Fixie's Shelf

Jesse's Bunny

The other day I set up my sewing machine, and within five minutes Jesse was moseying around asking if he could sew something. I was inspired in a homeschool-ish way, and was happy to work my boring sewing repairs around a fun project for him.

First he leafed through my journal at all the rabbit pictures, and chose one for basic inspiration. Then I let him choose from my special-fabrics bag, and I thought he chose a really lovely combination.

Next I drew up a pattern for him, and he chose which fabrics would go where. He did the machine sewing himself, and I did the fixing-up seams where things had gone wrong. There were a lot of tears when bunny was half-turned-through because she looked so appallingly wrong. But hopefully some sewing-learning happened after that when we finished turning her through and Jesse discovered how sweet she looked.

Jesse stuffed her, and I smoothed out the stuffing-bumps. I helped him sew the eyes and nose. By this time a whole day had gone by and he was exhausted. I did the last bits for him - handsewed the face to the body and closed up the opening.  

All done and he was soooooo rapt! He's already given her a mad personality and has sucked down one ear so it flops forward. Very cute.



Now he's dreaming of making a robot doll...

 

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.

Garlic Harvest!

 

I can't resist posting this photo of the garlic I pulled form my garden. I've always longed to have a witchy garlic plait like this one. I've never successfully grown garlic before, and I couldn't believe my eyes when I tugged on the stems and they burst from the earth fat and round. Wow! So many of them. These are just the ones that remained attached to their stem. There are more, stemless, sitting in a bowl. And more still, in the food forest, a bit too small yet for a good harvest.

The thing that impressed me the most was that when they were lying in a pile outside, drying a bit before I plaited them, Jesse pointed out the two largest bulbs (much larger than any in this photo), and said, "We should plant those for next year."

Well that blew me away. I didn't know he knew that you planted the cloves to grow more bulbs. Maybe he saw me planting them, months ago. More than that I was thrilled by his foresight, his understanding that if you plant the best, you'll get a better crop next time. I haven't specifically said this to him, though I remember commenting to him that it was odd that I was told to replant the smallest potato onion for next year's crop. Maybe he remembered and applied it to garlic. Even better still, I thought the comment implied a basic grasp of the idea that instant gratification (ie, eating the biggest and best right away), is not always he best approach. In these days of "put it on your credit card and have it now", I've hoped to instill in him a sense of the concepts of "saving" and "waiting". I felt with that one comment about garlic, somehow it embodied everything I've wanted him to learn in homeschool

New Year's Resolutions

Happy New Year to all the lovely readers of my blog. Thank you for popping this way to read what I've written, and also for the lovely comments and emails you send me from time to time. I know there's many more of you out there than say hello, though, because the number of daily hits for this blog astonishes me. I don't know who you are, but hello, welcome, and happy new year.

I don't have anything striking for my new year's resolutions. Just more of the same. But for the record, I'm planning to:

- continue my great homeschool routine with Jesse. For the last several months I've finally cracked one that I've been consistent at even when exhausted, on tour, working far too hard etc. Every morning Jesse does three different homeschool activities, which get changed around from day to day. I'm liking it. This structure works for me. Now I just hope I can continue it and not have it fall away.

- continue working in my garden. My garden is Eden, a true sanctuary, and it really feeds us as well as feeding my soul. I hope to continue learning to become a better gardener.

- keep my family's personal resource footprint at 10% or less (last count it was 7% excluding work... I'm happy with that) and make a few other changes to help us live even more sustainably. I want to make a solar attachment for my dehydrator. I want to try again, next winter, to live without a fridge. I want us to use the rocket stove more. I'd like to discover and make good use of a solar oven.

- get a bit more exercise and look after my back better.

Overall, I want to have a good work/life balance, which is never easy to find.

What about you, what are you planning for this year?

A garden for a child

This is Jesse's garden. He's six years old. You can see his cubby in the middle, which Paula built using only stuff we had lying around. Jesse is an avid collector of junk and the hubcaps and other cubby attachments are treasures he's brought home.

The green bed at the front of the photo is potatoes, the one next to that is Jesse's autumn vegie bed with peas - snow peas, shelling peas, sugarsnap peas - beetroot, cabbage, and carrot. Behind that, you can't really see in the photo, is a bed of strawberries. There's a new empty square bed in front of Jesse's cubby and I think we'll put our next batch of strawberries in there.

Beyond that you can just make out, in the shadows, a tree stump meeting place. We had so much wood in our wood pile, and it had to go. So with a chainsaw we cut these stumps and I dug them into the ground. Jesse and I planted some groundcovers around them - wild strawberry and cammomile lawn. Hopefully they'll spread and make it pretty and green.

And behind that is another big garden bed. Next summer we'll put cucumber, zucchini, tomato and watermelon in there. For now though, it's been dug over, fed, and planted out with snow peas as a green manure. It's also had a sprinkling of worms and worm castings - thank you to our lovely worm family: Cleo, Cleopatra, Leo and Elizabeth (and all the others). Hopefully by summer the soil will be gorgeous and ready to grow an abundance of food.

The garden has a wire fence around it to protect it from the chooks (you can see Little Red in the photo). Hopefully when Paula gets time she'll build a pretty fence like she made for my vegie garden. I was worried that fencing off this area would make it feel inaccessible for play, but actually it makes it seem more like a colonial cottage in miniature. It's very appealing in real life - I'm not sure if that comes through in the photo though.

Every day, Jesse and I head outside at about 5pm. First he pulls the plug on the bath and I empty the greywater onto whichever part of the garden needs it. While I do that, Jesse starts the pump on the small water tank and waters his vegies with that. He's better than me at remembering to turn it off afterwards. While he's still doing that, I head over to my vegie garden and do whatever needs doing there. Jesse often comes to join me when he's finished, or I find him climbing a tree or playing somewhere in the garden. I love the way this routine gets him outside and into nature. It seems a very good form of homeschool. While we're working I'm often chatting with him about why we're putting compost on plants, why we fertilise with wee, why we dig, why we want worms in the soil and so on. Just the other night I gave him a quiz, wondering how much of this stuff has sunk in, and I was impressed to see he could answer just about all questions.

I'm hoping that, come summer, he'll be able to handle his entire garden, water-wise, and I'll just need to help him with planting, weeding and harvesting.

A crown for my six year old

Back when my cousin was six, she used to be afraid to lie in bed alone at night, fearful that wicked witches such as Cruella De Ville and the various evil characters in stories I used to tell her would come and get her. I would lie with her, but my aunt called me out, concerned I was preventing her from falling asleep. 

My solution was to stitch her a crown, a silver crown, inspired by Robert O'Brien's book The Silver Crown. The crown, I told her, would protect her from all evil, and keep her safe. She just needs to put it on where she is afraid. My cousin, all grown up now, still has the crown, and although it's too small for her now, she keeps it by her bed and holds it when she needs comfort. She tells me its magic still works. 

This week Jesse turned six. He has his own fears - he's afraid to go to the studio by himself, and various parts of our garden, in case he be spirited away by ghouls or ghosts. This is not my doing! I never told him any scary stories! But I have been working on a solution. I stitched this crown from him, making it as magical as I possibly could. I chose an exquisite blue and gold fabric that shimmers, and when I gave it to him I explained the fabric was made from mermaid hairs and threads of the ocean. 

I wasn't sure what he'd make of it when I gave it to him. He wanted lego for his birthday, and transformers, and toy cars.... and I suspected that a handmade crown might rate rather lower than a pile of brighly coloured plastic. I didn't give him the crown in the morning when he opened all his other presents. I saved it until just before bedtime, and then finally pulled it out, a last secret present. 

When he opened it he was overawed. "This is the BEST present in my whole birthday!" he told me. He put it on and he could feel the magic. I was so touched - I really wasn't sure... but since then he's worn it every day. He wore it when he hurt himself, and said it soothed him. He wore it after an argument with Paula. He wore it to go to the studio by himself... and sometimes he puts it on just to enjoy it. I hope he gets to enjoy its magic for as long as my cousin....

And secretly.. I'm proudest of all that my boy can recognise and value something handmade above a piece of lego.

Home Again

We walked in the door, days ago now, to a round of meetings, deadlines, applications and all the paperwork they involve, and rehearsals for gigs (since I haven't trained for some six weeks). It hit me in the face like a storm and I'm still reeling. I've hardly seen my friends yet. But three of the deadlines fell today, and now that it's night time and all over, I can breathe again.

In the meantime, I am incredibly proud to say that even in the depth of all this crazy busy-ness, I have remained a connected mama to Jesse, something which often falls off the edge once I get going on deadline-mania. In the photo you can see us making pasta together. And I was so proud, Jesse really did make his own pasta. We washed his hands, put his hair back in a headband, tied on an apron and got to work. I gave him a lump of dough, which he rolled out with a rolling pin, and fed through the pasta machine several times, and eventually he fed it through the spaghetti-cutter. He lit his own match and I helped him light th stove. He filled his own pot of water and put it on the stove himself. And then he added his own pasta. After that he grated the cheese - yes, cheese I made myself, months ago, which I dug out of the back of the fridge. And there you see in the second photo, his plate of wholemeal pasta. I am incredibly proud of him for basically doing it himself.

The next day he said to me, "Let's make pasta!" But I was too busy...argh! Soon, sweety, I promise...

We've also been riding our bikes together. I am in love with my new bike, and have been experimenting with how far I can go. Jesse comes along for the ride, so to speak. We rode to Preston to visit friends, the other day, and it was so very far for Jesse (took us an hour) but he stuck at it and even consented to ride home rather than catch the train! We rode to Ceres, ate their delicious pastry rolls, played delightful make-believe fairy games, and rode home again. We rode to Yarra Bend, which feels like it's just round the corner now, after all those big rides, and played more magic games.... And to keep our inspiration alive, at night I lie in bed with him and read him The Magic Faraway Tree, the same beautiful copy I had when I was a girl.

Jesse

Here are some snippets of conversation that Jesse has been involved with recently. I always mean to write them down but often forget.

Jesse: I need a poo.
Me: Ok you go and pop on the toilet. I'll come soon to wipe your bum.
Jesse: I want Paula to do it.
Me: I'm not sure Paula wants to. I think she's having a lie down.
Jesse: (calling to the next room) Paulie! Do you want to wipe my bum?
Paula: Umm, no thanks.
Jesse: (to me, in surprise) oh, Paula doesn't want to wipe my bum. Ok, you can do it.
Me: (somewhat less than sincerely) thanks.

In bed the other night as I was tucking him in: Jesse: I love you all the way to the tenth planet and back, in a bath with wings. Did you know there's a tenth planet? It's even further away than Pluto. That's how much I love you. That's SOOOO much.
(Awwww.)

Paula overheard Jesse talking to a boy he met and played with at a party, as they were saying goodbye to each other. Jesse: If you came over to my house I would play with you SO much.

Climbing onto Paula's lap: "This morning I am interested in you."

And on spotting her washing the dishes, "Oh, you are nice to be cleaning it."

Home education as spectator sport

Paula is teaching Jesse about the map of the world. I actually had this idea for a progressive way to teach Jesse geography, and since my own geography is so utterly pitiful, I thought I would learn as well. We'd start with the seven continents (I didn't even know what they were, or that there were seven of them, till I read it in a homeschool book recently), and then bit by bit draw in countries, as we met people from those places or had reason to be interested in them. I mentioned this to Paula, who was very inspired, and in fact got up and running. She drew in the continents, and now Jesse can name them all, drive a toy car from one specified place to another. Since I snapped these pics she's added in several countries and can give Jesse small itineraries, which he does by driving his little car. It looks like I may not be going to learn geography afterall - but I try to peek over their shoulders from time to time and see if I can quietly catch up. Meanwhile I have to say how much I love watching...

Jesse gets to be Martha Grimstone...

The Grimstones are so woven into the fabric of Jesse's life that he talks about them all the time. He spotted an antique fire alarm and said it looked like it would belong to The Grimstones. Then he made up a story about there being a fire in the mountains, coming towards the valley where the Grimstones live, and they would need to do magic to make a fire engine to come, a magic fire engine, which will put out the fire.

We were chatting, last week, as we sat in the loft that is my studio, me painting and glueing, him fiddling with my magnets and other trinkets I keep on my desk ready to use, and got to the topic of what he's going to do when he's a man. "I'll be an artist," he told me. He got some paint on his fingers and then told me it doesn't matter, because he's working with me, so it's ok to get paint on his fingers, like me. "What will you make, as an artist?" I asked. "Books," he said. At first I didn't understand properly. "You mean you'll write books? Make up stories?" "No," he shook his head, "I'll make big books." He gestured to Elcho's lab, and then I understood. He'll make large wooden books which unfold to reveal ancient rooms. Exactly what I'm doing right now. "They'll be for The Grimstones," he told me.

I hopped into the bath, which is also in the loft, while Jesse played with Elcho's lab. He told me to be Grandpa Grimstone, and he will be Martha, and I was to instruct him on how to do magic. So from the bath I told him which potions to use: two drops of Elixir de Gwellum, a pinch of Poffius Fangs, three shakes of Fer, two sprinkles using the spoon from the silver bowl... and stir... He loved it, sitting there seriously applying his ingredients to the cauldron, picturing himself as Martha Grimstone with two little plaits. It came to me that I should video him. But the camera wasn't within reach. And then it came to me that we should make a small movie, in which he gets to play Martha Grimstone, and do magic.

To make the most of the homeschooling approach, I figured we could start with a story board, and using index cards, I wrote the story in pieces for him to arrange. I've left space on the cards to glue down a small photo. A few days later I dressed Jesse up as Martha, (he begged all morning for us to make a start, especially the bit where he gets the Martha Grimstone make up), and we did a photoshoot for the story board. Now I've just got to print the photos and we'll stick them down. Once that's done - we'll head to Irene and film it all.