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.

Stormy Adventures

For those wondering where we’ve been, Littletree and I were hit by Cyclone Oswald – well, not us personally, but the area we live in was heavily affected. It had seemed that the usual January storms weren’t coming this year, and me being me, I hadn’t seen the news, so I didn’t know it was coming.

The wind picked up and the rain came down, and before I knew it, the power went out, and the phone. Littletree and I spent the next couple of days huddled up in the house, while trees came down around us, with no power, and the cellular reception tower went down, we had no way out and no way to contact the world.

The roof leaked terribly, the downstairs flooded (again), the pergola blew away, more trees came down, the road turned into a river and half washed away. The village water supply got contaminated so we had to boil water, and I was kept busy siphoning water out of the downstairs flat, and putting furniture up on bricks.

But we spent our time, playing Dungeons and Dragons, reading science textbooks by candlelight, and making up Minecraft-themed parody lyrics to every song we could think of. We danced to no music, and made handicrafts, and ate tinned food and fried bread. We snuggled and giggled and enjoyed being without phones and electricity and internet.

This river was our driveway

This river was our street

This river was our back patio

This river was the downstairs living room

this river was the garage

This river was the bathroom

The knee-deep water I was siphoning out with a garden hose (and no, I don’t own a siphon pump)

This was the pergola with most of a tree on top of it

The back stairs which have ceased to exist

And this is where there used to be a road, but a tree fell on it, taking out all the power lines and phone lines for a few days

The fallen tree from above

When the storm finally blew itself out and the workers finally came to clear it up,

Littletree took great interest in watching from the balcony with her binoculars

Slowly, slowly, they got it cleared

And it became a street again

And we’re all safe and sound in the end.

Littletree’s Little Business

Littletree’s entrepreneurial talents have been full-speed ahead lately; in addition to her usual brownie and muffin selling, she’s been making loads of earrings and selling them, frantically saving up money.

Faster than I ever would have guessed possible, she had enough to buy herself her current coveted item – an iPod Touch. Well, this was also expedited by Apple bringing out the 5th Generation iPod Touch, and phasing out the 4th Gen ones, which meant that they suddenly became very cheap in stores, and she’s very happy to have it, regardless of being “last year’s model”.

First there was the great unboxing

And the magical moment of peeling off the screen cover

And voila!

Of course, then I had to spend a couple of hours installing iTunes on her computer and reminding myself how much I really hate iTunes and wondering why it has to be so damn difficult…

But I’ll chalk it up to an educational experience.

And Littletree is stoked; listening to music, playing games, messaging her friends, reading e-books, and learning stuff. She even bought herself a cute cover for it.

Now she’s redoubled her savings efforts, with the goal to buy a better telescope.

An Elven Adventure

Littletree has taken to Dungeons and Dragons – I suppose it was inevitable, what with all the geekery already going on in that child (remember we’re talking about a kid who wanted scale plush microbes for her birthday and who thinks drawing up molecular structures is a fun afternoon).

I asked my parents if they could send up some of the old books and dice we played with when I was young, and Littletree got a Player’s Handbook and her own set of dice from the Google SecretSanta at Christmas…

And away she went creating a character.

Lindy, the Ranger Elf.

Lindy has Autumn-ginger hair (oddly, about the same colour as Littletree’s), is fairly short for an elf (go figure), is a skilled archer, and wears leather armour. Lindy also has a keen sense of perception, and a strong connection to nature. She has great skill in climbing trees and in healing (sound familiar?)

So we go on little adventures, and the learning never stops. So much mental arithmetic, reading, statistics, calculations, as well as spatial awareness and strategy. Fun times!

C is for Cookie

Littletree has been doing some workbooks lately, and one of them – a phonics workbook, of all things – included a simple recipe for simple sugar biscuits.

So off she went, measuring,

Sifting (I love the old fashioned retro sifter I found at an op shop!)

Rolling out dough and cutting shapes

and lo! Biscuits!

She even did the dishes :-)

And it was educational too – we learned that it’s better to put two trays in the oven that squish everything together to make it all fit on one tray… and we learned that if you put a leaf-shaped biscuit too close to the bum of a bunny-shaped biscuit it comes out stuck together looking like a squirrel-shaped biscuit!

Conversations with Littletree

Don't get advice from

rocks, they always talk in

riddles and it's impossible

to get a straight answer.

Trees, on the other hand,

will tell you what you

need to know, but they

ramble on and on and on;

they never get to the point.

-- wisdom from Littetree

Half My Life

Now that the new year has passed, my dreadlocks can count their 17th birthday, and I realised (actually a couple of months ago), that I’ve passed the point where I’ve had them for more than half my life.

Given that I started them at sixteen-and-a-half, and I’m now thirty-three (and a half), so here’s a tribute to an epic journey – they’re not quite as long as they used to be – a few years back they were to my ankles, but that proved to be a hazard, so I keep them hovering around knee-length (for more history and dreadlock Q&A, see this old post on my Fifteen-Year-Dreadversary). 

One more trip around the Sun

Now that we've all survived another trip around the sun, and as we embark on another, entitled, 2013, I want to wish everyone a Happy and Awesome New Solar Revolution

Naturally, being a “new year”, I’ve been having long discussions with Littletree about what a year actually means – one trip around the Sun for the Earth, and how different cultures mark the start of each year at different times, and how different calendars calculate such things. And that rabbit hole of research led us, like so many things, to learning about the Sun, and the NASA website…

She pointed out the same thing I remember saying to my mother when I was about her age – what’s the point of calling it a “new” year, when every day starts a new year. And for each person, a new year really starts on their birthday.