Hope For The Future

I am haunted by a memory.

I am about six years old. There is a girl in my class called Anna who was born in Sri Lanka. She has very dark skin. I don’t know many people with dark skin. I like Anna, she’s nice.

One day at lunch time a group of kids surround Anna and start chanting
“Anna, Anna, black banana!”
over and over again.

I join in.

I don’t think about it, I just do it. I don’t think how Anna must feel, though I can see it on her face.

When I get home from school I tell Mummy about my day. I tell her what some kids said to Anna at lunch time. She is shocked that they would say that to her.
“You didn’t say it did you?”

I lie.

I see from the horror on my mother’s face that this was a terrible, awful thing to have done. I don’t want her to know I was involved and I know I will never do it again.

Children can be cruel – sometimes intentionally leading the charge, sometimes joining in the pack mentality. Both are cruel and ignorance is no excuse.

Girls can be particularly nasty. I have plenty of anecdotal evidence to testify to the nastiness of girls. Not only have I been one, I also have two younger sisters, I’ve been through school with plenty of girls, I’ve taught girls and now I have three of my own.

I have tried to raise my kids to be kind and friendly but feared that they wouldn’t be. Who knows what happens at school or football training when I’m not there?

And then I find out.

MissChief (11) is in Year 6. She has some good friends at school – they’ve had a few issues over time but they’ve resolved them well. She’s been on the receiving end of some nastiness from a couple of girls in her year, but fortunately she’s resilient enough to roll her eyes at them and walk away (over and over again as required).

I’m learning that she’s also a fabulous role model and a quiet but strong leader.

There’s a girl she knows who is a talented artist but finds other subject areas difficult. She doesn’t have many friends and MissChief works hard to honour and recognise her talent, to include her and befriend her even though her own friends aren’t keen to do so.

Recently the kids had to choose a partner for some class work. MissChief chose to work with another girl in her class who struggles with learning. “Most kids don’t like working with her, but I do. I thought maybe I could help her.” MissChief did the writing and her friend came up with some awesome ideas demonstrating creativity and lateral thinking. They enjoyed working together and learning from each other.

Another girl has physical disabilities which mean kids have to have patience and make an effort when communicating with her. MissChief does.

She’s no saint. She can be pretty awful to her siblings at times (creative name-calling is her forte and she sometimes leaves her patience at school) but she does apologise and when it comes to the crunch she’s a protective and loving big sister. I’m proud of her and excited to see where her compassion and empathy will lead her as she grows up.

Perhaps my nastiness as a six-year-old had a positive effect in the end. The look on my mother’s face taught me more than any lecture or punishment would have. My parents valued people no matter what they looked like, sounded like or what their abilities were. They passed these values on to me, and it looks like Mr Wonderful and I may have succeeded in passing them on again.

Sporting Skills

Here’s a piece I wrote for HerCanberra about parents’ behaviour at junior sporting matches.

Things I Never Thought I’d Say (all in one day) #3

Mother’s Day Quotes of 2012.

Dear Mummy You’re awesome! Love The Cute One Thanks Cute One.

I haven’t been given a teddy bear in years!

I always need bookmarks.

I love your poem MissChief

 

(I love my Mum
She is so fun
She is so nice
And she loves rice!)

That will be useful for writing notes on for school. (notepaper from MissChief)

It’s beautiful. (re. amethyst and silver bracelet from Mr Wonderful)

I love your poncho.

Please don’t open the door when I’m in the toilet.

It’s time to get dressed now.

Yes that shirt does go with those pants.

Mmmm. Porridge.

We’re late for church.

I love you.

Bring me a brush.

You look beautiful.

We need a yummy dessert. For lunch and dinner.

It’s time to get DRESSED now.

Put your stockings and shoes on now.

Are you ready to go?

I’ll put your stockings and shoes on.

Are YOU ready to go?

Alright! We’re ready to go.

No, you don’t need anything else, we’re leaving now.

Thank you.

You are very handsome Sluggie.

I need a coffee.

I forgive you.

God, help.

You sit down and answer the first question on your assignment and I’ll sit right here.

Come on, you can do it.

Is that how hailstorms are made?

Just write it. If you can’t just type the words without getting distracted you’ll have to use paper and pen.

I’d love to play Cluedo this afternoon.

Soup for lunch, jaffles for dinner.

Aren’t you cold?

You need a jumper.

Here’s a tissue.

Should I turn the central heating on? Yes.

No you can’t wear those shoes out before the wedding.

I love you.

Just calm down.

Sure you can have a kiss.

Cuddles!

I love you too, beautiful.

Excellent, you’ve finished your breakfast! (At lunch time)

You sip while I get you a Band-aid.

The Cute One: Happy Mother’s Day to you, you’re a hundred and two, you smell like a monkey -
Me: I smell like a monkey?
The Cute One: a nice smelling monkey – and you look like one too.

And all this before lunch was served.

Happy Mothers’ Day!

 

Magic In Black And White

We bought a magical machine on the weekend. It didn’t come with fairy dust or time travelling ability, but it does make the impossible possible and turns screaming banshees into smiling beauties. It also has very cool sound effects.

When Sluggie began his first year of schooling we chose not to complicate life by filling every afternoon with extra-curricular activities. Come first grade though, he began piano lessons and MissChief and Goldilocks soon followed suit.

The Cute One has been listening to their piano music on CD as well as their (mostly) daily practice sessions since before she was born. Last year (at age 4) she pestered me to start lessons.

“Let’s wait until next year.” I said, pretty sure this was a passing fad and dreading the thought of ‘encouraging’ all four cherubim to do their piano practice.

She ignored me and taught herself Hot Cross Buns and Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.

I realised I couldn’t put it off another year, so she started in February. She loves it. When I mention that it’s time for piano practice three bodies disappear behind closed doors, up trees or under lounges while The Cute One leaps up and down.

“Me! Me! Can I go first?” I glance at my pyjama clad daughter and her uneaten breakfast and bite my tongue. How can I argue with such enthusiasm?

The Suzuki method of piano tuition focuses on listening. Just as my kids learnt to speak (by hearing words spoken) before they learnt to read, so they have learnt to play music (by hearing pieces on the CD) before learning to read the notes.

Surrounded by this music her whole life, it has seeped into The Cute One and become part of her. When she sits at the piano the music just “falls out of her fingers” as one piano teacher put it to me.

The others like piano too – really, they do – they’re just not so keen on the time it takes out of every day. With all the complaining and moaning that happens (from one nameless child in particular) it’s a bit of a struggle getting four lots of practice in before school starts – and it usually involves a certain amount of loud vocal accompaniment on my part.

Enter the magical machine: an electronic keyboard. Sluggie (13) and MissChief (11) tried it out in the shop for far longer than they usually remain focused. Now I have them fighting over who gets to practice first. And getting it done quickly with no wasted time in order to play with all the funky sounds. And improvising accompaniments to the tunes it came loaded with. And making up their own pieces to play on any instrument they like at the touch of a button. And laughing and joking and working together as they do it. It is truly magical.

All except The Cute One who grins at me with glee then runs down the other end of the house where she has the acoustic piano all to herself.

Spot The Difference

I’ve had three kids on school camps over the last three weeks. There’s always a noticeable change with one away, as I’ve explored before, but this time the differences were more marked when they returned.

Goldilocks (8) went on her first school camp three weeks ago. MissChief (10), having been to three already packed the bag, named every item in it (woohoo!) and passed on her accrued wisdom to a willing disciple. Goldilocks left without trepidation for one night at a campsite ½ an hour away.

3pm the next day she stepped off the bus, scanning the crowd of enthusiastic waves and relieved eyebrows until she spotted me. With every step she hugged her pillow more tightly and cracks appeared on her stoic I’m-perfectly-fine-thank-you-very-much face. She buried her face in my shirt, a few tears escaping as she did so.

“How was camp?”
“Good. I just started missing you on the bus.”

We didn’t hear anything about camp that day. She was so tired she sat and read a book all afternoon then collapsed in bed after little more than a cursory poke at her dinner.

Over the next fortnight I managed to extract some details. I’ve had two kids attend this particular camp twice each, so I knew what to ask. It still took a while to find out that she’d had no hot chocolate for supper and juice on her cereal for breakfast because they forgot to leave soy milk out for her. Even though I had written it on the form. And rung up and requested it. And offered to send it myself. And was assured that wouldn’t be necessary. But I’m over it. Really. Not bitter. At all.

This did leave me a liiiiittle bit nervous farewelling MissChief two days after she’d had an allergic reaction in her own home (see my last post). I prayed a lot and kept myself very busy until pick-up a couple of days later. Oddly enough she reacted exactly as her sister had a week earlier with barely held back tears.

“How was camp?”
“Good. I threw up on the bus.”

She managed to eat dinner but hardly expanded on her initial analysis of camp. We did learn more over subsequent days – mostly about how terrible the food was, how meeean the teachers were and how big the spider was in her cabin. Sometimes she accidentally let slip interesting information about what they actually did.

Sluggie’s turn. There is such a thing as too much anticipation. Year 7 camp was supposed to be a month ago, but was postponed due to torrential rain. He had packed, unpacked, waved two sisters off to camp, then repacked. Finally, at 6am Monday morning he left for his own adventure.

When I picked him up and asked the inevitable question I wasn’t prepared for the answer. He may well have started with “Good”, but this wasn’t followed up by a solo phrase. Instead he spoke non-stop for the five minute walk to the car, not pausing for breath the entire 25 minute drive home. And what did he talk about? Sea creatures and scientific experiments, questions he had asked and answers he had found, ponderings he had explored and things he had discovered, interspersed with the odd “Look there’s an M3!” pointing out the window.

He faded when we got home but geared up again once dinner was served telling tale after tale.

It got me thinking about how different my kids are one from another. In single word generalisations Sluggie is the talker, Goldilocks the thinker, The Cute One the doer, and MissChief?

With the memory of Sluggie’s half hour lesson on octopi and salt-water leeches in the forefront of my mind, on Thursday I was in the car with MissChief (off school with asthma). All was quiet until we drove past the lake when she burst out with “Wow, look at that!” The sky was overcast and she was taken with the exquisite reflection of autumn trees on still water. “It’s beautiful.” A minute later she laughed and commented on the interesting pattern made by two identical buses leaving an intersection in different directions. “That’s so cool!” She’s the creative one, noticing colour, shape and tone in the ordinary and the everyday. She’s quietly observant, picking up on things others miss.

If I’m not careful I’ll miss them too. I need to listen to not only the words of my talker, but also the thoughts of my thinker, the actions of my doer and the creative expression of my artist.

Mess Can Be Dangerous

My kitchen bench is clean and tidy. I admit it’s a worry that this is noteworthy but noteworthy it is. It wasn’t that bad, certainly there were no cockroaches present or even ants – nothing to stop me looking down my nose at particular eating establishments recently closed for health reasons in my fair city.

But something in my kitchen caused an ambulance to be called on Saturday night.

I have a nice, big kitchen bench. Sometimes. Before it becomes a dumping ground for all manner of things. It starts with the notes from school, then the junk mail rests its weary head there, the semi-completed craft activities on the table have to go somewhere when dinner is served. The mountain grows to include toys needing fixing, Textas without lids, an unpaid gas bill (oops), birthday cards from 3 years ago, printouts of recipes I really will try one day, books I have confiscated because we don’t read during dinner (darling), a button or 72, 12 shopping lists that never made it to the shops, 2 empty tissue boxes and a full one, spare change (huzzah!), scrawled notes for a story and 5 open recipe books.

With Everest in my kitchen ¾ of the bench becomes unusable. But that’s OK because I can work in the smallest space. Really. And I did for a while.

On Saturday evening Mr Wonderful took Sluggie (12) to watch his first Rugby game (go the Brumbies) and I made egg mayonnaise with Goldilocks (8). MissChief  (10) and The Cute One (5) are allergic to eggs so we were very careful. We put the eggshells straight in the compost and washed our hands about a thousand times. We whizzed it all up in the Thermomix and I drizzled some of the unappetising failure of a curdled conglomeration onto Goldilocks’ dinner. Despite its ugliness she liked it and devoured her salad.

MissChief served herself dessert on the table not the bench, but within a couple of minutes approached me with panic in her eyes.

“My throat is itchy and it feels weird.”

I don’t know how it happened but somehow the tiniest amount of egg made its way into her system. I switched to autopilot. Administer Phenergan, call Nana, call 24 hour health service, tell lovely nurse the symptoms: swelling lip, itchy throat, hives.

“I’ll just transfer you to the ambulance service.”   

Well. That was unexpected. Usually they say “take her to hospital.” But she hasn’t had internal itching before.

Our little street doesn’t get much excitement, so the flashing lights on the ambulance drew a bit of attention. The little girls waved out the loungeroom window with Nana, having been reassured MissChief was going to be just fine. Which she was. The antihistamine did its job and they gave her Prednisone just to be sure. We caught a cab home at 10:30 (another first for MissChief) and she succumbed to a peaceful sleep.

Me, not so much. All I could think about was the fact that on Monday morning I would be waving her off to camp for three days. If I, her own mother,  couldn’t keep her safe how could I trust a campsite to give her uncontaminated food?

I did what I could – emailing the camp regarding what had happened and informing the teachers first thing Monday morning. Maybe if I scared them enough they’d be really vigilant.

I certainly will be. The mountain has disappeared into the bin, various bedrooms and bookshelves so I can wipe the whole bench clean, not just ¼ of it. And I won’t be making mayonnaise again.

Learning To Ride A Bike x 4

We’ve taken the training wheels off The Cute One’s bike. She’s doing pretty well and soon she’ll be riding with the big kids down what we call Mulga Bill’s Hill.

At the moment she still needs someone to give her a running start holding onto the seat, to let go when she’s balanced and facing the right direction, and to count how many squares of footpath she makes it through before veering onto the grass. She got to 10 last weekend.

We’ve been through this process of teaching to ride three times already but each child learns so differently it’s hard to believe they are siblings.

Sluggie (12) loved anything with wheels as a toddler, so the opportunity to self-propel was something he hungered after. He learnt to ride on the local school oval with determined eyes and a firmly set jaw. Dad gave him a push start, he rode ‘til he wobbled and fell, then jumped back on to give it another go. There was a lot of cheering from Dad, but Sluggie himself was quiet, reserving his energy, focusing his mind on the task to be achieved. It didn’t take him long to ride unassisted.

MissChief (10) would be just as easy I figured. Being a perfectionist, like her brother, she would put in the effort and that would be that. Except her perfectionism came out in a different way. When Mr Wonderful took off the training wheels and she tried to ride the bike a strange thing happened, she rode for a little way then fell off. Surprised? She was. This wasn’t in her plan – she wanted to ride the bike, not wobble and fall off the bike. So because she couldn’t ride it perfectly she didn’t want to do it at all. “It’s too hard, I can’t do it, I hate riding, I’m not going to, I want to walk, I want to watch TV, I’m too hot, too cold, too tired…”

She was also scared of falling off, which is fair enough. Mr Wonderful found a path with large amounts of grass on either side and I bought a soft toy to give her when she had mastered two-wheeled travel. The combination worked, though she gritted her teeth and frowned silently through the entire process, forcing smiles down at the edges when we praised her achievements. It took a long, long time.

Balance and co-ordination are not listed among the strengths of our Goldilocks (8), but persistence and patience are. There were many tears during her riding lessons and having an older brother and sister whizzing past at speed no doubt added to her frustration. It didn’t seem fair that she couldn’t master the bike when they rode with such ease, and she expressed this loudly. But she got there in the end, after many bumps and bruises.

Last weekend Mr Wonderful and Sluggie went mountain bike riding on one of the many fantastic trails around our city. I took the girls for a ride to the local playground, MissChief and Goldilocks riding ahead while I helped The Cute One.

I couldn’t help but shake my head and laugh at how different she is to the others. I knew this, but I was surprised by the stand out contrast: The Cute One talked the entire ride. And I mean non-stop. There were no silent moments. At all.

She has the determination of her brother, but expressed it vocally rather than silently: “I’m watching the middle of the path, I’m doing it, I’m going to get there this time, do you think I’ll get to 6 squares?”

She wasn’t a fan of falling off, but neither did it bother her much: “Woh that was close, I almost hit the tree, just as well I didn’t, that wouldn’t be good would it?”

She sought out better ways of doing what she was doing, but they weren’t always improvements: “Goldilocks rides like this (wiggles handlebars forwards and backwards so the front wheel goes from side to side) so I think I’ll ride like that too. “

She took advice and added her own: “Look where you want to go. So I should look at the footpath because that’s where I want to go isn’t it? Maybe I should look here instead (looking at the handlebars) wooooh. Maybe I should look at the footpath.”

She set goals and was excited when she got close: “How many squares did I get? 4? This time I’m going to get 10. How many? 8? Yessssss! This time I’m going to get 11. How many? 4? Well this time I’m going to get 11.”

As a teacher I know of a multitude of learning styles. I know that people can learn by talking – but I assumed that meant learning by explaining to others what they are learning. I never realised you could learn to ride a bike by talking, but that’s what she’s doing. I wonder if she’ll learn to drive using the same method. Stay tuned.