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Raising Critical Thinkers - Fairy Tales

I am by nature a thinker. I don't mean to say that Keith isn't, I mean that for him, thinking a means an end whereas for me it is also a hobby.

You may recall I recently went on a mission to get Esme another copy of The Gingerbread Man for Christmas and faced with reading it over and does that gingerbread man NEVER LEARN ... either my brain was going to give or I needed something to make the process worthwhile.


I did what most modern parents do and got me some Google action and oh my LORD am I in geek heaven with the site I found.

Teaching Children Philosophy is an incredible resource that has pages covering different books including my new most hated fairy tale.

I love that is suggests different topics and themes for discussion and one of the ones it mentions in this context is that of ownership: Does the gingerbread man belong to the Old Lady (et al) because she made him and does that therefore mean he should shut up and get eaten?

I wasn't sure an abstract conversation about ownership was quite where Esme is yet but my synapses got firing and my brain had spun into a topic I am really trying to push with the older two at the moment – bodily autonomy.

It may be a simplistic view – but it is my view - that one of my jobs in raising future adults who respect their own and their prospective partner's bodies is to teach them that simply put, no means no. I find myself using an inordinate amount of time and energy at the moment explaining to one or the other of them that if they don't like someone touching them, that have the absolute right to tell them to stop, and that if someone does tell you to stop, it happens NOW. No questions asked.

Esme is currently enjoying testing this theory by clamping her legs together when you try to put a new nappy on her until you ask her permission (and even then it's 50/50) but it's all part of the process, and a healthy power for her to be exploring.

Anyway, this book, this BLOODY book.

If anyone doubts that starting these conversations is worthwhile I really suggest you try it because I was blown away by what happened.

Me: Bla, bla, gingerbread man ran, bla, bla come back little gingerbread man, etc, etc, shoot me now … So what do you think Esme? Should the little gingerbread man have stayed and let the little old lady eat him?
Esme: No.
Me: Really? Why do you think that?
Esme: Because no like it!!
Me, just about stifling a “HOLY SHIT!!”: What do you mean? He didn't want to be eaten?
Esme: Yes.
Me: So if he didn't want the little old lady to eat him it was OK for him to leave?
Esme: Yes, ginnerman run way.
Me pushing my luck: So do you think the little old lady owns the gingerbread man?
Esme: …............................ you read.
OK so teaching 101, know when to STFU, I get it, but holy smokes Batman, she's only gone and heard what I've been banging on about for the last few months!! It's sunk in, not just in that glazed “shut up already” look I get from them sometimes, but really sunk it to the point that Esme at the tender age of just 2 is applying those principles to other situations and stories.

In my dreamy utopian parent bubble, I would love to think that we are raising children who do more than just absorb. In fact, since we are still very much looking at homeschooling as an option for the children, I find myself trying to crowbar in learning opportunities whenever I can.

Don't worry, I just heard myself then and I did a little dry heave as well. After I publish this I'm going to go and flush my own head down the toilet.

I don't mean I try and turn every activity into a formal lesson because that would make me the most boring mum in the world and I just got a new tattoo so we know that can't be true, I mean one of the things I love about homeschooling, and unschooling in particular is that you are walking with your children through their curosity.

Alfie is currently big into dinosaurs which led to he and Keith picking up a vintage sticker album from the local Op Shop (that's Kiwi for Charity Shop by the way. You're welcome) which they read most night before bed. Alfie's favourite dinosaur is the Toystaurus Rex (that took me a few cups of tea to work out) but he also loves ole Brachio as well because of the long necks.


Right there are chances to talk about why animals have different teeth when they eat different things and also to think of modern day animals who might share the same features for the same reasons. That one might have been helped by having fed the giraffes at the zoo.

For me it's not about the knowledge, it's about the process of collecting it. It's about teaching the children to ask questions of everything around them. 

Even me. 

Especially me.
Monday, 30 December 2013 Comments: 5
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A New Family Tradition

I'm not one for creating family traditions, but that's because I have a terrible memory and don't want the the responsibility of keeping track.

This one I think I can handle though, especially with the help of my Google calendar to remind me.

This year we have each child a tape measure - I know, we spend big in this house - and each Christmas Eve we will measure them and write down what each them wanted be when they grow up.


Alfie was a given, I had hardly finished the question when he gave me the usual answer.

Olive? Well she just wants to be bigger.

Esme surprised me though. I tried to  explain the concept to her, and gave her lots of options and she thought for a moment, little brow furrowed, before announcing "I do dancing" and giving a little wiggle.

This is not a legal and binding commitment on the part of my children to their future careers, but my reaction to their choices surprised me.

I hope my children find careers that give them joy, but secretly, I had hoped that at least one of them would want to do something that uses their brains.

Such is the nature of small children, they are physical creatures and mine more than most.

It was good learning for me as well. A pointed lesson in the reality that my children are willfully, unbiddably their own people and my hopes for them, however romantic, are my own.

Recognising that, and respecting my children's right not to be burdened by my expectations might well be one of my hardest journeys.
Thursday, 26 December 2013 Comments: 0
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Giving and Receiving During The Festive Season

Christmas is coming up fast and this year we have reached new and heady heights of disorganization.

Seriously, it's epic.

Two things we have done though involve trying to focus the children on the traditional values off Christmas: Giving and receiving.

The receiving part is easy, and fun: we went to see Father Christmas today. We weren't going to because, well, queuing up with small children for an hour in a stuffy department store is as much fun as stabbing yourself in the guts with a chainsaw, but it was necessary.

It was made necessary

We went to a community BBQ yesterday and toward the end, in rode Santa on a fire engine. 

I know.

He was funny, and also slightly scary. His costume was pinned together scraps of red fabric and his belly was something liquid which sprung a leak under the physical exertion of his entrance causing him to utter a line no parent wants to hear from Santa ... "Careful little boy, Santa's rather sticky"


When he called us on stage, Alfie wailed and I was left carrying both he and Olive up to get our home made gifts. Esme was only marginally less freaked out in daddy's arms. 

Which makes it all the more surprising that when we got home, the children decided they wanted to see the "real" Santa today.

I stopped short of telling them that the Santa we had just seen was going to be the best that they were ever likely to meet and for reasons they were to young to appreciate and instead agreed that we would face the hell of central Wellington at Christmas.

I'll keep this story short and sweet: The queue was long, the shop was hot, the children freaked. 


Alfie isn't in this photo because he was peering around the door. Yup, he didn't make it into the room.

On the flip side Esme got to ask Santa for "ginnerman", despite the fact she already has a copy of The Gingerbread Man and she is now convinced that she will receive another copy under the tree. So far that's not working out so well; in fact it seems to be something if a rare book in these parts. 

The giving part of this Christmas is a slightly harder sell, but we think a worthy one.

We are asking Alfie and Esme to go through their toys to donate the ones they don't use.

I know, we just shipped this shit half way across the globe, but this is as much about them learning the value off giving as it is streamlining the amount of obnoxious plastic crap those two own.

I won't pretend this is the most popular thing we have ever attempted, but it had been pretty therapeutic for all of us.

In a few weeks we will take the box of toys down to Alfie's school where he and his friends can enjoy the toys together.

Where I don't have to find homes for them.
Monday, 23 December 2013 Comments: 0
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She Believed She Could, So She Did

This is the inspiration behind my next tattoo.

This is what it looks like when you give up lunch breaks to take pumping breaks instead.


This is what happens when you stop realise that just "because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something that I can do"*

This is the result of a thought that started with “what would it be like if I didn’t have a low supply”

In the spirit of transparency I would like to point out that this is not the result of a single session, nor is it enough to cover Olive while I’m at work. 

But 

It is what I am capable of.

It is life as a working, pumping mama:

And it makes me proud.



*Helen Keller's wise words, not mine.
Friday, 20 December 2013 Comments: 0
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A Review of WaterWipes

Something amazing happened recently.

I was asked to review a mystery product by Kiwi Mummy Blogs and being the adventurous sort of course I said yes.

I have to admit I was a little disappointed when I saw the size of the package on my doorstep - bit small for a dream sling I thought - but I decided to suck it up and see what was waiting for me.

And lo, there is a God of Awesome Surprises and she is good because it was better than a sling. Oh yes.

When I opened that package the clouds parted, angels sang (choirs of them) and I snatched the contents up like it was gold bullion.

As a crunchy mama, I spent no small amount of time finding products that I felt chimed with our desire to tread lightly while also being awesome for my children. One of the hardest things for me was leaving those products behind in the UK when we moved to New Zealand not knowing whether we would find replacements.

All of which is by way of qualifying my excitement to find myself clutching, like a little plastic wrapped piece of heaven, my favourite mama product of all time:

WaterWipes

These are wipes that I love so much that when a well known high street pharmacy had them on offer, I cleared out their entire stock.

These are wipes that I love so much that when the same pharmacy failed to restock, I resorted to cotton wool and water rather than buy another brand.

I have never done a product review before, but writing one for WaterWipes is simple for me:


Buy them, love them, cherish them because they are the kindest thing you will ever use on your baby.

These wipes are so gentle I use them on newborn nappy changes, I use them on newborn faces, toddler faces, MY face.

They are so gentle that you know those teething nappies that leave bottoms glowing Rudolf Red? They are the only things that don't make my children howl like a wolf is ripping off an arm. In fact these wipes have a nice cooling effect as the water evaporates which means my teething children give a big sigh of relief as I lay one over their red raw backsides.


On the flip side they are also strong enough to have removed what could generously be described as Stage Makeup after a works night out without leaving me feeling like my cheeks had been caught in a nuclear blast.

My only initial reservation about these wipes is that they were always relatively expensive in the UK, but actually what I found was that they worked out quite reasonable when you took into account the fact that you would use one per nappy change, rather than 3 or 4 poorer performing wipes.

Because that's the thing about WaterWipes, even putting aside the fact that they are insanely low in unpronounceable chemical crap, they are genuinely high performance wipes.

And they don't make your baby smell like an old lady's bathroom.

What more could you want?!

Thank you to Kiwi Mummy Blogs and Munch Cooking for sending me that little slice of awesome.
Thursday, 19 December 2013 Comments: 0
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Nowhere to Hide

The last six months have been hard on the elder children: They have acquired a new sibling and moved across the world away from everyone they knew and loved.

OK let me be honest here – the last six months has been hard on all of us.

Keith and I have tried really hard to help the children settle but it has been especially hard for Alfie. He misses his friends, he misses his grandparents and he misses his old school.

He also lacks the emotional maturity to articulate the depth of his loss.

The net result of all of the above is that Alfie has sometimes displayed some fairly erratic and unpleasant behaviour.

It is a well-worn pattern: 
  1. Esme invades Alfie’s bubble (that bubble which a second ago wasn’t there by the way)
  2. Alfie wails on Esme
  3. Esme gets an anger on and comes out fighting (oh daughter, do you have to be SO like your mama?)
  4. The closest parent flings themselves bodily between two scrapping children to separate them long enough for them all to calm the hell down
  5. Rinse and repeat.
The big challenge for us as parents is that we were struggling with our own nameless stress for a while and found it hard to do anything more meaningful than prise open clenched fingers and bodily remove one of the children from the situation.

As things have settled into our new normality, Keith has taken the lead to help us develop some strategies to really help Alfie. This shouldn’t come as a surprise - Alfie is more Keith than Keith is himself - but it really humbling to see how intuitive Keith is with Alfie.

This cartoon from robot-hugs describes those two perfectly.


Some of the problems come from Alfie's newly developed need for privacy.

We are blessed that the new house gives him his own room but Esme being the social creature she is, doesn’t necessarily understand that sometimes her big brother doesn’t want her around. Sometimes Alfie doesn’t understand that he doesn’t want her around either, and so we have started offering him the choice of playing in his room with the door closed.

This is very different to him being sent to his room - I see no value in that as a parent just as I received no benefit from it as a child – this is about us saying “ok stop everything, take a breath, do you want some time away from everyone to do your own thing in your own way?”

Usually the answer is yes, especially when he is tired and especially now I know to offer since Keith has highlighted Alfie’s cues to me.

I think he’s highlighted them to Alfie as well.

Those two are walking hand in hand through Alfie's childhood, listening and learning from each other daily. Raising a boy with a mature emotional vocabulary isn't always at the top of the list of parenting goals but it is an awe inspiring thing to witness.
Tuesday, 17 December 2013 Comments: 0
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Spontaneous

When my children look back on their childhood, these are the memories I want them to cherish.


The days we grabbed a pizza and went down to the beach to eat.

Huddling together against the cooling evening breeze.

The chug chug of a boat finding the perfect fishing spot.

The sparrow daring to come up to out feet to steal our crusts.

Digging holes in the sand with our toes.

Just because.

Thursday, 12 December 2013 Comments: 0
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What Would Happen Without Bedtime?

My parenting journey reads like many others of us who have started down the path of believing the “experts” before realising that their inner voice sings a different song. 

Like these others, I too have a sacrificial eldest child who suffered the outrages of feeding schedules, sleep training and tummy time. I have a very different relationship with him to the one I have with the girls and I feel like it will be a long fight for us both to repair the damage of those first few months. 

I remember, with absolute horror, leaving Alfie to cry for a few minutes each time he was put into his cot. I remember telling a curious relative that he “needed a few minutes to calm himself” because that is what I had read and the number one best-selling baby author couldn't be wrong, could she?

By the time Alfie was six months my inner voice had drowned that “advice” and we were really starting to find our feet and trust our instincts with him, mainly due I think to the problems he had with eczema. It was left to us to find answers and to listen to what our boy was telling us and that helped us gain confidence as parents to know what was right for him.

In the last four years we have become parents who are guided by and trust their children: We feed on demand so that the babies have their milk when they want and take as much as they want. We practise Baby Led Weaning which means our children are in control of how much, what, and when they eat. We deal in natural consequences rather than punitive punishments. We allow the children to assess their own risks, usually while Keith supervises and I hyperventilate somewhere out of sight.

Despite all of that, there is one area where we were slow to modify our expectations – bedtime.

The children have long had the freedom to nap as and when they see fit - especially the two girls who have been Velcro babies from birth which has meant they have grown up spending as much time as they want in slings and sleeping when the mood takes them – but bedtimes were always something different.

We wasted hours upon hours in darkened rooms rocking, bobbing, singing, shhhing, patting, in various combinations to achieve the holy grail of Bed Time. The calories we must have burnt sweating under the dead weight of sleeping child. The pulled muscles we suffered trying to lower them into a sleeping position without waking them.

Why?

Because everyone has to have a bedtime.

When you think about bedtimes in the context of Attachment Parenting, bedtimes, like a lot of parenting assumptions actually give some very negative messages to our children and become counter intuitive.

Bedtime means I know better than you when you are tired and need to sleep.
Bedtime means I don’t trust you to make sensible choices.
Bedtime means I deserve some time without you around.

None of which actually holds true for me.

My children know damn well when they are tired. It’s roughly the time they become completely irrational, whine uncontrollably and make me want to punch myself in the head for a little light relief. Incidentally this is exactly the same way I act when I'm tired. The difference is that I recognise these behaviours as tiredness and at least try to remove myself from polite company. If I come from the standpoint that my children, like me, are intelligent enough to recognise their behaviour then maybe my role as a parent isn't to force them to be tired by 7pm sharp, but to help them recognise what it means to be tired and what they can do to help themselves feel less like the world is ending.

My children also know how to make sensible choices - Except the baby. She has proven to me that her idea of sensible is to actively seek out large drops and throw herself off them with a whoop and hang loose hands. She is never allowed near sharp objects or any sentence starting “I bet you …” - The other children can make sensible choices though, they prove this to me on a regular basis. Given free reign, they don’t stay up until 2am every night, they take themselves off when it suits their body clock. Alfie is an early bird: He’s tucked up by 7pm and wakes before 6am. Esme is a night owl: She won’t sleep before 8.30 and will kick your ass if you try to make her up before 7am. 

Do you want to know how many hours we have spent trying to change those facts? Many. Do you know what we achieved? Nada. 

Well except to create a new saying. 

It goes something like this …

YOU CAN’T OUT-STUBBORN A BATSFORD


Our children are going to bed at the exact same time that they have always gone to bed. The only difference now is that we aren't taking hours out of our day to try and persuade them otherwise. Instead Esme stays up with us, sometimes on Keith’s back, sometimes “helping” me tidy up until she starts yawning and then with Keith or I will take her to bed for cuddles until she drops off. Alfie wakes up at sparrow’s fart and either plays in his room or goes to the dining table to eat the bowl of cereal Keith has left out for him. Neither of these things involves me wanting to cry with frustration which I consider a win/win.

All of this is possible because I am genuinely blessed enough not to feel like I need “time off” from my children: Perhaps because I am at work every day meaning I always feel like I'm playing catch-up with my family time. I'm also blessed that my evening pastimes don’t involve ritual animal slaughter, getting fall over drunk, chasing the dragon, orgies, or anything I wouldn't want to explain to my children. 

There are plenty of hours when they are asleep for all of that.

I love Attachment Parenting for many reasons, but way up there on that list is the fact that it allows so much more time and energy to be poured into positive activities rather than into battles. Like so many of the realisations Keith and I have come to since we started this journey, the question becomes why the hell didn't we do this earlier?
Tuesday, 10 December 2013 Comments: 3
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Post Pregnancy Hair Loss

This is absolutely my least favourite part of having babies.
 
When I was pregnant with Alfie I remember the luscious thick flowing locks that women are supposed to have as some kind of cosmic pay off for months of bone crushing tiredness and sickness.
 
With the girls, not so much.
 
With them I had thick hair, yes, but it was prone to somehow be both frizzy and greasy and was best ignored in case it came out fighting. Even my hairdresser asked me in not so many words to stop coming to see her because I was blackening her otherwise glowing reputation for hair sculpting.
 
One of the perks of writing a blog though is that you get to talk about the stuff that really matters and, more importantly, that nobody ever told you would happen because at least then you wouldn't lose your mind thinking you were a falling apart.
 
I'll keep this simple.
 
Ladies, 3-5 months after you've given birth - that's right, just when you are feeling a little low because your body hasn't answered your whispered prayers and pinged back into shape, you're still waking up several times a night and the novelty has PROPERLY worn off, and your skin is breaking out in zits - then, THEN your hair is going to come out in big clumps.
 
Because nature hates you.
 
 
This is just one pass with my brush. I would have done more for dramatic effect but it was just too depressing.
 
More depressing still is washing my hair and rinsing my hands of a spiderweb of shed hair again and again.
 
My solution has always been to get my hair cut short and to work hard at what I suppose is technically a comb over to hide the glint of scalp in the sunlight.
 
And this is a big thing for me because I come from a line of women with fine hair and absolutely no hairdressing skill. I hate my hair at the best of times, at the worst of times, like now, I can actually feel myself burning with shame when I see photos of temporary hairline.
 
But as with most pregnancy related things, this too shall pass. I won't say anything twee like the little darlings make it all worthwhile because frankly when you are sitting in a business meeting wondering if you are blinding the guy opposite with your forehead the little darlings don't figure.
 
The comfort of knowing that this is a temporary phase does.
Thursday, 5 December 2013 Comments: 0
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Like a Thief in the night

There are days where the tiny incremental changes that mark our lives suddenly become massively apparent.

At the weekend we went mooching round some Op Shops and it occurred to me that Alfie had peeled off to do his own thing and that actually I didn’t mind. I wasn’t cringing for the sound of a toddler body-checking a glass cabinet, or the gut churning rip of an expensive painting, I was content to trust him to explore.

I was so curious about my new attitude towards my son I turned back to find him. And there he was sitting amongst the books reading silently to himself.
 
 

And it took my breath away.

Like a thief in the night, time has stolen any last trace of toddler from him and left me instead with a beautiful boy.
Monday, 2 December 2013 Comments: 2
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