The Guitar Lesson

It was Frog's birthday last week and while she claimed "I want for nothing Mummy, I have everything I could possibly need" (which is clearly both mildly nauseating and blatently untrue) she actually did have a birthday wish after all.  She wants to learn to play the guitar.

Being completely tone deaf myself I am more than happy to indulge her musical passions!  So I visited Foote's for a pink guitar and found two local guitar teachers to try out. (Frog and I, rather meanly I agree, thought this was sort of like the X factor).  Both teachers were great and one was perfect.

Most specially while Frog had her lesson I was able to watch her learning.  And I was profoundly moved; by her concentration, her passion to learn and her willingness to keep trying until she got things right.

When we pack our children off to school we miss out on so much of the wonder of their learning. I'd forgotten how much tenacity children have when they really want to know something (remember learning to walk) and they're so flexible and fearless - happy to make mistakes and then just try doing things a different way in order to achieve the end result.

As grown ups we are much more rigid, much more scared of doing things;  I have so much to learn from my Frog!

Your words or mine?

While it's wonderful, albeit somewhat alarming, when your children mimic your words (we all remember the first time they used our favourite swear words, don't we?) it's also brilliant when they use words that aren't our own.


Picture the scene: we're at Kew Gardens, it's chilly but the sun is shining.  We settle down on a bench outside the palm house to eat our sandwiches. The lavender walk way and the rose gardens are in front of us. 


Frog and Rowdy are whirling like dervishes around the flower beds begging for indigestion. Rowdy stops suddenly, takes a huge sniff of one of the roses and shouts "these roses smell deluxe."  Deluxe - not one of my words that's for sure, but definitely one a 3 year old boy should be using.  


By the way I've just started a twitter thing - do follow me @hypnogogo

The law of unintended consequences

As most of you know I gave up my permanent job in July to spend the summer with Frog and Rowdy.


Now of course they are back at school.  I was worried that with freelancing and setting up my own business that I'd have less time with them during term times, even though we'd have more time together in the holidays.  But, delightfully and unexpectedly (so far at least), I've had more time with them than I did before.  


It's only an extra 45 minutes more than we used to have after school and work finished so it's certainly not structured-activity time or doing-lots-of-things time; it's simply taking-time-to-be-together time. We have leisurely suppers where we laugh about the day and moan about the teachers! Their bath-time lasts from hot to cold (literally, really cold) and best of all there's plenty of time for stories.


What awe and wonder there is in being slow!

summer holidays

As I write it seems that summer is well and truly over.  


It was my first ever summer holidays at home with my children and a thoroughly enjoyable one too. I learned so much just hanging out with them every day. The most important lesson: slow down. It's so important to take time just to be (as opposed to do).

We lay down on the floor face to face and chatted about nonsense.


We read stories. And made some up too.


We went camping and toasted marshmallows round the bonfire, made new friends and fed pigs.

We climbed St. Michael's Mount in Cornwall and imagined pirates coming to catch us.


We swam and sunbathed at the lido, the Frog perfected her diving and Rowdy and I rated her, Olympic style. Then we all pretended to be synchronised swimmers.


We saw Toy Story at the cinema and battled with the 3D specs.


We explored parts of Kew Gardens we'd never been to before and made camp under the branches of a tree while it poured with rain outside.


We ate a lot of picnics!


But mostly we didn't do much at all - just hung out together and enjoyed each other.  


Awe & Wonder at its most profound.

The climbing wall

Sunday was a glorious afternoon. From grey and cloudy beginnings the sun broke through and shone in a clear blue sky all afternoon. From memory it does this every year the weekend of the Lambeth Country Fair.  We were there with Lulu, Frog's best friend, and her family.  


For those of you who read this blog regularly you will know how much Frog loves to climb.  Nothing makes her happier than scaling an enormous tree and sitting in it. I'm not sure what she does up there: thinks, watches, sits, watches and thinks I guess. Anyway she loves it and is truly fearless.


On Sunday at the Country Fair they had some fantastic (and free) activities for the kids, including basketball, tennis, football and a climbing wall. Understandably this was like giving Frog all the sweets in the sweetshop. She literally squealed with pleasure when she saw it.  


She and Lulu scaled the first wall, the easy one, faster than you can say "go spidergirl go". 


The harder wall was trickier. The spaces between the 'grips' were further apart and the girls are still only little.  Frog did well, she got within a metre of so of the top, then came down.  Lulu was still climbing.


I expected Frog to call to her friend to come down and get on with the next activity. But no, she stood on the ground below her friend and bellowed encouragement; she pointed out good places to put her hands and feet and truly supported Lulu during her final burst to reach the top. And when Lulu touched the buzzer that signalled her success both girls were equally, ecstatically thrilled.


In those moments my daughter reminded how pure and perfect friendship can be. About how it can be both competitive and yet supportive. About how your best friend cheering you on makes anything possible. And about how when success is shared and celebrated together it makes it so much more fun! 


Awe and wonder at its best.

The Plan

The frog has a best friend.  They've been best friends since their first day at nursery and the only time Frog is sad is when they've had a falling out, which thankfully doesn't happen very often. The best friend's name is Lulu.


They are totally smitten with each other and would choose to be together 24 hours a day, seven days a week if they could.  


This passion is truly brilliant when I'm trying to get Frog motivated to go out on a day trip with Lulu and her family ("do your teeth/tidy your bedroom/finish your homework ... or else we won't be able to meet up with Lulu").  All tasks are done with time to spare, with no fuss and nonsense and mostly with a smile! 


It's less easy at the end of the day.  Having to go their separate ways often ends with the mums having to hunt one of them out from a secret hiding place or prize one off the other's leg as you might with an over enthusiastic puppy. It's sweet if somewhat irritating. 


Last weekend we took the girls and Rowdy to Brockwell Lido. It was a great day, we had sandwiches and ice creams, braved the freezing water and got a glimpse of the future as Frog and Lulu sunbathed like teenagers, whispering secrets about school and giggling furiously at their own in-jokes.


Later, as we walked across the park to the car (lazy, but essential with two exhausted three-year olds in tow) the girls announced they had a plan.  They were in extremely high spirits about it too. They made various attempts to trick us into giving them chewing gum and we thought the plan had been executed/thwarted.  Wrong.


Lulu's mum dropped us off at our front door and Lulu was out of the car and at my front door before you could say "I need a wee". And this is what she did say with accompanying ham-acting to go with.  


And it was the ham-acting that caught them out. Lulu didn't need a wee at all, it was all part of 'the plan' to get her into my house, to drag out their last precious few moments together. The chewing gum was just a decoy.  


This incident, though not easy to describe, was full of awe and wonder. The tricksiness and deviousness of these six year old minds is simply awesome; in the end the plan was pretty good at a strategic level, they just need to brush up on their execution! 

More important is the wonder of friendship - so strong that you never want to be apart, so profound that you'll risk getting into trouble just for a couple more moments together.  Friendship is grounded in making plans and being creative together, where together you are better than the sum of your parts and when together everything is simply more fun.


There's nothing quite like a best friend.






Pic taken Winter 2009

Deepwater

Silence in our house is never a good sign.  It normally means that one or other of the children has tied up and gagged the other.  So after a short while of silence on Sunday afternoon I dragged myself away from the football to investigate. 

To my profound surprise the children were playing together nicely (seriously I never thought I’d use those three words in the same sentence) with their playmobil hospital, rescue helicopter and numerous other emergency service vehicles.  

I asked what they were playing.  “Doh mum, it’s the Deepwater Horizon oil spill clean up of course” came the reply.  

Silly me. 

It’s so easy to get caught up in the routine of everyday - meal preparing, teeth cleaning, homework doing, park going - that sometimes I forget to notice how aware of the world my children are and how grown up they are.  They really think about things; big, important, global things. They think about them seriously and make sense of them in their own way. 

I just smiled and left them to it, best not find out who was Tony Hayward and who was Obama.  

Myatt's Fields

Saturday's weather was gorgeous. To celebrate I took the children up to Myatt's Fields to play in the water park there, which is truly brilliant.  For those of you who regularly read this blog you'll know how much my children love water!

It struck me watching the children play that in London (in our middle-class, over-protective, helicopter-parent bubble) that there are very few opportunities for my children to play with children of different ages. They don't do it much at school, they certainly don't do it out of school where play dates are strictly restricted to those children whose parents I quite like!

This is actually quite sad; they learn so much from each other - heirarchy, turn-taking, confidence, how to fit in, limits & boundaries, trust and independence as well as the actual games they are taking part in.

It was wonderful to watch them play, take their part in this micro-society and explore the world with a bit more freedom than they're normally allowed.  And they relished it - awe and wonder at its best!

And the sunshine was pretty lovely too.

Perspectives

One of the wonderful things about having children is the way you are constantly forced to change your perspective on the world. Seeing things through their eyes is without doubt one of the best ways to ensure a daily dose of 'awe and wonder' in your life.

We had a wonderful day at Kew Gardens on Sunday where this idea of perspectives was something we (the grown ups) thought about a lot. 

The Treetop walk literally made us see things differently.  From 30m or so above the ground, walking through the leaves, how could it not.

After lunch we played wheelbarrow races, gave the children 'elephant' rides and generally romped on the floor. I haven't laughed so much for ages and the children truly loved it with us 'on their level'.

Kew Gardens is beautiful at this time of year and the children were exploring their independence as well as their surroundings, going on bear hunts and various other expeditions.  Simply observing the way they live so completely 'in the moment' was an interesting shift in my perspective. I'm going to try it more, it might well be one of the best ways to ensure a bit more wonder in my own life!

bubbles

Friday afternoon, the sun was shining and one of Rowdy's friends had been given some bubbles in a party bag at school.

The two boys took it in turns to be the 'bubble blower' and the 'bubble catcher'. They played for about an hour until all the bubble mix had gone.  There were no cross words, many squeals of delight and much romping, stomping and climbing in pursuit of the ones that were getting away.

There are few things that children love more than bubbles. 

I remember when Frog was just learning to talk shouting to me in M&S "look mummy bubbles, green bubbles!".  They were grapes.  It still makes me smile. 

I love bubbles too.