Saturday 21 June 2008

Re-post: House stuff and brain development - Feb 05

From Thursday, February 24, 2005

I've spent most of the morning cleaning and tidying - mainly tidying. I love my toddler and my teenagers but they need a *lot* of facilitating. I'm not complaining about this, it's not something I resent doing at all, especially since I read of some published research about development of the brain, which said it looks as though the part of the brain related to tidy living doesn't mature properly in most people until the age of 25! It was previously thought that all of the brain was fully mature by a much earlier age but a lot of brain scans have now been done of people of all ages and areas of the brain mapped WRT their different purposes, hence the recent conclusion.

This makes sense to me in the light of my own experience, the way my children are and what I've observed of other people I've known well for a long time. Babies and toddlers have such a short attention span, living very much in the here & now to the extent that when their interest moves on they'll just drop whatever they were previously doing and forget all about it. This was demonstrated to me this morning when, tidying up, I realised many of Lyddie's DVDs were missing from their boxes and I couldn't see them anywhere. They're expensive and easily damaged, so I was concerned and I asked her where she'd put them. She honestly didn't know the answer, because, for her, they'd ceased to exist the minute she'd finished with them. She'll have stuffed them underneath something or between something or behind something or even just thrown them - out of sight, out of mind, quite literally.

The older children are different again. I've just filled a laundry basket full of crockery from their rooms, and another one full of dirty clothes - and it's only about 3 days since I did this last time. They're helpful, intelligent children who understand the consequences of their actions, but simply can't function all the time to the level required to live tidily. Zara came in from the snow yesterday and stripped off wet jeans, boots and socks onto a heap on the cloakroom floor. "Can you put those to dry?" I asked. "No, " she said. "My legs are numb with cold. I've got to go and get warm."

I can remember being like this. It's NOT laziness, it's to do with a way of thinking. I can remember the next thing being of supreme importance, or my hunger or comfort being far more urgent than tidy living. Tidy living requires a presence of mind not usually found in young people, I think. You have to create a template for how you want things to be. "A place for everything and everything in its place," was my stepfather's mantra. In a house full of everything we need and use, this is a very complicated thing to do. Maybe toddlers' sorting games help to develop the function. (Rosie?) I struggle with it myself sometimes.

Also, in the modern world there's too much stuff. I sometimes feel like I'm forever sorting through mounds or heaps of stuff: keep or throw? Landfill or recycle? We have hundreds of little bits of toys, audio cassettes, CDs, books, comics, files, folders, bits of paper, jars, ornaments, odd socks, packets, boxes, wrappers, cheap toys, notebooks.... the list of manufactured stuff that comes into a modern family home on a regular basis is endless. Most of it never gets used, but if you just throw it all away you're both adding to the landfill problem and risking discarding someone's vital receipt, favourite comic etc. So it all needs careful sorting and thinking about, which I find to be very taxing on the brain! I can only do it properly and consistently when I've had enough sleep, good food and a bath. Otherwise I put it off and then it mounts up and becomes more of a problem.

Even when I think I'm on top of it, there'll be a little seam of chaos somewhere that I've missed. This can be the garage (usually), or one or more of the teenagers' rooms (usually), or Lyddie's toyboxes. Even areas under furniture attract chaos. There's a 6-inch gap under the bookshelves in the dining room that's rarely clear of little bits of junk. I could spend all my time sorting through things and tidying up and there will still be some place in my blindspot that I just don't see.

I think our personal spaces are perfect reflections of our inner selves, because they result directly from how we think, because how we think dictates how we live. Just as there are little areas (or sometimes big areas) of chaos in our houses, there are also little (big?) areas of chaos in our minds.

Blog-writing is also a great method of procrastination when there's lots of tidying-up still to be done.

posted by Gill at 11:21 AM 12 comments

Re-post: Epiphany & field plans - Jan 05

From Tuesday, January 04, 2005

According to Wikipedia, Epiphany was set on the 6th January because Chanuka, the Jewish Festival of Lights is on that date. Chanuka, I went on to read, is the time when Jews mark the renewing and/or rededication of their temple, by burning oil lamps and candles. I think the theme of renewal fits in with the other days we observe at this time of year, like New Year's day, Christmas day and the Solstice. Also it makes sense to have fire/light/candle rituals in the middle of Winter, just to keep people's spirits up when the days are so short and everything seems cold and dark. So the tradition, at this time of year, is to focus on renewal, before the seeds start sprouting and life begins again.

I can go with that, it feels right to light fires & candles and think about the year ahead. It's also a good time to plan which seeds to plant and where, and to start preparing the land for them before the weeds take root again. Early in November I cleared 2 of our raised beds and dressed one with manure (for potatoes) and the other with well-rotted compost from the bins. I'll probably try to grow brassicas in that one, but in previous years these have all been eaten by rabbits. This year I'm planning to construct metal cages over the brassicas and the crucifers too. The rabbits don't eat potatoes or the leguminous crops. The field is Northwest-facing and very exposed, so more crops do better if I start them off under cover and only plant them out when they're fairly strong.

But the thing I most need to be doing in the field in Winter is land-clearing, because it's easiest when the land is dormant. I usually do a bit just before Spring, in February - I widen the paths a bit and maybe surface some of them with grit or cinders and do any restructuring work that needs doing then. There's an area by the entrance where I want to convert a deep border into path and an overgrown brambly area into... I haven't decided what yet, and I'll have to decide before I clear it or it will just revert back to overgrown brambles. Nature has a way of doing what she wants.

My main aim regarding what I do in the field is to work with Nature rather than against her - which is why my field looks so unkempt compared to my neighbour's neatly-mown grassy haven! But I don't want to dominate the earth, I want to learn about it instead - there's an amazingly intricate system of chemical balance going on, when you leave ground to it's own devices. Weeds don't just grow in any old place; they all have a function, which is to replenish the soil with the nutrients it's missing, amongst other things. So, for example, nettles will grow where the soil is lacking in iron and after quite a few years, that soil will be iron-rich and something else will grow there instead - to replenish any other missing minerals. Of course, nettles are a valuable crop for us humans because they supply us with iron too, and huge amounts of other vitamins and minerals in early Spring, just when we need them. They've also got a lot of medicinal uses and you can make a powerful liquid plant food out of them. I'll always allow nettles to grow on my land, in fact I think long and hard before removing any plant that's put itself somewhere. I've never yet come across one that isn't performing a vital function, so I only pull 'weeds' when I *really* have to.


posted by Gill at 8:51 AM 0 comments

Re-post: Dry stone walls - Mar 05

From Friday, March 11, 2005

A long ramble, vaguely related to dry stone walls

I slept last night from 10pm until 8am this morning and am feeling much better for it. Still full of cold, sneezing etc., but the sun's shining and Blogger comments are working again! So I'm a lot happier. I'm wondering how best to spend my day today. There's so much that needs doing.

Ideally I'd like to work out in the field. The dry stone walls all around the field are broken, and I noticed something really interesting last week. A little band of boys had come up the hill to grass-sledge down the public footpath. I had a chat with them, told them about the deer. They seemed like really nice kids. The eldest (about 8) was doing a bit of a tough-boy routine, but when I told him about the deer he said he'd be frightened of them! How far away from natural living have we come, when strapping young lads are frightened of deer? I put him straight: "Oh no! The deer are much more frightened of us. They'll run away and hide as soon as they hear or see you."

Eventually I got back to my path-digging and the boys sledged a bit more, then started to wander back to their homes again, through the top fields this time. They were a bored-looking, straggly group, kicking grass and bickering a bit as they went. Some of the walls around the top fields are in need of repair too, though these fields are owned by the dairy farm and hence, not my problem. But as they went past a broken bit of wall the boys, in their boredom, started breaking more off it and throwing the stones around. They soon tired of this too and carried on their journey without having caused a lot of extra damage, but it started me thinking about a couple of things:

Chaos attracts chaos and decay attracts decay. The boys weren't interested in damaging the walls that were intact. It just wouldn't have occurred to them. But if something's damaged, it appeals to bored young minds to speed the process up, by adding their own bit of damage. Why? I think I've got some tentative reasons. Young lads are full of physical creative energy. If they can't put it to productive use, they'll put it to destructive use instead. That kind of energy has to go somewhere.

Once upon a time they'd have been employed, quite legally, to labour for stone-wallers at their age. They'd have been well-supervised by the adult, taught how to repair the walls and they'd have gained satisfaction and pride in the end results. Nowadays, we have to pay someone £500 per week to repair stone walls (not that I can afford to) and about as much again for the amount of new stone they'd get through in that time. It's highly-skilled labour. Children are of no use to us except to sit in classrooms 5 days a week and be 'taught' how to read and write. What are they supposed to do at the weekends? Not society's problem. Except that it is society's problem, because society is having its walls and everything else wrecked by bored, frustrated kids.

My walls will stay broken for now, because there's no-one to look after my children for the 200 hours it would take me to fix them. And there's an interesting thing. I've got 3 potential workers here myself: one to babysit, and 2 to help me wall-build. I haven't asked them to help because I don't like to influence their decisions about how they spend their time. I'd much rather one of them thought: those walls are collapsing: I'll fix them. Why doesn't that happen? 2 reasons: it probably doesn't occur to them they CAN fix them, and they actually don't care whether they're broken or not.

I recently asked Ali what he'd do with the field if it was his. The answer? "Sell it." I was stunned! "You can't sell land! It's for your children, your grandchildren! You can't sell it!" He just shrugged and walked away.

What's the point in keeping land for your children if they don't even want it? Maybe it's a teenage thing. Or maybe the landowning instinct has had its day, and the way of the future is virtual living, in virtual space.

There are proper answers to all this somewhere, that will make it all make sense and fall into place - just waiting for me to work them out.

posted by Gill at 8:22 AM 7 comments

Solstice sorting

Happy Summer Solstice to everyone. I love this time of year - it was broad daylight at 10pm last night! We were outside, enjoying the smell of Lyddie's Night-Scented Stocks, which do smell incredibly sweet from about 6 feet away, and generally admiring the late Solstice sunlight.















Today, I'm doing some major blog sorting. I feel like I should erect signs everywhere:







The last time I had a major sort out was in November 2006, when I deleted my original main blog and completely - and very selectively! - rebuilt it with some little drop-down menus at the sides. Then in July 2007 I started creating additional blogs to further tidy things up a bit, but I neglected to sort the old re-posts out and allocate them to their new rightful homes. I've thought for a while they looked a bit odd, stuck on the side of Sometimes It's Peaceful, which is now essentially only about home education and recently the coding started to look odd as well, when the words didn't even fit their little boxes, due to some obscure browser changes I think:












This has been bugging me for weeks, but I've been too busy with other things to find the time to sort it out. Anyway. Today's the day, hopefully. And possibly tomorrow and the day after, judging by the amount there is to do. I've done some already, but there is much, much more to do.