Holiday Survival Guide

Moonstone, our Crystal and Mineral shop, depends much on seasonal trade so we tend to be busiest during school holidays. As a result I carry a subtle constant feeling of guilt that my children are missing out! I’m sure this is the case for many parents. This holiday we have a Gem and Mineral Exhibition in Menlyn Shopping Centre in Pretoria.

My daughter will be jolling with friends but my six year old son will be with me most of the time and even though I’m going to be busy, I’m making a point of creating a holiday survival strategy which makes everyone happy!

H. P.O.A. (Holiday Plan Of Action)

-Stick to his usual bedtime. Its so easy to let this one slip during holiday time but I so often end up with a thoroughly uncooperative young individual on my hands.

-As children are most energetic in the morning hours, I plan to focus on exciting physical playtime early, right after breakfast. Previously I would have tried to pack work in before he wakes up and end up attempting to distract him with things to buy myself time. My kids have always been great at keeping themselves entertained but I’d like to make this holiday fun without overcapitalizing on impressive distractions or making them feel marginalized. So you’ll find us cycling, walking the dog, playing hide and seek and treasure hunting in the garden between 7 and 9 in the morning for the next 2 weeks!

-Organize indoor free play for afternoon down time and make sure there’s always music playing as this will increase his concentration span and feeling of contentment. I'll let him choose as this increases his involvement and affirms that he has a say. He has discovered Bob Dylan recently! Audio books are a winner in my house, and it’s cool to get them to illustrate the story they're listening to.

-Google 'crazy animals' together and select one clear picture to print out everyday with the name for him to copy in detail and then put in an Awesome Animals of the world file that he can take to school first day to show teacher.

-Keep a picture journal of the holiday, each day gets one drawing of the day's events and I may add photos later. 

-Sending him off into the garden with a camera is a great way to ensure hours of new discovery outdoors.

-Kitchen time- I’ll be encouraging him to make a side dish for dinner, popcorn, gluten free banana bread, date balls and co. Also we’ll have a lunch decorating competition daily where I’ll chop a bunch of veggies and other edibles into slices, squares and rounds for him to make funny faces on rice cakes sandwiches, we’ll take photos of them, and he’ll help select the best one at the end.

-Get him to choose the toys that go with when he has to go with to work but give him enough time to select carefully and include books that he enjoys looking through. Where’s Wally is a winner!

- Pack healthy snacks for when we leave the house to prevent crazed starvation buying!

http://freshearthorganicfood.blogspot.com/2012/07/super-easy-healthy-snacks-on-move.html

-Find some cool kid’s events to go to as a treat. This will be easy for us as Plettenberg Bay is the most beautiful place on the planet but is decidedly lean in the Museums, Arts and culture department.

Happy holidays everyone. May the next two weeks find you bonding with your kids, keeping your sanity and not too happy to see it end!

We have chickens! ~ Mariella

We have chickens. Well to be precise, we have chicks, two of them! Chomp, for obvious reasons, and Star. As you may probably be able to discern from the names, they are our children’s chickens! The hours of enjoyment they are getting out of these cute noisy creatures is not as easy to quantify as our primary reason for getting them, free range eggs. 

 

I’ve been putting this off for a while now but it’s so easy to keep chicks. We have a fig cage, about 5x5m, which will be their final home, but for now they are in a little mini cage, which will double up as a chicken tractor and nursery later. They sleep in a box indoors with a red light overhead at night until they get older.

A chicken tractor is a mobile, easy to move structure with a open floor which can be moved about all over the garden, typically over beds which have been harvested and need to be prepped for the next crop. They can be any size or shape, but should have a dry, wind free section built from wood or corrugation with a shelf off the ground where they can sleep in the dry and lay eggs. The rest of the tractor can be clad with chicken wire and open to the weather. Find a more in-depth guide to chicken tractor building here : 

http://sustainablog.org/2011/10/how-to-build-a-chicken-tractor/

I made one out of the wooden side walls of an old tile crate that I got from behind a tile shop in town. I cladded it with chicken wire and that’s it. Some people keep their chickens in chicken tractors all the time and some have a large chicken coop and they put the chickens in the tractor as and when they need land worked over. A friend of mine made the effort to call a large scale free range egg farm who supplies a big supermarket chain to make sure of their methods. She was informed that they were experiencing very little rain so the chickens were not free range for the foreseeable future, when she inquired about the ethics of not altering the branding, she was met with a garbled response….does make one wonder! We buy our eggs at farmer's market just make sure but are looking so forward to our own eggs!

And it’s enjoyable to have ‘livestock’! My photographer friend Anja Wiehl put it better in images than I could in words. It’s all about the cycle of life, you feed the chickens, they lay the eggs, you eat the eggs, you crush the shells up and feed them back to the chickens to make strong healthy eggs, make sense to me!   

Being woman on Woman's Day! ~ Mariella

Today is International Woman’s Day. 

The first National Women's Day happened as far back as the 28 February 1909 in the United States. In 1977 the UN proclaimed the 8^Th of March as the Day for Woman’s rights and World Peace and it took off from there!

Every Woman’s Day I become acutely aware of how privileged I am to lead the life I do,and of how my fore-mothers worked hard for the rights I now have. I become aware of the blessed women around me, of women in countries devoid of basic human rights, of the staggering rape statistics in South Africa and how the only way out, for me, is to strengthen community.

And every time this day comes around I can’t help but think that there isn’t an International Man’s day! A day when we celebrate what it is to be a man in this brave new world. And it really is new, with the rules of the game having changed, being Man today can’t be an easy gig!

There is a very interesting initiative called the ManKind Product committed to building and supporting emotionally mature, accountable and compassionate male role models in our communities.

http://mankindproject.org/

The one way to help redefine, or rather, eradicate, the line between the Macho Oke and Sensitive Male is to refine what it means to be a woman. If I require an emotionally grounded and sensitive, spiritually evolving, physically strong, environmentally responsible, socially considerate Sacred Warrior in my life, then what, exactly am I proposing to cultivate in myself?

I commit to strengthening that within myself which is inherently and uniquely Woman:

~To cultivate the patient mother in me who knows how to guide my children without breaking their spirit, how to nurture them so that when they go out into the world, the words they remember from their youth were of encouragement, reason, affection, clear boundaries.

~To cultivate a secret garden within my life, a labyrinthine realm which is mine alone, a workshop, a clandestine chamber within my soul that I alone have a key for where my Manifestation Machine lives! That crazy, creative, lively, insightful machine which makes my future and drives my fears out with shear enthusiasm and direction, which depends on no one else for replenishment but me.

~To always take the time to consider where I am, how I feel, when I need to rest and to have enough respect for that, that I can freely and clearly communicate it to those around me before I falter.

~To breath!

~To manage my life in a way which cultivates Balance. To be committed to every facet of my life important in keeping me content, be it a weekly phone call to my mom, a daily run around the block even though the laundry needs folding, fresh juice, hugs.

~To cultivate my own sensuality. To take responsibility for creating a new template of femininity which overthrows the limiting public opinion of the ‘empowered woman'. To give the beautiful feminine Goddess within me her space to shine, to leap out from the dark, the shame, the uncertainty, to embrace what makes me a woman and teach this to my daughter.

~To give time to romance. To know that it is not neglectful to separate from the mother and teacher and professional and dive into flowers and chocolates and be assured that it will not fall apart in my absence!

~ Pursue Beauty.

~To work hard and extend myself fully into this life, to not fear healthy ambition.

~To laugh.

~To share and care for those I love and for my natural environment, to affect the lives of those in need in real and lasting ways and to consider the needs of the planet as equal or more important than my own.

~To reach out when I need help.

~To love myself, and be positive about myself, because if I do not champion myself, I cannot expect anyone else to.

And, most important of all; To not beat myself or anyone else up within an inch of my or their lives if I don’t achieve all of the above all of the time, but instead to smile, because I’m Human and a woman and in this great University of life, being Human and a woman rocks!