Merl and I are currently attending The Marriage Course, which our church is running/facilitating.
When we first got married (7 years ago) we read the book associated with the course and found it extremely helpful. Lots of very very good advice about listening and communication and prioritising your marriage (like actually making it a priority to spend meaningful time together). Also good stuff about in-laws and love-languages and all that kind of stuff.
But 7 years is a long time ago, and although we have read the book, we don't own a copy, and our skills get rusty. So, despite having 'marriage night' written on our calendar each week and us both making the effort to keep that evening free from outside interruptions, we have not been making the effort to get off the computer or put our book down and actually talk to each other. Neither of us are big 'date' people - we are just as happy to sit home with a mug of hot chocolate - but we haven't really been doing that either... To be honest, we've even been using our 'marriage nights' as the evening to do our monthly budget spreadsheet! Now that is not fun and meaningful time :)
This course is the right thing at the right time for us. With our 2 small girls being such a big part of our family we really do need to make the time and effort to express to each other how much we love each other - otherwise we have just ended up communicating about nappies and dinner and laundry and returning library books and dishes and bills and all the other mundane things that make up our daily existence.
If you are married (or equivalent) I would highly recommend getting along to a course near you. It is run in heaps of countries over the world, and although it is delivered in a Christian context, the actual content of the course is just solid good common sense - applicable by anyone regardless of faith convictions. There is no group discussion time or anything dire like that - you and your partner go, get a candle-lit table for 2, some coffee and cake (supplied by the host church), watch a DVD, which is a recorded version of the live seminars held at Holy Trinity, Brompton, and whenever the DVD is paused for you to converse with your mate, the music is turned way up so you can hear each other, but not what anyone is saying at any other table. There is a workbook which is supplied and contains course notes and space for you to take notes and all that kind of stuff.
We had the 2nd session on Wednesday evening, and it's been great.
Read more...
Apr 11, 2008
Apr 9, 2008
sheep for lawnmowers
Weird news story bit.
Apparently in Turin the local council have decided to use the local sheep herds to keep grass verges etc short, rather than the usual ride-on petrol mowers. This is pretty cool. At first I thought it was an April fools hoax, but if it is, some big papers have been taken in.
Here's the Guardian's coverage
Here's where I first saw it - at Planet Green Read more...
Apparently in Turin the local council have decided to use the local sheep herds to keep grass verges etc short, rather than the usual ride-on petrol mowers. This is pretty cool. At first I thought it was an April fools hoax, but if it is, some big papers have been taken in.
Here's the Guardian's coverage
Here's where I first saw it - at Planet Green Read more...
Apr 8, 2008
The wonders of garlic
Warning: This is a long rambly post about health complaints. The upshot is that garlic-infused olive oil has successfully treated bacterial infections (like boils) and glue ear in our house. Keep reading if you're a sucker for too much detail...
Miss4's body has always seemed to be badly affected by stress. Even as a wee baby she would come out in eczema whenever teething, and her immune system would just collapse - ringworm and earache etc etc just from the usual teething routine that every child goes through.
When I took her to the doc to confirm the ringworm, he looked sadly at her and said "that is one stressed child!", before waltzing out of the room to do something else. Which made me feel like a terrible mother - babies shouldn't be feeling stressed! Fortunately we had a very stable living arrangement, a rock solid daily and weekly routine and very loving home relationships. I shudder to think what the poor child's body might have done if anything else had been going on.
Which brings me to more recent developments. With the return to kindergarten (in New Zealand, kindergarten is like a preschool which kids may attend when they're 3 and 4 years old), Miss4 has started pulling out her hair again. This is a sure sign of her being overtired and overstressed - it happened for several months when we moved to the South Island, and it happened again for a couple of months around the time my mum died in November last year. Her immune system has also packed a total sad. A month ago we were dealing, simultanously, with candida, boils and warts - yep, fungal, bacterial and viral infections. At the same time.
Now, I am a biochemist by training, but even without all those years at varsity, I would probably still know that if you treat the boils with antibiotics then your thrush is going to get worse. And the thrush wasn't responding to the anti-fungal creams we tried anyway.
If we let the boils run their course, they became large and painful and lasted over a week before bursting and draining of their own accord. All the modern literature advises not to burst or lance them yourself - to let nature take its course. But she was in pain and feeling miserable the poor thing, so I wanted to find something to do to help.
So. What to do?
Last winter, when dealing with glue ear and a child who was stone deaf for several weeks, I infused some olive oil with garlic, to try dripping some warm oil into her ears (I was desperate - 2 months of antibiotics was achieving a big fat nothing and my baby couldn't hear). A friend swore by warm garlic oil drops, the internet seemed to give it the cautious nod (apparently it's a very common treatment in Europe), so I tried, three times a day - By day 2 she could hear! This was the child who if you stood right behind her and shouted her name, would give no indication of having heard you. She had a hearing test at kindy - a tympanometry - flat-lined. And two days after starting olive/garlic oil drops she was hearing again. I was ecstatic.
The olive/garlic oil has been sitting in readiness ever since.
In thinking about the candida infection, I had a vague recollection of advice to try oil, even just as a soothing agent while the body caught up with the infection (we had tried topical yoghurt, but Miss4 said it was too stinging and flatly refused to cooperate. She already eats a pottle every day). So I tried the olive/garlic oil - just to see - it could hardly make the situation any worse. And while I was at it, I anointed the two boils that were on the increase at the time.
The thrush is an ongoing thing. The oil seems to help keep the irritation down, which is good, and things are improving, but slowly. But the amazing thing was the boils! By the next evening, they were less red and angry looking and Miss4 reported on them being not as sore. I continued to oil the boils twice a day and within 5 days they were what I would call 'healed' - they hadn't progressed and burst, on the contrary they had just gotten smaller and gone away. I kept the oil treatment up for another 3 or 4 days, and all is still well!
Yay for garlic. Good for ears, good for bacterial infections, good for cooking! Could there be a more perfect food :) I will definitely keep this one in mind and see how it works on things like infected hang-nails and that sort of thing.
p.s. We have dropped the number of days that Miss4 is enrolled at kindy. 5 whole mornings is clearly too much for her, so during the winter terms at least, she will be at kindy for 3 mornings and home for the other 4 of the week. A 4 year old should not be desperately hanging out for the holidays! Read more...
Miss4's body has always seemed to be badly affected by stress. Even as a wee baby she would come out in eczema whenever teething, and her immune system would just collapse - ringworm and earache etc etc just from the usual teething routine that every child goes through.
When I took her to the doc to confirm the ringworm, he looked sadly at her and said "that is one stressed child!", before waltzing out of the room to do something else. Which made me feel like a terrible mother - babies shouldn't be feeling stressed! Fortunately we had a very stable living arrangement, a rock solid daily and weekly routine and very loving home relationships. I shudder to think what the poor child's body might have done if anything else had been going on.
Which brings me to more recent developments. With the return to kindergarten (in New Zealand, kindergarten is like a preschool which kids may attend when they're 3 and 4 years old), Miss4 has started pulling out her hair again. This is a sure sign of her being overtired and overstressed - it happened for several months when we moved to the South Island, and it happened again for a couple of months around the time my mum died in November last year. Her immune system has also packed a total sad. A month ago we were dealing, simultanously, with candida, boils and warts - yep, fungal, bacterial and viral infections. At the same time.
Now, I am a biochemist by training, but even without all those years at varsity, I would probably still know that if you treat the boils with antibiotics then your thrush is going to get worse. And the thrush wasn't responding to the anti-fungal creams we tried anyway.
If we let the boils run their course, they became large and painful and lasted over a week before bursting and draining of their own accord. All the modern literature advises not to burst or lance them yourself - to let nature take its course. But she was in pain and feeling miserable the poor thing, so I wanted to find something to do to help.
So. What to do?
Last winter, when dealing with glue ear and a child who was stone deaf for several weeks, I infused some olive oil with garlic, to try dripping some warm oil into her ears (I was desperate - 2 months of antibiotics was achieving a big fat nothing and my baby couldn't hear). A friend swore by warm garlic oil drops, the internet seemed to give it the cautious nod (apparently it's a very common treatment in Europe), so I tried, three times a day - By day 2 she could hear! This was the child who if you stood right behind her and shouted her name, would give no indication of having heard you. She had a hearing test at kindy - a tympanometry - flat-lined. And two days after starting olive/garlic oil drops she was hearing again. I was ecstatic.
The olive/garlic oil has been sitting in readiness ever since.
In thinking about the candida infection, I had a vague recollection of advice to try oil, even just as a soothing agent while the body caught up with the infection (we had tried topical yoghurt, but Miss4 said it was too stinging and flatly refused to cooperate. She already eats a pottle every day). So I tried the olive/garlic oil - just to see - it could hardly make the situation any worse. And while I was at it, I anointed the two boils that were on the increase at the time.
The thrush is an ongoing thing. The oil seems to help keep the irritation down, which is good, and things are improving, but slowly. But the amazing thing was the boils! By the next evening, they were less red and angry looking and Miss4 reported on them being not as sore. I continued to oil the boils twice a day and within 5 days they were what I would call 'healed' - they hadn't progressed and burst, on the contrary they had just gotten smaller and gone away. I kept the oil treatment up for another 3 or 4 days, and all is still well!
Yay for garlic. Good for ears, good for bacterial infections, good for cooking! Could there be a more perfect food :) I will definitely keep this one in mind and see how it works on things like infected hang-nails and that sort of thing.
p.s. We have dropped the number of days that Miss4 is enrolled at kindy. 5 whole mornings is clearly too much for her, so during the winter terms at least, she will be at kindy for 3 mornings and home for the other 4 of the week. A 4 year old should not be desperately hanging out for the holidays! Read more...
Apr 7, 2008
Link to home ed discussion
I've been spending some time lurking at the New Zealand Association for Gifted Children (NZAGC) 'phorum'
This particular thread here "A Hard Choice to Make" was quite helpful to me in thinking about home education. There is good up-to-date NZ-specific information from parents who are homeschooling their kids. Also, there is some good to-ing and fro-ing between people asking the usual questions (How do you know it's the right thing? What about socialisation? Aren't homeschoolers reclusive freaks?...), and people who have gotten quite good at answering them :) Read more...
This particular thread here "A Hard Choice to Make" was quite helpful to me in thinking about home education. There is good up-to-date NZ-specific information from parents who are homeschooling their kids. Also, there is some good to-ing and fro-ing between people asking the usual questions (How do you know it's the right thing? What about socialisation? Aren't homeschoolers reclusive freaks?...), and people who have gotten quite good at answering them :) Read more...
Apr 5, 2008
Book Review - White Owl, Barn Owl
We got this book out from our library last week. Miss4 loves it. The illustrations are magical, and the gentle story of a Grandpa building a nesting box for barn owls then taking his granddaughter out in the evenings to quietly see if a barn owl appears is just lovely. "We were patient lots of times!" reads the text - just what I can imagine Miss4 saying.
The story is surrounded by good barn owl information - how they hunt, where they nest, what they eat, why and how they are so silent when they fly... A great 'living book' of natural history for picture-book aged readers.
At the end of the book are instructions for making a couple of types of nesting box, so you can help provide shelter for these increasingly endangered beautiful birds. They have a widespread distribution on Earth, but are endangered in some areas (like the Midwestern US) due to habitat destruction. More barn owl info here
Now I wish Barn Owls lived in NZ so we could build a nesting box!
. Read more...
Apr 4, 2008
Have meat, will eat :)
Mmmmmmm. Meat.
My sister-in-law works on a mixed dairy-beef farm, and we finally got organised with another sister and a nephew and a friend to share a cow. yay.
We bought 1/4 of a beast, and it arrived over the weekend, all butchered and packaged into "3 person" portions. I am very excited.
I cooked up the first lot of it last night. Oh boy is there a lot of meat in one of those portions! These butchers are clearly used to packaging meat for country folks :) So it will be eat some, freeze some for the casserole cuts. Which works out very well, actually , as there are quite a few days when I get to 4.30pm and realise I have no idea what is for dinner, and I love being able to grab a home-cooked meal from the freezer. Read more...
My sister-in-law works on a mixed dairy-beef farm, and we finally got organised with another sister and a nephew and a friend to share a cow. yay.
We bought 1/4 of a beast, and it arrived over the weekend, all butchered and packaged into "3 person" portions. I am very excited.
I cooked up the first lot of it last night. Oh boy is there a lot of meat in one of those portions! These butchers are clearly used to packaging meat for country folks :) So it will be eat some, freeze some for the casserole cuts. Which works out very well, actually , as there are quite a few days when I get to 4.30pm and realise I have no idea what is for dinner, and I love being able to grab a home-cooked meal from the freezer. Read more...
Apr 1, 2008
You mean I get to do this forever??
We were in the garden the other day, Miss4 and I, doing some drawing in our 'nature books'. At least, I was drawing a fuschia on a bit of scrap paper, while she was drawing 'grass' in her scrapbook.
She was chattering away, as is her wont, while I was drawing, and it became apparent that I wasn't really listening...
Indeed. Read more...
She was chattering away, as is her wont, while I was drawing, and it became apparent that I wasn't really listening...
"I'm sorry love, I wasn't really listening, what did you say?"
"Why weren't you listening? When I was talking, Mum? Why did you just carry on doing your drawing and not be paying attention? Why did you?" (not hurt or sad or anything, just a continual stream of why why why...)
"Sorry, sweetheart, I was concentrating on my drawing. This is something I am just learning how to do so I need to concentrate so I can do the best I can.
"Why?"
"Because I'm still learning how to draw"
...silence for about 2 seconds..
"Wow! You mean Grown-Ups can learn things?!"
Indeed. Read more...
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