Hamburgers Deconstructed

This is a photo of what my six year old son ate - he actually had another hamburger patty and some     extra mushrooms too. 

These patties are honestly just mince. Not even seasoned. Because, sadly, my kids don't like pepper. <<sad face here>>. So, you could perk them up with salt and pepper, with chili, with any herbs or spices you like.

I shaped them into patties and heated up my gorgeous cast iron frying pan with some bacon fat - MMMMMMMM - then I placed the patties in and cooked them til they were done. I always have to cut one in half to check. But that then becomes my sample one, so nothing lost! When the patties were all done, I popped the mushrooms into the same pan and the mushrooms soaked up all the yumminess from the patties and the bacon fat. Then, when the mushrooms were nearly done I scoooched them over to one side and popped the kale in the other side to wilt a little. I did sprinkle some salt on the mushrooms and kale.

That's IT! easy as! And all in one pan!

The cabbage-y looking stuff on the plate is some of my friend's DIVINE sauerkraut. I can't get enough of this stuff, and neither can Louis. She's not in commercial circulation yet, but the moment she is I will do a piece on her so you know where to get some.

Hope you and your family enjoy this super simple meal soon.

Herb-Crusted Roast Chicken

Your oven needs to be at about 220 degrees Celsius so get that sorted.

I love going out to my garden with Joss and a pair of scissors to choose which herbs to put in our meals. She loves it too, and the care with which she handles the plants is gorgeous to see.

So, if you've got them in your garden - grab a pair of scissors and go and get:

A handful each of rosemary, thyme and parsley.
Bring them inside and wash them, then pull the leaves off the stalks of the rosemary and thyme. Place all the leaves and parsley in a pile and start hacking into them with a delightfully big knife. Here's your perfect opportunity to imagine that you're Jamie Oliver, Gordon Ramsay, Nigella Lawson etc and experiment with developing your knife skills.

When the herbs are chopped into little pieces, get 30g of butter (if you're dairy free just use olive oil), two cloves of garlic and a couple of pinches of salt and cut them into the herbs. Eventually you will have made the srummiest herb butter (or oil) you've ever had.

Take the chicken out of the packet and place it in a roasting dish, breast side down.

Roll up your sleeves, call your children into the kitchen, and each take a couple of small handfuls of herb butter and schmoosh the butter ALL over that chicken.

Place it in the oven for 20mins at 220, then turn it down to 150. After about 60mins at 150, turn the chicken over and brown off the breast-side for about 20mins (still at 150).

Check that the chicken is cooked by poking a knife into the leg-joint and seeing if the juices run clear. When it's cooked take it out of the oven and let it rest covered with some baking paper and a tea towel for about 20mins.

Guerilla Learning

Louis and Joss have been watching a lot of a little cartoon called Octonauts. For those of you who don't know, it's about some animals that live underwater in an "Octopod" and go around saving other marine life (most of the time). It's a fairly benign cartoon. No-one is bopping anyone on the head, or calling anyone names.

I was busy business-scheming yesterday so they were watching some Octonauts and all of a sudden Jossie came through to me with a roll of toilet paper and started imitating the little penguin that is the medic on the show. She wanted to bandage me up (which, coming from her mouth, sounded more like "sandwich me up"). Oh, how lovely it was to sit there and let her wrap metres of toilet paper around my arm, and have her ask, full of concern, "It feel better, Mama?"

And then, last night we were at a friend's house for pizza and play (and wine) (and liver cleansing tea) and Louis picked up all of the marine-animal toys and started naming them, "Look Mama! A Hammerhead! A Lemon Shark! A Lobster!" Such JOY in him while he made all these connections!!

I, for some reason, have a lot of faith in their ability to learn all that they need to learn in an academic sense. My concerns rest mainly in the area of supporting them to have a healthy innate sense of Who They Are. I really think that's my parenting challenge (as in, My Challenge, not theirs).

A while ago I was watching Louis play with a friend of his in the back yard, and I thought to myself, if there was a natural disaster I actually have a lot of faith in Louis that he would be capable, as long as adults trusted him to do it. THEN the next thought was, that goes for Me TOO! I need to trust him to BE who he needs to be.

Most of the challenges I face with this are around television. I have a cyclical love/hate relationship with the contraption. BUT, when I give myself over to his innate knowledge, when I trust him, when I let it go, amazing things happen.

While we were on holiday, Ron had reached the limit of *his* tolerance of Louis' television watching. And we asked Louis to come down and talk about it. He didn't want to. So I sat with Ron downstairs and brainstormed the Why's and How's of what Ron wanted to see. Louis had crept down the stairs and was listening outside the door. At some point he said, "Papa, you said you only want me to watch an hour? and then go and do something else for an hour?" "Yes" "I can do that!" It was interesting to me that out of the whole conversation Ron and I had had, Louis had focused on that small aspect of it.

So, we came to that tentative agreement and Ron set up something on the Apple TV that after an hour it prompts you to either turn it off or continue.

The other day, I announced that we needed to go to the library, and Louis said, "But it hasn't been an HOUR!!!" and I said, "Are you kidding? It's been about THREE hours!!" and he looked at me perplexed and said, "But the message didn't come up." And I explained that he had to not use the remote for an hour for that message to come up. So he gave me the remote and said, "when the message comes up, we can go, ok Mama?"

Wow, look at that! Using a tool to self-regulate! I think he knows that he's missing out on Other Stuff because he's watching TV and seems unable to break the connection. So he's found a tool to use to break it! I'm so impressed!! He's six!

We had a little friend come over on Tuesday who introduced Louis to Jake and the Neverland Pirates. There's a bit more name-calling and bopping on heads in that one, so I have to work harder to embrace it. There'll be *something* in there that Louis is drawn to though, so I'm waiting to see what that is. Waiting and Trusting.

Our Time is Our Own

This morning I woke up before the children, so I got to luxuriate in the bliss of their warm, floppy, sleepy-scented beings.

Eventually I snuck out of bed, leaving them there, with visions of sitting with a coffee and watching the world-in-my-back-yard go by.

Before the coffee was ready I heard the very soft pitter-patter of newly woken feet.

Louis appeared at the kitchen door and asked, "Mama, you wanna come have some waking-up snuggles with me and Joss?"

YES!

So we did.

I love the no time constraints aspect of unschooling.

Authenticity in Parenting

I have been struggling with my own demons for a couple of weeks. I finally went to get acupuncture, and now I'm like an acupuncture-addict; hanging out for the next treatment… and the next… So, at some point after my first treatment, I found the headspace to pick up the book Connection Parenting by Pam Leo. It was recommended to me by someone who has walked this path of respectful parenting far longer than I, and who said something like, it was the most important parenting book that she read on her journey. I bought it a while back and gave it to The Sound Guy to read first. Because it's not nice to always be the person that reads the book and then tells the other person everything they're doing wrong. So, this time he got to do that :-). I got a few "looks" which meant "stand down soldier" and I took a breath and left the room. I got told "We shouldn't tell them what to do", and then got told that I was probably doing most things right, if I could just get my ANGER under control.

Anger has followed me around like a particularly sticky shadow on this parenting journey. Anger has been my constant companion - more than joy but probably not more than connectedness (thank goodness).

At the same time as all this reading was going on, I was lying in bed with not enough energy to open my eyes, but feeling like doing something, so I started listening to a book I've had on my phone for a while. It's called Codependent No More, by Melody Beattie. A friend of mine who has experience with addiction has been talking to me about the cycles and the side effects of addiction, and mentioned this codependent thing a couple of times. So, I thought I'd check it out and see where it took me. Well, FAR OUT. Reading these two books together has been mind-blowing.

Connection Parenting gives us exactly two parenting tools: connection and re-connection.

You know what gets in the way of connection? My own shit.

You know what unravelling Codependency has done for me? Explained why my shit is in my life.

See how this all works together?? Amazing how the universe conspires, huh?

So, the other night when it was bedtime - we all go to bed together - we got up off the couch and went to the bathroom. Louis said he didn't need to go. We did our evening ablutions and went to bed. When we were nearly all tucked up, Louis announced that he did in fact need to go. ARGH!!! He has some fears around being by himself, so I needed to go with him. ARGH!!! Didn't he realize that I'd already said Yes, to another episode of Octonauts, Yes to another story, Yes to singing a song… and I was TIRED. Didn't he realize that I was all out of Yeses? Didn't he?!! So I resentfully got out of bed and stomped to the bathroom, shouting something along the lines of "I ASKED you whether you wanted to go!!" THEN, I remembered the book. The codependence one. I remembered that it said that when we're saying Yes but feeling No, when our Yeses are inauthentic, it's a breeding ground for resentment. We quickly move from this Yes (rescuing) to Persecution (why doesn't he realize) to victim (I'm so tired I can't deal with this!). It's called the Karpman Triangle. WOW. I think that triangle just changed my life.

So, the next night it went a little more like this:
All of us on the couch, approaching bed time "Mama, shall we watch one more?" "Ok, but honey I'm really tired, so you can choose to either watch one more or read a story when we get to bed. Which would you like?" "Hmmmmmm, how about watch this, read a story, but no song?" "Yep, sure."
And then when it was time for evening ablutions, "Remember last night, let's all go to the toilet now so we don't have to get out of our snuggly bed again." And we did. Then on the way to bed, Louis figured out his book was in the car, "Mama, can you go and get my book out of the car?" I really thought about whether I wanted to, and you know what? I didn't. So I said so. Louis' response to that was "Ok, I'll choose a different one." WTF man, really? This authentic parenting thing is THAT easy? Amazing.

It seems to me that Louis is constantly pushing me towards authenticity. I think he has a very highly tuned BS-radar, and pushes and pushes until I'm authentic. Somehow, even an angry-and-authentic mother is preferable to a trying-to-please-inauthentic mother. It's like he senses he's on dicey ground when I'm being inauthentic, and more stable when I'm being authentic, whether that's finally saying no in anger (not really ideal) or saying no straight up when that's authentic (much more useful).

So, I've been checking my Yeses. Usually I'm checking my No's to see if they can be Yeses. Now I'm checking my Yeses too. And it's been completely liberating. Yay! for reading two self-help books at the same time!

Oh, and I'm also re-reading To Kill A Mockingird in preparation for reading Go Set A Watchman, which I am super excited about. And you know what? I love how Atticus is with his children. I love how he dances the line between respecting his sister's beliefs and his children's beings, I love how respectful he is to everyone, how he has genuine joy and delight in his children. I am intrigued by Harper Lee now - I always wanted to name one of my children after her (and conveniently after Ben Harper - another favourite artist of mine) but alas, I've run out of babies to name. Might need to get a cat.

In Celebration of Small Moments

I went out for dinner with a lovely friend of mine this week and she was talking about having a new-found appreciation for the small moments. Oh YES, yes, yes. This is where my heart is, in the small, tiny, miniscule moments. This morning I woke up at 6:40am, a child on each arm, and I lay for an hour drinking in the bliss: listening to them snuffle; feeling their fluffy bed-hair tickle my nose; gazing at their super delicate eyelids; studying their puffy, full lips; enjoying the warmth from their bodies; just basking in amazement at the awesomeness that is my children.

The moments that stand out for me this week are:

Riding our bikes through the fountain on Marine Parade. Louis is just fascinated by the motion/vision of making things (sand, mud, water) spray out from a wheel. He demoed a remote control car in one afternoon by placing it in the sand, holding it there with one hand, and using the other hand to take it to full revs with the remote. He can watch that sand flick out for hours. Literally. I love that he loves it. So, we rode our bikes through the fountain and made the water flick up with our bike tires.

It was Fathers’ Day this week and we were Father-less, but thinking of him, so we set the table, had juice in champagne flutes, lit the candles and celebrated how awesome the Sound Guy is whether he’s in our country or not.

A lot of this week was spent relaxing in the sun. I think I’m solar powered.

And some of the moments in short: Louis getting my breakfast for me; Louis and Joss snuggling up on the couch; Joss pretending to do smelly farts out of NOWHERE and all of us laughing uncontrollably; Ron FaceTiming me from the side of the stage of a Crosby, Stills and Nash gig, listening to what he’s listening to, seeing the smiling faces, catching a small snippet of the energy he so loves; having afternoon tea with good friends; going on lung pinging hard-arsed walks with another friend.

So much to celebrate in a week of small moments.

Socialisation- BLAGH!

Well, we’re back! What a journey it’s been. My favourite part of our holiday was watching Louis and Joss be a team, a unit – watching them work together, play together, resolve together. In a world where they were the two people who best understood each other, they came together in support and it was glorious to see.

The trip back has knocked us for six. (is that a kiwi saying?) We are all, still, incredibly tired. Our most desired spot in the house is still snuggled on the couch in front of the TV. We are enjoying quiet, and calm, and relaxing. We are enjoying eating our food, walking the dog, visiting the beach. It’s good to be home.

I learned during our time away how difficult it is for people who are not used to unschooled children to interact with them. And interestingly this is the most frequently asked question: How will you “socialise” them? Which does imply that the child they see before them is not socialised. But let’s back this truck up a little: You know when you get a new puppy and one of the things you need to do with it is to take it to lots of different places so that it gets “socialised”? Well, apparently with children, “socialisation” involves sending them to the same place everyday, to be talked to by the same teacher and interact with the same children. That doesn’t make sense, right?

So, when adults find it difficult to interact with unschooled children, who frequently have an opinion and a strong will and are used to being listened to and engaged with and respected, when other adults find it difficult to interact with them, it is often “evidence” that children need to be “socialised”. Because asking a child how school is going just rolls off the tongue, right? Asking what school they go to, who their teacher is, what their favourite thing to do at school is – all these things are so socially acceptable, that for an adult not to be able to ask these questions means that there’s something wrong with the child’s upbringing. Obviously.

When we hang out with other unschooling familes, I notice that no-one tries to engage with my children. Nobody puts on an act of trying to find common ground. Adults wait for children to approach them, with questions, requests, comments, ideas and an authentic conversation flows from there. I was in the car with a ten-year-old unschooled boy the other day who found common ground with me (!!) and started to tell me all the movies he thought I might enjoy watching. I loved it! These kids just don’t do small talk – these are my kind of people!!

The Sound Guy asked me once a while ago, are our kids going to be weirdos? And my reply was, going to be?! Really?! They already ARE! 

There’s a gigantic big chance that these children are going to look different, talk different, behave different to their age-related peers. They do now, because they’re not sent to school to be molded into shape. They will (probably) in 15 years because they will have had 15 years of not going to school to be molded into shape. We’re not unschooling our children inspite of this, we are unschooling our children because of this.

Giving birth, breastfeeding, co-sleeping, natural toileting, and unschooling have all required from me that I put my ego firmly to one side and constantly raise the question, Who the fuck am I to interfere? Most of the time I defer to their innate knowledge of themselves and their be-ing and just get the fuck out of the way. Parenting for me at the moment is about providing foundation. I am the bit that you don’t see, you don’t notice, you don’t think about. Humbling. So, no, my children will not be “socialised”. So you can stop asking. Actually, scratch that - keep asking, I love talking about all this - I love it when people ask. ASK AWAY!!