Shadow Shot Sunday - Homemade paper lanterns

It is the Chinese New Year  tomorrow, so we made paper lanterns to celebrate. 
It is also Sunday in Australia now - visit Tracy for Shadow Shot Sunday.  Happy New Year!

Two watercolours - two children

 

The Beach at Brora, Sutherland. By Karen (age 29)

Blue Campervan with Purple Seats. By James (age 3)

What talented artistic children I am blessed with :)

Winter table.

Now that Christmas has been cleared away, the seasonal display looks a little bit empty. That is just as it should be though, as outside is stark and bare. A simple soft snowy white cloth, some beeswax candles to represent the light and warmth that we crave right now, and an old, much thumbed Ladybird book about winter.  In the centre is a white cyclamen - a plant that blooms in Wintertime and, for me, is symbolic of light and growth in the darkness.

 

The pine cones from the seasonal table have been used to make suet and seed feeders for the birds.  Our garden robin was an early visitor.

So, not much can be done in this freezing cold weather except stay by the fire and work our way through some of our Christmas books.

 

Luckily on my last charity shopping trip I managed to pick up a couple of old fashioned thick woollen blankets, along with some linen napkins (my current obsession).  So, for the time being we can snuggle up cosily, and I can read my elder son's Christmas gift to me and dream of what I can do with all those vintage textiles. 

Solstice images

We made sunny orange cupcakes.

We found the delicate wing from a butterfly lying on the snowy covered garden path . A poignant reminder of the summer past.

We built a SnowWoman, and how fine she looks!

Darkness falls early on the snowy field across the road

 Perfect for a candlelit evening by the fire.

Blessings to all on this Midwinter's night.

Time out.

Hello there! I have been sufferring from an eye infection this week, so I have not really felt like squinting at a screen.  It was my 'camera' eye too, so taking photographs was not really top of my list.  Which was a shame, actually, because my darling husband gave me a much wanted zoomier lens (55 - 200) for my camera as a birthday gift. Never mind, I am feeling much better and hopefully the weather will clear up next week, and I will amaze you all with my artful close ups.  We are heading off to a family wedding down in England later in the week, so that will give me lots of photo opportunities too.
Anyway, despite spending a lot of time with hot compresses on my eye, we managed to keep going.
Here are some of the things we got up to.

Wheel painting with trains and cars.

Watching the sparrow cafe.

Going for a very cold and dreich walk in Polkemmet Country Park.

Making coconut cupcakes for Kristine to take to work for a Children in Need fundraiser.

And a wee run to Crieff at the end of the week.  It was too rainy there to take photographs, so I snapped this one of Stirling Castle from the car on the way back.  John was driving though. 

.

James is 3!!

James was 3 years old Tuesday.  We had a really lovely day.  He loved his new red tricycle with pedals!

A whole book about trucks and cars and things that go - this is his favourite page right now.

Gran and Papa gave him this wonderful digger - definitely the present of the year.

A very happy boy on his birthday.

Big sister Kristine gave him lots of crafty things and they spent a fun afternoon painting and glueing - each other as well as the paper.  Not sure really who this present was for:)

Birthday boy - still sporting his green smiley face "tattoo" gets ready for blowing out his candles.  He's waited a whole year to do that.

A wild game of jumping on the bed with Finlay was a fine end to the day.

Maybes aye - maybes no

Although that quote is usually attributed to the great Kenny Dalglish (of whom I used to have a glow in the dark picture of pinned up on my bedroom wall), it sums up my mood today. Not huge earth changing decisions to make, but nevertheless I am torn.
I saw a link to this site on a blog I follow. It is called Nanorimo - National Novel Writing Month. The gist is that you have to write a 50,000 word novel during the month of November. I am seriously seriously tempted, but have not signed up yet. We are talking just under 2000 words a night here. I usually have approximately 2 - 2.5 hours of an evening to cram in all my hobbies. Usually I just manage to flop down in front of the laptop, read lots of blogs, post comments and follow links etc. Updating my own blogs (I actually have 4, but only 2 are active right now) is a masterclass in procrastination. On the odd occasion when I have committed myself to write a post on a particular subject on a certain day, I have reverted back to my university essay writing days. You can always tell by how shiny my kettle is.
Also, James always chooses those days to wake up at 5.30 a.m. and go non stop until 10 p.m. I shudder to imagine what I would look like after 30 days of that!
The organisers say that all you have to do is write 50,000 words and it will most likely be total rubbish - the point is to get writing - just keep your bum in the seat and do it. Everyone always says they have a book in the and will write it one day. This could be the one day. I even have a rough idea of a plot, but I have never done any creative writing since primary school, when my creativity was shut down by a couple of horrible teachers and school bullies. It might just be the thing to get me lay this ghost.
There is an inspiring story on the Nanorimo site from a US Marine, who completed the challenge last year while on active service in Iraq!! Oh I don't know. I am excited by the prospect, but I am not good at writing freely - I have edited this post at least twenty times already and sat for minutes at a time searching for just the right word. I may be too pedantic to do this, but as Johns says, I could do the 50,000 words and get them in by the finish date and then go back and rewrite - ho hum!
Just remembered that November is a busy birthday month - James and me - and we have John's nephew's wedding down in Hampshire at the end of the month, so that will be at least a week long trip as we fit in all the family we've not seen for a while A few days to decide though - it starts on November 1st. Do check it out.
More angst to follow. I don't know whether to make a Christmas cake or not. I was eying up the dried fruit in the organic farm shop today and thinking it was time. The trouble is that no-one really likes it, and John and I end up eating most of it. In fact, last summer I went to use my tartan cake tin and found the previous year's cake still wrapped up. It was fine - there was a fair bit of the old preservative in it, but by the time we finished it, it was time to make the next one, and I didn't have the stomach for it. It is a nice thing to do though, and I always feel quite Christmassy around this time. I just don't know...

Gift of Jewels -

I received my Gift of Jewels in the post on Saturday morning. It was so exciting to go to the letter box and see the bright yellow hand addressed envelope, covered in airmail stickers lying on the mat. I tore it open and some bright photocards tumbled out, just like a shower of jewels. They were various scenes; two indoor still life pictures- glowing and warm, a cool shot of long feathery grasses and a sepia print of a patch of ethereal pale flowers. The card itself was an image of gem like colouring pencils with beautiful words penned inside.

Life is rich
Beauty is everywhere
Every personal connection has meaning and
laughter is life's sweetest creation.

Thank you so much Margie. I simply loved this gift and I am so pleased to have met you.
Margie and her sister Kath share a fantastic blog www.soeursdujour.com She lives in Canada - just 5 miles away from where my own sister lives! So - you are right Margie - every personal connection does have meaning.

Thank you again - and many thanks also to Se'Lah for organising the Gift of Jewels project. What joy and love has spread around the world from your wonderful idea.

When does learning happen?

One of my favourite books in Learning all the time, by John Holt. Here he relates accounts of how children learn from everyday life, and how that delight in learning is conditioned out of them at school. I have been privileged to observe this learning process in my son, James, who will be 3 in November.
James is now of the age where we are being asked" When does he start preschool?" every time we are out. It gets wearisome, butI don't really want to get into the intricacies of our family life with the woman from the corner shop, or the bus driver, so, for now I just answer - "He's only 2!".
But he will not be going to pre-school or nursery. He will be continuing this marvellous expansion of his learning at home, directed by his own needs, interests and desires.
Today, learning happened at 5.30 am, when he just had to get up and play some game with his diggers and trucks. Fortunately, my husband volunteered to get up with him, and when he brought me a cup of tea, he commented on how he could almost see the neurons firing in James's brain - he was full of it. Talking his game out loud in long, complex, sentences, he was obviously working something out that had been on his mind.

I took over at 7.30, and the learning continued. We read a couple of comics - Roary the Racing Car. We made a cut-out tool box from the magazine, and then played a complicated game of fixing cars and buses - the sofa cushions being the cars. All this was entirely instigated and directed by James - I was there purely as a facilitator and gofer - it was such fun too!

The whole day has been like this. One learning event after another. Going to the DIY store with Dad, coming home and making a seesaw with bits of wood, making his own sandwich for lunch, playing the piano and singing along to his own tune, helping make dinner, picking plums, dividing pastry for the pie, using the leftover paste to make yet another birthday cake, singing all the words of Happy Birthday - all these activities were a small part of his own agenda for the day.
He is still going now, I hear him pretending to be a snake "I'm gonna eat oo Dad"

Now, thankfully, a 5 am - 10 pm full on day is relatively unusual here, but sometimes it happens. If we were shackled to other timetables, this day would have been so different, so I am truly fortunate that we have that freedom. I imagine how stressed I would be by such an early start. I might have lost my temper and shouted; harassed and nagged everyone into getting ready for work and school, cutting short any play or fun. "No time, no time!", in the rush to be out the door, far too soon. James would not have had the opportunity to do all the things he did today, unless he was at home. No-one would have played with him for hours on the living room floor, in just the way he wanted to, or let him help cut mushrooms for the risotto that he asked me to make for dinner. He might have come home, tired, clutching a piece of paper with blue paint slapped on it as evidence of his creativity, but would he have been told to be quiet when he began to play the piano and sing joyously as he did after tea today? Would he have been laughed at or ridiculed for playing with his Barbie campervan - organising a trip to the beach for some of his toys?Would he have been able to do these things anyway, or might he have been told to do some other box ticking activity instead? I do not want to endanger his gentle unfolding in any way by subjecting him to the shoulds and should nots of this society and certainly not by it's clock.

Instead, we were able to forget time and just go with the flow. It was only place to be. Seventeen hours of present moments - learning all the time.

Please visit Debs at Muddy Bare Feet, who is hosting Home Education Blog Carnival today for International Freedom in Education Day. There are so many inspirational posts there, much more coherent than this sleep deprived one. Night Night!

Freedom at last!

The new term began last week for the Scottish schools. For the first time in 25 years, I have nothing whatsoever to do with schools, or schooling - I am free from living according to a dictated timetable! It feels good.

I was asked at the weekend when James would be starting nursery. It was the first time I have really been asked that question by someone outside the family. It seems to be a given that all children need to go to some kind of 'preschool' education to ensure they should have the 'right start' and and early 'advantage'. It all seems so negative, this jostling for advantage - making sure they are ready etc.
Yesterday, James and I were at a local country park. There was a group of older teenagers from one of the nearby secondary schools there on a field trip with a couple of teachers. They were all on bikes and were involved in some sort of map reading challenge, in the style of something out of the TV programme The Apprentice. Now, I have never seen this programme, but I understand it to be very competitive and aggressive. They had to navigate round the park, carrying out various challenges on the way. Point s were given for these achievements and deducted for transgressing the rules. They wheeled up to me and asked me if my name started with J (one of their challenges). I was happy to oblige them, and allowed them to take my picture for their evidence. They were excited to have completed this, but minutes later, their faces fell when their teacher, in a very loud and patronising voice, deducted the 5 points because one of the bikes was left in the wrong place. This scene troubled me all day. While I recognise that there were some team building skills involved in this challenge, I do not think that this type of conditional training is what our children deserve. In the future, they will face many real challenges - most of them the result of the mistakes and greed of previous generations. They will need to live and work in a different way - radical free thinkers will be needed, and I fear there will not be too many of those who survive such negative experiences.James and I went on to complete our own challenge - we got lost! Well, that can happen when you let a 2.5 year old lead the way. We weren't that lost, but we did end up taking a much longer walk than we meant to. It was a lot of fun though - pretending to be dogs in the long (wet) grass, sitting by the river, close encounters with butterflies, and finding our first conkers. James also walked up a fairly steep hill on his own. Given that 6 months ago he was lying with his leg in traction, that was certainly an achievement. We looked at the different leaves on the trees growing around and talked about where the river was going - he sat for ages waving goodbye to the water :) Yes - I guess he knew what direction he wanted to go in today!

So - James will not be going to preschool or nursery - he is in charge of his own learning, and while that may mean he will choose to attend school at some point, he will make that decision. For now, every day is a new challenge, and one he meets with eagerness and joy - I will do my best to ensure he always feels like that.

Shadow Shot Sunday - Jupiter Artland

This week's shadow shots were taken during our day out at the magnificent Jupiter Artland
sculpture park. The previous two posts also feature works from this amazing collection. (Can you tell I liked it?)

These pieces are part of the series Weeping Girls amongst trees, by Laura Ford.

Just walking through the shady woodland, we happen upon five statues of little girls weeping. Quite a surreal experience and a wee bit disturbing; a real contrast to the other exhibits we had seen up until then. Great shadows though. I also liked the way the sunlight played on the tree above echoing the menacing ambiance.

If you scroll down to the previous post, you will see more of this work - Firmamanet, by Anthony Gormley. After looking upwards for those shots, I then looked down, and it was just as wonderful in shadow form. Sadly, the sun was only out for a minute, but it was enough.
The world is full of great shadows. See them at Shadow Shot Sunday on Hey Harriet.

To Jupiter and beyond.

We've just had the best day at a place called Jupiter Artland - amazingly only 12 miles away from our very house! It is set in the 80 acre grounds of Bonningtoun House and is a private collection of outdoor artworks, commissioned by the owners, who very generously allow the public pre-booked access. Around every corner there were the most incredible sculptures, earthworks and structures by some big names - Andy Goldsworthy, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Charles Jencks to name only a few. I took 402 pictures, but don't click away, I am only going to show a few highlights here. If you are in Central Scotland in the next couple of weeks, I would seriously urge you to visit this wonderful space. It is only open from Thursday - Sunday until the 31st August, then it closes until next May. The cake from the cool Airstream cafe is worth the trip alone!

One of my favourite parts was the Life Mounds by Charles Jencks. An incredibly sexy installation comprising various terraced earthworks, paths and water which are based round the theme of the cell.



I love Andy Goldsworthy's work and this one, Stone House was just... just... well, it rendered me speechless. From the outside it looks like a little stone built hut in the middle of a nice soft green woodland. But open that nice sturdy door and - wow! He has excavated all the earth away to reveal the natural bedrock - it is really quite a shock to be confronted with the naked planet.





This was a little limestone bridge, called Only Connect, by Ian Hamilton Finlay. On either side of the bridge are two milestones, inscribed with the words Only Connect - the final words from the novel Howard's End. This was James's favourite exhibit, and we played here for ages.



The knitters amongst us were very interested in Shane Waltener's Over Here. Knitted on circular needles using different types of fishing line, this was a fabulous site to behold, like a gigantic spider's web spun between two trees, and making us see the landscape in different ways.

Finally, for this post anyway, The Love Bomb, by Marc Quinn. An enormously colourful 12 metre high orchid - beautiful and yet terrible. Mind you, James thought it was Santa Claus - hmm - yes I suppose that could fit in the the sculptor's idea.

I so loved this place and we will definitely be back several times next year. I will be posting more photographs from Jupiter over the next few weeks.

When the muse strikes....

...well - you just have to grab at it - even if it is 5 am!

So there I was at that time on a Sunday morning being dragged out of bed -
"C'mon Mum, s'light - me paint!" said the 2 1/2 year old artist. A whole new big sentence; words I had never heard him use before. How could I resist? I am unschooling radically and I am here to facilitate. I am also one of these older mums and I need lots of sleep to make sure I have the energy to do this. Nevertheless, I am there sloshing out finger paints into jar lids, finding paper, slurping down a strong English Breakfast blend, trying to convince an insistent boy that finger paints don't require water or brushes and that I don't have any other paints and I promise I will get some proper paints as soon as I can. I lose the argument, but he soon sees my point when he tries it out, and goes back to the traditional hands-in style. Autonomous learning by the "me do it" process. Works every time! (Why do I doubt it?)

At around 7-ish, he decided he wanted to go back to bed. Great idea Son! Back we went and snuggled in beside still sleeping Dad and we dozed on until 9.30 - not bad - everyone's needs met, and some creativity to boot!

Later I felt a bit creative, so did some baking. Well, that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it:) Banoffee cupcake anyone?