Merry Giftmas!

I can't believe xmas came around so fast, I guess being pregnant, and raising two children makes the time fly by faster than is conceivable!

We had a wonderful family feast with turkey, ham, pork, and chicken that was all free range! And plenty of salads, a potato salad, a green salad, and a pasta pesto salad made from home grown rocket and basil.

To top it off we had chocolate chunk and berry ice-cream made by Stylish. We put the ice cream in mini cones, dipped them in melted white chocolate and turned them upside down (so they'd look like xmas trees) and the kids decorated their with m+m's. The ice cream tasted like very cold chocolate mousse, it was really yummy!

Stylish spent the day making videos of everything on her new ipod, and Spikee is in love with his new ambulance toy - complete with sirens. Tonight we downloaded Pink albums for her while Spikee and I played his new dice game. The game is with the characters from the movie Cars, and instead of having numbers on the dice it has colours so it's perfect for him.

Today he got a pencil on a mini etch a sketch and began doing some writing. He did a couple of tidy and organised little scribbles in the way you write letters! Then showed us all his writing, there was no doubting what it was! I was about to take a photo of it when he had to wipe it off - darn it! I'll see if I can get him to do it again.

Two days ago we got some pet fish for Spikee and Stylish, and they're going really well. The tank looks amazing! We have a crocodile that's mouth opens and shuts and bubbles come out to aerate the tank, colourful green rocks, glowing eggs, and a weird sort of decoration that looks like ancient pillars with coral growing off them (Spikee chose that ....). It was an early giftmas present. Spikee is really enjoying the job of feeding them each morning and night and he talks to them and gives them updates on everything from the impending arrival of Santa to the fact that I stored some clean rocks for their tank on top of the fridge.

In two days we head off on our camping trip! We're spending two nights in a hotel on the way to Eden, and we'll stay in Eden for a week of fishing, swimming, and fun family times!!! We're so organised it's ridiculous. We've bought roof racks off eBay, and a camp kitchen and chairs and tables this year to add to our already impressive collection of "make camping luxurious" accessories.

Tomorrow I'm taking the kids to see Where The Wild Things Are while A packs the camping stuff and watches cricket whilst consuming beer. I can't wait! I can only imagine how excited the kids would be ...

old school .....

We've been going swimming at the local pool late in the afternoon. Two days ago we ran into a lovely girl that used to go to all Stylish's parties and whatnot. They swapped numbers and email addresses, so hopefully they'll catch up for a play soon.

Then today we went to the pool again and ran into a different child. She told Stylish that one of the girls they used to play with is pregnant. She is 12yrs old and pregnant. Now, the truth is that we don't know if that's reality or not, but either way it's terrible. If it's not true, it's sad because kids are spreading such shocking rumours about each other, if it's true, well what more do I need to say.

One of the reasons I pulled my daughter out of school was to protect her from the trouble she was starting to get into. One day she and the girl from the pool, the one who is reportedly pregnant, and another girl left the school. They went to the pregnant girl's house, played at their neighbour's house (they climbed through a hole in the fence), were fed fried chicken from a well known source, and black fizzy drink from another well known source. The mother then told them it was the end of lunch and that they could go back to school if they wanted. My daughter did want to, and was caught by a teacher, re-entering the school.

The girl's were nearly suspended over this event. They were put on what the prison politely terms "withdrawal suspension" where they had to go to another classroom for two days. My daughter was sent to the classroom of one of the most ridiculously "strict" teachers in the school. He made her spend two days facing the back of the classroom and told her off for turning around at any stage. The girls were also banned from playing at recess and lunch and had to sit in a classroom in silence, writing out the school rules.

I pointed out the the principal that these girls were old enough to know the school rules already, and that perhaps the school would be better off to work out WHY they had broken them. But that's just how schools do things apparently, and those are the rules. The fact is that my daughter was happy to leave the playground because several of the boys were relentlessly teasing her ... and getting away with it. The boys in question were putting sexual letters in our letter box, and prank calling us until midnight on Saturday nights. And when I reported this to the school? they informed me that they couldn't do anything about it because it wasn't happening in school time, or on school property.

Personally I believe the parent who allowed the girls to play in THE NEIGHBOUR'S YARD and fed them CRAP should have been bloody well charged with something or another, because her actions were wildly inappropriate.

And furthermore, how schools can claim to deal with bullying "HEAD ON" bewilders me, but it's whole other topic, I just thought it was a question worth posing at this stage of my rant.

So that explains some of the reasons I removed my child from the institution. But I didn't "know" when I did it that it was the right decision, I made that decision on impulse when I was dealing with massive grief (I lost a son and a very close friend within 6 months). It was a knee jerk reaction to a very bad, untenable, position, but it turned out to be the best one I ever made for my kids! Interestingly enough, as the last 18 months have progressed I've thought of more and more reasons to un-school them! I realised that removing her from that particular school wouldn't fix the problem, because when you take a child who is bullied from one school and put them in another school .... the cycle of abuse and bullying continues. I figured she'd find the same old kids in the new school, just wearing a different uniform.

It makes me very sad to think of a 12yr old child in such an environment that she is sexually active already. This whole situation makes me brutally aware of how I can only save one child, and that child is my own. If I manage to do that then I can be glad, but I will always wonder what became of the other girls who left school one lunch hour and triggered our un-schooling journey .....

100th post!!!!!

I thought to celebrate our one hundredth post, I'd do a list of things we love about un-schooling!

1. no uniforms
2. no cut lunches going soggy
3. no homework
4. no bullying
5. no comparisons with other kids
6. no testing
7. no learning boring stuff!
8. no peer pressure
9. no drop offs and pick ups
10. CELEBRATING INDIVIDUALITY!!!
11. learning about things that interest us
12. gardening!
13. it's easy to be a non consumer family!
14. visiting museums, zoos etc when they're empty!
15. maths at midnight, but only if you feel like it
16. REAL socialisation with children from all walks of life and all ages
17. FREEDOM!
18. learning to think for ourselves
19. learning to read between the lines
20. holidays any time it suits us, not just when every one else is on holiday
21. real, genuine relationships with each other
22. learning life skills
23. no need to fill time, it fills itself!
24. kids at midwife appts, not at school!
25. helpful, responsible, participating, happy, CHILDREN!!! Children, not sheeple!

rats and restaurants .... not all at once

Stylish is full of amazing ideas for decorating her new room, and most of them involve prettying up the rat cage and the frog tank. We had a bit of a worrying moment the other morning because she realised that she'd left the rat's cage open all night and only one little ratty was still home. After her old rat Pip had deserted her only a week before we were a bit worried that these ones, which are far less tame, wouldn't show up again.

After a few hours of worrying and crying, and insisting that they were gone forever she came into my room and - lo and behold! - was holding one of the escapees. Over the course of the next few hours she saw the other one running up and down the hallway numerous times but was unable to grab it because it was so fast and jumpy. Then yesterday afternoon she opened her desk drawer and noticed that there was a toast crust in there. She wondered how it had managed to find its way into the drawer so had a closer look inside, and right down the back, trying to look inconspicuous was the last little ratty.

This morning she made them a run in the corner of her room and put lots of inviting (if you're a baby rat) things for them to climb on, hide in, and explore. They've been in their play pen all day having a whale of a time.

I took the kids out for dinner at a local Vietnamese restaurant tonight. It's too hot, and I was too tired and pregnant to bother cooking anything. It was nice to go for a walk in the evening air as everything cooled down. At the restaurant Stylish chose to have fish with ginger and shallots and I chose the deep fried bean curd with chili and lemon grass. We shared it all of course. Spikee had two big bowls of rice, and two cups of green tea, and refused anything nutritious or tasty looking (I'm so over his breatharian lifestyle). The tofu was so amazingly delicious that I ate nearly all of it, and even bothered to bring the last two bits home with us to eat later - as soon as I got home actually. Even Adam thought the tofu was delicious and he's not much of a tofu eater. fall that walking After all the walking I am way past my used by date. Stylish just brought me a very nice cu p of tea so I'm chilling out in the bedroom playing on the internet and drinking my tea. What a lovely summer evening!!!

unlearning opportunities all around!

Stylish found some lizard eggs in amongst the bricks out in the back garden. She brought them in and kept them in a tank for about four weeks, then today she decided that they weren't going to hatch and she was going to stick them back outside. She picked on up and POP! it burst open and a mini lizard leaped out! Then another one hatched, and now we have quite a few tiny little baby lizards.

Yesterday in the garden we saw an enormous huntsman spider being dragged across the garden by a yellow tail wasp. At first we weren't sure who was dragging who, but upon closer examination it became obvious that the spider was paralysed. I called Stylish to come and see and she told us all about it. Apparently she saw them on a David Attenborough doco a few weeks ago. She said to us "it's injected poison into the spider and paralysed , and now it's dragging the spider back to it's nest to feed it's baby" .... and sure enough we watched as it dragged it all the way across the garden to a cozy little burrow under our rogue watermelon, heaved the enormous spider down the hole and was never seen again!

more pics

dinner from our very own garden

I decided to uproot something in the garden that I was pretty sure I hadn't planted. It turned out to be the most lovely bunch of tiny little potatoes! We cleaned them, and boiled them, and ate them for dinner with fresh mint, chives, and parsley from the garden. We had them with salad that was all home grown (lettuce and cherry tomatoes), and free range chicken which I marinated in chili and lime sauce that we bought way back in April at the easter show from in the produce hall. As we ate there were many exclamations of "this is yum!" and "this is sooooooo YUMMY".  And one member of the family (who shall remain nameless) rolling peas off the table onto the floor and telling us all - quite cheerfully I might add - to shut up. 

There are two more bunches of potatoes growing in the garden now, and we'll leave them until xmas and harvest them for salad on xmas day. I discovered after a google, searching for cucumber plants, that our pumpkin is actually a cucumber plant! We have nearly thirty flowers on it and they're so pretty, but sooner or later they're gonna turn into a massive crop of cucumbers, probably not in time for xmas unfortunately.  

I discovered a rogue watermelon that has decided to spring to into life beside the trampoline. None of us have any idea where it came from!? But there it is, doing it's own thing, growing well! We may get fruit off it one day! The potatoes began in the compost heap that is now our garden bed, so we have rogue potatoes too. And they taste amazing!

a day at taronga

Today we spent the day at the zoo, we got up nice and early (8am on Saturday is early!) and drove over there. We would have caught a ferry if I wasn't pregnant, but I thought all the walking and waiting might be a bit much after a day wandering at the zoo. 

Stylish was very impressed with the Corroboree frog breeding program that was on display, and I was very interested in how many of them there are in captivity when there are only about 50 in the wild. Taronga is working on their resistance to a bacterial bug (the main reason they are critically endangered) to make their release back into the Alpine area where they live, more effective, and hopefully to replenish their numbers in the long term. She impressed us all with her reptile knowledge about various species which she rattled off before she had a chance to read the information next to the animal, she is such a wealth of information!

Spikee was kind of interested in stuff, and yet more interested in bolting about like a mad thing. he must have ran about two kilometres up and down hills. When asked what his favourite animal from today was he said "de effant" which translated into English is "the elephant". He also liked the part of the seal show where the seal was balancing a ball on it's nose and playing catch with the keeper. He was also really interested in the goats that he got to pat - don't get me started coz I really want a goat.

The zoo has changed so much since I was a child. One of the changes is the play areas that are kid friendly. There is a wading pool with a boat in it that Spikee loved, and we all dipped our hot feet in the cool water for a bit. There's also a large play area all constructed from wood, and it had a whole water play area with water wheels and water falls, and pumps, and a sand pit where we spent some time letting the kids just be kids without having to be interested in stuff! After half an hour there Spikee's mood improved notably.

Stylish got to climb inside the old bear enclosure and was horrified at the darkness and the tiny space that the enormous bears used to live in. it's probably less than three metres of floor space, and a large part of that is taken up with a water trough. 

All round it was a lovely unlearnt day! Now we just have to muster up the energy to cook something for dinner! We have our last lettuce ready to harvest, and we also have about 13 tomatoes. And on that note, I'm gong to go and water everything and get some dinner organised.

isn't it amazing!

Every day Spikee requests paper and writing equipment to do some writing! He basically scribbles, but he calls it writing, and it's most definitely the beginnings of literacy. His computer skills improve every day, and the hand / eye coordination required to operate the notebook mouse are starting to surprise me. Stylish was his age (3.5) when she started using a mouse and playing edumacational games.

Stylish got two new pet rats today. Pip ran away two days ago, and for such a tame rat I'm quite surprised that she hasn't come home! Never the less, if she does there's plenty room in the house for them all. She called them Matilda, Grape,  and the first new rat we got last week end is called Electra. They're happily getting to know each other in their newly designed home, and eating the turkey stuffing that A brought home from work (we all ate the turkey). These rats are the best fed rats in this hemisphere. The more or less live off our kitchen scraps. Their home is decked out with things Stylish has collected from second hand shops (recently some plastic tissue box covers) and bedding hammocks that she has sewed by hand.

I can't decide what to do tomorrow, I was thinking we might go swimming if  I can be bothered dragging myself all the way out to the pool. Or maybe we'll stay home while it's hot and meet A after work for laksa and a look at the huge xmas tree in Martin Place. Spikee seems to be catching the xmas bug at long last, so that might be right up his alley!

happenings

Today isn't too hot so we spent a good deal of time in the garden weeding, and planting mustard which I'm hoping will be ready to eat by xmas. Spikee very enthusiastically waters his peas and corn each day, and was delighted when I showed him some of the pea plants we started ages ago now have flowers on them, so does our watermelon. Plus we have about ten or more pumpkin flowers, and twenty odd strawberry flowers too.  The kids (and the grown ups) have all been interested in the seeds we plant because they  .... look just like the seeds in the fruit or veggies that you eat. (pick the city slickers)

Stylish is really getting into the whole water saving thing now, and when the washing machine starts pumping out the water is often standing right there with the hose going into the watering can, ready to run it out to the garden and come back for more! It's rather therapeutic for me, so I suppose she finds it enjoyable too. We have such an elaborate system of bottles, buckets, and watering cans happening that we rarely waste a drop these days, which - owing to the size of our growing veggie patch - is great! 

The kids decided that they're not going to buy xmas presents this year, they're going to make them instead! Which I think is lovely, and will be pulling out all the stoppers to assist them over the coming weeks. Recently for Grandpa's birthday Stylish gave him a red pot of soil with seeds in it for him to water and discover what she had given him as it grew, I thought that was creative. They both made him cards which he loves.

I had a bag of organic black beans sitting in the cupboard unopened for a while now and I decided to do something with them so I googled black bean sauce. It was the easiest thing I ever made, and everyone (except the resident breatharian) loves it! We've made it four times since then. We did some food science with the bean soaking process, because you're meant to  use fermented black beans, so we soaked them over night and watched the yeast forming. Then observed how much it grew over the course of the second warm day until the mixture smelt disgusting - at which time we were hesitant to admit that the beans were ready to cook. 

Stylish has started her new blog and is enjoying the creative side as well as the writing side. As soon as it's got more on it I am permitted to post a link here. She is really showing some internet competency these days, enjoying a couple of reptile and amphibian forums, and her game (which seems to be under control thus far). 

Spikee keeps wanting to write, so today we sat down with a pencil and I wrote 'a' and he wrote it too! then I wrote mum, dad, Stylish, and Spikee, and he read them, and recognised them when written again! After that I took him to starfall where he enjoyed looking at the letters and saying what words he could hear the sounds in. Then after that he requested some 'nummas' so we went to poissonrouge and did their numbers a few times. He managed to more or less drive the mouse himself which is a huge development!

general happenings ....

Stylish has decided to start a new blog with animal information. I'll help her to do that tomorrow, stay tuned! She also has a new pen-friend which she seems to be enjoying. And she has recently gone back to her old on line game with horses, I'm hoping that now she's more de-schooled than she was when she first got involved with that, it won't take over her life like it did last time. Limits will be placed on it if it looks like it's getting out of control. I much prefer self set limits though .....

Apparently her male frog is calling early in the morning and waking her up, she's not impressed with his efforts  (I personally admire him, waking her up takes some effort!). We gave our old rat a few days to grieve, and then yesterday purchased a tiny little timid baby rat from some ghastly pet shop - it cost $20!!! Over the course of yesterday and today the poor wee thing is much less skittish, she's obviously not used to being handled. 

Spikee is asking more often about writing. He asks me to write a certain word, then scribbles over it, I figure he's heading for some more controlled efforts ... in the next five or ten years. He's also learning to read numbers, and gaining some competency bit by bit at number recognition. His counting is really taking off too! 

Yesterday he asked me if he could plant some seeds so I showed him what seeds we had and he chose some corn and peas, filled a pot with soil from the compost heap, dug little holes with his fingers, and the pushed the seeds in. He very enthusiastically watered them several times yesterday, and then again today. 

Tomorrow we're gonna be making a clock out of a lemon - don't ask me how - so we'll no doubt have pics to show off! And Spikee will be watering the garden again ... and again.

what do you mean you're not a teacher?

I often get asked if I'm a teacher when I say that my children don't attend the institution for their "schooling". No, I'm not, but they learnt to walk and talk from me, and they were pretty important things!

I went to school for twelve years, and I don't fondly remember much of it as "social". I also don't remember much that I learnt in maths, science, history etc etc ... but these days there's this funky little place of reference called THE LIBRARY. There is also the INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY aka the Internet, should we need to hone our skills on anything long forgotten - or never learnt. 

If school failed to teach me  grammar and spelling, complicated maths, or USEFUL maths for that matter, why will it now (when it's more under funded and classes are larger and teachers are more inexperienced ...) succeed in teaching my children those skills? 

Society has some very strong ideas about the education system. I fail to understand how on one hand we criticise so much of it (discipline, bullying, values, basic skills, playground safety, teaching skills etc) and on the other hand send all our kids there without batting an eyelid!  It's very similar to the way we view hospitals as unsafe, understaffed, dirty places .. and yet insist they're the only safe place for women to give birth. Our society has many contradictions running rampant and un-questioned. And it seems to me that as an "advanced" civilisation where the population is receiving such "excellent education" there really isn't much analysis being undertaken. 

I'm not a teacher, I don't do much teaching though ... the idea of removing the kids from school was to totally and radically alter the mode of their learning as compared to their schooled peers. I can't live without questioning things, as a thinking woman I can't avoid it,  as a media student I learnt to really deconstruct the status quo and one of the things I have totally deconstructed since those skills were imparted upon me, is the institutionalised method of educating children. 

Thus I find myself answering the same question over and over ... "no, I'm not a teacher, but I don't need to be one to home school". "No, I don't think my kids are missing out on anything, I think they're getting MORE from their day actually". "My children design their own curriculum, I don't follow one set by the state". "Yes, home school is legal". 

I hope that goes some way to answering some of the more pressing questions. Now I'd like to pose some to those who are so convinced that institutionalised learning is working for their kids.

• Do you know what your child did all day today? (I know what mine did)
  
• Do you know what your child learnt today? (I know)
  
• How well do you know and trust all the adults that are in charge of your child 5 days a week? (my answer would be 100%)
  
• How many life skills did your children learn today? (mine did life skills all day)
  
• How interested in what they did were your kids? (mine were 95% - washing up is boring, but a useful skill nonetheless)
  
• How intact is your child's self esteem after a day of constant comparisons to other children and bullying? (without the comparisons and bullying - pretty good thanks)
  
• If your kids had a choice would they learn maths every morning or only when they needed it? (only as they need it here)
  
• Have your kids finished their homework? (mine do maths for pleasure at 10pm Sunday night ... but they don't do homework)
  

Giftmas fast approaches!

We have set up our xmas tree, and decorated it with some new decorations and some fairy lights. We have turned the lounge room into Stylish's bedroom, and made her old room into Spikee's play room / bedroom - he did sleep in there the first night but is now safely back in bed with his dowdy old parents. 

Stylish is loving her new bedroom, and Spikee is feeling terribly grown up and independent with his play room. We set up the plastic xmas tree in there, and will do present opening and whatnot in there come giftmas morning. 

We had some sad news this week, with the death of our favourite rat. last week she started getting frail and her breathing was odd, then on Monday afternoon she took a turn for the worse and died. Poor Stylish is devastated. She wanted to cremate the rat, as her grandma, baby brother, and cousin were cremated. So I breathed deeply and we set up a funeral pyre in the garden. Stylish helped collect fire wood, and then we dug a hole, put a wooden board in the hole, place the rat (wrapped up in furry rainbow material) on top of the board and built up the fire about her body.  It burned for about an hour before we let it burn out and doused it with a bucket of water.

The garden is going really well, but we have decided to move into our own house some time next year so we're hoping to harvest as much as we can before then! I would hate to leave it here after so much hard work. The strawberry box has 11 flowers in it!!!

Tonight, and most nights actually, we go walking around the neighbourhood enjoying the xmas lights on people's houses. The kids think it's the best thing ever, and I quite enjoy it too. Sometimes we even go to the park and they play for an hour or so first, it's been too hot most days to get out much, so going at night is our only option.