Andrew Roberts » Parenting

Living Willow Wales at the Lampeter Apple Day

AndrewRoberts — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 08:10:17 +0000

Living Willow Wales stall at Lampeter Apple Day Oct 10th 2009

Living Willow Wales (me and Lisa) did our first willow stall back on Oct 10th 2009 at the Lampeter Apple Day, and lots of fun it was too! Getting everything together was hard work but it seemed to be appreciated. And we even had enough space to put up all of the willow letters we had made. I was a little worried about this as although planned to be smaller our letters ended up each being about a foot high. We put on a little mini workshop for the children by bringing along a couple of Rose’s small table and chairs and providing paper, charcoal pencils (willow of course), willow rods and various willow shapes to copy. Rose did get a little territorial at one point and excluded all other children from the stall by building a barricade of chairs – she’s such a sales women! Several children where running around with willow wands (a simple willow star shape) by the end of the day. We also brought along samples of eachof the different kind of willow that we grow. We’re mainly using and selling the fast-growing structural willow (Viminalis and a viminalis x triandra) at the moment but are building up our stocks of various ornamental and basketery willow. The Salix Ethroflexuosa being the most visually impressive, being corkscrewed and bright red. We had lots of interest in the photos we’ve got of some of the amazing things people have done with willow especially Marcel Kalberer. I wouldn’t say we’ve done anything truly amazing yet, but I’m quite excited about the 40ft space ship we’ve got planned this winter!

As well as us, and apart from the appley things going on (people could bring there apples for pressing), Gary was there with his Maesyffin Mushrooms - loved the pate; a local shoe maker; a miller with flour created using one of the few genuine water mills still in operation; Transistion Lambed; and a couple of other stalls I didn’t get chance to look at.

So with the great weather, all in all a great day out.

We all love maps

AndrewRoberts — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 00:31:52 +0000

I’m a great lover of maps. I can spend many a happy hour poring over maps, especially local maps, looking for a new, undiscovered corner to discover. So you can imagine my delight when Rose drew her first map (that I’m aware of anyway). It had some islands on it that we lived on and some houses, and lots of sea. She’ll be appreciating the tilt feature in Google Earth and flying around the landscape in no time. She also is coming on with her letters, is starting to recognise some more and starting to draw shapes resembling letters, so not long to go there.

After all this acedemic study it was time to let off steam, so Lisa, Jake, Rose and M, who’s staying with us at the moment, went down to Cai Bach beach to have a romp around – I stayed at home and went up to the round house.

Letter from Ffarmers

AndrewRoberts — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 20:24:00 +0000

After the usual frantic start to the day trying to get everyone and everything together, Rose and I headed up to the cottage to do a change-over. The plan was to get there by 10:30 to leave us a bit of time to hang out (I wonder if she is going to learn to hate these mythical people – the customers. “Don’t touch that Rose it’s all tidy for the customers”). We finally arrived about 12, with just enough time to clean. No enjoying the place today. In fact the customers turned up about an hour early and had to be sent off into the hills again.

Rose managed a good bit of self-learning whilst we were up there though: someone had left Scrabble so she spent half an hour making unfeasibly long words and recognised a few letters.

Lisa made the most of being free of Rose and spent the day working herself into the ground in the allotment. When I got home I made a few small steps closer to getting this blog into it’s final state.

Rosie’s Day: Baking, Hugging and Swimming

AndrewRoberts — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 20:34:00 +0000

Well I think Rose has had the busiest and most news worthy day of us all, so I’ll dedicate today’s post to her. She started it off doing a bit of baking with Mum. Rose had bought a fairy cake making kit yesterday when she was down the shops with Lisa and spent the morning making some very tasting cakes (which I greatly enjoyed with a nice cup of tea!) Lisa and Rose then went off to visit Lisa’s knitting buddy who has a four year old little boy called Thomas. They spent the afternoon playing: Thomas likes too show off his strength and carry Rose around in a loving embrace; he read to her for a bit and they spent a while off in pre-schooler make believe land.

When she got back I took her swimming. After an initial burst of piscine enthusiasm (?) when she was a few months old, we’ve recently started a regular jaunt to the swimming pool. There has been lots of kiddy stuff going on down there during the summer, which is fun but the pool gets a bit manic, especially as Rose doesn’t really like getting her face splashed. So the contrast today, now that the kids have back to school was amazing. For a while we had the whole pool to ourselves. The sun was streaming through the windows casting an impressive sun glint on the walls, and making for an almost tropical experience under the water. Rose really loves swimming now and it can be a bit of a challenge trying to get her to leave the pool after the hour is up. She happily swims around the pool with her arm-bands on, which allows me to get a bit more exercise in swimming around, and around and underneath her. We took her bike down but she was a little tired on the way home so I got to carry her bike all the way up the hill. And I think her enthusiam for cycling that day had a been a little tempered by the fall she had trying to negotiate a shallow ditch.

We rounded the day off with a bit of TV, computing (I let her drive while we ordered a new swimming costume off the Internet for Lisa – we could have her in the pool with us soon) and then to bed in her tent

A quick aside as the post has a kiddie theme: I persuaded Jake to come out mountain boarding with me today. Now that the grass is getting a bit flatter the main run is getting faster. We tried a new slope in the next field, which although steeper is a lot more rutted and harder to carve a turn on.

Home Education

AndrewRoberts — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 16:45:00 +0000

Imagine if when you were a kid, one day your mum had said to you “Jimmy, you don’t have to go to school any more if you don’t want to. Apart from helping us out occasionally you can pretty much whatever you like for the rest of your life!” Imagine not growing up with any of the hang-ups that school and society forces down our throats: get some qualifications, get a job, and get on with it. Imagine growing up happy and continuing to be happy for the rest of your life. OK, well maybe not going to school isn’t going to necessarily cancel out everything else bad going on in your life, but we’re forced … forced … to spend our childhood somewhere we probably don’t want to be while our parents pursue jobs that they probably don’t enjoy to earn money to buy things they don’t really need. That can’t be good.

For the first four or five years of a child’s life we trust them to learn all about life and the skills they need with minimal input from us. What changes? Why, all of a sudden should we ship our kids off to school, isolate them from real-life and stick them with 30 other pupils of their own age, amongst 100s of children all of whom are forced to go there, when real-life is going on on the outside. Is school just free childcare? Can we not be bothered to spend time with these amazing little people? OK, they can be a pain in the arse sometimes and you won’t always feel like playing horsies again (!) but surely they deserve a better start than this.

I went through the usual routine: O levels, 5 A and AS levels with a couple more O levels thrown in so I didn’t get bored and finally a degree. John Holt describes a job as what you have to go to earn some money and a career as a series of jobs. Whereas work is something you feel drawn toward, something you really enjoy doing (and hopefully someone is going to pay you to do it). After my degree I spent a “year out” aimlessly wandering around Europe and visiting friends until I got bored and I felt the only option was getting a job. Middle of recession not the best time to be looking for work but I eventually found one and I’m not saying it wasn’t fun at times but I spent a lot of time gazing out of the window at the sunny day going on outside. After four years I eventually built up the bottle to go self-employed, but this still involved a lot of travel so after moving to Wales I finally started to try and find local “work” and carve a niche for myself in West Wales. I used what skills I had: did some tutoring, computer repairs, worked in an animal sanctuary, did some gardening, until computers looked like the easiest and most fun way to make a living and have enough time plenty of time to play. Then a family came along and that is a whole other story. But my point is it took me fourteen adult years until I finally realised that I didn’t have to go out and earn lots of money for stuff I didn’t need. I had been forced to go through education, then what do you do, you get a job. You want to earn as much as you can – fulfil your potential – but what about the stress; the doing what you don’t want to do

FREE THE CHILDREN!