Fixie's Shelf

Homemade Journal - Mark 2

While I was in that magical creative headspace sparked by making Raise Your Own, I thought I'd try again with that journal I made. I made a new cover for it with some paper ripped out of a 1970s sewing pattern book, and a paper doll I had in my collection. NOW I'm in love with it!



 
 



 
 

 

 

Another house cushion

After I made the house cushion cover in my last post, I realised that when I wash the cover, my cushion will be bare. I hate being without it in bed, so I decided to quickly whip up a spare cover out of a piece of old sheet I had in my cupboard. I tested out the freehand sewing feature of my sewing machine and wow - I love the way the writing turned out! A nice little touch for a spare cover. Actually.. maybe I like it better than the main cover! Pity I didn't look carefully at the sheet before I cut out the pillow - there seems to be a stain centre front. Bummer.

 

 

Tiger Mother Update

Since I wrote about The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, our household has been centred around a strict programme of homeschool which Jesse has to follow.

In the past, when I've instituted a star system, it's been brief and focussed only on achieving one thing. Jesse has generally mastered it quickly and easily, and Paula and I are happy to have such a smooth outcome to the problem area. This time though, the system is long, complicated and daunting for him.

Implementing it has been very challenging for all of us. Paula and I, several times, have been tempted to chuck in the towel, but we've managed to hang in there. Even at the start of week three, Jesse's morning routine, which he has to complete within half an hour, with me giving only a single prompt, tends to elicit mountains of tears, as he is afraid he can't manage it. It's not THAT hard - make his bed (which he's been doing for years), take morning tablets and drink milk, get dressed and put pyjamas away, brush hair, brush teeth. He often misses getting a star because he took longer than the allowed time (ie he got distracted and spent most of the time farting around), or because he thought he'd done it all but missed a key component, or because he'd done half of everything (put on half his clothes, drank half his milk etc). I was starting to despair.

This morning he got up and did it without being asked. I held my breath, didn't prompt him or remind him, just waited to see what would happen. Ok so there was a bit of farting around, but forty minutes later he'd done everything. And then he turned to me and said, "Let's do hip hop."

Several mornings a week we practise hip hop or ballet. After reading The Brain that Changes Itself, I decided that for good brain development Jesse should work on co-ordination exercises like handwriting and ballet. He didn't really want to enrol in ballet - "Can I do hip hop?" he begged - but I said he'd had to. As it is, he enjoys it now, and our home practise sessions are even fun. It only took a few days of the star system to enlist such co-operation in the classes that we are able now, to laugh and make it joyful.

To satisfy Jesse, we found him a hip hop teacher as well - a really fantastic one. He does a private class once a week and it's incredible. The dancing is such a perfect fit for Jesse, and he's so inspired, especially by the ultra-cool Darren, who teaches him. Strangely though, our hip hop practise sessions have been hell. Paula and I contemplated letting him just learn from Darren, and doing whatever he feels like, hip hop-wise, during the week. Afterall, we don't want to spoil it for him. BUT... the classes are expensive, in terms of our time and energy, as well as money. I'm really not prepared to have Darren teach him monkey swing, and then teach him monkey swing again the next week. So - during the week I insist that we practise monkey swing until he can do it properly, so he's ready for the next move. If he doesn't want to work so intensively, I suggested he could see Darren fortnightly instead. But no - he's really keen to learn from Darren weekly.

You'd think with all this motivation, that practising would be easy. But it's been the hardest thing of all. Most mornings we've had forty minutes of arguments and tears as we've tried to work it out, and I keep changing my approach, trying to find a better fit. Finally, yesterday, we had our first really good hip hop practise session. He enjoyed it, he improved, it was fun, it was satisfying! Hooray! And then this morning, he WANTED to practise. He put on music and did a few routines. YES!

Just as I was thinking this whole four-week programme was doomed to failure, it seems to be shifting. We're (hopefully) moving to a place where we can enjoy the structured parts of our homeschool, where Jesse takes responsibility for his daily domestic/personal tasks and attends to them without Paula and me needing to spend half a day harrassing him. In this new place, Paula and I have more time and energy for FUN with Jesse.

A few weeks ago, I was singing a song in German, and Jesse asked what I was doing. When I explained, he said, "Can you speak German?" I nodded. "I'm SOOOO JEALOUS!" he told me. Well I promised to teach him. I got us a German book for kids, and downloaded a German language app onto my iPhone. I've been determined to keep this separate from the star system. I have to keep reminding myself, over and over, this is strictly fun. We are only doing it because he wants to. If he doesn't want to practise, he doesn't have to. This approach is going remarkably well. He's spent a fair bit of time with me recently on the German book, or doing the games in the app, and very often now we exchange a few sentences in German... more and more as he learns more. It's fun. For me, too. This is really why we homeschool - so that we can take on things like this and let them unfold and genuinely find fun in learning.

I actually believe our star system has helped lead us to this place where he CAN enjoy the fun of German. Maybe it would have happened anyway. But I'm not sure. Before I started insisting that he do various homeschool activities, he was in the habit of lying around reading for so much of each day that I started to get annoyed. As a child, I was like that. All my holidays and weekends, I could happily read. So I could understand. But I did think he was turning into a little couch-bound prince, who ate books while the rest of us served him, and I couldn't bear that sense of entitlement. He still reads plenty, and we encourage it, but he's also in the habit of doing other things, which I think is good.

House Cushion

I made this house cushion to go on my bed. My much loved reading cushion had worn out completely. I replaced it with this little house, made entirely from things I already had on hand. I think it's gorgeous.

 
 

The Grimstones on Wicked!

Last year when we took The Grimstones to Glasgow and Liverpool, I had the pleasure of being followed around by a camera-man from Remark! (a Deaf TV company) for days.  Finally they've used a little bit of the footage in their current episode of the show Wicked.  The bit about The Grimstones is right in the middle of the program.  You can watch it here.

 

Passing on inspiration

One of the things I love most about my job as a performer, is getting to have an impact on the lives of people in the audience. I got the most charming email the other day, after my shows at The Victorian Arts Centre:

Hi Asphyxia.

I took our 6 year old Roby to your show "Mortimer Revealed" last Sat afternoon at the Arts Centre and afterward he looked at your sets and asked me to buy your book. In the car home, he studied your book. On Monday afternoon, when I picked him up from after school care the girls told me that he had made puppet characters, two bad wizards and snow leopards that afternoon there and performed an impromptu puppet show for the 15 kids in after school care ! I just love the fact that he obviously took in your show and that it implanted the seed of inspiration for him to make and perform it himself! Thank you and well done on such a lovely show! We didn't get to see "Hatched" so would love to see it if you do another run again in Melbourne.

Cheers & Many Thanks,
Sharon and Roby

"Raise Your Own" art installation

It's been so long since I did any art (other than writing books for Allen and Unwin, and illustrating them, which is definitely a form of art - but a commissioned one, so it counts as work), that I have gotten out of the habit. Trying to find the right headspace seemed impossible. I've wanted to make this piece for over a year, and so I wouldn't forget about it, I had a drawing tacked to the stairs, showing how it should go, complete with instructions for what colour to paint each item. I'd even assembled a kit, back when I did the drawing, of the various components I planned to use.

I sat down and got started, by doing the easiest thing: paint house black. One thing led to another and by the end of the day I was fantastically inspired - I'd gone into that special, magical headspace where I felt I could invent anything. My sister, Cal, came over half way through the day and worked with me. She made the fish, altered and painted the chook on the roof, and made gorgeous tiles for the roof of the house.

This whole piece represents my dreams - I hope one day to be able to raise my own meat, fish and honey as well as the vegies and fruit I grow now.

I'm really pleased with it - I think it looks beautiful.


 
 

The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother

Have you read this book? What did you think of it?

I was fascinated by The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua from the moment I read about it in Time Magazine. I was in the midst of a series of arguments with Jesse, as well as trying to work out what homeschool approach I want to take, and the book seemed to be offering me something. I got ahold of a copy and read it last weekend.

It's about a Chinese woman who was raised in America by strict Chinese parents, married an American man, and decided to raise her children the strict Chinese way. She set out to show that the Chinese method of parenting is superior to the Western method, though in the end, I think she wasn't quite so sure. One of her daughters went along with her methods (hours of rote learning, hours of piano practise every day, no sleepovers or playdates) but her second daughter refused to comply, and the household became a battleground. In the end, her second daughter won.

What I was looking for in the book was an understanding of Chinese parenting and how it works. What she says is that Chinese parents demand and expect more from their children than Western parents, and this is how they show their respect for their children. Chinese parents begin with the idea that their children are strong and tough, and need to be trained to become stronger and tougher, whereas Western parents tend to think of their children as being fragile, and worry a lot about damaging their self-esteem.

By the time I put down the book though, I realised I am far more of a Western parent than a Chinese one, and I don't really aspire to be a Chinese parent. Amy Chua reports of her struggle, after leaving school, to find what she wanted to do. To please her father she enrolled in courses such as economics, which bored her to tears. It wasn't until later she managed to find a variety of law that she could live with. Even then she wasn't passionate about it, the way her husband is passionate about his work. And I think this is the great drawback, of raising children with obedience and compliance as important values, because it makes it harder for them to look inside themselves and see what they feel passionate about.

Amy Chua points out that Western parents think they are being strict when they make their children practise a skill for half an hour to an hour every day, while Chinese parents know that the first hour is the easy one - it's hours two and three that get hard.

Well on reflection, I don't want to make Jesse practise anything for several hours a day. I do want him to practise basic skills that he is learning each day - half an hour to an hour is fine by me.

When I'd finished the book I realised what it was that I wanted from it, and I got it. I wanted the inspiration to be a bit stricter, and to demand a bit more from Jesse than I have been. I want to raise the bar and assume he has the strength and skill to do what I require. And my requirements are very much a Western Parent's dream, not the dreams of a Chinese parents.

I want him to:

- do his morning jobs without me having to harrass him. You know, the every day things like getting dressed, brushing his teeth and so on. The same with the night time.

- do his various homeschool activities without argument. Yes, be compliant and obedient. I don't need this as a great life value or focus, but for those exercises, like handwriting, ballet and guitar practise, I think it's fair enough.

And that's it. Pretty straightforward.

I was inspired by the Chinese approach to work out a way to achieve it - to demand that he work on achieving these goals at once. Before, maybe I would have gone with a gentle phase-in of expectations, and been much more flexible. Instead, I'm going with the tiger mother approach. I've put up a chart with a breakdown of everything I want, and a star system of rewards and consequences as he works towards achieving it.

Breaking the idea to Jesse was terrible - we had tears and tantrums as he was so daunted by the chart. We postponed starting for a week so that he could get in some practise. This week is official week one.. and it's taking a lot of my focus and energy to be so strict and demanding. Ouch. But I'm hoping we'll get some results soon.. results in the form of a smoother, easier daily routine, with more of my energy left for playing with Jesse and doing fun activities with him.

Anyway, if you've read it leave a comment and tell me your thoughts!

Aquaponics

I've been looking into raising my own fish to eat. I have bumped into the idea of aquaponics before, but I thought it was a very high tech arrangement that needed heaps of electricity, a special greenhouse and so on.

I've discovered that you can do it simply with the amount of electricity it takes to run two pumps, and they need only run intermittently. One aerates the fish pond, and the other pumps water from the pond into a vegie garden bed, and it flows from there back into the pond. The vegie garden bed has no soil in it - instead it has gravel or clay pebbles. As the water runs through it, the plants take up the nutrients in the water - so any fish poo and wee is cleaned out, and what returns to the pond is nice, clean water. Meanwhile, apparently, the vegies grow fantastically, with all this water and nutrition.

A system like this is particularly handy if you live in a very dry place (we get shocking droughts here, though the last one has just broken, thank god), because you can grow a significant amount of vegetables and fish, using just a bucket of water a week (to top up the pond). That's pretty good, if you ask me.

Unfortunately, the systems you can buy seem to be very expensive (you'd need to grow and eat a hell of a lot of fish to payback the price of most ready-made systems), and extremely ugly. This is what put me off in the first place.

However, I got newly inspired when I saw this gorgeous pond (photo above) made by Ecolicious. The vegie beds, instead of being hideous plastic trays on stands, are recycled bath tubs from the tip, surrounding a pretty timber deck. Rather than installing an expensive plastic fish tank, the Ecolicious crew dug into the ground and used a pond liner and rocks.

The garden in front of our house, which we look at every time we look out the windows, is quite pretty, but it's taken years to work out which few plants will tolerate growing there. I'm not sure what's wrong - the soil must be absolutely shocking, though I've added compost from time to time. it's shady, and almost everything I put in there dies. It's a very inefficient use of space, considering that I'm managing a very high level of food production from most of the rest of my garden. However.. now I'm dreaming... what if I dug it up, put in a fish pond (it seems we humans love looking at water - look at our obsession with buying beach front and river front properties) and some recycled bathtub grow beds?

Jesse assures me he'll be happy to go fishing in our pond to catch our dinner. There's another great bonus to this idea. The front garden is home to our rabbit cage, and we let the rabbit hop around sometimes. But her angora fur gets rather damaged by all the dirt and mulch. A rock garden with pebbles instead of soil will be perfect for her - I could grow her food there, and she can self-serve without me worrying about her fur getting dirty.

But dare I take on yet another project? I'm always trying to slow down....