Plaxtock
Just come back from a lovely mini-festival which was brilliant, run by Tatty Bumpkin‘s creator, Sam Petter. More info to come…
Keeping your sanity with September looming…
So getting ready for playgroup/ nursery/ school etc is daunting and with Christmas not far behind, it’s a time of hair-pulling, teeth-grinding, wine-swilling insanity for some parents. If you have time read ‘Stopping: The art of being still when you have to keep going!”, recommends several ’stillpoints’ a day when you stop, also talks about ’stopovers’ like holidays where you rest for a while and some people need ‘grinding halts’ where you have to have a life changing retreat from it all to work stuff out.
I used to work as an educational tour guide with teenagers which was fairly full-on! I learned very quickly to snatch 10 mins or so to just be still and calm before the little blighters got drunk on cheap French cider again! Good practicing for parenting two manic boys though!
Tatty Bumpkin and Relax Kids CDs both good for kids to learn to move, breath and relax by the way!
School uniform – a sustainable parent’s dilemma August 24, 2007
So I grabbed a pack of 2 red polo shirts in Asda (my son school just do red polo shirts and blue sweaters with logos as uniform) and when I got home I was shocked to see they were £2 – just £1 each. The claim most supermarkets make that you can get an entire uniform for less than £20 is true then.
Now I’m a bit of an old hippy when it comes to organic, fair trade and the like but I’m also aware, not having the luxury to live in an ivory tower, that trying to keep afloat financially with kids (at whatever level of income) can be hard at the best of times. So what to do?
The clothes my employer Tatty Bumpkin makes are either made on a fair trade co-op in Sri Lanka or in a very kosher factory in Turkey that we’ve checked out so I feel like a hypocrite buying these clothes knowing full well the state of the factories that make clothes that cheapily. Alas we don’t make organic / fair trade polo shirts.
I then came across Spirit of Nature – an eco-online store that makes organic and bamboo mix polo shirts (check them out) – bamboo is an amazing fibre we use in the Tatty Bumpkin kid’s clothing collection. It’s got a long list of environmental benefits, is UV resistant, feels like silk, dries quickly, regenerates quickly, needs no pesticides, even does the washing up, sends the birthday cards and will cook the tea if you ask it nicely!
So the compromise I’ve gone for are 3 organic / bamboo polo shirts and 2 Asda sports and 2 uniform as back up. Not a great solution but the best I could afford!
another literary classic!
I love this poem!
Stevie Smith – Not Waving But Drowning
Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.
Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he’s dead
It must have been too cold for him
his heart gave way, They said.
Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.
The Fisherman… (by Heinrich Boll) August 20, 2007
An American businessman was standing at the pier of a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several large yellowfin tuna. The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish.
“How long it took you to catch them?” The American asked.
“Only a little while.” The Mexican replied.
“Why don’t you stay out longer and catch more fish?” The American then asked.
“I have enough to support my family’s immediate needs.” The Mexican said.
“But,” The American then asked, “What do you do with the rest of your time?”
The Mexican fisherman said, “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take a siesta with my wife, Maria, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine and play guitar with my amigos, I have a full and busy life, senor.”
The American scoffed, “I am a Harvard MBA and could help you. You should spend more time fishing and with the proceeds you buy a bigger boat, and with the proceeds from the bigger boat you could buy several boats, eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats.”
“Instead of selling your catch to a middleman you would sell directly to the consumers, eventually opening your own can factory. You would control the product, processing and distribution. You would need to leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City, then LA and eventually NYC where you will run your expanding enterprise.”
The Mexican fisherman asked, “But senor, how long will this all take?”
To which the American replied, “15-20 years.”
“But what then, senor?”
The American laughed and said, “That’s the best part. When the time is right you would announce an IPO (Initial Public Offering) and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich, you would make millions.”
“Millions, senor? Then what?”
The American said slowly, “Then you would retire. Move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take a siesta with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos…”
A blue day… August 19, 2007
So I’m back from holiday and swimming in emails and washing, am hormonal and irritable and tired. Today is a blue day. I’ve recently started colour coding my days for amusement – red days are days of high energy or of being cross, green days calm and serene or days spent mostly outdoors. Yellow days are happy days or days when I eat a lot of butter. Or ice cream. Or cheese. Blue days tend to follow as I realise how chubby I’m getting and can’t work out why… Purple days are days spent in deep spiritual contemplation. I haven’t had one of those yet but it’s early days…
You can also categorise children – my two preschool boys remind me so much of puppies sometimes it’s not funny (high-energy, simple, loyal, friendly) so they are now categorised into dog days. Today was a quiet, serene labrador day but most days are red setter days, occasionally lumbering Great Dane days or yappy Jack Russell days. Some days they are like our old Samoyed (white fluffy husky-like and awfully cute) and often they are like Jackalls. If you’re a dog lover and have boys -try it!
If you’re really getting into it and like chocolate you can also do it to people at large – chocolate=good, bread etc=bad so that bread roll people are horrible; pain au chocolat people don’t appear to be so nice but really have a heart of, well, chocolate; Kit Kat people seem nice on the outside but there’s nothing inside worth writing home about; Penguin people are great through and through and Green and Blacks’ 70% cocoa dark chocolate(or Maya Gold) are the best people of all… (apologies for product placement, please substitute with your preferred brand / home cooking)…
Challenges
Carrying on from the idea of your values… inevitably you will meet with challenges, especially as a parent. In fact for a long time I came across few challenges at all, until that is I had kids!
We’ve just come back from Newcastle where Nige and I went to university and it brought back lots of memories of (mostly armchair!) campaigning with my fellow politics students. Everything seemed so simple then, things we agreed with, things we denigrated. It’s only been in more recent times that I’ve realised things are rarely black and white – here are three things I’ve had to change my mind about lately (with relation to kids):
- preschool education – I have to say that I thought preschool education wasn’t essential by any means and that it was all milk and biscuits and nursery rhymes. Having seen a brilliant preschool first hand which is working with a wide variety of special needs and different cultures and backgrounds, I’ve seen what a lifeline it can be to vulnerable children and parents and what good quality preschools can do for kid’s attitudes to learning and self esteem.
- women and work – no need to elaborate but I had no idea how hard it was to work and run a family or to take time off and return to work, often with your confidence trailing behind you! I once was looking to recruit and actually said ‘what we really need is a mother returning to work who’ll just be happy to get out of the house [to do the really boring job I was offering]’ – shocking really I know
- special needs – given that parenting is supremely difficult even at the best of times, I (and I’m sure I’m not alone) always think it must be even harder if there are also special needs issues too. I think for most mothers autism is one of the hardest things to think about because connecting with and snuggling your child is something we naturally want to do and it fills us with panic to think about a child who would find that difficult. This article radically changed my views on this slightly pitying and patronising attitude…
Northumberland
We just went on a bit of a pilgrimage to Northumberland, a place that is special to Nige and I who used to escape the city to rest when we were first ‘courting’! It’s a wild place with so much history, amazing skies, all kinds of castles, friendly folk and hardly any tourists (I’m wondering if I should even share it with you!). The kids loved it and really got the openness of the place.
Core values
Many moons ago when I worked in a proper office, for someone else, who sent me on fancy training courses and everything, I did a few management courses. One of them was about how everything you do should emanate from your core goals and that way you would be perfectly content. I don’t remember what it had to do with managing but it did result in a few people jacking it in and taking off with surf boards around the world! One thing I did think early on in parenting was that never was this truer than with parenting…
So here are some of my core goals (note my next post will be about challenges so please don’t assume I’m some smug saint and all these work all the time!):
relevance / meaning – I have always felt, and this is just a personal thing, that the kids should understand what we do and why we do it – so what we choose to eat, where we live, what work we do (resulting in me leaving my job and starting child-related businesses that my kids not only understand but gain a lot from – see entries on Tatty Bumpkin and Barefoot Books) etc. We try to do this in an undogmatic, way, I don’t want them to think that’s the only way to do things…
anything’s possible – I’ve long been a believer of if there’s something you want to do / is needed and no one is doing it then just do it! It does mean I never get to veg and watch TV but is incredibly empowering. I was very lucky that my parents gave me a sense of anything being possible and that there were no limitations on what I could do, that I was utterly capable of anything (I did entertain a brief spell of fancying myself as a super-hero and jumping off the top of a tall fridge freezer dressed in my dad’s parachute boots and hat but otherwise entirely naked – but generally I think it was a good thing). All around us there is evidence of people getting him off their backsides and doing great stuff and there are loads of groups coming up with amazingly creative answers to (often multiple) problems.
sustainability – having long been a pursuer of all things environmental, it feels a bit like a (sometimes slightly annoying!) coming of age now that sustainability, carbon footprints etc are the words du jour. The kids are master composters and love being outside. They haven’t yet (thank goodness) started lecturing me about my car use (as my neighbour’s daughter does!) but they are pretty aware of the environment. The thing I think anyone new to all things green needs to realise is that it is a journey with no specific destination, that is to say that it’ll never be finished: I thought I was doing pretty well (we eat almost all organic, mostly wholegrain food from a food co-op, use cloth nappies, no chemicals in the home etc) but I keep finding new things (like the Mooncup, if you don’t use one, try one, they’re suprisingly good) and am still dealing with old demons like my tendency to use the car when I could probably avoid it.
Happy Tracks in the Snow 
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