Early Bilbies

Littletree has gone away for the holidays to stay with her grandparents in Israel, so she’s over there now celebrating Passover.

We haven’t ever really celebrated Easter before, and she’s well-informed about the Pagan origins of the holiday, and knows that technically, it’s a Spring rite, and therefore should be observed around the full moon after the Vernal Equinox, which isn’t for another six months for us up here in the Southern Hemisphere. We’ve talked at length about Ishtar and Oestre and the significance of rabbits and eggs.

This year, Littletree declared that she doesn’t mind about all of that stuff, she just wants to have the “wake up in the morning and have a surprise easter egg hunt with hidden chocolates”. She explained to me that she knows that the “Easter Bunny” would just be me pretending, but she asked me to do it for her anyway. And to do it early, since she would be away on the “proper” Easter – as she wisely pointed out; it’s irrelevant when we do it, since it’s not really Easter anyway, and the whole holiday is just a made-up thing.

Fair enough.

So off I went to a purveyor of processed egg-shaped chocolate confections to purchase a small hoarde of goodies for Littletree to find. A dozen “egg-sized” chocolate eggs, a small bag of “mini” eggs, and an Easter Bilby.

The Easter Bilby is an important and noteworthy part – here in Australia, rabbits are a massive plague of a pest, and meanwhile, the Bilby is a cute little Australian native animal that sort of vaguely looks like a bunny, and they’re highly endangered since the introduction of European settlers to the country (said settlers were also the foolish imports who brought the rabbits with them). Anyway, Australia tries to cull feral rabbits, and promote saving bilbies, and somehow, eating chocolate bilbies at Easter instead of bunnies is a part of that. Or something. At least it’s educational.

Anyway, Littletree awoke on the morning before she left to find a little trail of chocolate eggs outside her door

She started collecting them up in her shirt

Until she found that the trail led out into the garden to a basket

There were eggs hidden all around the house

and around the garden

Littletree got quite the stash!

She did plan to save the Bilby, but after about an hour she came to me, all distressed, and said, “mama, the worst thing ever happened – I was playing with my Easter Bilby and the wrapping just fell off of it, and then it broke, so I had to eat the broken bits, and then it was uneven, so I had to eat more to make it neat… and now it’s all wrecked.”

The poor child – she had to eat the whole thing!

She did save all the eggs to take to her cousins in Israel though – apparently they don’t get chocolate there, only matzah.

Learning Elvish

Littletree was doing a crossword puzzle today. The clue was "A small fairy who plays tricks on people (three letters)".

She could not, for the life of her, guess this one.

When I told her it's Elf, she said, but Elves aren't small fairies who play tricks on people. Elves are tall and fair, honourable and skilled with bows. They aren't small fairies at all"

Another clue was "a small plant (5 letters" starting with "sh").
She could not guess shrub, and it turns out she didn't know what a shrub is at all. I said, "you know, a small bush, as in bring me a shrubbery!"

She knows what a shrubbery is, because she has a cultural reference for it.
Then she started rubbing my back and saying shhhhhhhh. "I thought that's a shrub: shhhhhh-rub" (yup, she shares my sense of humour).

And she's totally right. I now understand much more why my child, who is incredibly bright and well-educated, doesn't do so well on standardised tests. She not only hasn't spent the past 4 years being trained to do standardised tests, she has a completely different set of cultural references.

It doesn’t mean she isn’t educated – she is very educated, and has a wealth of knowledge in many areas that would put a lot of college students to shame. It just means her sphere of learning follows a different path than the one prescribed.

Sk8r Grrl

Not content with just being an awesome roller-blader, ice skater and boogie boarder, Littletree’s newest fad is skateboarding.

She has a few friends who skateboard, so she got the bug, and tried it out a few times, but hadn’t really gotten a good opportunity to learn to skateboard without a board of her own.

After several months of her constantly bugging occasionally reminding me politely that she wants to get a skateboard, I found one in our budget so I bought it for her as a present (lucky Littletree – normally she has to save up herself to buy that sort of thing)!

Starting out slowly at first, she’s getting the hang of it really quick – I’m always amazed because I could never do stuff like that as a kid. But her balance is really good and she’s quick to work out how to do tricks.

We’ve been bringing the board with us to homeschool group so Littletree gets to practice with other kids and learn tips and tricks from them too

So much awesome :)

Plants v Zombies IRL

We’ve been getting into playing Plants v. Zombies lately, of course, zombies are all the rage.

So when Littletree was having a moment of feeling frustrated about something, I came up with an idea so inspired I can’t even take credit for it – must have been a muse: Plants versus Zombies In Real Life.

The premise is simple: I pretend to be a zombie and walk up the length of the garden while Littletree puts obstacles in my path (flowerpots, bricks, sticks, rocks), and rips weeds out of the garden and throws them at me, which is a double bonus, because the garden gets weeded at the same time!

It was great fun, especially pretending to be zombies, and even more especially being out in the winter sun. And most of all – somehow getting Littletree to weed the garden!

Then she got so excited about it, she decided we should make it into a movie… here’s the intro:

Littletree doing the intro to our Plants v Zombies game

Epic!

Breaking Point

Littletree was having a moment of overwhelm today – she lost the tiny magic key that she found in the forest, and it was just the last straw for her in an overwhelming situation.

She got really angry, and really frustrated, and said she wanted to scream and hit something. She chose to go into her bedroom and scream into a pillow and punch the mattress. I went into her room to offer her some support, and she told me she just really wants to break something.

I suggested she just feel into that, but that physically breaking something might not be productive. Then she got inspired, and asked if she could break sticks – the skewers we use for kebabs.

So I got her the packet of kebab skewers out of the kitchen and lay in bed with her while she snapped them. Half a dozen skewers later, she started talking about writing a program that would function like a to-do list, but with time stamps and check boxes, and with features like alarms and reminders.

Within five minutes we were out of the room, and talking about all sorts of stuff, happy again… and all it took was a few wooden skewers.

Transitions

Apparently Mercury has been in retrograde, and as we all know, mercury is poisonous. So weird things happen.

Purple and I have separated, which is one big change. Actually, it’s a huge change! It’s been eight weeks now since he came home from vacation at the Rainbow Gathering in Washington State and told me he wants to break up.

We’ve been married for eight years, and despite a lot of ups and downs, it all seemed to be going well. I do get a lot of questions about the nature of our relationship – yes, we were polyamorous, and no, that’s not the reason we broke up.

It’s been a rough couple of months for me, going through teh dramaz with Purple moving out, and then not moving out, he wasn’t talking to me for a while and shut himself in his bedroom. I also (unrelatedly) broke up with my girlfriend; my beloved, who broke my heart. So I’m entirely single for the first time in many years. It’s been a very depressing couple of months, and really feeling like I’m barely hanging on at times.

Now that we’ve had a bit of time to work things out and a little space, Purple and I have decided to stay living together, at least for the time being. We are, after all, still best friends, and we’re still parents to Littletree.

We have our own bedrooms and it makes a lot of sense in many ways to be housemates. We’ve started the process of subdividing our block of land, with future plans for Purple to build a house on the other half. Who knows what the future will bring!

In the meantime, I’m feeling very “wrung out”, and coping as best I can. Littletree is a total champ. She told me one day: ‘no offence, mama, but when you and Aba argue, it’s your fault. Because even though it seems like he always starts it by saying something that’s mean, you have to remember that he’s too stupid to start fights!’ LOL

She’s a resilient kid, and very pragmatic. I can’t believe how much she’s growing up.

So tomorrow Purple goes back to Israel for a while, and who knows what will happen. Meanwhile, life goes on :)

Trust

Littletree has gone on a self-imposed screen-free and sugar-free break, she asked me to hide her computer for a week and to put away her pocket-money so she can’t get sweets and asked me to get extra fruit and veggies.

All this came about while Purple was away in San Francisco for a couple of weeks earlier in the month. I think she just missed him a lot, and turned to spending a lot of time watching DVDs and eating “junk” food to fill in time. After about a week of watching rather a lot of movies, she announced that her head wasn’t feeling good and she was having trouble sleeping, and not feeling good in her body. She identified that it was because of spending too much time in front of a screen, and not eating well enough, and set about making a plan to get better.

Well, it’s been three weeks now, Purple is back, but Littletree is still avoiding sweets, and goes days at a time without turning her computer on. Today was the first time in ages she bought herself chocolates and sat down to watch a DVD.  Then she begged me to make a hearty veggie soup for dinner, with extra kale and garlic.

I’m so impressed with the way Littletree makes healthy choices for herself. She knows her body and is able to recognise what she needs, on her own. I firmly believe this is because she has a 100% unhindered, self-regulated diet. And most of all, because she is trusted.

Without going into the details of how it works, what it comes down to is having an intrinsic trust of the child. It's sub-consciously saying to the child: ‘Of course you'll make healthy choices and I absolutely trust you to do so’. From that, the child gets the message that she is trusted, and therefore trustworthy, and thus, can trust in herself to make the right choices - as all children will, given the right support.

I’ve been talking about this kind of trust all week, and struggling to really define it – it’s a kind of trust that’s bigger than ‘trust’; it’s something so intrinsic and whole-spirit. Then someone sent me this quote from Dr Jeremy Hayward:

"In order to communicate very openly with the world, you need to develop fundamental trust. This kind of trust is not trusting “in” something, but simply trusting. It is very much like your breath. You do not consciously hold on to your breath, or trust in your breath, yet breathing is your very nature. In the same way, to be trusting is your very nature. To be trusting means you are fundamentally free from doubt about your goodness and about the goodness of others."

While the prevailing cultural belief in our society is that children are inherently bad; that they won’t behave “properly” and that if given the slightest chance, they’ll only get up to no good, be spoiled, or worse. Children are treated based on the notion that they need to be trained, restricted and restrained to ensure that they can’t act on their inherent “badness”. Any parent or educator who isn’t constantly vigilant to reign in the inherent unruliness of children will be seen as negligent.

Trusting in children is about coming from an intrinsic belief that children are inherently good. And they *are*. Children truly are good, and they will behave in the manner they are expected to – not necessarily in the way we tell them to with words, but in they way we show them they are supposed to act. For the most part, we show them that they’re bad and going to get up to mischief. We show them that they are going to fall and hurt themselves, that they will eat nothing but sweets and junk if given half the chance.

But with true trust, in an environment that models respectful behaviour, children are perfectly wonderful, social beings. They do the right thing. They learn from their mistakes, rather than being protected from making them.

I trust Littletree. I trust her to go exploring in the candy aisle at the supermarket. I trust her to know how high she can safely climb. I trust her to behave like a sane, healthy, respectful human being. And she does.

(Littletree on a climbing wall)

Blue Room

When we arrived home from our recent trip, Littletree went into her room and announced “My room is a total disaster MESS!” I pointed out that her room was relatively tidy, just that she has an awful lot of stuff. Most of which she’s grown out of.

So she set to work, filling up 2 massive bags of junk stuff that was still perfectly good, but that she didn’t want or need any more. Clothes she’d grown out of, toys she doesn’t play with any more, and about a billion pink dresses (she absolutely will not, under any circumstances, wear anything pink or a dress, which is odd, because many wise people assured me that if I allow her to don a pink dress, she will surely grow up to be a brainless airhead hooker, completely oppressed by the dominant male patriarchy.)

She took all this stuff to sell at the village market on the weekend, and being the lazy industrious girl that she is, decided to not actually man her stall, but just leave all her wares lying out with an “honour box”. No one stole anything and she made $15.35 :)

Littletree announced that she doesn’t get to spend enough time with Purple, so she proposed a “daddy-daughter-day”. The premise being that the two of them would spend the whole day together doing fun, cool things.

They played card games, went for a walk together, had lunch at the cafe… and then Littletree decided to do something with her now totally bare room.

I came home to see this

Purple and Littletree making great use of the left over paint from our bathroom.

Littletree wants to re-create something like the kitchen we had when we lived in Tel Aviv – I painted it with a blue sky and sunflower scene

(Littletree aged 2)

And the finished product, a tidy, clean, fresh room!

Now I just have to paint the sunflowers!

Rainbow Adventure

We’ve been out at the Australian Rainbow Gathering on and off for the last week and a half – well, to be more accurate, Purple was there on and off, Littletree was there for the whole time, and I just popped in for a day.

Purple and Littletree went out the weekend before last, just planning to stay two days. They had a great time (while I stayed home waiting on a client due to start her birthing process any day now).

But when it came time to go home, Littletree was having such a great time, she didn’t want to leave. Some very good friends of ours offered to take care of her for a few days till Purple and I could come back the following weekend to pick her up. The site is very conveniently located just a few minutes from a small village with a phone and only 2 hours drive from home, so it was agreed that if there’s any problem someone would call us to come out and get her immediately.

Pretty confronting! I missed my little girl; it was the first time she was without her parents for five days! She did call us twice to say hi and have a chat, both times I asked her if she wanted me to come and get her, both times she insisted she wanted to stay. I knew I could trust the people taking care of her, and there were a lot of parents with unschooled kids out there, as well as several women Littletree knows well from past gatherings and feels connected with, so I surrendered, knowing that she was safe and cared for, following her own path.

As parents, we all know there will come a time when our kids grow up, become more independent and start going out to parties and festivals without us. I knew that day would come… but I didn’t expect it this soon!

Littletree is simply confident and independent. She knows what she needs and can clearly communicate and express herself. I wonder what happened to all those people who said if I breastfeed too long or let her sleep in the bed with me or carry her in a sling all the time she’d end up never learning how to cope on her own and I’d have her clinging to my skirts forever? I guess that will kick in any day now.

In any case, I went out on Friday with Purple to pick her up, and still she wanted to stay, so Purple spent the weekend at rainbow with Littletree, I just spent a day out there and came home.

Twas lovely to see everyone, and feel the energy, however briefly.

And now Littletree is home again, we’re spending lots of time together, just hanging out. :)

Presents!

At Littletree’s request, we had a sort of Christmas celebration here… though we did it in honour of Mithras.

Since we now live in a village with established friends and neighbours, Littletree had accumulated a hefty stash of presents under her “tree” (well, I think compared to the average Christmas-celebrating Aussie family, it was pretty minimal, but for us it seemed huge).

I think there was about a dozen presents, though admittedly four of them were from me ;) Littletree was hugely impressed, especially considering the only time she’s ever gotten Christmas presents before was two years ago, when she got two presents (last year we managed to avoid the whole affair by being at the World Rainbow Gathering in New Zealand).

Littletree’s Christmas wish list contained: a photo album; a yacht; a trip to India; and funky t-shirts. We already got her some t-shirts at the op shop last week, and we’re going to India next year… a yacht was out of my budget, so I got her a photo album, and a gift card to have photos developed. She was so happy to get that! I also got her a small box of her favourite chocolates and a coconut

Her godmother sent a chemistry set

 

Our neighbour gave Littletree a Ganesha colouring book

A friend from rainbow sent us all little hanging decorations made from origami cranes

And she also got a few assorted trinkets from her friends in the neighbourhood.

I even got a present! The ever-gorgeous Lady Demelza sent down a magical box full of goodies, including this awesome bumper sticker for me:

Women & midwives united – PEACE AT BIRTH – PEACE ON EARTH – bringing honour & trust back to birth

An excellent sentiment :) Merry Season to everyone!

New Article – Connected Communication

Essence of Life has published another of my natural parenting articles, this one is about communicating authentically with children, and supporting them respectfully in expressing their feelings in the way they need to.

You can read it HERE

Incidentally, Littletree also wanted to show off her new sparkle hair-spray

Fire Station Tour

Last week our home school group went for a tour of the Fire station, which was really cool. The kids got to have a question and answer session with some of the Fire fighters

Followed by a tour around the station

Then we watched one of the fire fighters putting her full suit on

and had a look at the Fire truck

The kids kept asking the fire fighter what happens if they run out of hose. He insisted that they have loads of hose. Then one child asked, “but what if the hose gets burned in the fire?” The fire fighter again asserted that they have plenty, and opened up the hose storage. Not to be fooled, the children asked what happens if even that hose runs out. The fire fighter, undaunted, opened up yet another hose storage compartment and assured us all that there was more than enough hose, and no way they could ever totally run out. Littletree of course, pointed out that unless they have infinite hose, it could at some point, run out. The poor fire fighter didn’t stand a chance against the logic of unschooled kids! LOL

The kids all got to climb up into the cab and have a look around

and best of all they all got a turn of the fire hose!

which was perfect for a hot, sunny day

It was a great day, and of course the kids all got fire-safety promo goodie bags :)

Learning to Read

Littletree has been really inspired to learn to read lately, and she practices writing a lot as well. The other day, quite out of the blue, she said she wants to learn to read Hebrew.

We have a big stack of Hebrew learn-to-read books that Purple brought back from Israel one time, only Littletree wasn’t interested in them back then. So I got them out and dusted them off and we sat down and went through the first one together.

First I read it to her once through, and then we looked at all the individual letters and talked about what sounds they made. We have a set of Hebrew alphabet magnets on the fridge, so we got those to help us as well.

  

After about half an hour of practicing together, Littletree was able to read through the whole thing, she was so excited and proud of herself at the end she made me take a video of her reading it.

And then it was on to the next book…

I love that we’re a multi-lingual household and I love that it was totally Littletree’s own intrinsic motivation and choice to start learning to read :D

Tooth Faerie

When Littletree started losing her baby teeth, I decided not to mention the tooth fairy; like with Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, I don’t want to lie to my child – especially not about faeries, since we believe in them anyway – no need to sully our knowledge of *real* faeries with imaginary fairies that parents use to con their kids into brushing their teeth and behaving well.

But of course, being a real child in the real world, Littletree heard about the tooth fairy from other kids. I was careful not to say anything for or against the tooth fairy, just that some people believe in her and some don’t. Littletree was one of the ones that did, apparently.

When her first tooth came out, I swapped it for a rose quartz, but the second tooth I forgot to do anything with, and it stayed in Littletree’s little “tooth box” on her temple for several days. Until one day she came running up to me all excited with a little plastic jewel (that I swear had been in her craft supplies box), saying that the tooth fairy had given it to her for her tooth.

The tooth was still in it’s little box, so I took it and kept it with the first baby tooth (yes, I keep them, I’m just sentimental like that). And so it went, with Littletree putting her own gifts from the Tooth Fairy in the tooth box every time she lost a tooth, me remaining non-committal in regards to the existence of the Tooth Fairy, and all was well.

Until one day a couple of weeks ago she came home from a friend’s house, stomped in the front door and asserted, “You LIED to me! The Tooth Fairy is NOT real. I feel so HUMILIATED!”

What could I do? We just had a cuddle and she cried a bit and we talked about it.

The next day she happened to lose another tooth – the 8th one! Since I still wanted to keep her baby teeth, I had an idea and said to her “Since the tooth fairy isn’t real, how about I buy your baby tooth from you for $2 because I want to keep them.”

She was outraged, “How could you SAY such a thing? The Tooth Fairy IS real! Don’t ever say something like that.” and she stomped off to put her tooth in the tooth box.

Argh!!!

I had to laugh about it, and shortly after, I was in town and saw this in the window of the toy store:

“Tooth Fairy” Every Child’s “HERO”

I had to laugh! I can’t even decide if this is unnecessary quotations or not!

Australian Unschooling Conference

Well, it’s all over now; we’re all packed up and ready to leave. The conference ended last night with a party at Dayna Martin’s cabin, after the closing speeches and thank-yous.

We had such an awesome time, it was wonderful to be so immersed in so much unschooling energy, and for Littletree to have a safe space full of over 100 unschooled kids.

Littletree got involved in working in the snack shop/ sausage sizzle – she loved being able to help in a real way, and she was pretty good at adding up people’s orders and counting out change. Not to mention turning sausages! I love that this was a place where children were automatically respected to take on these roles.

One night there was a talent show, which was fantastic! I enjoyed it so much, seeing all the amazingly talented kids and parents. The beautiful part was that all the kids who participated did so of their own free will. When the kids felt shy or decided to back out, they were respected; no parents were sitting in the wings urging them to keep going after the child decided to step down :)

Littletree got up, but was a bit too shy, so our friends played a little guitar and drum so she could dance without being alone. Thus her confidence built, she actually got up on the stage and sang one of her ‘stream of consciousness’ songs about magic. It was fantastic! I’ll be uploading videos to YouTube when I get home to good internet.

We still spent loads of time by the pool

And the kids’ space hosted so many awesome activities – the kids all made “prayer flags” to hang up

We even had a “mum’s night out” and all the mamas walked over to the local club for dinner and a few drinks. I got to sit with Dayna, which was awesome :D

But I did manage to catch a few of the conference sessions between long chats about unschooling and playing with kids and hanging out with cool people

There’s so much more to share, and of course I took a bunch of photos. There’s a flickr group created for the conference, so everyone can upload their photos there and talk about unschooling, you can see it HERE

We’re sad it’s over now, but glad to be going home. Can’t wait till the conference next year!!!