Tag Archives: Children

Magic Kitchen Fairy

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We have a Magic Kitchen Fairy.

It’s true.

She’s amazing.

For example:

If you spill something on the bench, you can just leave it and the Magic Kitchen Fairy will wipe it up.

If you pull the inner seal off a bottle of milk, just leave it on the bench. The Magic Kitchen Fairy will pop it in the bin for you. The same goes for empty packets and wrappers.

Dirty plate or cup? Just put it down wherever you’re sitting. The Magic Kitchen Fairy will be along soon to collect it for you.

Whenever you make a sandwich, don’t worry about the cutting board, knife and crumbs and stuff. The Magic Kitchen Fairy will clean that up for you.

Oops. Had an overflow in the microwave? Not a problem! Just go about your business and the Magic Kitchen Fairy will wash the tray and make that microwave sparkling clean again.

If you forget to put that box of cereal back in the pantry, not to worry. The Magic Kitchen Fairy put it away for you.

See? She’s amazing!

She hates me.

No, listen, she really hates me. I’ve tried doing those things and she never cleans things up for me.

And I swear when others leave a mess and I’m around, she hides and leaves me to do it.

She hates me.

You don’t think she exists, do you? But she does. I know.

How do I know she exists?

Because I know my husband and children definitely believe in the Magic Kitchen Fairy.  They trust her completely to clean things up for them. Surely four people can’t be that badly mistaken, can they?

I mean, if they don’t believe in the Magic Kitchen Fairy, then they must be leaving those messes for me to clean up. And that can’t be right, can it?

We have a Magic Kitchen Fairy.

Magic Kitchen Fairy (2)

(Re)Living The Italian Life

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Last night I went to Tuscany. San Gimignano to be precise. Oh, the food, the wine….

Yeah, okay, so I didn’t really go there. Well, not on an aeroplane in actual person. What do you think I am, a movie star?

I did, however, buy a bottle of Vernaccia di San Gimignano and make homemade ravioli. And I listened to Italian music while I wrestled with the pasta machine. (There may or may not have also been some choice Italian swear words in action.)

“Why??”

I knew you were busting to ask that.

Two lovely friends are currently living the Tuscan life on the trip of a lifetime in Italy. They’ve been posting photos and stories on Facebook and I’ve been reminiscing.

Yes, we did once fair dinkum go to San Gimignano.

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On a seven-week European odyssey with three small boys in tow (ages 11, 8 and 5), we had wisely booked a week in a small Tuscan town at about the halfway point. We didn’t know it was wise at the time. The wisdom only became apparent when we got there after our previous stop in Nice included the line “I’m over it! I want to go home!” That was me. As chief travel agent, tour guide, purchaser, cook, washer and seemingly font of all travel wisdom, the pressure was building. The opportunity to stop and breathe in one place for a week brought sanity back to us all.

Sometimes the significant travel memories that stay with you are not about awe-inspiring art or impressive structures or spectacular landscapes. Sometimes they are about living the life, feeling a part of a community of which you are a part for just a tiny moment. That was Certaldo for us. I’d managed to book a three bedroom apartment in a former 13th century palace with a tower where you could sit and see the towers of San Gimignano in the distance for only AU$800 a week.

Home is a palace
Lucky they were short
Just chillin’
Just chillin’ even more
Italian family life
Never underestimate the beauty of somewhere to wash and dry your clothes.
The view

Of course, first impressions count when you travel and the fact that we arrived on the weekend of their annual food and wine festival may have had some impact on our positive experiences. We didn’t know it was on when we booked. Another of those serendipitous moments that make a holiday special.

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Boccaccesca Wine and Food Festival, Certaldo Alto

It was like it was all meant to be.

We relaxed, shopped at the market, read books, ate a lot of good Italian bread and cheese and made day trip forays into neighbouring tourist centres such as Sienna and San Gimignano. We didn’t have a car so these were accessed by public transport. There’s nothing quite like squeezing onto a crowded local bus to make you feel a part of the community.

Living like the locals
This is the life
Sienna
Rustic Tuscan food on a steep Sienna street
Gelati in Sienna
San Gimignano
San Gimignano

It was a favourite moment in our holiday and I can’t help thinking that its impact was greater because it came at just the right time. We headed off after our week-long stay with renewed energy and patience.

I’d love to go back but I suspect that it wouldn’t be the same.

In the meantime, I’ll find the odd bottle of Tuscan wine in the local Dan Murphy’s, drag out the pasta machine and relive la dolce vita at home.

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Certaldo Alto, Tuscany

 

 

 

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Just One Child

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He was standing there alone, as he often did; standing where he wasn’t supposed to be, as he often did.

Somehow he’d found his way onto one of the dirt mounds that would one day be the floor of a new classroom. He’d had to cross several narrow planks to get there, over the deep trenches we’d been digging for the past few days.

He stood there and silently watched as we finished off the last of the concreting from which we’d taken a break to walk back to camp and have lunch. It was lunch break at school and while the other children played in the ‘yard’ (little more than a cleared space between the buildings), he’d done his own thing, as he often did.

The concreting done and seeing the children starting to gather to go back to class for afternoon lessons, I reached out my hands to lift him over the trench to where he could join his classmates. As I picked him up to swing him over, I felt him reach to wrap his arms around my neck. Aware of my responsibilities in regard to child safety and not forming attachments that I could not sustain, I smiled at him and kept him at arms’ length as I carried him over to the other side.

He went off to class. We went back to work.

As we walked back to camp, he was there. Standing some distance away, he was shouting a word at us over and over again. From the cheeky look on his face, I’d guess it was a Not Nice Word. As we came closer, he ran towards us. Stopping still some way away he suddenly spat in our direction.

Shocking? Maybe. Disgusting? To some, I guess.

Me? It just endeared him to me all the more. I’ve always been attracted to the ‘naughty’ ones.

We were all, workers, students and teachers alike, heading home at the end of the day. I saw him and he came, wanting to be picked up. Perhaps against my better judgement but unable to resist, I picked him up and carried him down the hill to the turn off where he went right to go home and we went left to go back to camp. As I put him down, he grabbed for my hand, wanting to follow. A teacher arrived and intervened, shooing him away. I watched as his big sister dragged him back along the path to home.

Our last day and I asked a friend to take a photograph of me with some of the kids but most particularly with that one little boy. I wanted to pick him up but I resisted and instead knelt down beside him for the photograph.

Later, after a beautiful and emotional farewell from the village, we were walking out of the school when I passed him and his family. I reached out my hand to say goodbye to him and he grabbed it and held on tightly. My resolve broke and I leant down and gave him a hug. As I released my arms and went to straighten up, the tiny arms around my neck tightened and his feet lifted off the ground. Several times I tried to set him down and each time he held on tighter.

“Pick him up and carry him down to the corner,” suggested our guide.

So I did, walking down the hill back towards camp for us and home for him, chatting to his father with his mother and sister close behind. As we reached the point where our paths diverged, I felt his arms hold even tighter. I said goodbye and then turned to our guide who reached up and took him from me. I quickly walked away, not looking back.

Halfway back to camp, our guide caught up with me and said, “He is still crying for you.” I stopped and looked back only to see his tiny frame running along the path towards us, his mother in close pursuit. It took all my resolve not to run back to him. I stood there and watched as his mother finally caught up with him and dragged him crying back towards home.

Many tears were shed in camp that night.

In a post I wrote last year about Voluntourism, I questioned the ethics of volunteering for short periods of time in orphanages. I felt it must be cruel to bond with children and then leave them forever.

I didn’t mean to bond with him. Against all better judgment I did.

And it tore away a piece of my heart to leave him.

How anyone could volunteer in a situation where it is part of the job to bond with not just one child but many children and then to be able to just walk away at the end of it is beyond me.

It’s still there, that piece of my heart. With a tiny boy in a small village in Nepal. Just one child and my life was changed forever.

 

 

 

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The Children of Lura, Nepal

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By the children of Lura, Nepal….

On the last day of our community project, we spent the morning playing with the children at Manju Shree Primary School. They loved having their photos taken and were fascinated by my camera so I slung the camera around the first child’s neck, showed him how to push the button to take a photo and let him go. And then child after child after child.

These are the photos they took of their friends crowding around to have their photos taken. They’re better than mine! Enjoy the slideshow.

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A House Full Of Boys Doesn’t Equal A House Full Of Balls

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Baby Boys

I am a mother of boys. As in, only boys. Outnumbered in the gender stakes, I have no female allies in the house. (Even the cat is male.)

Mothers of only boys are a unique breed. So much so, there are even clubs you can join to meet other mothers without daughters.

Mothers with both sons and daughters can get a bit narky when you claim special standing for having only boys.

“But we deal with that, too,” they’ll say when you complain of stinky bedrooms and an inherent ability not to notice a household task that needs doing.

Yes, but you also have someone you can nudge when the male offspring are suffering from man-flu and share an eyeroll. Mothers of boys can only eyeroll inwardly.

We will never be the Mother of the Bride or the Maternal Grandmother both of whom seem to hold a higher standing in society than the paternal equivalents.

I am not one of those mothers who wishes she’d had a daughter so she could buy pretty dresses and play with Barbies. I was never that kind of girl myself, preferring to climb trees and play with Lego and I had a passionate objection to wearing dresses. I hate clothes shopping and the pink-themed aisles in toy stores give me the heebie jeebies.

But sometimes I can’t help wondering what my life would be like if I had another person in the house whose brain was wired similarly to mine. Maybe I’d feel a little less like an alien in my own home.

So you can imagine how keen I was to open up an article in the weekend magazine of one of our national newspapers to read about other mothers like me.

Boy Oh Boys

Click on the image to read the article.

At the first line – “Neck deep in dirty footy tops, toy soldiers and cricket balls…” – I sighed. As I read on, I sighed some more. By the end, I was more than a little annoyed.

A household full of boys does not automatically equate to a household full of sporting equipment. I do not bond with my boys over football matches. We bond at superhero movies. I do not trip over basketballs in the house but over stacks of Japanese comic books. Our television is more likely to be tuned to the sci fi channel than the sports channel. I do not spend my time managing their sporting schedules but managing how much time they are spending in front of a screen. I don’t have to learn the rules of cricket scoring but I do have to learn how to use the parental controls on the wifi router.

It’s not that we didn’t give them the opportunity to pursue sports. Their father grew up in a sporting household and is a cricketer and tennis player. Cricket, tennis, football, basketball…we offered them all at various times to each of the boys. None of them stuck. It’s just not in their nature.

Boys don’t have to play sports.

Yes, they need activity, especially in the early years. So there were lots of trips to the park, the beach, the indoor play centre. And you have to watch them every second because they will take risks. But I’m more likely to be trying to get hair dye out of a costume shirt than grass stains out of cricket whites.

Frankenstein with his monster and Igor
Doctors Four, Eleven and Ten

I suspect I was destined to have boys. My husband is one of three boys. His father is one of two boys. His uncle had two children who were, you guessed it, boys. Let’s face it, I was never going to have a girl.

And that’s okay. Because I consider myself lucky that I scored three boys who love things I love – fantasy books, sci fi movies and cosplay – and I don’t have to trip over cricket balls in the backyard.

Being a mother of boys is a challenge but a house full of boys doesn’t have to mean a house full of sports any more than a house full of girls has to mean a house full of dolls.

Boys are different – I’ll never understand the tolerance for a floor carpeted in dirty clothes and the lingering smell of rotten apples – and being a mother of boys is different to any other parenting experience.

But…

I wouldn’t change it for all the sonic screwdrivers in the universe.

And yes, that title is a sniggering play on words. I live in a house full of boys, remember?

 

 

 

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Parenting By The “Making It Up” Book

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The Number One thing you learn when you become a parent? There is no instruction book.

Well, that’s not entirely true. Go into any bookshop or search online and there are many, many instruction books about children and parenting.

The problem is that there is no instruction book for you parenting your child. Or you parenting your other child because, trust me, the books (if they existed) would be completely different.

The books that are out there are not totally useless. They can tell you that if your baby is crying it’s probably this, this or this. But when you’ve tried fixing this, this and this and your baby is still screaming that’s when you want to hold your smartphone up to his* head and get a digital readout of what he’s thinking. Where’s the app for that??

Those books will tell you developmental milestones come at “about” X age. Mind you, “about” can have a range of anything up to a year. So when your child’s peers are all running around the park and yours is still crawling across the grass on his elbows looking like the world’s tiniest commando, you try not to worry.

And when do you worry, anyway?

When your child is three and is showing no interest in toilet-training, when is it still part of “normal” development and when is it time to put out the call “Houston, we have a problem”?

Think it gets easier when they get older? Think that if they can walk, talk, feed and toilet themselves, the hard yards are over?

Pfft.

The difficulty when they are older is trying to help them with things for which you do not possess the skills. And I’m not just talking about differential calculus.

How do you help your child establish solid study patterns for his final exams when you always used the “stay up until 3am the night before” study method?

How do you help your child navigate a tricky bullying situation at school when you were bullied as a child and never really got over it?

How do you encourage your child to pursue educational opportunities overseas knowing that you would never have done it yourself?

How do two parents who are introverts help their introverted children survive a world designed for extroverts when it’s a struggle for themselves?

How?

You make it up.

You pretend you know what you’re talking about. You act like you know what you’re doing.

And you hope nobody notices.

Parenting is not an exact science. It’s not even an approximate science. It is jumping out of an aeroplane when you’re still trying to order the parachute from the supplier. Repeatedly.

Sometimes it all comes together and you soar and float in blissful success. And sometimes you go ker-splatt.

I guess the trick is to scrape yourself off the tarmac, get back up there and try again. And hope in hell your kids survive and thrive in spite of you.

Freefall Parenting

Freefall Parenting

*All the pronouns in this post are male not because I believe in the patriarchal habit of using the male gender for general reference but because I only have boys. Referring to girl children is just not in my vocabulary.

 

 

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Born That Way

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I have a theory. It’s that people go through life in the manner in which they were born.

I’ve come to this theory through exhaustive research. Which means through watching my three kids. Who are, you know, exhausting.

Child Number One arrived a week late and has been running late ever since. His birth was steady and predictable and that’s pretty much how he approaches each day. He gets there when he needs to with a minimum of fuss.

He goes through life like this:

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Child Number Two arrived early and quick and has been in a hurry to do everything ever since. He just got up and walked when he was ready, he toilet-trained in one day and we’ve had to put him in a school with a vertical curriculum so he can zoom through the subjects he’s interested in before he gets bored.

He goes through life like this:

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Child Number Three. Sigh. Child Number Three took his sweet time arriving. First he was coming, then he wasn’t. Then he was, then he wasn’t. This went on for 29 hours. Then he decided he was coming and arrived in a rush. So how does that translate into his life? He will show all signs of having caught onto something (sleeping through the night, for example) but then some time later decide he hasn’t (driving his parents mad waking several times a night, for example). He’s got it. No, he hasn’t. He’s got it. No, he hasn’t. And then one day, we’ll realise that he got it permanently some time ago when we weren’t looking. This is also the child who one day will get himself up, dressed, breakfasted, make his lunch and be sitting on the couch ready for school by 7.30am. The next morning he’ll get yelled out of bed at 8am and even then he will stand staring into the pantry wondering what to do next.

He goes through life like this:

Vekomaboomerang

 

Me? Yes, well, I’ll admit that writing this post did prompt me to contact my mother and ask about my own birth. Apparently it was pretty straightforward and boring. I was disappointed. I think I was hoping it was a bit radical or at least interesting. However, it turns out that while my birth was uneventful, the pregnancy was memorable. My mother suffered from contractions on and off through most of the pregnancy. That’s definitely me. As a wanderer and Jack of All Trades, I am always looking out for the next new thing, always wondering what lies around the next corner. I can imagine myself, having been in the womb a few months already, thinking “Okay, I’ve done this womb thing. What’s next? I want out. What’s next?” 

I go through life like this:

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But, you know, it’s just a theory.

 

(Final Image – Creative Commons: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mymollypop/3511904343/in/photostream/)

 

 

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A Member of the MOB

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A friend of mine recently gave birth to her first baby, a boy. I was inordinately excited not only because it was a long-awaited child but also, I soon realised, because she’d had a boy.

“Welcome to the MOB!!” I exclaimed excitedly in an email reply to her announcement.

Mothers Of Boys. We’re a unique…um…mob. I’m sure mothers of only girls have their unique challenges too but there’s something about being the one outnumbered in the household gender stakes that makes life more interesting. (Any fathers of girl-only households reading this are welcome to write their own blog post perspective.)

It’s quite possible that my friend, down the track, may become a Mother Of Boys And Not Boys but for the time being she is a part of the club. A club in which I am a more-than-paid-up member.

A Member of the MOB

A Member of the MOB

After my first two boys were born and I was pregnant with my third child, I lost count of the number of people who asked “So, are you hoping for a girl?” It got a bit boring so I took to looking at the enquirer in horror and saying, “Oh, goodness, no! Why would I want one of those? I wouldn’t know what to do with one.” (I still don’t.)

Do I sometimes wonder what it would have been like to have a daughter? Of course. Do I ever wish one of my boys had been a girl? Never.

Besides, from listening to my girlfriends, bonding time with daughters seems to mainly involve clothes shopping. I’d rather be poked in the eye with a blunt stick (I believe it’s more painful than a sharp one). Give me a Joss Whedon movie outing with my boys any day.

In the hospital, after the birth of my third son, a cleaner told me that when my children were teenagers, I’d be glad I had boys. I held on to that promise through the years of small boys running amok in playgrounds, picking up any remotely pointed object to be used as a weapon, through the three-year-old penis obsessions and the pre-teen biffo and insults. And now, with two teenagers and one on the cusp, I can honestly say she was right. As I watch mothers of teenage girls struggle with the hormonal nastiness, psychological bullying and body image issues, the full-on early boyhood years seem worth it. Boys – my boys at least – are so much more straightforward. Well, as straightforward as parenting any teenager can be.

I can’t wait for the possibility of a cuddle with this newest member of the male race and to recall those thrice-heard words,

it's a boy

 

 

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Praising Kids – Is It A Good Thing?

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Kids and Praise

 

Positive reinforcement. Positive psychology. Praise. Affirmation.

Popular parenting buzzwords. Drummed into us from Day One. Tell your kids how wonderful they are. Tell them they’re special, unique, can achieve anything.

Sounds good.

But are we ultimately setting them up for a fall?

The world – the nasty, real, complicated world Out There – doesn’t really care if your mother or father thinks you’re fabulous. ‘They’ will pass judgement on you based on the current social standards of the day. And those standards shift and move, morph and change.

The kids don’t stand a chance.

So what happens when they don’t get into the course they want, don’t get the job they apply for, don’t get the life they expected?

Does it hit them harder? How do they move on from their first rejection? How do they cope when the world doesn’t work like a pass-the-parcel where every child gets a prize?

Are we doing them a disservice not to prepare them for a world that may very well chew them up and spit them out? Should we prepare them for a life that may or may not go the way they want it to?

But what would happen if we didn’t praise them? What would happen if we told them what they do is average, ordinary or even sub-standard?

What would be the impact then?

And could we even do it, as a parent?

I know I couldn’t.

All of us just wants our kids to be happy. We don’t want them to feel pain or sadness. We want them to be able to follow their dreams and make their way in the world.

It’s just that the world doesn’t seem to want to cooperate.

So, we are torn. We make our children sad as children or we set them up for sadness in adulthood.

I honestly don’t have an answer. Like every parent, I’m trying to raise my kids without an instruction manual or a crystal ball.

My instincts tell me to do all I can to make them happy now. And I just hope, if I can raise confident, positive children, that they will weather whatever storms the world throws at them.

Hope. Hope and Love. That’s all we’ve got. And keep your fingers crossed.

 

 

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