Church Camp at Waikanae

We spent the weekend at El Rancho in Waikanae - and what a beautiful weekend it was. Lovely weather, good friends, and the kids reliably disappearing for stretches at a time. (Katie and Rowena didn't even sleep in our cabin.) I was carrying round (and even read some of) a book by John Holt "How Children Fail", which sounds like a depressing title, but is actually a classic book with some telling insights into things that make school hard for kids, and ways to overcome them. (He makes some points which I personally agree with - which is always a good way to know that an author is writing sense!!!)

Bit of a slow start to the weekend though. We spent over an hour in s--l--o--w m--o--v--i--n--g traffic up the coast, due to road resealing. We had an unprecedented chance to check out people's gardens. Then, when we arrived, we couldn't go into the campground because about a dozen police cars were there before us - an armed offenders squad call-out. We went off to the beach/cafe, and by the time my latte had arrived someone had had a text that it was all over and we could get in. I didn't see anything in yesterday's paper about it, so will have to keep a look out.

(Later)
Reading the above, it sounds like I am pleased to not see my kids for large chunks of the weekend - which is not the case. However, there is a huge contrast with what going to camp was like 8 or 10 years ago with little kids. In fact, I felt like we had all the advantages of being a childless couple hanging out with friends, plus all the advantages of having children - with none of the disadvantages of either.

Walk to the Windmill

This morning I went on a school trip, walking to our local wind turbine. This was with Sophie's syndicate - 108 kids, 4 teachers, a handful of parents and 3 dogs. It took us about 50 minutes, uphill all the way, and was fine except for the last 5 minutes which was a bit steep! (Brutal actually.) Beautiful view when you get there though. I hadn't walked it before. I think that counts for my exercise for today and at least one other day as well.

By the way, you can see our house if you know where to look.

March Quilt Guild

I ended up speaking at quilt guild tonight. The scheduled speaker was unfortunately sick, so, at the last minute, someone organised to have people speak about their local quilt groups. A couple of people had been primed ahead of time, but then others who were in groups were asked to get up and talk about their group. When the moment came it was either Dianne or myself!

We formed our group nine years ago this June. There are about 5 in the group at the moment, but it has been up to 10 at times. We meet on the first and fourth Thursday evenings of the month, either at peoples houses, or at the Resource Centre. I talked to a lady who wanted to join the group, and swapped phone numbers. We have made a lot of quilts over the years, but some years lately we seem to do more knitting than quilting. The trouble is that I don't have a hand quilting project that I just want to work on at the moment. I probably have a top I could baste (I have any number of UFOs - unfinished objects.) The best idea is to have a medium sized project that you keep in a bag and only take out when going to a meeting - that way you always have everything to hand.

Sushi

I sat down to blog about sushi (of all things) last night, and got majorly distracted looking for a suitable photo on Google Images to illustrate the post. All of a sudden it was past my bedtime! I'm going to have to do my own 'food styling' to get just what I want.

I was thinking about sushi because that's what Bern volunteered to bring for a work morning tea this morning. So we came home last evening from homegroup and started rolling sushi at 9.45pm. In the event, he wasn't well this morning, and didn't go to work, so the kids had some sushi in their lunchboxes, and we can have the rest as an entre tonight.

I can't remember why we made our first sushi, but it has become something that Sophie is the expert at. We usually make vegetarian sushi, with pickled ginger, cucumber, carrot, avacado, etc. (This is because some people in our house are fussy about fish (!), and we don't usually shop for special ingredients, so just use what we have in the fridge.) Served with soy sauce for dipping, and very dilute wasabi paste. When we were away on holiday with friends in January we had some very elegant picnics with sushi (and salads, bread, etc). It's actually very portable, if you take a board and cut it up at the picnic site.

Chickens at playcentre

Well, there's never a dull moment here. I took G and I(child) to Playcentre yesterday - and Henrietta had brought two chickens for a visit! They 'free-ranged' around the outside area, pecking under the bushes and generally ignoring the children. The kids, I in particular, thought they were fascinating, watching, pointing, and coming back to watch them again later. Great to have a 'country experience' for these city kids.

Meanwhile, G was very involved with cars and trains during the session. She was rolling cars down a ramp into the water trough, and later walking round and round a table which had the train set out on it, rolling carriages. Very engaged with both. 'Rotary' or possibly 'trajectory' schemas are indicated.

Here's Susan Harper on schemas. Good old Google! (I wonder who else I know has a blog?)

Minimalist water play

Because I am teaching toddlers at the moment, my programme has a strong focus on exploring the elements of the natural world. That means providing opportunities for water, sand, (dirt!!) and natural materials every day. Water in particular has a very strong fascination for most toddlers, and though it's something they interact with every day (eg, drinking it, washing in it), they never tire of exploring all its properties. At 1 and a 1/2 they are developing 'working theories' for how it 'works' and how it interacts with other substances (like their clothes, or the ground). They also find it very familiar and soothing.

However, waterplay has one or two limitations. It is quite possible for a toddler to drown in fairly small amounts of it (eg, if they knock their head falling into a bucket of it), and they will also get soaking at any opportunity, until they practice and develop their motor control. (One reason for lots of practice with the stuff.)

One of my favourite ways of offering water play outside is in a shallow tray. I have a plastic tray which I weigh down with biggish stones, and put 1/2 inch of water in it. This needs hardly any supervision as it's impossible to drown in, but provides patting and small splashing opportunities, as well as allowing the toddler to see how stones will change appearance when wet, and then dry in the sun. They can get their hands wet, but won't get their clothes soaking (unless they very carefully sit down in the tray - which I haven't seen yet, but this doesn't mean it won't happen).

I sometimes put a tray of water out as well as a water trough, along with buckets, watering cans and the teaset. But it's particularly useful when I don't want to change the kids clothes again, but still provide water exploration opportunities.

Round the Bays Photos

They have finally got the photos from the Round the Bays funrun up on the web. These are commercial photos and can't be saved to disk, so I can't put on the blog, but you can see me finish at this link. I don't know how long these links will work, but they are good today.

Bernard is here.

Sophie is here.

Jerusha is here.

Bic Runga Concert

The other event of the weekend was that we went to the Bic Runga concert at the Alana estate in Marinborough on Saturday afternoon. The weather turned out hot and sunny; we set up with our blankets and wine and nibbles, kicked back and had a great time. One small niggle was that she only sang for 65 minutes - not enough for 50 bucks. Her sister did some songs as an opener.

During the band's break, when Bic was singing with just her guitar, she suddenly stopped in the middle of the song and declared "there's a man having a pee in that bush over there!" She sounded quite taken aback (well, wouldn't you be?) and laughed, and it took her a minute to get singing again. I bet he was deeply embarrassed (should think so). Very funny.

Some more on Bic here.

The host site is playing up and not printing posts.

(later)
I have got Bern to load Firefox onto my computer, and using that I was able to access the functionality of Blogger. I still don't know why Internet Explorer let me down. I just want my computer to do the things I want - with no complaints!

Martinborough Fair

I went to the Martinborough fair at the weekend, with my sister Annie and several of her friends. They have been making a weekend of it for some year, and it was nice to be invited to join them. The weather is usually good and we were not disappointed this time. It was warm and a bit overcast on Saturday morning (when the fair started) which was all to the good as it kept the heat down. Sunday was a scorcher; we did some local shops and found a shady cafe courtyard for lunch.

Annie and I looked at about half the stalls in the 4-5 hours we had. Far too many to do them all justice. Lots of jewellery this year, and quite a few paintings stalls this year. I always like the textile stalls. I like handmade sewn stuff, and there was lots of woolen crafts too - knitted jerseys, felting, etc. The berries and ice-cream were lovely! We yakked late into the night.

Photo is from Google Images - so probably a previous year.

On sausage packaging

Yesterday we went to a BBQ for Girls Rally at Shoreland Park. This happened to be one of those days when I was extremely organised, and had a caserole in the oven early, so that I could do a bit of study before tea. Sophie reminded me about the BBQ, and of course there wasn't anything suitable in the house to take, so we went to the supermarket on the way. (I am now VERY ORGANISED INDEED for tonight's tea!)

I would like to say thank you very much to Island Bay New World. My usual supermarket is pak'n'save, and in the last few years they have stopped selling sausages in trays of 12. When you have a family of six, 12 is a most convenient number for sausages, and 11 is just no good at all. For some strange reason, pak'n'save started packaging in groups of 11 or 7. I can't think of any moderate group size where 11 or 7, being prime, are of much use, once you get past the toddler stage of only wanting (or getting!) one sausage. (I would quite understand groups of 8 or 10.)

I care about numbers, so this sort of thing bothers me.

Anyway, as I was walking along the meat isle I said a little prayer to the sausage-packing-fairy: "please could there be a tray of 12" - and there was! Lots. Lemonade, bananas, bread, and the salad and sauce from home, and we were away.

ps, I counted 57 seagulls lined up to take bread that was being thrown to entertain a one year old child. Mostly in neat ranks of 4 or 5, and only the front ones josstled each other. Perhaps you have to rise quite a way up the seagull 'pecking order' before you even have a chance to fight for thrown bread!

Read too long. Blog tomorrow.