joy of joys - a small orange and white box, upon which (yay marketing!) was a picture of one of the penguins from Happy Feet 2.  Negotiations ensued, and Niamh ended up the owner of said box, and its contents...which in this instance happened to contain three chocolate eggs with toys insides.  Specifically, toy figurines from the Happy Feet movies.  She has quite a collection, now.  They watch the movies together, and she re-enacts scenes using the figurines.  And I still stand around the corner, with my fist shoved in my mouth, because it appears that none of the figurines know the words to any of the songs in the movies either.

So stricken, earlier today, I heard plastic Mumble say to plastic Erik, something that made me prick up my ears and realise I was over-simplifying things.  "Nooo, Erik," said plastic Mumble.  "You're an Emperor Penguin.  You have black feet.  Sven is a puffin.  He has orange feet."

Huh? thinks I.  I never noticed that!  (I checked google, by the way, and yes, she is correct!)  But Mumble wasn't done yet.  "Puffins don't live in Antarctica," plastic Mumble told plastic Erik.  "They're Arctic birds.  That's north.  Antarctica is south."

There was suddenly a lot more room for my fist in my mouth, because my jaw had fallen on the floor.  But there you have it.  And so I bring this all neatly back to trust.  And if I am to self-reflect on this whole experience, I have to admit I had forgotten all about it.  While I was busy mentally smashing the Happy Feet disk into a thousand pieces, and worrying about being a bad mother for buying my child enough chocolate penguin-figurine-containing eggs to keep the Bunny out of business for several years to come, Niamh was busy learning a little bit more about our world.  Her teachers?  Two animated movies, and a box of cheap chocolate eggs.

Learning is always happening.  Sometimes, you just have get your fist out of your mouth and put your trust back in your child.

Patience

Patience is something I've never been particularly good at.  And, I've discovered, it's not really something I have been particularly good at learning, either.  Despite many, many opportunities having presented themselves to me, I remain sadly lacking in the acquisition of patience department.  In fact, given that I have Niamh to compare myself to, I can now safely say I have the patience of a two year old.


 A lot of things have been happening here, lately.  Not many of them pleasant, but with the ups of life must, I suppose, come the downs.  One HUGE up is that Niamh and I will soon be moving to northern Antarctica (aka Tasmania).  A very sweet little farm and a welcoming community of gorgeous unschoolers await us there, and I have been assured - by my duck-mad and rather persistent offspring - that many, many ducks will soon be quacking their way into our future...(and if I get MY way, into a pot...in my oven.  Mmm...duck...)

 
Waiting for all this to come to fruition is hard.  And I'm not getting ANY better at being patient, despite the fact I have no choice.

Anyway, enough about all that for now (though watch this space for more news!).  What has Niamh been up to lately?

She has been learning how to fix the reticulation

Creating her own sense of style

Dancing (with ducks)

Drawing (ducks)

Archaeology (with dinosaurs!)

Making an ice cave for her toys to explore

Making a solar system model

And just generally living life as only a 2 year old does!

Come to think of it, I have way LESS patience than a two year old. 

*Cough*

I am still alive...
 
...just very, very lazy.

I have (at last count) about a billion things to update here, but, well...LAZY.  It speaks so succinctly for itself.

Okay.  If I may just waive the white flag of innocence for a moment.  "Lazy" is the word I have chosen to describe the 24 hour a day, 7 day a week, unassisted mothering of a very engaged 2.5 year old who has apparently taken my daring to sit before this other-worldly portal as some sort of personal insult of the highest and most severe degree - thus limiting my available blogging hours to those between her falling asleep and my carrying her to bed (ie, ZERO).

Okay.  So not exactly zero, either.  Because, if I'm to be truthful, there is that hour or so after she falls asleep and BEFORE I ferry her to bed...that self-same, blissful, peaceful, duck-free hour during which the white, ungainly blancmange I am so displeased to call my body and I, prostrate and mentally weak with the constant pressure to come up with the answers to all things beginning with "Why...?", am lying on the couch and mindlessly watching television (documentaries, I swear!!).  I could choose to give up this sweet, precious, restful hour to blogging.  I could choose to allocate this hour to vouchsafing the particulars of my day to you, the wonderful few who dare to follow my pointless ramblings.  I could choose to conjur up the effort required to wax erudite...intelligent...even daringly political on subjects vital to my heart such as unschooling and treating children with respectful consent.  I could also choose to spear out my own eyes with shards of glass.  Because, at the end of the day, I WANT to be lazy.  I enjoy being lazy.  I have EARNED being lazy.

You mothers will understand what I mean.  It's the kind of laziness that you will defend - suddenly and even terrifyingly against any non-combatant ideals to which you loftily aspire - to the talon-bearing, teeth-gnashing, telephone-ripping-off-the-wall, husband-daring-to-ask-you-if-you-want-a-coffee-heavy-pot-stoving-in-the-head-of, death.  It's lazy with a capital "get the hell out of my way, I'm a mother and I've had enough of every other human on this planet who might possibly want something from me at this moment and I'm bloody well doing NOTHING or I'll kill you."  It's where lazy wishes it could go for its holidays.  If it was brave enough.  Or lazy enough.  It's the kind of lazy where normal lazy takes a few, rather drunken steps backwards, holds up its lazy hands in supplication and say, "Whooaaa, mate.  I don't want any trouble here.  I'll maybe catch you later."

I could go on.  But the above-mentioned lazy (the one currently holding a weapon to my head and smiling at me in a bright, "let's chat" kind of way) has informed me that I have a date with the couch.  Maybe even a freddo frog.

Laziness is in the eye of the beholder.  As long as those eyes are mine, and the mouth below them is filled with chocolate, anyone who has a problem with laziness can go...do something incredibly amazing and sporty and tell me about it later.  There's napping to be done.

Long Time, No See

Phew.  It's been a while since I've updated here, hasn't it?  I'd love to be able to report that so much has happened.  But really, life has just chugged along its fairly familiar path, as it so often is apt to do while leaving us feeling busy, swamped and plain worn out - despite the fact that, upon reflection, we really have nothing to show for ourselves...

 I hope you like the title of this blog.  It came to me as one of those unnoticed idioms which you dismiss as a superficial attempt at humour, but only afterwards realise your brain was actually trying to send you a message.  But we'll get back to that in a minute...

We have been doing a lot of soul-searching lately, on a lot of subjects.  Top of the list is currently the kind of life we want for our beautiful daughter. You see, for a long time, I didn't see.  Well, I thought I saw.  Don't we all?  The part of me that likes to be right (which is, let's face it, the most ME part of me), was pretty convinced that what I was looking at was the whole picture.  You know, kind of like looking through a window from a short distance away...you might see open fields and clear skies and think, "I see the world out there," but really, you're only seeing a small piece of an infinitely larger reality - a chunk, a 'glimpse' as those in real estate like to put it (and we all know what that means when we read it, right!).  What you're really seeing, frankly, is a hell of a lot of wall and glass and, if you're lucky, a splash of colour which, in time, you may come to call "the whole world," because you've forgotten that any more of it exists than what you can see.  (Seeing is believing, anyone?)

As so many adults do (and have been trained since childhood to do), I mistook the view for the destination.  I wanted so much to believe in that view, too, because hell, it was the ONLY view, after all.  When you're faced with so much wall, a window is a lovely thing.  A refreshing possibility...the potential for a greater existence.

For a long time, I have loved the window.  Justifiably so.  It is easy to lose oneself in a beautiful view.  Windows offer potential, too.  The view itself can prompt much discussion, thought and planning.  It can take you in directions you hadn't previously planned.  Nothing better than a glimpse of what lies just over there to interest you enough to want to start a journey...to get you up out of your chair and really study the view.

The great thing about windows (I'm going to run with this theme today...I like it a lot!) is that they offer more than just a pretty prospect.  They let in light.  You can open them up and breathe clean, sweet air...air that fills you up and cleanses your mind and smells of things you never dreamed existed.  And if you only dare poke your head outside...wow!  What a world!  What a universe!  And all that is required to explore it is to pluck up the courage to unlock that big, imposing door and take your first tentative steps forward.

And in that spirit, and with all the hopes, fears and excitement of explorers in a brilliant new land, so we have taken our first tentative steps into the world Radical Unschooling.  Already, it feels so right that I wonder why I was ever content with just the window.

Long time, no see.

But the view is SO worth the wait!