As most readers of Seeing With New Eyes will know, we don’t have any educational structure at all in our house, and only a very loose daily pattern that we tend to follow to keep me sane, and even this is subject to huge amounts of flexibility and change.  So how do the children learn anything???  Occassionally I’ve written posts discussing things like this.  I don’t really like the idea of identifying learning taking place as I prefer feeling that the children really are just living and enjoying life and that they learn what is important to them, whether I can see it happening or not. 

I also disagree with some writers on autonomy in childhood (most notably Jan Fortune-Wood) who don’t feel that John Holt was right in his trust that true learning was somehow mystical and worked by some unseen process of absorption in a way we can’t possibly understand.  I see my children doing it all the time!  Who knows what they learn from a conversation?  I think it’s possible they even learn things other than the answer to the question they’ve just asked.  They wouldn’t be able to identify it, so how would I be able to?  Their minds are just constantly working, thinking, adapting, placing new ideas in context with old ones, consolidating things they already know etc.  I just think children and learning is like an ice-berg - we only ever see the very tip of it and have no right to see any more than the tip they choose to show us. 

And this is what is wrong with school - they just focus on that tip of learning - the bit they can see and test and check up on.  But the tip can be fragile and breaks easily so what is far more important is nurturing what is going on under the water - the bits that will be there for the child’s lifetime.  How on earth can that happen in school when so much importance is placed on ‘the tip’?  How can children really get to the depths of their learning under the water when they are forced to pay all their attention to the fragile and unimportant ‘tip’ throughout their schooling period - the bits they’ll forget as soon as they’ve passed the relevant ‘tests’ unless they happen to have a special interest in whatever it is?

Back to my own children, who are given the freedom and autonomy to focus on the depths of their learning that are important to *them* and relevant to *their* lives - not imposed on them by the powers that be.  On Friday the girls asked to do some cutting out so we got out some of our Guardian wall posters that we’ve been cutting out gradually in order to use the pictures for anything they fancy - posters/sorting/whatever.  Or maybe it’s just the enjoyment of improving on their cutting skills.  Who cares?  Not me .  As long as they are enjoying it then they *must* be getting something from it whether or not it fits in with a curriculum.  Anyway, we managed to get two posters cut up before we had to go out to a friend’s house and, my goodness, the conversations (and other things) that took place while we worked together!  We talked about the things we were cutting out.

“What’s this I’m cutting out now, Mummy?”

“What is a newt?”

“What do those words say at the top, Mummy?”

“Mummy, Cotton-tail has got her bit all wet under the tap!  She’ll get our bits wet too if she’s not careful and then they’ll be ruined!”

Cotton-tail had her own pieces of the wall chart to ‘cut out’ with her plastic scissors (normally I’d give her a normal pair, if she were any other toddler, but Cotton-tail does like to wave them around alarmingly opening and shutting them in a very scary way!  She started by having a go with the scissors, then decided she’d prefer to just spend some time putting the pieces of wall chart in and out of the folder we were storing our cut-outs in.  First of all she had to learn how to undo and do up the popper holding it closed.  After she’d done that a few times, and put her pieces of paper in and out of it a few times, she decided she’d see what happened if she screwed up her pieces of paper and then took them to the downstairs loo to see what would happen to them if she wet them under the tap.  Then she brought them back in and stuffed them in the folder again - hence the last comment above!  This game went on for some time.  Unfortunately she hasn’t yet learnt to turn the tap off so we quite frequently suddenly realise we can hear running water and have to rush to turn it off ourselves, hoping that it hasn’t been running and wasting water for too long!

Mopsy recognised a pike which features in one of her favourite books and was very pleased with herself. 

And so on and so forth.

What else have we been up to?  Well Flopsy has spent the last few months pretending to talk in French and asking me to tell her some French words.  We considered going to a local HE French class but Flopsy doesn’t really ‘do’ classes so didn’t bother in the end.  Yesterday my Grandad gave me a set of 6 ‘learn to speak French’ cds that he’d saved the tokens for from the Times and Flopsy was thrilled.  We listened to the first one on the way home in the car (a 45 minute journey) in the evening - four 15min lessons each very similar to the last to give plenty of practice - by the third lesson I could hear both Flopsy and Mopsy trying to repeat some of the French words and this morning Flopsy asked straight away if we could put the cd on again.  If this is anything like her recent dinosaur craze (which consisted of buying toy dinosaurs, getting dinosaur books for her birthday, buying Walking With Dinosaurs with her birthday money, getting yet more dinosaur books out of the library, visiting the Natural History Museum and more; and which was very, very involved and indepth and was joined by Mopsy with nearly all of it - alongside this, Mopsy’s also had a very deep interest in “Great White Sharks that eat people”!), then I can see us having the cds on in the car for quite some time, and ending up with a 5yo who knows a fair amount of French. 

Now, my pre-knowing-about-and-understanding-and-valuing-autonomous-learning head says to me ‘Great!  Something I can ‘tick off” but my new-improved-absolute-respect-for-my-children-and-for-them-owning-their-learning head says ‘Great!  Something to make car journeys more enjoyable for them!’ and the learning that may or may not take place becomes irrelevant.

Sandra Dodd recently got people to take part in a ‘Learn Nothing Day’ and the response was fairly unanimous - how can you learn nothing?  John Holt says that you’d have to shut away a child in a dark room for his entire childhood if you wanted to get him to not learn anything and even that wouldn’t work completely.  Just because we can’t quantify or test what someone has learnt, doesn’t mean it isn’t happening, and in fact, the bits we can quantify and test are probably far less important than the bits we can’t because the ‘testable’ bits are the bits that won’t stick.  I’ve often thought that revision for exams is a bit of a daft thing to do - if you have to revise the stuff, then you don’t know it, you’re just memorising it.  If you really and truly *know* the stuff that will be in the exam, you’ll only need to revise a few specific things like dates, maybe, in a history exam for example - the bits you’d normally look in a book for.  But we’re told in school to spend weeks and weeks revising for exams - doesn’t that suggest that we don’t really *know* the stuff they’ve been feeding us for the last year?

Anyway, because of the inspiration and trust in the process I’ve gained from reading other blogs of autonomous home educators (or unschoolers as they’re known in the US), I will continue to jot down here little snippets of how it works for us because I know, from experience, that it is difficult to trust in a process that you can’t see happening until you’ve spent a lot of time with other people who do trust in it (both IRL and online).

Thursday is the day my mum comes over and I go to work at the bf support group for two hours in the middle of the day.  Dad came too this week because it’s school holidays (he works in a school) so he took me and picked me up.  Mum had brought the stuff to make the strawberry cheesecake from Big Cook Little Cook, as requested by the girls, so they made that as soon as I got home.  I also had a shift on the bf helpline after work so I didn’t see much of what was going on during the day with the children - probably lots of playing and fun, I should imagine!  Dad told me that the girls refused to stop picking up the chickens, which is very annoying as they were doing the same on Wednesday.  I’ve now had to tell the children that the chickens need some free-ranging time and they can each pick up each chicken once, and then only if I ask them to, e.g. to help me put them away, and that if they keep doing it, it’s not fair on the chickens and the children will have to stay inside while the chickens free-range.  Worked with Flopsy yesterday (Friday) but not Mopsy so she had to come in .  Hopefully she’ll understand soon and give a bit more respect to the chickens’ rights to forage un-molested!

Friday we went to a friend’s house and hung around there until mid-afternoon.  She’s in the early stages of pregnancy, and I’m in the late stages, so we’re both exhausted and spent the time lying on the sofas hoping the children entertaining themselves isn’t causing too much mayhem wherever they are!  We’d collected one egg in the morning, and came home to two more, so all three chickens are officially laying now

We had expected a very boring day yesterday, having no car, but it turned out to be very full and fun.  Our crocs arrived very early and Flopsy put hers on straight away and has only taken them off for bed since!  Mopsy’s not keen on hers - I think she can’t get over how loose they feel and refuses to keep wearing them to get used to them.  Fingers crossed she does soon!  Cotton-tail’s are too big, but we’d expected that.  I can’t decide if mine are too big or not.  They’re certainly bigger than the website says they should be, but I seem to keep meeting people who wear theirs as big as mine are and find them fine.  And I’m fairly certain that the next size down were too small when I tried them on.  They’re very comfy though, and despite a lot of walking yesterday, came home with no pelvic ache at all, which just about never happens nowadays, so they’re clearly not too, too big.  I might go and try on a smaller size anyway, which will either reassure me, or I’ll buy a smaller size and someone suggested keeping the larger size to wear in the winter with socks - or I could sell them on ebay.  I wore them for too long yesterday to really send back, unfortunately.

A friend and her 22m old came over late morning to see the chickens and have lunch with us, and then another friend texted me to invite us to join her and another family at some free children’s street theatre that was going on in town in the afternoon.  We knew we’d have to the get the bus, so I was a bit reluctant knowing how tired my back gets, and not knowing if I ought to wear my crocs or not, but my friend persuaded me to try them out for the day and sell them on ebay if they didn’t work out.  I took my merrells with me anyway, just in case. 

So we got the bus into town and met up with the other families to watch the most fantastic street theatre.  It was 50 minutes long and the children managed to stick the whole thing out and really enjoyed it all.  It was like a silent comedy movie, with someone playing an accordian and making sound effects and three other actors playing 8 characters who were involved in some way or other in the theft or recovery of a stolen Mona Lisa at a station.  It was very funny and very slapstick with lots of people falling over and being put in dustbins and hanging from great heights when ladders get taken away etc.

Then we all went to get the children snacks and a drink, which took us to 4pm.  Two of the children begged us to take them to the ‘dinosaur museum’ - a lovely, free city museum that has a very small dinosaur section that our children all love - so we went there until it closed at 4.45pm, got the bus home and then played with the chickens until DH got back. 

Mopsy has suddenly worked out how to pick the chickens up - something I worried about at first, but the chickens don’t seem to mind at all, so I stopped asking her not to.  Flopsy’s not quite so brave and will only pick one of them up.  Cotton-tail keeps trying, but is not at all gentle so we have to keep rescuing the poor chickens from her.  I’ve just noticed they’re short of food, so will go and top them up.

We haven’t done much at all today.  I had a shift to work on the helpline from 9-10am and somehow, while I was upstairs hiding from the children in order to answer phone calls, DH managed to get all three dressed, breakfasted and suncreamed and I didn’t hear any shouting!  I wasn’t dressed or breakfasted, though, but once I was, we all went on a croc trying on trip.  We have succumbed to the croc fashion but only after a year of refusing to simply because everyone else was - I’m very daft sometimes!  Anyway, after a week on the beach with children whining about sand in their doodles, I have decided that crocs would be a very good investment for them - a bit more expensive than doodles, but easier to get them to put on, and they can wear them in the winter with socks, and they can be handed down.  Plus, getting some for myself means that I no longer have to struggle bending down to do up my Merrells straps (walking sandals which are the only things that doesn’t make my pelvis ache front and back after walking only a few yards!) - this is a particular problem now that the lovely Cotton-tail likes to undo *all* the straps whenever she gets the chance.  So we went to Brantanos, tried on a load of crocs, and then came home and ordered them in the desired colours.  They were on a multi-buy promotion so Cotton-tail has some to grow into (she’s a bit too small for their smallest size).  I’ve since found out that, not only will they not make my pelvic pain worse, but that many other pregnant women with pelvic pain have found that wearing crocs actually make it better!!!  So I’m very much hoping they arrive in the morning and I can look forward to a much more comfortable last few weeks of pregnancy.  The children are very excited indeed.

When we got home, we had lunch and let the chickens out to free-range for the afternoon and then just dossed about rather a lot!  Flopsy and Mopsy made themselves a bunkbed with their little wooden table and lots of teatowels from the kitchen.  DH played lots of tickling and rough and tumble games with all three of them.  Flopsy’s very tired at the moment, thanks to her sleeping problems, so she keeps getting upset and storming upstairs.  I went up to her one time when she was cross that it was Mopsy’s turn to choose the video they watched, and we lay on the bed together and felt and watched the baby move.  She loved it and I went to get my favourite pregnancy book for us to look through to find out what the baby could do now.  The pictures prompted a very long discussion (not the first!) which included female anatomy, in particular that of a pregnant woman; labour and birth; how to take a baby swimming; how babies get sandy when they go on the beach.  Eventually she got bored and I suggested we go downstairs together, which she agreed to, but then by the time I got downstairs she’d run back upstairs again.

She eventually decided to come down if DH would play a grown-up game with her that was too old for Mopsy to play - she chose Monopoly and, true to form, Mopsy suddenly turned the tv off and announced she wanted to play.  Cue lots of crying when Flopsy put her foot down.  These moments are the frustrating ones when you have lots of children and believe in finding a solution that suits everyone.  I managed to distract Mopsy for a little bit by asking her to help me get the chickens in - she threw them a load of mealworms into the run, and then amazed me by being able to pick one of them up that was only half-way in the doorway!  We shut them in and put their shower curtain over them as it looked like rain, and then Mopsy ran in and asked again if she could play Monopoly.  As Cotton-tail was being fairly easy and not disrupting the game too much, I suggested that Mopsy and I take a different grown up game upstairs to play on our own and she jumped at the chance.  She actually decided to do her marble run and we went upstairs and played with that for absolutely ages.  Then she chatted to me for a while about her Grandma’s marble game (solitaire) and about how Grandma had said (apparently) that she’d be very happy if one of her marbles ever got broken…think there’s been a bit of a misunderstanding there, but hey ho!  When we got downstairs, Monopoly was being put away and DH told us that Flopsy had built a green house somewhere this time (I have no idea how they play it so she can join in, but he somehow manages it and she loves it!). 

I noticed two little notes on the fridge that were folded over.  One said ‘Daisy’ on the front and the other said ‘Tom’, and I realised that this is what Flopsy had spent a lot of the morning working on and was what she started last night.  Daisy is a new friend of Flopsy and Mopsy’s and is 14 (I think!).  Tom is my brother.  His note said ‘To Tom max and Bob the builder and scrabble and red dog blue dog are here lots of love Flopsy’ - she asked us how to write ‘and’ but copied the rest of the words from their piles of board games around the room.  Then she asked me for ‘are’ ‘here’ and ‘love’ but knew the rest.  DH told me he’d been asked for a lot of the words for Daisy’s note which read ‘to daisy.  all the chickens are laying eggs. lots of love flopsy’.  So sweet!  Must remember to help her post them tomorrow!

The last event of the day was poor Cotton-tail.  I could hear DH in the kitchen cooking our supper, talking on the phone to his manager and randomly saying ’stay awake, Cotton-tail’ while I was pinned to the sofa by the other two.  Then I heard him finish his phone call and put Cotton-tail on the kitchen counter to watch him cook.  Then I heard a crash, and a swear-word and lots of crying - poor little thing had fallen asleep sitting on the kitchen counter and fallen off and DH only just missed catching her!  She was absolutely fine, though, with a cuddle and some arnica, thank goodness. 

Then we all had supper and DH is currently reading to them and (hopefully) getting them all to sleep, having bathed them all amidst lots of ‘would you *please* stop throwing water over the side of the bath!?’ and other commonly heard phrases during a bathtime that includes several children!

Or just another one-off, I wonder!  Hopefully a return to blogging.  I like looking back over what we’ve done and enjoyed having a chance to get on my soapbox from time to time.  Tonight, I’m sitting up with Flopsy who can’t sleep, and so I’m just surfing the next waiting for her to drop off again.  I was thinking of blogging about what we’ve been doing today, and haven’t done that since when I very first started blogging when Mopsy was born!

The night before last, Flopsy couldn’t get to sleep until midnight, the night before that it was 10.30.  Considering DH and I are usually in bed by 10pm at the moment, this was making us quite tired and angry etc. but DH had Saturday and Sunday off work so I wasn’t too fussed the first night.  However, I was not looking forward to looking after all three girls on the hottest day so far, on my own, heavily pregnant, and lacking in sleep.  Before I went to sleep, I told DH to take the car to work so he didn’t get so tired cycling (he can leave a little later if he drives) and said I’d just spend the day letting the girls watch tv and lolling on the sofa with the fan on trying not to lose my temper whenever they started bickering.  However, when DH woke, Flopsy was already awake (she wakes early, goes to sleep late and I don’t know how she’s surviving at the moment!) and I couldn’t get back to sleep, and my pelvis was aching (obviously slept awkwardly) so I got up and apologised but said could I please keep the car so that I could take them out.  I figured that even if I just took them out for an hour in the morning when it wasn’t too hot, it would help all our fraying tempers!  Being the lovely DH that he was, he agreed immediately and sped up his morning preparations so he had time to cycle.

After he left (at about 6.50am), Flopsy sat on the sofa watching tv, as she likes to do in the mornings, and I faffed around on the computer.  Then we heard little Cotton-tail bumping herself down the stairs, as she likes to do.  She comes and sits right close to Flopsy (she adores her big sisters) and cuddles up to her to watch whatever she’s watching.  Soon after 8am, Mopsy came down to join us too and by this time I was watching the delights of early morning children’s tv too so Mopsy cuddled on my knee in her lovely cosy, dozy state she is in when she first wakes up.  I asked them if they’d like to go to the NCT toddler group we helped set up and still go to occassionally (we don’t go too often because the Children’s Centre it’s based in keep going on at us to get everyone, including ourselves, to ‘register’ with them and fill in this extensive form which is not, IMO, appropriate and I refuse to do it.  Luckily my friends who still run the group also think it’s too intrusive and are negotiating with them to change it - that’s a whole ‘nother post though!).  A couple of their young friends go there so they do like going sometimes, although Flopsy finds it too boring to go every week being so much older than everyone else, but they decided they did want to go this morning.  We have to leave soon after 9am to get there on time, but I decided to take things slowly as I was in such discomfort.

We set about breakfasting and discussing how we would tell which of our chickens laid which egg (oh yes, we now have chickens…will post about them at some point if I keep this up!) - Flopsy has decided the way to tell is to ask them, because apparently she can understand ‘bok, bok, bok’   For some reason unknown to mankind, all three children co-operated with suncreaming, which, along with teethbrusing, is just about the only thing we insist on happening, so I didn’t get stressed out then - had to do it sitting on the birth ball though, as it was too uncomfortable to sit on the sofa or floor.  Then they all *gasp* got dressed without too much cajoling - not sure what was in their cereal…some sort of ‘let’s be nice to Mummy medicine’ or something.  Usually this is where I’m getting flustered when I’m tired and achy and asking them tetchily why on earth I’m putting all the work in getting them ready for something *they* want to go to!  Then, even more of a shock, Mopsy let me brush her hair!!!!!  This is a very rare occurrance in our house - she usually looks like she has a very blond birds’ nest on her head, with a few curly rats tails coming out the bottom, but this morning she looked very neat and tidy with a plait in it!!!  Flopsy also asked for a pony tail so she looked fairly presentable too!  Considering this toddler group is full of mainstream parents, I do palpably feel the ‘looks’ I occassionally get when my three are ‘allowed’ to just be children, but I console myself with the knowledge that my friends running it are totally accepting of our family’s lifestyle and the rather smug feeling of ‘I have more experience (more, and older, children than anyone else there) and more knowledge (willing to think outside the box!) than the rest of you so pah!’

We all piled into the car (Mopsy can now strap herself in, but Flopsy can’t ) and I put the buggy in and an extra-full nappy bag just in case we made any impromptu decisions about what to do after the group.  Then we were off and got there about 40 minutes late and had a lovely time.  Mopsy and Flopsy did some lovely paintings (which we leave to dry and one of my friends collects for me next time she goes), and Cotton-tail clung to me for ages, which is unlike her in general, but something she’s started doing lately…maybe picking up on the ‘new baby coming’ vibes…?  There are lots of silly rules at this Children’s Centre, so I have spent some sessions telling the children they can’t do this or can’t do that - luckily they seem to understand that, although the rules don’t make sense to them (or to me, for that matter), we have to follow them if we want to come to the group, so they’re pretty good when I ask them to stop doing forbidden things now. 

We had planned to go to a children’s yoga session we tried out two weeks ago before our holiday, and which none of them joined in with but which Mopsy was very upset when it was time to leave saying ‘but I wanted to do yoga!!’.  So it was very easy getting them to leave this time (usually it’s a nightmare!) and we drove off to the next town and got there in time not to have to rush, except I didn’t have money for the car park so had to just keep my fingers crossed that there wouldn’t be a parking attendant round in the next 45 minutes!  The session was really lovely - we only have to pay for Flopsy and Mopsy.  Flopsy decided she was still not ready to join in, but Mopsy joined in for the whole session with me, and Cotton-tail was so sweet copying as much as she could.  Mopsy absolutely loved it, actually, so I’m looking forward to going every week now.

After yoga, we’d arranged with a newly pregnant friend who runs the toddler group and has two children who are very friendly with mine, to go round to her house for lunch and to survive the afternoon.  When we got there, the children all asked for McDonalds so we decided that it might not be a bad idea to go there and eat in the restaurant - an hour of coolness!  When we got back, my friend’s DH had returned early from work, and set up their new big paddling pool.  He was so kind getting myself and my friend chairs so we could sit with our feet in the pool, and a parasol to shade us.  We consequently had a blissful afternoon with the children all playing and splashing to keep us cool, and entertaining eachother so we didn’t have too much to do.  Then the thunder started and we all came in and had crumpets.  Poor Flopsy then complained of a tummy-ache so we left and got home only an hour before DH was due to arrive back.  Poor thing came back drenched from the torrential rain.

All in all, considering I’d been dreading the day, it turned out really, really lovely.  Flopsy’s just fallen asleep next to me on the sofa now, so I’ll click on ‘publish’ and go and wake DH to carry her upstairs to bed.  Fingers crossed she doesn’t wake when he puts her down, or I’ll be back writing something else!

I’m low on motivation to blog and low on motivation to do lots of good things with my children at home.  We’re very busy most days, but our at home on our own days are getting more and more boring and frustrating (and also more frequent and longer due to Dh’s changing working hours coming up to Christmas).  Maybe I’m suffering from SAD.  Some friends and I have set up our own HE group and we have our third session on Wednesday, which I’m looking forward to.  We were out this morning, but a friend who had planned to come this afternoon can’t anymore as her son is still unwell so we are trying to amuse ourselves.  We sometimes go to collect Dh from work as that shortens our day a bit.  Yesterday (yes, my Dh works all weekend sometimes ), we watched loads of tv but also did quite a lot of other small things - some experiments of the week; pouring water; pouring rice; tracing letters in a tray of rice; playing with the train track (quickly while Cotton-tail was asleep!); pushing eachother around in boxes - but none of them really took up very much time at all and before long they were clamouring for the tv to go on again.  I don’t mind them watching tv, except that I find it soooooooo boring myself!  And Mopsy gets frustrated when she watches a lot of it - she starts fidgeting and hitting Flopsy. 

After we came home from our toddler group, we had lunch while the tv was on.  Then they watched Doodle Do which reminded them of the tissue-paper watercolours they do sometimes (which they learnt about from a different episode of Doodle Do than the one they watched today).  So we did the tissue paper water colours but unfortunately I gave them tissue paper which, for some reason, doesn’t bleed its ink, so that didn’t work as well as it has done in the past.  It didn’t seem to bother them - they just enjoyed the process.  While they did that, I painted some papier-mache heads they made ages ago with Dh while I was laid up in bed with a bad back.  They’ve been sitting on the table annoying me for nearly two weeks now, so I felt I had to do something with them!  When the pink paint’s dry (they’re going to look rather sunburnt), I’ll see if they want to draw faces on them and stick on some wool hair. 

Then they decided they wanted to go outside.  Flopsy put her shoes on but Mopsy had previously removed her tights so decided to go oustide barefoot despite the freezing cold!  They wanted to hunt for worms with spades but were too scared (?) to go inside their play house to get spades.  I was too grumpy to help them but reluctantly agreed to go and pick out some from the rain-filled sand-pit for them and then came back inside.  Apparently these weren’t good enough and Flopsy stomped back in again, followed by Mopsy a bit later on. 

Flopsy watched me play a Kakuro puzzle online while Mopsy washed her hands, and now they’re playing some imaginative game.  I can hear them in the room next door and they’re playing really nicely (I wonder how long that will last?).  Someone’s called Flip-flop and the game involves pretend beds - a common theme in their games.  I can occassionally hear a shriek of frustration from Cotton-tail who is at an age already where she wants to be able to do everything and is very annoyed she can’t.  She spent an age trying to hold two pens in one hand earlier on - I remember Flopsy and Mopsy wanting to learn that too at some point.

I’m feeling desperately tired for some reason.  I slept well last night so I really don’t know why I’m so exhausted.  Must be suffering from SAD!  I know I’m not pregnant for many reasons but the most chief of those is that I don’t feel sick - there’s no way I’d manage to be pregnant and not at least feel sick, if not actually be puking! 

I’m a bit fed up that we don’t live in the country-side with a big garden with place to explore.

Ok, I can hear the play has turned  a little sour.  They’re over-involving little Cotton-tail - Mopsy seems to think she can play horses with her.  Must go and save her. 

I don’t do very much in the way of journal-type blogging but suddenly feel an urge to, so here goes!

This morning we went to our NCT toddler group.  It’s held in a children’s centre and a lot of my non-HE friends go there with their children who our children get on very well with so we all look forward to it.  The first part of this morning was very hellish indeed, though.  I have this totally irrational need for the girls to both get dressed first thing in the morning.  It’s partly because leaving anywhere, including our home, with three young children is hard work, but having one or more to dress first as well just makes it a nightmare, so if they’re all dressed before we start the day, then that’s less stress for me when it comes time to leave the house.  Mopsy, however, has recently decided that she doesn’t want to get dressed in the mornings and that she would rather stay in her nightclothes all day.  This is really, really stressing me out.  It’s fine on the days that we have no morning appointments because we can just stay upstairs playing and find a way to make a game out of getting dressed.  Those mornings go very pleasantly.  But when we have morning plans and I don’t have enough time to faff around with creative ways of dressing stubborn toddlers everything just goes to pot.  And stubborn really is the best way to describe her.  When she decides she doesn’t want to do something, she just will not do it, and she’ll refuse to do everything else I suggest to boot, just because I’ve suggested it!  She really cuts off her nose to spite her face, suddenly deciding she doesn’t want to go to the toddler group or to do whatever else she’s been very excited about doing. 

What I *should* have done is just collected together Mopsy’s clothes and taken them with us in the car, in the hope she’ll at least get dressed when we get there and, if she didn’t, just gritted my teeth against any strange looks at my be-nightied toddler (which was DH’s sensible and rational suggestion when I rang him in hysterical tears).  However, what I did instead was to get crosser and crosser until I ended up physically forcing her into her clothes in an absolute rage that her stubbornness would mean that all of us would be late to, or even absent from, something that *all* of the rest of us wanted to go to (including her).  She was crying, I was crying and Flopsy was running around being all sweetness and light as siblings are wont to be when one of them is messing around.  Then Cotton-tail did a poo in her nice clean nappy and spilt chocolate milkshake all over her clean clothes.  And Mopsy kept defiantly taking her left sock off.  And I ended up lying on the floor wailing and despairing at her stubbornness and defiance but mostly at my own completely crap and shit and terrible handling of the situation so that it spiralled so out of control that I behaved in a way that I feel is one of the crappest way of parenting.  Bizarrely she was more than happy for me to put her shoes on, just not her clothes. 

We got out in the end and I drove to the group crying and wondering how on earth I was going to compose myself before I got there.  I managed to look not too blotchy-faced when we got in but one of my friends said ‘Hi Clare, how are you?’.  ‘Not very good this morning’ I replied and burst into tears.  My friends were wonderful and helpful, despite not really subscribing to the non-coercive way I *try* to parent so not really understanding why I was beating myself up so much.  One reminded me how I’d described how I’d had to get through a couple of weeks of non-stop tv when I first stopped limiting it, until they started to self-regulate it, and suggested I just let Mopsy wear what she wanted and grit my teeth about the irritation it causes in me in the hope she’ll get it out of her system.  I think I’m going to have to do this, and just keep my fingers crossed that I don’t get too many strange looks.  

What made me also furious, though, was myself.  The fact that I was putting social norms above the needs of my child.  I was being awful to my baby just to make her conform!  What is the matter with me???  I’m the queen of not-conforming!  Why do I have such a bloody block over this getting dressed thing!  What is the worst thing that will happen if she goes out in her nightie?  She’ll get odd looks, and she’ll get cold.  So I ignore the looks and feel proud of my self-assured little girl; and I take spare clothes and warm over-clothes for her to wear when she gets cold.  I *know* all this in my head, but I have such a problem putting it into practice.  I need to write myself some posters to put up round the house reminding me not to be such a control freak and to stop seriously not taking my children seriously!

Anyway, moving on from this rather miserable start, once I stopped crying at the toddler group, I really started to enjoy it and the girls were happy the minute I got them in the car to go there, so they were fine.  After the toddler group, we drove home and rang my very good (HE) friend (who we had planned to visit that afternoon) to ask if we had agreed to eat lunch with her and if not, to say we’d be late as we hadn’t yet eaten.  She said she’d happily feed us, so I gathered up wellies in case we went to the park, and we drove off again to her house.  Another good friend (also HE) was going to join us there too with her children.  The afternoon was lovely.  Sometimes when we visit this friend, our youngest three children rub eachother up the wrong way, but having the extra children there kind of diluted the atmosphere a bit so it was much calmer.  And the extra adult made a difference in terms of protecting Cotton-tail.  My friend reads this blog so I have to be nice about her.  Ha ha, only joking, K.  Honestly, we love meeting up with this friend, and happily our children mostly get on really well too.  It’s only that on occassion the younger ones clash because they haven’t yet gained the ability to not lash out when they lose their temper.  Myself and the other vistor took some of the children to the playground at one point, while our host made cakes with Mopsy and her two youngest - Flopsy watched the tv (very sociable!).  Then when we got back it was time to leave and we came home.

When we got in, I checked my emails while Flopsy and Mopsy played some very inventive game which involved making it all dark in the living room, and pretending to go to bed.  But they also had to jump of sofas, or something, and Mopsy hurt herself at one point.  Then Mopsy saw an empty tray similar to the ones we keep the playdough in and asked to get the playdough out.  I told her that Flopsy knew where it was and to ask her if she’d do it, which she was more than happy to do.  And DH came home to both girls playing happily with playdough, making ‘ice-cream’, and Cotton-tail crawling round the floor screeching as she is wont to do.  I’ve done an hour’s shift on the breastfeeding helpline, and we’ve had supper, and the girls are watching Bedknobs and Broomsticks.  I wonder when they’ll go to bed…

Two big things have happened in our family.  Mopsy has weaned, with very little encouragement from me.  And Cotton-tail is walking!  At 9 3/4 months!  What is going on???  She’s very wobbly, and looks very drunk, taking one step and then waiting to balance, then another one, then plopping down on her cloth-nappied bottom.  Feels a bit less pleasant when nappy-free but doesn’t seem to bother her.  She’s very cute, particularly as she’s so small to be walking!

With Flopsy and Mopsy’s permission, I really want to post about how they’re learning to swim as it really is such a joy to be involved in.  We used to take Flopsy and Mopsy when I was about 4 months pregnant with Cotton-tail.  There is a shallow (1.5ft) play pool with a slide and a ‘beach’ and a learning pool right next to it with steps and an even-depth floor.  Neither of them would let go of us even in the shallow pool when we used to go.  Mopsy was still a baby really, and Flopsy was just too frightened and wary, although she loved going to the pool.  We really tried to get her to be comfortable in the water and she eventually got to the point where she would walk a few steps in the pool towards us, even without armbands.  We stopped going after a couple of months - I can’t remember why. 

We’ve started going again and have been about five times now and they absolutely love it.  I explained to Flopsy why it was both liberating and (from a safety point of view) important to learn to swim and she agreed she wanted to learn.  I asked her if she’d prefer to do lessons, and expressed my concern that she’d want to do it then get scared and refuse once we got there and had already paid up for them.  She agreed with my concern.  I asked her if she’d like me or Daddy to teach her (there is a 2 adults to 3 children under 4 rule at our pool so we both had to go anyway) and she said she wanted Daddy to.  She already had a float but we bought another one for Mopsy and noodles for them both too. 

We go into the learning pool first as it’s only open for the first hour, then we go and play in the play pool (well, they play in the learning pool too but you can’t really do learning to swim in the play pool)  The first time Daddy showed Flopsy how to hold on to the side of the pool and to kick her legs.  They both wore arm bands and Mopsy wanted to have a go with everything Flopsy was doing.  Flopsy then kicked her way across the pool but neither of them would let go of an adult’s hand.  [Flopsy’s just asked me to watch her doing a jacob’s ladder that she’s just worked out how to do].  Cotton-tail gets cold after half an hour so I take her in and get her dressed and I go and read a book while she falls asleep on me then the older girls and Daddy join us another half-hour later.  Dh told me they really enjoyed playing in their arm bands in the play pool and went down the slide a few times.

The next session I suggested that Flopsy have a go with the noodle and take her arm bands off.  Big mistake.  I really struggle with my desire to be involved the whole time and find it really hard to let go of things to other people.  Flopsy really digged her heels in and said that she definitely wouldn’t take off her armbands and didn’t even want to learn to swim any more anyway.  So I backed off and Dh tried to undo the damage by doing no teaching at all that day.  It worked.  Once I went in with Cotton-tail, they both decided to take their armbands off to play in the play pool which is not particularly easy when the water comes up to your chest and you don’t know how to swim!  They had a great time.

Fast forward to three swimming sessions later and both of them went into the pool today completely refusing to wear armbands.  Mopsy kicked her way across the pool leaning over a noodle with no adult assistance whatsoever.  Flopsy can touch the bottom of the learning pool and the water reaches her chin but, despite the fact she’s not swimming yet, she moves around the pool very confidently without holding on to an adult or anything else that floats.  She’s very bouyant when she does want to do some ‘learning’ so I’m guessing that very soon she’ll just be launching herself into the water and discovering that she’s swimming.  Mopsy’s at the same stage as Flopsy but doesn’t have the advantage of being just in her depth in the pool. 

They’re already enjoying the bouyancy and skills they’ve learnt so far and I can see them yearning to be able to swim properly to give them even more freedom and fun.  And what a blessing to be able to feel safe in water.  And what a privelege for Dh and I to be a part of the process.  No regimented swimming lessons for us!