Asterix the Educator

Children never cease to amaze me with their ability to retain and synthesise information. Also their uncanny knack for bringing up complex subjects when you are distracted, brain-impaired and in a hurry, so that you have the additional challenge of finding simple and suitable but accurate responses.

Breakfast this morning, the usual school day hustle to get up and out of the house. An impromptu lesson in comparative religion comes out of nowhere:

“Mummy, does everybody in the whole world have Christmas on the same day?” – my six-year-old’s thoughts are never far from the anticipation of Christmas right now.

“Well Christmas is always the same day but not everyone celebrates Christmas.”

“Oh yes, some people don’t celebrate birthdays either” – she ponders, they’ve dealt with the astounding fact of some children not having proper birthdays, as there are a couple of Jehovah’s Witnesses at school, who can’t come to birthday parties or eat birthday cake.

“Well there are lots of other religions in the world that don’t believe Jesus is the son of God, and Christmas is his birthday so they don’t celebrate it. They celebrate at different times”

“He was born a long time ago.” She is being Mary in her Nativity play and is thinking herself into her part.

“2006 years ago”, chips in my son who likes to be accurate, “like St John in the year zero.” They were learning about some of the saints last term.

“When there were dinosaurs?”

“No, they didn’t still have dinosaurs then!” My eight year old son is getting a grip on the vastness of time now.

“That was when the ancient Romans ruled a lot of Europe,” I put in, to get time into perspective “like in Asterix......Jesus was born a Jew and they believe in one God. The Romans believed in lots of different gods.”

“Mercury and Jupiter” agrees my son “and Juno.”

Here I obviously look amazed at his knowledge - they haven't touched upon ancient Rome at school.

He explains: "In Asterix the Romans are always saying by Jupiter or by Mercury.”

Here the conversation draws to a close as cereal bowls have been emptied and there is a rush to get dressed and organised for school. My brain reeling, I rewind to check that I haven’t given any inaccurate information, that will be retained and brought out to confound me at a later date. No platitudes or sweeping generalisations are safe in this family, I’m having to sharpen my perceptions and redefine and clarify my own beliefs in order to keep up with my children.

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Strawberry Jinx

This time last year I was afloat in a sea of strawberry jam. Our organic strawberries were prolific, we sorted them and sold the best quality, then I was left with all the seconds to jam. Twice a week I would preside over a madly foaming fragrant pot of strawberry syrup as it converted itself into jam and stack the latest jars onto shelves already groaning under the weight of the previous weeks jamming. I sold loads of jam at the local market, gave it away as Christmas presents and still had enough to see us through to the next strawberry season.

This year I have a sneaking suspicion that the universe has taken me at my word with my mild grumblings and reluctance to face up to the labour of another strawberry season, overflowing with brilliant red fruit to sort, process and jam. Plus I committed a crime against frugality by carelessly letting my very first batch of jam burn, so it is fit only for baking. The strawberries started fruiting as normal, but after a week or two went on strike. Instead of the usual 5 or 6 kilo harvest twice a week, we were getting a mere kilo. We just supplied our one customer with whatever there was, ate the seconds ourselves and had none left over for jamming.

Finally the strawberries seem to be picking up again. Their flavour is sweeter than it has been for ages, they are fewer but less affected by bugs than last year and this week I finally had enough to make a batch of jam. Today as I lovingly stood over it, stirring far more often than necessary, determined that this time it would not burn, I was once again seduced by the bright colour, the rich aroma and the prospect of stocking my shelves again. My three jars won’t last us long but maybe if I’m careful not to complain about the extra work and admit that I love it really, the universe will allow me a few more batches of jam before the end of the season.

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Stormy Post

Post everyday I will ! That Pomo monster is trying to get me though.A storm has knocked out our phone lines - power cut too this morning. I am writing against time before the next storm gets overhead, at my sister-in-law's house. If we get power back at home I'll edit to write more but for now I'm going to hit that publish button while I can.

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Nine Men Morris

This is a game that my son brought home from school. I'd never heard of it before. It is simple enough for a child of 6 or 7 to grasp the rules, but it has the potential for enough fiendish cunning ansd strategy to keep an adult interested. I haven't mastered the finer points of it yet.

Each of two players has nine pieces. White starts and places a piece at any of the intersections or corners of the grid. Black places a piece and you take turns until all the pieces are on the board.

The aim is to get three of your pieces in a row. When you manage that you can choose any piece belonging to your opponent to remove from the game (you cannot take one that is already in a row of three). So you are also trying to stop your opponent gettingthree in a row. Once all the pieces are on the board you take turns moving your pieces one space at a time, still aiming to get three in a row. Usually one person's pieces get decimated fairly quickly, but there is a fall back position. Once you are down to just three pieces you can hop one of your pieces wherever you like on your turn. This can turn your game around. The game ends when one person is down to two pieces and can no longer form a row.

The beauty of this game is that you can play it anywhere. At the beach you could draw the grid in the sand - (three concentric rectangles connected by the four vertical lines) - and use pebbles versus shells as pieces. At home you can draw the grid on paper and use beans or bottletops.

My six year old has mastered the rules and has even on occasion caught me unawares, when I've been trying unobtrusively not to win too easily or to allow her to get ahead, she's suddenly knocked me right out of the game with no mercy. My son of course goes all out to win on all occasions and makes unashamed use of the strategy of moving a counter in and out of a row of three picking off my counters turn after turn. Once I've worked out the secrets of success maybe I'll share them with you...or then again maybe I'll keep them to myself in a devious ploy to win all tournaments when it gets played on the internet!

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Kiss Chaste

My daughter has only two more weeks of kindergarten, she is growing up so fast. The school year ends on Dec 1st and next year she'll be going to Big School. Her interview went fine, she wasn't too shy and she is definitely ready for Class 1. Yesterday she glanced sideways in concealed adoration at her big brother and said "Next year I'll be able to see you all the time."

He is taking his duties as older brother seriously and took it upon himself to prepare her for the rigours of the playground by teaching her the finer points of kiss chase today. I kept well out of the way, overhearing things like "You have to kiss him on the lips, then he has to chase you" as I couldn't trust myself not to pour the cold water of parental angst on this necessary rite of passage, which was accompanied by cascades of giggles.

My children are growing up far too quickly now!

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Christmas in Summer

Christmas is coming and the geese are getting fat. Suddenly we are rehearsing Christmas carols for end of term nativity plays. My son wants to practise 'The Holly and the Ivy' on his recorder. I've dug out my Christmas cake recipe and stocked up on dried fruit and ground almonds for it.

All this festive preparation still seems weird to me coming as it does at the beginning of summer. The long summer holidays lie ahead of us, days of swimming and going to the beach and in the middle of all that a festival that to me says winter, cold, snow, huddling by the fire by candlelight. I think this is the hardest cultural difference to adjust to moving hemispheres. Christmas is such a nostalgia-inducing traditional festival and hot weather just doesn't fit the picture. The Christmas lights are duly strung up in our local town, but we never see them lit as the sun is still shining at bed-time. Mulled wine is best saved for our Midwinter Festival but we do feast on mince pies around Christmas, my sister-in-law being a master hand with melt-in-the-mouth pastry. The traditional turkey and gammon stay on the menu but we usually eat them cold with salads.

For the children this is Christmas though. We wondered about taking them to experience a real English Christmas with Granny and Grandpa one day, and maybe we will, but they might wonder at the thrill of muddy, damp Christmasses in Southern England, not a snowflake falling, dark at four o'clock and never a swimming pool in sight. We're creating a different nostalgia template for them here. One composed of stripey jellies, cutting the tree from our own farm and dragging it to the house only to find it too huge to stand inside even with our generous high ceilings, sewing funny felt tree ornaments for all the family, swimming, beach and braais, picking the last of the strawberries for Christmas lunch and singing Christmas carols by the light of the setting sun rather than candle light.

Every year I leave baking the cake until the week before Christmas and then read in the recipe that I should have baked it months before and wrapped it up, just peeking at it occasionally and dousing it with brandy. I keep telling myself that this year will be different, but convincing myself to bake a Christmas cake when it's hot outside is hard..I never really believe deep down that it is going to be Christmas until the last minute. I hereby promise myself to bake that cake before the end of November, as for Christmas cards....will email ones do? That last posting date for overseas always comes before I've even sprinkled the glitter near a bright coloured piece of card, usually we put together a digital montage of pics of our delightul offspring and email it to all our friends and family on Christmas Eve or New Year's Eve on some years. Six weeks left though - plenty of time - remind me again in a couple of weeks.

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Musical Hats

With all these different Hats to don, today has gone by in a blur of metaphorical millinery.

I started off in Kindergarten Hat. The morning was not quite a smooth as yesterday. The day’s grace accorded guest teachers had been used up and the boys decided to test boundaries a little – just the odd surreptitious bounce off the walls and each other to see what I would do. Holding them all in my consciousness felt more like being pregnant with twins busy kicking and elbowing at the walls of the womb.

The main feature of outside play was a snail race, with the construction of an elaborate track of bark and some slices of log as the winners circle. Much pushing and prodding, lifting up and redirecting was necessary to cajole the snails into competing.

Home to a brief respite in ordinary Mum Hat before putting on Photographer Hat at a jaunty digital angle to resize and fit into a template all the school photos that I took last week. We had a false start with Fireworks on the weekend and had to redo the template in Photoshop to get a better resolution for printing. I did one class of 19 before my bottom became numb and I got up to find it was past four o'clock already.

I flung away that Hat and reached for the billowy, floury Baker number. I’d baked yesterday but we seem to have eaten all three loaves already, so to avert a crisis tomorrow morning it had to be done. Once a batch of Rye Bread was rising I glanced across at the yawningly empty biscuit tin – in for a penny, in for a pound – might as well do a batch of biscuits while I’m at it. Then some dough for pizza for supper, I think this hat must have some extra energy tabs in it. All this to then collapse in a heap, only to remember the NaBloPoMo monster. With no lyrical prose on the go there was nothing for it but to catalogue my day of musical hats, except... bother... I never got round to giving Numerology Hat a twirl today.

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