Ocean

It is chilly, the rain is starting, and the wind at my back sends streams of loose sand skittering around me as I walk. I cut across to the water and stand, taking in the grey skies, the powerful surf relentless on the sand in front of me. Here is the moment my whole morning has been building up to. On the bus I considered whether my determination would trump today’s weather. But now I’m here, I know there’s no point if I don’t go ahead. I squat down and take off one shoe and sock, then the other, and roll up my jeans. The wet, dark sand feels amazing between my toes. The first breaker hits my feet and I feel washed with energy. It is not the biting cold I was bracing myself for. I feel all the tension in my body pour out and I let out a huge involuntary sigh of relief. It has been several months since my last bare‑foot encounter with the ocean. I have so missed this feeling.

In Dar es Salaam we lived less than 20 minutes from the Indian Ocean but rarely went, until a photographer friend of ours offered to do a photo shoot with us at the beach. We had to be there early to get the best light, and we had the whole beach to ourselves before the sun got really hot. We enjoyed it so much that we decided to build regular visits into our schedule. From then on, we would get up early one morning each week and spend 20 minutes walking along the beach. We prioritized it because we all felt great when we went. At the time, we were living in a very electrically harmful environment, and I was suffering from a lot of weakness in my legs. But after dipping my toes in the ocean I would feel strong, and even be able to run down the beach, when the day before I’d had difficulty standing! I noticed that on days when I didn’t dip my feet in, I didn’t get that benefit, even if I walked bare-foot on the sand. At the time I assumed it must be the minerals in the water which my body was so in need of. Recently though I read that the ocean is a great way to ‘ground’ yourself, and I realised that this is probably why I feel so great each time I get my toes in the water. It’s literally resetting my body back to the earth’s natural electro-magnetic field.

Tanzanian Beach

For several minutes, cold breakers wash over my feet and I enjoy the sensation of being pulled into this powerful drama between ocean and land. Soon though the drumming of the rain on my hood breaks into my thoughts, and I know it’s time to leave. I stuff my wet, sandy feet back into my socks and shoes, and plough through the thickening rain to my bus stop, a smile spreading across my face.

Countdown to Half Term

We’ve had a good couple of weeks, and Esther’s doing great but we’re both pretty much ready for half term here! It’s hard to keep the pace going into week 6, but we’ll push on so we can enjoy our break.

Last week we finished up place value for now and moved on to addition strategies and fact families. There’s a wonderful website I’ve discovered called TeachersPayTeachers, where you can buy, or download for free, worksheets and activities created by teachers. It’s great for games, and useful if you need a different (and pretty!) way of explaining something. I found this Fact Family French Fry activity there, and posters for addition strategies. We’ve focussed on learning the numbers which add up to ten this week, through her workbook and games. We used old water bottles as manipulatives yesterday. Esther enjoys using bigger objects for maths - I think because it gives her more opportunity for gross motor movements.

We started learning about Israel last week in history & geography. I’ve been trying to use the internet more when our book choices don’t seem captivating enough. A couple of our books on Israel look like they’re aimed at older kids, so we’ll probably only spend 3 weeks instead of 4 on Israel. One of the books we read (Zvuvi’s Israel) mentioned a lot of tourist sites, and anytime we read about something we were interested in seeing, we made a note of it, and then researched them on youtube. We learnt about how silk and honey are made, watched a Tortoise Olympics at a Jerusalem zoo, saw a Hanukkah torch parade, watched people zipline down Manara Cliffs and learned about Dona Gracia. It was really fun! I need to remember youtube for future weeks! Granny and Grandpa are in Israel right now, so we had fun looking at their photos of Jerusalem. Another fun thing Esther got into was making a little model Sukkah in a cardboard box, as it was the festival of Sukkot.

Inside the sukkah 

In science we’ve started learning about brains this week. We’ve got some good books for this topic, and a few times Esther’s mentioned something we read out of school time (always a good sign!). I had planned to do a sheep’s brain dissection with her, but I lost my courage at the butcher’s this week... Maybe next week!

There was a lot of other activity going on this week, which has made school suffer a bit. Sid was away for 3 days at the start of the week, we’ve had power outages nearly every day meaning a lot of generator noise around us and not much good sleep, and there’s been a lot of rain and a storm or two. Also our househelp was off sick one day. So I’ve been winging it a little with school this week, but hoping to get back on an even keel over the next week and finish strong J Today Esther asked for a day off schoolwork, so for a couple of hours we read a biography of Clara Barton, which she loved and is finishing by herself as I write this. We didn’t do Wacky Wednesday this week, because I just plain forgot... But last week’s wacky idea was that every question either of us asked had to be sung theatrically with a scarf around our necks! The penalty for forgetting was a maths question, and there was a prize for whoever put the most energy into their questions. It was fun to start with, but got to be hugely annoying as we realised just how much of our day is spent in asking each other questions! I guess we got a lot of maths practice, and Esther won a logic puzzle book for her
show(wo)manship.

Roll on the weekend!

 

'Welcome home' sign for Daddy 

 

Some art she was working on this week

 

Our Bible verse 

 

A photo Esther took of her climbing tree

  

An arrow to direct the tooth fairy to the envelope she made holding her latest lost tooth. Still took the fairy a couple of nights to find it!

 

Wacky Wednesday, and Whose Learning Schedule Are We On?!

Here’s an update on our weeks 2 and 3 of school. We added in several things last week, so we’re now going almost full steam ahead, following the schedule I made.

Our maths books arrived (big sighs of relief from me!). We’re using Singapore 2A, and we use it most days but if there’s a concept she’s not getting from the book I try to find other ways to work on it. This week was on place value, and towards the end Esther has hit a wall (I think with school in general, not just maths!), so I’m secretly considering maths cancelled this week, so anything we do is a bonus. We have some funny maths books called ‘Life of Fred’, so we read from that and a biography of Archimedes, and played place value games towards the end of the week. On Thursday she requested that we not do anything that makes her think, but was still happy to play a game J

 

Week 2’s history and geography focus was on Iraq. We read a bit about the Iraq war, some folk tales, and some history from Mesopotamia. I found out that Ninevah, Babylon and Ur are all in Iraq. Interesting to think of Jonah, Daniel and Abraham walking this land. To be honest though, Esther just wasn’t very interested in Iraq! The non-fiction books I’d picked were probably a bit beyond her. And presenting her on Friday with a page to fill in of what she’s learnt tipped her over the edge... End of Iraq.

 

Week 3 was Lebanon, which has gone much better. We read a kid’s A to Z book of Lebanon and watched youtube clips of things that interested us: Jeita Grotto (a huge cave), traditional olive oil production, Lady Hester Stanhope and Eleanor Roosevelt (not sure how we got to her?). We read about Lebanese food and climate, and talked about the Syrian refugees flooding into the country.

For Brain Breaks this week, we’ve done some stretching exercises, danced, sung along to a Sesame St DVD and Esther’s cycled outside. I haven’t had a whole lot of energy this week, so we’ve both been a bit reluctant. Stretching is good though J

For science we read more about bones, and did an experiment leaving a chicken bone in vinegar to see if we could knot it after a week. Apparently the vinegar pulls out the calcium. It was bendy but not knottable, so we put it back in for another week. Esther also had her thumbs taped to her hands for 10 minutes (downscaled from a full day!).

 

 

I love her sense of humour!

Then we read about muscles. As with Iraq, this hasn’t really captured her attention. Maybe next’s week’s experiments will draw her in. I’ve given her free reign on the rest of the term’s books, so she’s been reading ahead – chapter books on Israel and a boy who loses his sight. I can tend to get over‑invested in a schedule when I’ve put so much time into it, and I start feeling anxious when we wander away from it, as if we’re getting ‘behind’. But actually, I really do believe that pushing Esther to learn something she’s not interested in is counter-productive. At this age, part of my job is to present the particular facets of a topic that I think will grab her attention so she’ll want to learn more (pulling rather than pushing). As she gets older she’ll hopefully learn how to root out the interesting for herself. So I’ve had to remind myself several times that when we go off (my) schedule it’s because she is learning (on her schedule), and any learning that she chooses is far more meaningful to her than learning I choose for her. Somehow the prior expense of time and money in a different direction makes that harder to remember! But I am trying to go with it and encourage her interests.

Our handwriting program has been quite a hit. We started cursive last year but I wanted to take a step back because I’m not sure her hand muscles are quite as strong as they need to be. So we’re using Callirobics, a 10-week program which practices individual curves and lines that are used in cursive without writing the letters themselves. We’re both doing it every day, and enjoying it.

Another great thing we did this week was having a Wacky Wednesday...

The idea is to do school differently for the day, to make things a bit more fun. Some ideas from my list for future weeks: choose a different laugh for the day and use it as often as you can; make and wear a silly hat for the day; all questions have to be sung; wear your clothes backwards, etc. This week I hid all the school books in different rooms. Esther had to hunt for them and we did each subject in whichever room it was found. It took a bit longer because of the hunting, but she LOVED it! Our favourite was writing letters in her den under the stairs J

Geography on the balcony and science on the patio :)

Back to (Home)school – Week 1

For at least the last month, Esther and I have both been soooo excited to start back at school! We’ve had 2 and a half months off over the summer while we moved house and I planned out this year of school and had books shipped over, and it definitely feels like time to get back into the swing of things!

On Sunday night, after dinner we gave Esther a back-to-school present and card, played a game together and prayed for her new year of school. We all enjoyed that and I think it will feature as a tradition for future years.

 

I wanted the first day back to be fun and light, so I had planned a surprise day at the beach (take some books, read, walk on the beach, swim...). But when I told Esther in the morning she looked completely crestfallen and asked why we couldn’t start in the schoolroom today! So we started in  on Monday, going at half speed. My plan is to start with just the basics, get into the new routine and gradually add in other subjects as we pick up speed. Also some of our books hadn’t arrived yet, so even my ‘go slow’ schedule had to be pruned back a bit! I’m aiming for full speed by week 3 or 4.

Our schedule:

After breakfast, Esther has half an hour to run around outside and get some energy out. She also has a couple of Brain Breaks through the morning to stretch, dance and go a bit crazy. I’ve realised if we don’t do this, the school day is very quickly derailed! This year we’re starting with 5 minutes of memory work. I’m using a book called ‘Sword Fighting’, which gives a Bible verse to learn each week with a daily Bible study. We’re just doing the memorising for now. Esther has a great visual memory, so this is a good way to start the day with something that plays to her strengths.

Then we have half an hour of maths. Our maths books hadn’t arrived at the start of the week so we played maths games this week instead.

 

This year we’ll be focusing on the Middle East and Asia for History and Geography. I try to weave Esther’s interests into what we do as much as possible, and she had asked if we could learn about Asia this year. As I hunted for homeschool curriculum on Asia for 2^nd grade I found... a big fat NOTHING. So a lot of my time this summer has been spent putting together a booklist and activities on Asia. (This is the kind of thing I could happily spend all day doing!) We’re learning about the Middle East until Christmas, and we kicked off the year with Iran, just because those are the books that had already arrived.

 

For science, Esther has been very keen to learn about the human body, so I decided we would spend a year on that and really get into it. She loves engaging books, and hands-on activities, so (after 3 years of homeschooling Esther!) I’ve finally figured out that as long as I base my curriculum on those we stand a good chance of success. I looked for a premade curriculum that would meet our needs and couldn’t find anything that fitted. Then I found a plan another homeschool mum had made for her son, which was such a God-send. I had to tweak it because Esther’s not so into blood and gore, but it was a great base to work from. This week we’ve been learning about bones. We read, and played a game called Skeletons in the Closet which helped us learn the names of the major bones (and we had a lot of fun playing with the skeletons after too!).

We’ve also been tracking new words we’ve come across on our Word Wall. Looking back over the week’s words they seem a little gruesome! We’ve had abyss, massacre, cartilage, stench, scorn, terror-stricken and vertebrae among others! That’s what you get for reading about a 12^th century trip across Asia, and skeletons.

 

We had Outdoor Hour on Tuesday, and collected some interesting things from the garden to study. Any advice on how to identify what we find gratefully received!

We had a Letter Writing session on Wednesday. Esther wrote a birthday card to a friend’s imaginary little sister called Dorothy. I didn’t get a photo before it went in the envelope!

On Thursday morning, Esther didn’t look too good and asked if we could skip school for the day. She rested and played and we read together a bit. On Friday she spent the whole day in bed and then threw up in the evening. Today she’s totally back to her normal self, and we were able to have friends over this morning. I’m so glad she got rid of whatever it was, and we’re looking forward to cracking on with week 2!

I’ve been reminiscing today about life as a kid. This week, our church has been discussing God’s creative nature and how, being made in His image, we people are all creative.  One of the questions we discussed this week was what creative things we used to do as kids.

The question brought memories flooding into my mind, and I’m feeling so blessed today to have such amazing siblings to have shared so many fun times with!

-          We improvised radio shows which we taped, with presenters, interviews, our own music, ads

-          We wrote comics and magazines

-          I vividly remember making blueprints for a blackberry jam factory to operate from my bedroom, designing a cart that would need to go up and down the stairs with blackberries

-          We used to make up all sorts of pretend games outside – we made the garden into a town and each of us had our own tree to sit in. I spent many happy hours up my tree with a penknife and an old block of plaster, carving little things.

-          We got hold of an old wooden go-cart one year, and spent the whole of a summer going up and down the road on it

-          I used to have a box of mechanical parts to make inventions out of. I wrote a little book of my inventions, which included a bendable fence so I could sneak across to our friends’ garden next‑door

-          We had a typewriter, which opened up a new world of fun - I used it to type stories, menus, order forms, magazines

-          We loved collecting conkers – and I guess we had conker fights, but all I remember is the collecting!

-          Once we decided to make an underground house in the garden. It was very important to us that it be a secret, so we would go out early in the morning in our pyjamas with a spade and take turns digging. I think we were also hoping to reach China. I’m sure we couldn’t have kept it secret more than a week, and once it was discovered we had to fill it all back in again

-          I made a little doll’s house out of old boxes and covered the insides with wallpaper samples

-          The game of Monopoly featured heavily in our summer playing. We would play over several days, steering a tortuous path through the unavoidable disputes and fatal interruptions by the cat, only to arrive at the end and find my brother had won yet again, to everyone’s consternation (well, probably mostly mine!)

-          Sunday was a day of rest, which generally meant going somewhere outdoors in the afternoon. When we got home we’d have tea instead of our normal supper, which involved sandwiches, a pot of tea under a rabbit cosy, and chocolate cupcakes at the end. One of the cupcakes would often have an extra silver foil case, which would become the treasure in a treasure hunt, or a paper aeroplane that we would all take turns flying down the stairs

-          We used to play complicated story games with duplo, which revolved around Superbaby and which we all found hilarious

-          Jumping off the top bunk wearing a plastic bag around our neck was good for when it was raining

-          Sometimes we turned the volume down on the TV and narrated it ourselves. I remember one James Bond movie Joel and I narrated, where he was desperately trying to get home to his baked beans. We were both in stitches.

Togetherness is a beautiful thing. Joel, Han and Rach: I couldn’t have asked for better friends and siblings. I miss being ten with you.

One Year of Gluten-Freedom!

Yesterday I was celebrating one year of gluten-freedom! I wanted to share some of my story with you, as a testimony of what God has done in me recently, and also to give my friends more of a window into my life. I know I haven’t been very good at communicating what’s going on with my health to people who matter to me, so apologies for the frequent silences and I hope this goes some way to explain where I’m at!

One year ago, I was living with severe symptoms of something. It was a huge struggle to get through a day without a nap. I would go to bed at night tired and often wake up 10 hours later just as tired. My muscles ached. My stomach was bloated and sore. My brain was in a permanent fog. I would forget words, people’s names, the point of what I had just started saying. Conversations were very difficult. I couldn’t follow what people were saying. It was very hard to process things going on around me. My brain couldn’t cope with any extra stimuli. If there was any background noise or activity while someone was talking to me, I couldn’t tune it out. And I couldn’t express myself in conversation. If I could write it down, I would get it out eventually, but in person everything moved too fast for my brain to keep up. I dreamed of being able to shut myself in my room with a pile of books and not have to talk to anyone. Most days I would assess my energy as 1 or 2 out of 10. It was a huge achievement for me if I was able to get dinner ready in the evening having looked after Esther during the day. I had mood swings, feeling snappy and impatient, worried, stressed, cross and sometimes unbearably sad. My creative spark was gone. I clung to routine. I would aggressively avoid trying anything new, because it would use up so much precious energy to process all the new stimuli involved. Even things that should have been restful (a trip to the beach, a backrub or a meal out) were hugely stressful to me. All of these things were impacting on my relationships. Being around people was such a draining and frustrating experience (being unable to fully express myself), that it was hard to develop friendships. As mother to a talkative, inquisitive 5 year old, I struggled to give Esther all the care and attention she needed. It was more and more of a struggle for me to get out and do things with her. Sid was amazing through this, listening, reassuring, comforting, cooking, but it was a continual battle for us to stay connected emotionally.

Many of these symptoms had been there to some degree since I was a child. I remember at age 6 or 7 needing to leave the table at mealtimes to go lie down because my stomach was so painful. They have definitely had a profound impact on my social life and my interactions with people right through my life. Then I was diagnosed with anaemia when I was 17 and an underactive thyroid after Esther was born, so it was easy to assume that any tiredness was related to one of these. Looking back, my symptoms did take a turn for the worse after we moved to Tanzania in October 2010. But I had had problems with my health for so long, I felt like there was nothing I could do to turn the situation around. This was just my lot and I was stuck with it. I really didn’t have any faith to see it change.

Until, one day I was talking with a friend about her health problems… She has low energy and we were talking about possible causes of it, and food allergies came up as we chatted. But it was something about her attitude that struck me. Where I had given up and let it take over, she was frustrated by her lack of energy, and didn’t want to accept it. I remember her saying, “It is not normal to have so little energy!” As I thought later about her reaction, I started to feel increasingly unwilling to let my life slide by in a haze. My mindset changed and I started to think that there has to be a reason for my lack of energy. And, taking it one step further, if there’s a reason, I can ask God and He can show me what it is! The Bible says we should call to God, so that He can show us great and mighty things that we don’t know (Jeremiah 33 verse 3), and that we should seek wisdom, so He can give it to us.

I started reading about food intolerances, and singled out gluten intolerance as matching with my symptoms. I read for a couple of months about how intolerances worked, and how to do an elimination diet to find out what’s causing the problem. While I was reading, I became hyper aware every time I ate gluten that I could be damaging my body even more. So when the date came that I had set as my first day of gluten-freedom, I had actually not consciously eaten it for weeks. It was the 18^th of May 2011, and I was so excited that this might be the solution to all my problems!

As it turned out, this year hasn’t been all smooth sailing. I initially felt better without the gluten, but then it’s been up and down on a daily or weekly basis as I’ve tried to adapt my diet to reflect what my body needs and can cope with. Overall, my health has steadily improved but I have had to turn detective every time my symptoms change or worsen to analyse the links between that and my diet. Did I eat something that might have contained gluten? Do I need to increase my intake of something? Decrease something else? Change one of the supplements I’m taking? Of course, I’m seeing a very good doctor, who has been fantastic, but at the same time I saw very clearly the need to understand this for myself as he is not there at mealtimes!

I have figured out that I most likely have celiac disease (2 close family members just got diagnosed with it). As a result, I suspect I have some major vitamin deficiencies. I also have pernicious anaemia and had a candida overgrowth through my digestive system and possibly something called Leaky Gut Syndrome (which is as nice as it sounds!). I had to drastically change my diet, cutting out a heap of foods (most carbs, almost all processed food, all refined sugar, additives and preservatives on top of gluten). As I cleansed my body of the candida, I lost more than 10% of my body weight in the space of a month and a half. 9 months on, I am just now starting to very slowly gain it back. Many days have felt so frustrating as I would have an energy crash which brought my symptoms flooding back and left me unable to do much more than sit on the sofa, going over the last few meals in my mind.

Despite the struggles, I come to the end of this first year of gluten-freedom with energy! My life looks and feels very different now, praise God! Most days my energy levels are 5 out of 10 (9 being Jack Bauer J). Along with energy crashes, there have been amazing step changes for the good. There was the day when I took a different route home. It was such a small thing, but it was a sign that I was becoming more able to step away from my routine. Then the day came when I realised that I am having ideas again! I had started to wonder, “what if…?” and suddenly I couldn’t stop the ideas coming! This had been absent, and it was amazing how noticeable the change was. A few months ago, another change came as I realised that I felt much more sociable and wanted to spend time with people! I now feel like I want to invest in friendships and am able to start doing that in small ways. I’m also able to process auditory data a lot better, and can even join in a conversation with several people after 7pm! This was unimaginable just a year ago!

As I recover and build my body up nutritionally, I am meeting new challenges. Issues of identity have kept surfacing recently. As I have more energy, I am finding that who I am has been buried under tiredness for years and I now need to separate out the patterns of behaviour that were due to illness, and those coming from my heart. This is an amazing task, as I find what God has put in there! I have always been told, for example, that I’m quiet and shy (because I have always behaved that way), but it always surprised me when people told me that. It didn’t line up with my heart. I’m just at the beginning of the journey, but as I feel my way along I can see that what is in my heart will be expressed more easily with time and healing. I’m excited to see these changes and find out who God made me to be!

Through it all, God is good, and He promises peace for each one of us. John 14 verse 27 says, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.” The word ‘peace’ here is the Hebrew ‘shalom’, which has a much richer meaning in Jewish culture than our narrow word ‘peace’. In Strong’s Concordance, ‘Shalom’ is listed as “completeness, wholeness, health, peace, welfare, safety, soundness, tranquillity, prosperity, perfectness, fullness, rest, harmony, the absence of agitation or discord”.

I pray this Shalom on you.

Dreams

How do you tell the difference between a dream that’s from our own desires and a dream that comes from God? A new friend asked this question a couple of weeks ago on his blog(http://davidscoffeestains.com/) and as I dug into my own thoughts on this, I was surprised by my answer! I believe all dreams originate from God. Any dream you can think of came from a seed planted by God – desires to grow, multiply, flourish, connect. He is the One who creates and inspires, and all good things come from Him. He puts a desire in our heart, with the expectation that we will flesh it out, bring it forth into reality in a way that’s true to our own identity and context. And you can be sure Satan will do what he can to twist, pervert and crush those dreams – that’s why some dreams end up looking so far from what God intended.

God’s ultimate aim in this process is for His Kingdom to be extended on earth. Once He has planted the seed in our heart, whether it goes on to fulfills His purpose or not depends on how we manage the dream. As we recognize the divine origin of the dream, there is a real temptation to cling to the dream, to hold onto it tightly. We want to push it forward, defend it, bind ourselves tightly to it, because here is something concrete that came from God and it is far easier to align ourselves with the concrete dream than with the ethereal God who gave it to us.

I think the process God calls us to in birthing a dream is rooted in submission. Have you seen sports players run down the field side by side, throwing a ball back and forth between them as they run together? This is how I see us working with God. He plants a dream in our heart, and then sets off running alongside us, expectant, arms ready to receive it back from us. He’s looking for us to give up the dream to Him, to say, “God, You are number one in my life. If this dream never happens but I still have You, I’ll be happy.” As we let go of the dream and run further, we will often hear God yell across, “Ready?” and he tosses it back to us.

I love how organic this process is! God takes immense pleasure from seeing us bring our own unique brand of creativity to bear on our dreams, making them a reality in a way that no-one else would do. So if He gives your dream back to you, just be sure to keep running with it! I also think He designed this way of partnering with us to strengthen our relationship with Him. His heart is always for relationship with us.

So how does this view help if I have a dream in front of me and want to know whether to invest in it? I think looking at the dream is always going to show up God’s fingerprints, because He planted it there. What if we instead chose to look at our hearts? Am I submitted to God? Have I given this dream to Him and really let go of it? Am I ready to partner closely with Him on this, His way? A heart submitted to Him is God’s dream, because no matter what state we are in, He can work with that.