family Archives - Lulastic and the Hippyshake

Roadschooling: Two parents, four boys, one bus and the whole of New Zealand for the rest of their lives

6 November, 2014

We are hitchhiking on someone else’s roadschooling dream at the moment. Friends we met at the very start of this year, when we were just a few weeks on this fair New Zealand soil, at the unschooling retreat in Foxton. (Going to that retreat was one of the best things we could have done, arriving new here. We made so many fast friends and felt like part of an instant tribe. We held the third unschooling retreat just down the road from our yurt last weekend- 120 unschoolers in the mountains…. Awesomeness.)

Anyway, just one of these families happened to be travelling around the country in a bus. Kind of like us at the time, but with double the children and with indefinite travelling plans, where as we were basically on a hunt for a spot to furrow down our wandering roots.

We kept connecting with Us In A Bus (it’s not actually their surname but you wouldn’t know it to hear us refer to them) through the year and on Monday we began a little holiday with them, our buses united on the road once again.

We are having a bit of a lush time … Totally buzzing out on their nomadic lifestyle. It is helping us recall our hoon around Europe last year (I’m remembering swimming in lakes beneath beautiful sunsets and Tim is remembering banging his head a lot and not having anywhere to do a poo.)

I love Ange and Hamish’s dream, I am totally loving sneaking in with it for a bit. It is a dream fuelled by Lego, sand castles and espresso.

They had safe jobs, a house in a nice town, four happy boys. And then they bought a bus, and began roaming NZ, playing and learning together. Soon they discovered they loved it and sold their house, establishing the bus and the road as their only home. And now they are all happy.

Ange was explaining this morning the rut she felt stuck in before. Tied to a mortgage, no time for fulfilment.

It was when their youngest child was one, after a bout of health issues, that Ange realised that the isolation she felt was having a serious impact on her sanity. They realised that something had to change, if not everything. At that moment they began planning a path out. It took them a year but now they have the life Ange has always imagined was possible for them.

Hamish, Ange, Will, Ethan, Micah and Arlo in a gondola (the word gondola totally cracks me up. Maybe because it reminds me of the word gonads.)

Ange describes wanting a community to bring their kids up with, and somehow, through the freedom of life on the road, they are discovering this. Communing with families all over the country.

They have found places to stay through online networks (like home education Facebook groups) and friends of friends of friends. Sometimes staying a night, sometimes two months if everyone is enjoying themselves.
They’ve had hitch hikers having a sleepover in their (tiny) lounge and have rolled out an extra bed for a visit from Nana.

The boys build stuff and play board games and draw and read and climb and dig and explore, Ange and Hamish taking it in turns to either play or work, running their online businesses with their excellent mobile internet and solar power.

Ange is the driver of their eleven metre beast, wrapping it around some of New Zealand’s gnarliest bends, and Hamish is in charge of meals with each boy choosing a favourite dinner to eat once a week.

In some ways their life is like every other large family’s- they eat around 5:30 each night, time is spent helping the boys navigate tussles, there can never be too many stories read to them, or enough biscuits.

But in other ways it is completely and utterly different. They are free to go wherever they want, they are together all day and all night, they learn from whatever it is they happen to be experiencing.

Last night we parked up on a magnificent beach, putting our buses nose to nose. Right now I am typing this up, looking at the rain thrashing the window and the sun trying to zap the ocean but failing.

The school bus has just driven into the bay, tooting it’s horn frantically, as if trying to round us all up.

But the classroom isn’t for these boys. They are too busy playing for that…

It isn’t everyone’s dream- it is theirs and they have found a way to live it.

And for a little bit, we are living it with them.

Well… drinking their coffee and using their whizzy internet, at least.

Ps You can virtually hitchhike with them via their Us In A Bus blog and their Us In A Bus Instagram and their Facebook.

Featured, yurt life

Yurt Life: Step into our bedroom waggles eyebrows

15 October, 2014

Really, it isn’t like that. Despite now looking like a harem our bedroom is pretty much asexual at the moment. It is our family bed, all four of us sleep there. So when it is time to put on our “business socks” we find somewhere more exciting.

(WOAH! Possibly crossed the how-much-intimacy-on-blog line there…)

So yeah. The harem look. Ramona has recently been saying that she doesn’t like the yurt. She wants a house with walls and better toys. I find it a little bit sad as I’m wondering if she has already picked up on what is “normal” and it is appealing to her. Or perhaps it is just a yearning for something different to what she has. I guess there are kids out there who live in a house with walls and would rather live in a Mongolian tent, right?

In an effort to help her love it more I spent the afternoon turning it into a magical place of dreams.

(Hmmm, yes, for some reason it seems like my brain decided that the answer to “I’d like to sleep somewhere more normal” was to make it even crazier. Gah. Brain.)

Tim found this bed, made of beautiful native timber, on Ebay for £150 (well, $300 NZ), beautiful condition mattress included. We waited for ages for something big enough to come up and then we got this AMAZING bargain. It is absolutely behemothic. Nice one, Tim. I’ve never been opposed to sleeping on a second hand bed, really.

It is super bouncy too, which the girls love.

These whimsical decorations have also hidden half completed craft projects, or projects that never quite worked out.

Like this bathroom mat. Made out of plaited tee shirt yarn, made from old shirts. It was going to be an absolute BARGAIN rug. You would have been astounded. But then when I went to sew it, I couldn’t make it flat and then it turned into a bowl. What the? Anyway, the plaits add a nice touch. I was going to cut the basket bit off but Ramona wanted to keep it as a nest.

So I put a couple of mod podge – retro fabric birds in it.

And I do love this. Although I’m not sure what it is. But it was fun to make, kind of woven wool. I was going to be make loads and then lost interest. Might still get round to it.

At the end of me snapping away, Juno wanted to climb on the bed and read a book. Oh yeah, she knows what people like to see…

“Let her sleep, for tomorrow she will move mountains” I have loved this quote for so long, having liked it on Pinterest last year sometime. (Had to repin as couldn’t find it…) I painted one for my niece and felt it was time to do one for our own daughters. I changed it a little, to be plural. (Are you on Pinterest? Come and say hi!)

Tim had a bit of a laugh though, as it doesn’t seem obvious that the girls sleep here. It is as if we WELL rate ourselves. Don’t wake us up! We are going to change the world tomorrow! Like sleepy Gandhis.

But, maybe it is okay, if you think “moving mountains” is just living a loving life, being kind, being brave in your own way, finding the extraordinary in the ordinary. I think that is where most of the world-changing comes from….

So there it is, a peek at our colourful, harem like yet hermaphrodite, graveyard of failed crafts, Family Bed.

Family Travel, Parenting, Thrifty

Yurt Sweet Yurt – Family Life under Canvas

8 April, 2014

Yurt Sweet Yurt – Family Life under Canvas

Waking up with something crawling on my face has pretty much been a lifelong fear of mine. A fear that was finally realised last Wednesday when a tickling sensation on my cheek pulled me from my dream (my dream was probably about sleep – both my day time and night time reveries are basically about getting more sleep…)

I pulled the tickling thing off my face and flung it on to the floor, I hunkered under the duvet and begged my dream to return quickly, quickly, quickly. But it was too late, I was wide awake and needed to know what the Thing was. I grabbed the torch and peered under the bed.

I was actually relieved to find an enormous Praying Mantis. Far, far better to have a goggle eyed, try hard stick insect having his devout way with my face than his cruel, shiny black scurrying cousin, the Cockroach.

We have a lot of cockroaches and other members of the insect community in our place. ALOT. There isn’t much you can do when the outside is so inside, y’know? Little cracks where the canvas wall meets the floor and gaping holes in the tree house kitchen. There are some serious blurred lines between our home and nature right now.

If the rest of it wasn’t so darn perfect it would definitely be too much.

But fortunately (unfortunately?) we LOVE living here.

We love the yurt which feels like an almost sacred space with it’s circular fluidity. The few things we lugged over from England just fit in it so ideally. The look is retro-yoga-retreat-chic, yeah.

We actually love having nature all up in our grills. We spend 90% of most days outside, which is what life is meant to be like I think. It is still HOT here so we eat our meals on the deck. Both the girls have swings that fly off the deck too.

We have a sort of kitchen cabin off the deck, and through that an old caravan which has become a bit of a play / craft room. We don’t have a bathroom (we smell more than usual) and have a little walk to the composting loo which takes a bit of getting used to.

We love living cooperatively with the other two families on the farm. It is making us fairly certain that we want this community life for our family.

We are surrounded by these little native owls called Moreporks and they sing us to sleep cooing “morepork! morepork!” There are plenty of nocturnal possums too but they have an unwelcome, evil witch cackle.

We love milking the cow (Yep! I am rubbish at it as I have way too much empathy) and collecting the chicken eggs and eating whole meals with 0 food miles.

We will have to see how we get on with the winter. It will involve waking in the night to put a log on the pot belly stove and pinning up wooly stuff all over the inside to insulate. It will be cold but hey, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, eh? We will be so jolly hardy by the end of it.

I just need to be more assertive and get on less intimate terms with the local bugs.

Parenting

How to be a Vegetarian Parent

5 February, 2014

Now. You wouldn’t think I’d need a guest post on raising a vegetarian family, what with being a vegetarian since the tender age of 10 when my plate of sausages I’d ordered in the cafe came accompanied by a little plastic pig and I was traumatised into vegetarianism.

However. The second day of Baby Led Weaning with Ramona I came into the kitchen to see her having a little picnic with her older friends, who had dished out the sausage rolls they’d bought with them and Ramona was gleefully cramming them into her mouth! Ramona now opts for meat, meat and more meat whenever possible…. Although she happily tells everyone as she scoffs that “Mummy doesn’t eat animals!”

So. It is with great interest and delight that I have the wonderful Chris of Thinly Spread contributing to my How To Be A _____ Parent series today, all about her vegetarian family.

I’m delighted to be here on one of my very favourite blogs writing about one of my very favourite things! I have been vegetarian since I was 19 back in 1986 (eek!), my husband cast off his meat eating ways when he was 15 and our children have never eaten a morsel of anything dead. They are now 17, 16, 14 and 8 and are adept at resisting peer pressure, advertisers, well-meaning lunchtime supervisors, friends’ parents and teachers. So – how have we done it?

Thinly Spread’s Top Tips for Raising Vegetarian Children

Tell them why: We’ve always been open about why we don’t eat meat. Obviously when they were younger we spared them the gruesome details and just told them that we didn’t want anything to have to die to feed us, as they got older we talked more about the meat industry itself. Living behind a butcher’s has definitely helped with this one – seeing a whole dead pig being carried in on a bloodied man’s shoulder is far easier to connect with a life gone than a bit of meat, sanitised and wrapped up in cling film on the supermarket shelf.

Make it Easy: It isn’t hard to find veggie treats and sweets so they don’t need to feel they are ‘missing out’. The hardest bit for my youngest in particular is when sweets are handed out at school (on a fellow pupil’s birthday not just teachers chucking sweets at children) but he’s happy now he knows we will trot to the shop and get him a veggie alternative. They even make vegetarian marshmallows now which has made campfires and hot chocolate much easier!

Don’t be Too Worthy: Vegetarianism doesn’t have to be all hearty wholefoods and brown gloop neither does it have to be over complicated and time-consuming. Fill plates with colour and flavour and lots of variety think about texture, smell, flavour and appearance – vegetarian food looks so good!

Grow Your Own: It is so satisfying to pull a parsnip the size of a child out of the ground and then serve it up in a soup or roasted with sage for lunch. Picking sweetcorn cobs and then racing them to the ready boiling water to make the most of their sweet goodness is a memory maker. We have a very small patch but I’ve always made room for a few veg for the pot – it gives them ownership over their food when they’ve grown it from seed and is a fab way of introducing new vegetables to small children! Even a pot of parsley on a windowsill or some cress grown as a caterpillar to add to an egg sandwich delights small children.

Stick to ‘the Rules’ but…: This is the tricky one. Food rebellion is often a child’s first opportunity to flex his/her muscles and test the independence water. One of my children used to store all his food in his cheeks like a hamster and it took all my strength not to make a big issue out of it, another wouldn’t eat carrots for a year – the first is now in his late teens and wolfs down everything at phenomenal speed and the other eats carrots happily. I have tried to allow them freedom to manoeuvre telling them that it’s fine if they want to try meat at other people’s houses but that it won’t be cooked or eaten in ours – none of them have been tempted, so far!

Teach Them To Cook: I think this is important whether you are veggie or not. Giving children ownership over their food, allowing them to choose a recipe to cook and helping them acquire the skills to do so encourages them to explore and to discover new flavours. Mine take great pride in producing a family meal even if it’s just pasta and cheese. Cooking with love is one of life’s simplest pleasures and once they have the tools and techniques to drum up some dinner I can kick back and relax!

I’ve tried to make vegetarianism just ‘what we do’ with no pressure, no drama, just quiet, calm normal every day life. As they’ve grown I’ve gradually introduced more information but made it clear that they can do with it as they wish. I’ve fed them with love with delicious cruelty free food and they are growing into caring, thoughtful adults before my very eyes. In the Autumn my eldest will spread his wings and fly and is contemplating veganism (mainly because he’s not keen on dairy – he used to projectile vomit after a yoghurt as a baby which was quite something to behold – he cleared a whole double bed with a stream of it once) and, at the moment, I can’t imagine any of them popping out for a burger. If they do, I’ll still love them but will bombard them with veggie lasagne, chilli, burgers, salads, soups and cake until they give in!

You can normally find Chris over at Thinly Spread where she blogs about family life and sometimes at her vegetarian food blog Life Is Delicious. She has written about vegetarian food and family life for various sites and publications and you can see some of her recipes on Great British Chefs.

Family Travel

New Year, New Home, New Zealand

28 December, 2013

Today has been our last full day in England for a while. Tomorrow we fly to New Zealand to begin something wholly new. We don’t know what, but we have a few (billion) ideas.

The last week has been a bit emosh, to say the least. My heart jumps into my throat at the littlest thing- my nephew Hudson reading Ramona her bed time story, looking at photos that have captured fun moments from the last few years, saying weepy, snotty Goodbyes to friends who’ve been my besties since I was seven.

It’s been the most overdrawn goodbye in some ways. We began properly telling everyone that we were moving to New Zealand at the start of the summer, mostly through, er, this blog. *note to self- best to tell employers about such a big move before blogging about it*

Then we said Cheerio and galavanted about Europe, than came back with a broken van, then said Laters again and trundled to Spain, then had a leaving party last week, and now, after a million farewells and six months of preparing to go, it’s here for real, quick as a flash, the time to leave.

I fall in love with New Zealand when I’m there. I really do. I moved there when I was 18 and lived there until I was 24. I met Tim there and when Tim and I were having those hypothetical conversations with each other about the possibility of marriage (you know, “If two people had only just met but really loved each other should one, like, ask the other one to get married? It’s just for a friend…”) he asked me which place I considered home. I didn’t think twice. I’d lived in New Zealand for five gleeful years already, three with my folks about and two more without them, without any family at all; “New Zealand! I never want to leave!”

We left about 18 months later, in response to an urge I had to be close to my sister while she had her first baby. And we’ve been here almost seven years…

My sister and I this week- matching blankets, coats and babies! (She is on her third now.)

For about five generations my family has been fairly nomadic- staying in places for just a couple of years at a time. Every generation, until us, have been ministers of religion, living all over the UK and the world for different vocational roles.

My grandparents, whenever anyone asked them what place they loved the most, which area they called home, would always reply, wherever they were, “Right here!”

I guess it’s in my blood a little bit, eh? This love-the-place-you-are thing.

My folks, this week.

Because right now I really feel I am tearing myself away from here. I feel like the London that I spent much of my childhood in has been in my bones all along. That returning to the neighbourhood I grew up in, and raising my girls for a bit here, has kind of unlocked a deep sense of home, a primal “This is my land! These are my people!” kind of thing. (Also, “These are my fried chicken bones! These are my fallen out hair weaves!” – not a patch of ground exists in South London free of these. But they weren’t actually mine, you see…)

We have just had the most wonderful 7 years here. We’ve made so many good, new friends and have rekindled old ones. We’ve had such a lot of adventures, riding our bikes, joining in protests, communal living, wandering streets, going to festivals, picnicking, swimming in rivers.

We arrive in New Zealand at 11:45pm on the 31st December- that is quarter to 2014! It’ll be weird celebrating the New Year with strangers around the baggage carousel (but I’ve had weirder, especially the one involving lots of elderly Scots and bagpipes.)

So, a new year and a new home, and lots of new adventures awaiting us. I just need to find out what a Zealand is, then I’ll get a new one of those too.

Have a lovely celebration yourself, and I wish you a great sense of hope for the year ahead.

*looks around the room at my family, has a bit more of a cry*

Family Travel

Campervanning around Spain with two kids, a surfboard and a caterpillar

25 November, 2013

A Spanish señora, as bronze as she is old, as rotund as she is wrinkly, wearing nothing but the very clothes she was born in raises her ams in the air and claps, everything jiggling. This was not the start of a rude flamenco though, but the middle of a series of star jumps, half submerged in the Mediterranean sea. Superbly, gloriously uninhibited.

Only in Spain.

We are in a desolate, sheltered cove just beneath an old castle built by the Moors. I’m sat here with Juno, poking plump pink jewels from a pomegranate in to our mouths. Tim and Ramona are building the castle in miniature form out of sand and there in the sea just behind them was this buxom old lady, butt naked, tanned deep in every crease. Doing aqua aerobics.

The only other people in sight are a Wedding Cake Top couple perched on the rocks next to the castle having their photos taken. They preen into every classic pose, her glistening white dress billowing, his waistcoat stiff.

It’s as surreal as a Dali, who hails from just around the corner. The sheer peculiarity of the scene strikes my heart with the wand of joy and my brain with the wonder of how we get to be here now, doing this.

These funny little moments happen a lot on the road. I feel tender; easily surprised, amused, unbound and unburdened.

It is obviously the basic awesomeness of having very little to do but sit around in the sun having bizarre things take place around us while the alternative was simply slogging away in the grimey depths of winter in South London.

And perhaps this general, elated sense of feeling is simply just an extension of that; the sense of alternatives. After getting totally lost amongst a tangle of tiny, dodgy streets in the middle of a massive city, coming across a huge square in the shadow of a beautiful basilica where it seems a micro fiesta is taking place just feels completely exhilarating. Because the alternative was getting mugged and stranded and still lost. Waking up next to a roaring ocean, the sun bouncing into the window, is a moment filled with relief that we didn’t get turfed out of the free parking spot by the Guardia over night.

(Or maybe aqua aerobics in the nick, grand basilicas and sunrises on a beach are simply enough in themselves.)

I think I could travel like this forever. This lazy, wild, seize-every-moment or just-sit-around-if-we-want kind of living.

Back on the beach, the lady wades out of the water, pubes dripping, and two enormous Alsatians have bounded onto the castle tower and are barking aggressively at the Just Marrieds. Juno has cast the pomegranate aside in favour of a gob full of sand. Ramona has begun to cry and I realise it is way past lunch and all we have is a gritty pomegranate and half a packet of rice cakes we opened when we first hit the road 4 months ago.

When we first left England our Campervan was jam packed. But new things have been added everyday. There is a Julia Donaldson book, A Squash and a Squeeze, where a wise old man advises a woman who feel her house is too small to take in collection of farm animals. (Mansplaining, I think it is called these days.) At the end of the book she gets rid of the animals and realises her house is perfect for one.

We have acquired a double buggy, for rampaging over dunes. And a secondhand surfboard, which we couldn’t resist but takes up a lot of space. And a pet caterpillar which doesn’t take up much physical space but rather a lot of mental space, trying to keep him alive amidst the mayhem. (We shouldn’t have let him in. It will only end in heartache. His name is, predictably, The Very Hungry Caterpillar.) I concentrate on the principle of A Squash and a Squeeze; this is great preparation for whatever new home we end up in eventually – anything will feel like a mansion compared to this. But mostly I swear as my foot gets stuck in a potty as I’m rummaging in the dirty laundry for the least stinky tee shirt and I bump my head on a bunk. (We are still bumping our heads.) It is a tiny, tiny space but we’ve somehow managed to misplace our two knives so I’m crouching next to the surfboard cutting an onion with a pocket knife.

Calm descends on the beach again. The Guard Dogs have disappeared, the bride and groom have gone to their banquet somewhere and the bare naked lady has gone. We caper around the beach as uninhibited as her, the need for lunch suspended. We are roaring lions, we are diggers, we are splashers, we are laughing baboons.

We are on the same team the four of us. It’s my favourite thing about this trip. With no agenda there are very few power struggles, with all the day to accomplish very few tasks there is no stress bleeding into the adult-child communication, making a gory mess. We all go to bed at 10pm and sleep until the delectable hour of 8am.

We’ve crawled slowly down the southern coast of Spain, coasting from cove to cove, and have landed in the barren, rocky beauty of the Cabo De Gata. We are climbing hills and collecting shells. Foraging pomegranates and oranges. We saw Africa on the horizon, it was pretty epic.

We are unfettered. Free as birds. Each one of us as wild and excitable as toddlers.

We pack up our beach things, now covered in pomegranate, sand and rice cakes gone mushy with sea water. We need to find a shop not having a siesta so we can buy lunch stuff. As we scramble up the hill we pass another old soul, kindred of the Señora, a man this time, himself completely starkers. We obviously missed the NUDISTA sign posts (again!) You know the Nudist Beach signs here are simply stick figures? Two stick figures, one with with two breasts and one with a penis almost as long as his leg. I imagine that for this beach they were probably naked male and female stick figures doing star jumps. An Official Aqua Aerobics in the Altogether beach.

Only in Spain.

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