Tag Archives: Kids

(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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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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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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My Life Next Door

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Next Door

Dear mother of small boys next door. Yes, I hear them. All the time. No, don’t apologise.

“Mummy, look at me! Mummy, look at me! Mummy! Look at me!!“

It’s been a while since I was called Mummy. It’s just Mum now. I don’t get told to “Look at me!” any more. Sometimes, they ask me to look at something they’ve done. Maybe check over an English assignment or a maths problem. And my heart swells a little as I feel needed again.

High-pitched little voices and giggles.

It’s all deep rumblings and explosive laughter on my side of the fence now.

Bouncing on the trampoline, chattering in the sandpit, rattling around in the cubby house playing make-believe.

The trampoline is neglected. The sandpit is long gone. Cosplay at scifi conventions is as far as make-believe goes in my house these days.

Words you don’t understand because he’s still learning to talk.

Words I don’t understand because he talks about stuff far beyond my knowledge.

Arguments and tears. “He did…” “They said…”

Well, I still get those. Less, but still. The arguments are louder. The tears more heartbreaking.

Dear mother of small boys next door. Yes, I hear them. All the time. No, don’t apologise.

Because once your life was mine.

And I still remember.

 

A response to the Daily Post Weekly Writing Challenge – Blog Your Block.

 

 

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The Good Enough Mother

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I was asked earlier this week if my youngest son (aged 12) would talk about what his mum means to him at church on Sunday (Mother’s Day). Being well aware of my deficiencies as a parent, this was a decision fraught with danger.

I said yes. People who know me are aware I have difficulty with the alternative response.

On Wednesday, he got into trouble for being late to his piano lesson because he wouldn’t get off the computer.

On Thursday, I sent him to school in his school uniform, forgetting that it was Colonial Era dress-up day.

On Friday, I forgot to go to assembly and his class was performing “Everything Is Awesome”. (No, I did not do it on purpose!)

On Saturday, I was grumpy with him because his Fruit Company piece of technology (which I abhor) wouldn’t charge and he wanted it fixed. With a million and one other things I needed to get done, the last thing I wanted was to run around town trying to work out how to get it repaired.

Supervision of the task of what he was actually going to say at church was given to his father. He reported that it was like pulling teeth.

It did not bode well.

So, naturally, when he stood up in church to speak, I was nervous.

Here’s what he said:

My mum is really caring. She cares for me, my brothers and my friends when they come over to play.

She is good at cooking and makes sure we eat lots of good things and not junk food.

When I am sick, she always knows what to do and helps me get better.

She helps me with my homework and helps me to prepare and make things when I need them for school.

She supports me when I do things at school like coming to watch me do Cross Country.

She helps me to make good decisions when I buy things to make sure I don’t waste my money.

She takes me to swimming and piano and helps me when I get stuck doing practice.

She is a really good example to me because she cares for other people, particularly those less fortunate.

She is cool because she likes things like Doctor Who and other shows we watch.

She does a lot of things for other people and always says yes when they ask her.

I am lucky to have a really good mum.

Yes, yes I did cry. Just a little bit.

Maybe it’s okay to be a ‘good enough’ mum after all.

Mothers Day

 

 

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When A Bad Day Turns Good

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The other day I had to speak to a group of kids about maintaining hope when things aren’t going so well. We talked about bad days. Here’s what they contributed.

“So, how would a bad day start?”

“When you have to get up early.”   “When you get out of bed and bump your head.”   “When you don’t want to get out of bed so you bump your head.”

“So, you’re up and you have to get dressed. Then you find out you don’t have any clean socks. Or worse, no clean underpants.”

“Or no clean pants or tops or anything and you have to go out in the nicky-nicky-nude.”

“It’s breakfast time. You pour the cereal into your bowl, you go to the fridge, open the door and…”

“There’s no milk.”   “There’s nothing there at all.”   “You have toast.”

“Then you go to school (probably hungry) and the teacher says, ‘I hope you have your excursion permission slip today. You won’t be able to go if you don’t.’ Of course you don’t have it.”

“I don’t want to go on the excursion anyway.”

“It’s the end of the day and you’re waiting for your mum or dad to pick you up…”

“And they FORGET!” “AGAIN! And look surprised when you walk in the door having walked home! On a hot day!” “That’s happened to me!” (This generated a fair bit of passionate discussion almost exclusively from my own children. So I told them, “Every child has to be forgotten to be picked up at least once in their life. It’s a rite of passage.”)

“So you get home (somehow), sit down to do your homework and…”

“You’ve forgotten your homework book.”   “You’ve forgotten your textbook.”   “You forgot your school bag.” (I’m a bit worried about some of these children.)

“Dinner time. What would dinner time be like on a bad day?”

“You drop your plate on the floor.”   “It’s food you don’t like.”

“What sort of food would that be? What don’t you like?”

“Chocolate cake with pumpkin.” (The mother of the child who said this stood up and announced loudly, “I’ve never served that!”)

“So by this time you probably just want to go to bed, right?”

“No.”

A Bad Day

A Bad Day

I love talking to kids about stuff. They are small conduits of innocent perspective and transparent wisdom. And often hilariously funny.

Having dissected the components of a bad day, we then spoke about what might help to make it a better day and we agreed talking to someone could help. (Someone said, “Talk to your mother” to which one joker responded, “Unless it’s your mother that’s giving you the bad day.” Predictably, the joker was one of mine.)

We talked about prayer and how it can help to send a silent call for help and know that even if there’s no magic to make the bad day just disappear, it can make a difference to know you’ve been heard and someone cares you’re having a bad day.

I’ve written previously about the remarkable singing group I attend every Friday. I’d had a tough week and by the time I walked in the door for singing last Friday morning I didn’t know if I wanted to burst into tears or punch a wall. Over the course of the next hour a beautiful thing happened.

Occasionally we are given the opportunity to volunteer to sing a verse solo during a song. The rest of the group joins in with the chorus. At these times I usually become incredibly fascinated with my shoes. It was always something I was never going to do. But on this day, I felt a metaphorical prod in my back and to everyone’s surprise (certainly mine), I slowly raised a quivering hand and said, “I’ll do it.”

When it came to my turn, I was terrified. My hands shook so much I looked like I was fanning myself and I wondered how anyone could possibly hear my voice over the loud thumping of my heart. But I did it. And survived. And I knew I was fully supported by the group.

Afterwards, people made sensitive, encouraging comments and I felt uplifted. Soon, I came to realise that my bad day had come good. When I had cried in the car on my way there, “How am I going to get through today?” I could not have known that help was on its way in the most unlikely of occurrences.

A Good Day

A Good Day

For me, it’s God. For you it may be the Universe, your own inner voice, or someone else’s voice in your head. Whatever it is for you, when the bad days come, send out an SOS and be prepared to watch and listen, and then to respond to the help that will come, sometimes in a way you might never imagine possible.

 

 

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