The Sick Book

I’ve been absent for some time. E and D are now fully qualified toddlers, each with a new sister, and we’ve all had many adventures together.

It’s a wet Bank Holiday today and as a treat I decided to update the sick book. I started it more than 30 years ago, before any of my own children were born. I collected together lots of puzzles, games, activities and stories – all cut out from various magazines or comics. They were all pasted into one of those lovely large scrap books with a proper wire spine holding the pages together. On the front I stuck a montage of interesting little pictures, which for many years gave it its special appeal.

When my children were ill, I’d give them the sick book so they could do the puzzles and read the stories. They could do the activities as well if they were up to it, but if not, at least they could get some inspiration. Over time, the little puzzles were filled in and various other bits coloured, but the book endured.

Today I started its makeover. I’ve re-covered the front with new pictures, but with great regret, didn’t photograph the original cover before I tore off the old and peeling pictures. I’ve removed or covered over all the ‘completed’ with coloured card things so that fresh puzzles can be put in. I’ve also added lots of new material that I’ve been collecting over the last couple of years. There’s still room for more, but there’s plenty of time before any of the next generation are going to need it.

The sick book is now a mixture of the past (including items such as silver milk tops and old pennies) and the present (a lot glossier).

And as a bonus, absolutely no technology is required to access it!

 

The Box

J did his sword dance in the kilt and sporran after tea.

(Extract from diary of 5^th January 1990)

I recently found an amazing shawl-type thing in a charity shop.  Just right for the dressing up box, I thought.  What dressing up box?  E and D are just about still babies, so a dressing up box is a bit premature.  I bought it anyway.  The future dressing up box is already in my head, so it may as well become a reality.

Dressing up is in the blood.  I loved dressing up so much as a child, that my best friend stopped coming round to play with me because she couldn’t bear doing it anymore.  Fortunately I moved, and found new friends who although weren’t as enthusiastic about it, were very happy for me to dress up so they could launch me on the unwary public (and relatives).  I remember one of their mums hid behind her dad when I appeared at the front door dressed up as an old woman.  I can still hear her shriek “Dennis! Who is it?!”  When I was a student, my very effective disguise as an old woman nearly resulted in an ambulance being called and I was in big trouble with my friends.

I could tell you more about the difficulties of walking as a spring onion, the unexpected pirate party and the very large hat I wore to J’s primary school.  There has been little opportunity to do much since those days, but I’m planning a possible comeback.

The dressing up box was an essential part of my children’s childhood.  It contained such things as the wig I acquired with St. Ivel yoghurt tops, green high heeled shoes (not mine!) and a wooden pirate leg.  The children seemed to be permanently dressed up –entering fancy dress competitions, planning great performances and playing practical jokes and living other lives.

This is my favourite dressing up story:

L came home from school one day and said they all had to go in dressed as a character from a fairy tale.

“So what do you want to be?”

“The Emperor without any clothes.”

“Right…”

…and so I made her a hairy chest.

 

This New Babyhood

It’s about 22 years since I last changed L(2)’s nappy.  It’s amazing how you get out of touch.  When I started to use nappies, nearly 30 years’ ago, they were terry towelling ones.  I think I probably wore them myself when I was a baby.

My first ever attempt at a Terry nappy

When I acquired multiples of children in nappies I advanced onto disposables.  What a relief they were, though I agree, not good for the environment.  Since those long ago days there seems to have been a revolution and it’s taken some time for me to get my head round it.  Granddaughter D wears amazingly fancy nappies with patterns and colours on, no longer hidden away under other clothes, but deliberately displayed for the world to admire.  What’s more, they’re washable.  And here’s something else.  There are even groups and websites where you can buy and swop these nappies.   It’s difficult for me to see what there is to get excited about, but I’m sure it’s a harmless occupation.

Not only have there been changes in nappies, but lots of other things as well.  I’m thinking of baby gyms, long bits of cloth so you can ‘wear your baby’, contraptions for the bath to stop your baby drowning and fancy mess-catching implements.  However did we manage before?

This is today’s world of babyhood and as the babies grow up there will be new things waiting for them that I probably don’t even know about yet.  What I do know is that there is a world of buttons and screens out there and I have to admit, this bothers me a bit.  Not that I’ve anything against these in their right place, but what happens if the babies reach them before they get to other things that are more fundamental to their development?  I can’t give up my real belief that babies need a whole range of experiences and stimuli, before they reach the buttons, so that they grow up as fully rounded human beings.  There is a fascinating world out there that they need to be introduced to.   I’m rather worried that some of them just won’t see it.

Life’s a Beach

Treasures on the beach

The other day I wandered on to a beautiful sandy beach on the French coastline.  As far as the eye could see there were bodies exposed to the sun – sitting, lying, wandering around.  I think I may have been the only person to be fully clothed.  I was certainly the only person sorting through the heaps of seaweed to see if there suitable bits to take home ‘to do things with’.

We always had our noses on the ground

I like to go to the beach, but not to sunbathe.  I like to see what has washed up on the tide, collect shells or look at rock pools.  In fact, one of my earliest memories was finding a white feather on a beach.  I remember bending down and picking it up.  ‘That’s not much of a memory’, you might say, but as I was just over 2½ at the time, I think that’s quite good going.

When my children were young we made a point of going to interesting sorts of beaches and they learnt to wade through mud, created sand sculptures, climbed rocks, collected crabs and beachcombed.  We even had a beachcombing log, where we recorded our finds (we went beachcombing quite often!).  On the list were fishing tackle, pegs, hats, messages in bottles and on one occasion we found a piece of McVities cake still wrapped in its packaging, which we took home and ate.  Delicious!

Grandma’s House

The other day I walked past a shop and a familiar smell wafted out – the smell was of my grandma’s sideboard.  A single smell can release a whole lot of memories and for a moment I was back in her front room, opening the sideboard door and remembering many other things about her home.

Grandma and Grandad had brought up five daughters in their little three bedroomed house.  There was a long dark passageway from the front door to the living room, separated by a heavy curtain.  A huge table filled the middle of the room and this was covered by a green baize tablecloth, until meal times when it was covered by a white cotton one.e sideboard was large and I spent many hours rummaging through one of the drawers, which was filled with all sorts of interesting things.  My favourite toy was a plastic garden set.  This was a board with holes in and you had to poke in little flowers, trees and pots with a small tool to make a garden.  I managed to find a little picture…

Britains Floral Garden Set

I remember the gas lamps and how they spluttered when they were lit, the two bedrooms with a shared door and the two large beds for my mum and three of her sisters, no bathroom, but a giant sink in the kitchen and the tin bath hanging outside on the wall, the long garden with the chickens at the bottom and the front parlour.  This room was hardly ever used, but I would spend hours there playing through a large number of singles on a record player until I reached my favourite – The Ugly Bug Ball sung by Burl Ives.

Last but not least was the toilet.  This was outside and tucked round the back of the kitchen.  I remember once locking myself in there and having to be rescued.  It was also where I hid when Great Grandma visited.   I lived in terror of her hairy face.

My own mother playing, during the 1930s, in the space between the back door and the toilet. It looked exactly like that when I was a little girl.

Sweet Seaweed

We walked down to the shore.  I collected seaweed on a stick for the compost (it was the only way to carry it).  We came across (horse) Bob’s field.  He came quite quickly towards us.  I got over the fence first.  L kindly held my seaweed for me.

(Extract from diary of 1^st January 1993)

Seaweed is one of my favourite things.  It lies around on the beach annoying most people, but I’m always disappointed when I come across a seaweedless beach.

Sea Lettuce (Ulva lactuca)

I’ve known for a very long time that people actually ate seaweed and when J was little I  used to give him toasted seaweed slices as a treat.  Of course, I bought these at the supermarket, but have also tried eating cooked Sea Lettuce, which can be found locally.  It’s not bad.

I then discovered that it could be used as a fertilising material and would be collected in vast quantities for spreading on the fields.  In fact, the rather prolific and smelly Enteromorpha is still collected locally and helps to keep the shoreline from becoming too swamped.  I didn’t own a cart and horse or ox, but I had a wheelbarrow and when we lived very near the sea I would wheel barrows of it back to the garden to spread on the vegetable patch and add to the compost heap.  I still collect bags of it when I can.

Seaweed collectors from Guernsey in about 1901. One of the postcards I bought on holiday there.

We used to make pictures with seaweed when we went to the beach and when the children got bored with it, I carried on alone…

Recently I used small pieces of dried seaweed to make cards.

 There must be so many other possibilities…

Paper Moments (1)

P spent quite a bit of time on the guillotine this morning.

3rd January 1989

How fortunate we are to have so much paper in our ‘paperless society’.  It’s difficult to imagine what it must have been like during the 2^nd World War when there was a paper shortage and anything that could be turned into paper was collected up – rags, string, straw and even stinging nettles.

We have always had an abundance of paper, and yet I’ve very rarely had to buy it.  It comes into the house uninvited and when my children were young, any good bits were used for drawing, modelling, cutting up and the thousand and one other uses they had for it.  Any fancy bits were put into the making drawer, but for everyday use they reused printer paper, the backs of letters, envelopes, cereal packets and other packaging and greetings cards.

I once managed to acquire some discarded wallpaper sample books.  These lasted for years and provided material for card making, collages and long paper chain decorations at Christmas (P once spent a whole day making them).

Wallpaper samples

I made sure they had access to paper, pencils and pens from a very early age, which they could use at any time of day or night, though I preferred them to be in bed at this time.As long as you give them what they need, children will make up their own paper activities, but sometimes they need a spark of an idea.  It doesn’t need to be complicated – paper is a simple thing. This one is top of my list:

Paper Doily

Cut out your basic shape.

Fold in half three times and cut out a few holes.  You might need to practice this a little to make sure it doesn’t fall to pieces once you’ve opened it up.

And here is the doily!

If you glue some coloured pieces of tissue over the holes, you create a stained glass window (or something like).

Woolgathering

As shears are sprung to the open position, they were shut for ease of carrying with a piece of wool tied tightly round the end of the blades. When he reached home the shearer’s wife stripped the wool from the shears, substituting a piece of rag or cord, then washed it and put it away.  When she had saved enough wool she used it for filling a pillow or a cushion.

(Ask the Fellows who Cut the Hay by George Ewart Evans,1956)

This originates from WWI. I found it in the family history collection.

I like the idea of collecting something unwanted until you have enough of it to make something useful.  I definitely like the idea of collecting the little pieces of fleece that a sheep leaves hanging on bushes or fences.  There are so many things you can do with it, apart from using it to stuff a cushion.  You could spin it into actual wool, make it into felt, use it for all sorts of crafts and if you get enough, even insulate the loft!  I have a very old friend who told me that he collected it as a child so his mother could make soft padding for his father’s artificial legs.  That would have been nearly 100 years’ago.

The fleece will need to be washed (in cool soapy water) and carded (combed) to get the bits of twig and other plant matter out.  You don’t need to buy special carders – little dog brushes will do.

I was fortunate enough to get hold of some whole fleeces fresh off the sheep, still with mud and sheep droppings attached.  One of them was from the first shearing of Dingledrop, a lamb that happened to belong to L.  I had a plan to spin the fleece into wool and then weave it into a blanket for her.  Unfortunately, this turned out to be rather ambitious and I didn’t get very far.  After many years, I found the festering fleeces in the loft and they were given their final resting place on the compost  heap.

Hopscotch

We were reminiscing about hopscotch and I was shocked to discover I’d never taught L how to play it.  P and I had once had an exhausting session out on the road when she was quite a grown up teenager.  We must teach the babies (when they’re old enough of course).

I wondered if I could find any instructions?  Oh yes, there are many, but not for the version we played.  The best thing is to try and describe it.

All you need to start it is a piece of chalk and a flatish stone to throw.  Draw the hopscotch like this:

It all starts when the first person to have a go throws their stone onto the 1.  They then hop and jump their way through all the numbers and back.  This is easy at the beginning when you can do one hop on the 4, 7 and 10 and put two feet down on the other numbers.

Your turn ends if your stone misses landing on the right number or you put two feet down when you’re not supposed to, or if you jump on the square that the stone is on.

You then throw your stone onto all the numbers, one by one, and repeat the same hopping and jumping.

Then it becomes a little more interesting –

Once you have worked your way through all 10 numbers you are able to claim a square.  You show this by writing your initials in the corner like this:

You will be allowed to put both feet down on this square, but other people won’t be allowed to jump on it at all, even though they will still have to land their stone on it when they reach that number.

The winner of the game is the one with the most claimed squares at the end.  Of course, the more you claim as you go along the easier it is to win.

I’m so sorry that I never taught L to play this when she was young.  She would have loved it!

 

Cabin Fever

J and I went for a walk.  We found 2 horses and a crowd of chickens, who all rushed over to see us.  One of the horses was obviously a bit too excited to see us and started to break the fence down.  We didn’t hang around too long.

(Extract from diary of 1^st December 1984)

Sometimes you need to get out of the house, but it’s not always easy to think of somewhere to go.  Just walking around can be boring, but there are things you can see or do without paying an entrance fee.

One of the first trips I took J on when he was just a few months’ old was to see the chickens.  We lived on a housing estate, but just on the edge was a small farm, and on this small farm was a field of chickens.  When we got to the wire fence separating us and them, they would charge towards us with great speed and enthusiasm.  J seemed unperturbed by this and I’m sure it has stood him in good stead for the varied experiences he has subsequently had.  When faced with strange things, I’m sure his subconscious tells him ‘I survived the chickens!’

I was always on the lookout for things going on that we could go and see.  Here are a few good ones:

Workmen and building sites (someone’s always mending a hole in the road these days)

Watching street lights being mended (they have those amazing cherry pickers)

Go through a car wash

Watch a car being washed

Feed ducks

Bottle bank

Visit a pet shop

Wander round a local market

Visit the library (sometimes we went twice in one day)

Ride on a bus

Ride on a train

Stand on a bridge (if it’s over water, play Pooh sticks)

Visit the beach – collect stones with holes in, build a sandcastle, make a seaweed picture, make a sand sculpture, go beachcombing, look for other sorts of ‘treasures’, gather materials for craft activities

Go wool gathering (a traditional activity which I’ll talk about more later).