Barefoot Bliss and the Education of Little Feet

Lined up in the entryway are the children's footwear, protection for various seasons and weather: rubber boots, sneakers and sturdy hikers.  Now that summer has arrived, it is the sandals that are most often in service and they can be found in a happy pile by the door while the boots and shoes stand neatly against the wall.

All winter long we have made sure that our children's feet were properly shod and now it is time to discard even the sandals.  There is nothing more pleasurable that the squish of damp sand between the toes while walking along the beach.

A friend told me about a hike she had taken recently with her two grandsons.  It had rained the day before and they came upon a muddy patch in the trail that could not be avoided.  To the children's surprise, she suggested that they take off their sandals and one of them was enticed to do so.  The feel of mud underfoot and between the toes is so different that that of the sand on the beach.

Our feet give us important information about our surroundings, especially what is below us.  They need to be educated through a variety of movement and tactile experiences.  I remember the first time my grandson sat on a carpet of green grass.  The green pokey spears startled him! His parents were amused by this at first but then realized that he actually needed reassurance.  After a few days, sitting on the grass became a familiar and enjoyable experience for him.

Every new touch experience adds to the child's capacity for sensory discrimination, becoming the basis for sorting and organizing their experiences and, later on, their thoughts.  This is why we have many different natural materials in a Waldorf early childhood setting.  Through our hands and feet we also learn about the different qualities in the material world and, in responding to these sensory experiences, cultivate different qualities in our own being.

Little feet delight in gathering different textural experiences.  In addition to grass, warm flat rocks, tiny tumbling pebbles and flakey wood shavings are different surfaces that might already be in your yard.  Cool moss and ground covers, such as creeping thyme, further expand the kinds of qualities that your child could experience.  Check out your yard to make sure it is safe, although learning how to navigate uneven surfaces and take care are also important aspects of the education of little feet.  Don't forget about the well-loved tradition of running through the sprinkler on the hottest days.

Touch is only one of the senses that are stimulated during barefoot excursions.  Movement and balance are also involved when the child is exploring the earth's many textures and surface features.  In recent years, educational researchers have recognized the critical foundation that these early sensory experiences have for late learning capacities. Natural textures also help stimulate the child's sense of life, the fourth of these foundational senses. 

So, send the kids out in to the yard barefooted on warm sunny days and maybe even on warm rainy days as well. Watching them may even inspire you to kick off your own shoes and feel the mud squishing up between your toes!

Posted: Wednesday, June 29, 2011 6:11 AM by Staff with 1 comment(s)

Picking June Berries – Sun That Makes it Ripe and Good

Now that our supermarkets and co-ops are chock full of fresh food all year long, it is hard to imagine the joy with which families used to look forward to summer and the return of seasonal fruits and vegetables .  That is, until you taste a piece of fruit grown locally and sun-ripened to perfection!  From the first scent, often more flowery that fruit-like, these fruits are a feast for the senses.  Warm in the hand, soft to the touch, its true flavor explodes on the tongue.  Of few fruits is this more true than of the lovely June strawberry.  We are lucky here in the Northwest to have excellent local farms, organic and conventional, and an outing to go strawberry picking is a perfect way to mark the happy abandon of the ‘schools out" season of the family year. 

One June, in this mood, I loaded my two daughters, aged 9 and 11, a good friend of theirs, my mother (recently relocated from Michigan), a bag of sandwiches and a thermos of ice tea into the car and set out for the sweet fields of Carnation.  There was something about swinging into the dusty parking lot beside the u-pick farm that brought me back to my own Michigan childhood, and we were all pretty excited even before the lady in the apron gave us our buckets.  The kids, big fans of outdoor edibles, darted right out of the car and into the bright farmyard.  

Once you begin strawberry picking it can be hard to stop.  The berries hide themselves cunningly in the shade of the broad leaves of the plant.  Gently lift a delicate stalk and maybe you will see a cluster of the bright red heart-shaped fruits winking up at you.  No one minds if the kids eat a few along the way as long as their buckets keep filling up.  As we picked, we chatted and the conversation soared and swooped from hamsters to Hogwarts to homemade jam, and as I remember, we even sang a little.  Before the sun got too high we were done, heavily laden and sun-kissed.  Strawberries grow close to the ground and so we were tired too - tired in the best possible way - and had a new respect for the folks who work hard to bring food to our tables, and to the earth that gives to us this food.  

Somewhere along the course of the morning a promise had been extracted to seek out the nearest body of water and to jump in it as soon as our buckets were full.   There was a river  running through a park down the road a piece that looked appealingly cool.  We floated along, showing off like porpoises while my mother sat in the shade and clapped.  Washed clean of the dust of the fields, we gobbled our sandwiches and headed home, to try our hands at a latticed crust strawberry pie! 

Posted: Saturday, June 25, 2011 9:20 AM by Staff with 1 comment(s)

Babies - The Movie

Now that my own children are no longer small, I have started to have a real craving for babies.  I miss their soft sweet skin and their dimpled feet and hands, for instance, and the joy of seeing them smile.  One day I will be an immoderately doting grandmother, but not for many years yet I hope.  Part of this lovely longing was satisfied recently by the charming film Babies, created by the French directors Thomas Balmes and Alain Chabat, and released last year.  A very entertaining documentary, Babies gives the viewer a peek into the lives of four infants from birth to one year of age as they are carried and cared for, eat, crawl and generally explore the world around them.  The thing that makes this film so unique is that the worlds they explore, are very different, as the  four babies are born in four quite distinct parts of the globe; in Tokyo, Japan; in Opuwo Namibia; in San Francisco, USA; and in Bayachandmani, Mongolia. 

Though Babies is a French film, and is filmed on location in three continents, the film has no subtitles. This is because there is no dialogue to speak of.  Neither is it needed, because, of course, babies can't talk!   What they can do is touch, taste, feel, smell, and babble, coo and cry.  What we the viewers see and hear are roughly 80 minutes culled from hundreds of hours of film, following these four through their first glimpses of their ‘brave new world'.  The experience is intriguing, touching and often funny! We see them experience first tastes of food and frustrations and freedom as the youngsters, eyes wide, imitate what they see around them and negotiate their surroundings. With what joy they first stand and take their first wobbly steps!   The parents, forming a warm circle in the periphery, fade into a blur of hands and encouraging voices and let the babies take the center stage. 

Though the babies are certainly irresistible, the film never becomes merely cute or cloyingly sweet.  With an insightful eye, Chabat has created a study of human nature at its, well, most naked.  I was struck immediately by the presence of these very young children, their unique personalities, their innate humor and cleverness, which reminded me that babies come to us with SO much, and are anything but blank slates.   Babies is also a clear picture of the universality of human experience as all four children go through very similar phases of growth, though the growing happens in settings that are starkly different, a high rise apartment on one hand and a mud and wattle hut on the other.  I tip my hat to the directors for showing the beauty and utility of both, again without too much sentimentality.  In the end the funniest part for me was that the youngsters in Tokyo and San Francisco with their all their baby gear, their shelves of toys and infant yoga classes, seemed happiest sitting on the floor playing with their toes.  The little ones in Mongolia and Namibia who get by with much less stuff and fuss, but are plopped right in the middle of the adult world of work and weather and livestock, seem to be coming up pretty well too, cheerful, sturdy and capable.   I guess the final message for me was, relax and love these little people who, remarkably, find their way into our lives.  Let them grow in their time.  The kids are all right.        

Babies is now available on DVD .  Treat yourself.  You won't be disappointed.

Posted: Thursday, June 16, 2011 3:25 PM by Staff with no comments

Dolly Tea Party

"Let's host a Dolly Tea party" I mentioned to my four year old.

"A Dolly Tea party?" she asked.

"Oh yes!  How about you invite your favorite dolls and we'll host an event.  What do you think we'll need?" I asked her.

"Well" she said, "we need a tea pot.  Let me go find my tea pot".

She was so full of excitement for the next hour, running busily around gathering all the things we would need to host the tea. It was a great way to conduct a treasure hunt, as one by one she appeared with a tablecloth, napkins, teacups, cups for water, a teapot and a serving tray.  Next came deciding on what to serve. I was really touched by her interest, her joy and her satisfaction in setting-up the table and then her dolls and fuzzy friends. She invited both of her siblings and, of course, their favorite dollies came along too. It was the social event of the doll's season and all of the kids enjoyed it together. 

I highly recommend a Dolly Tea party in your home.

Posted: Saturday, June 11, 2011 10:27 AM by Staff with 1 comment(s)

Hanging out the laundry while hanging out with the kids: An illustrated Primer

For our great-grandmothers, laundry was an all-day affair.  Every article of clothing and all the household linens were washed, rinsed, wrung out and hung up by hand.  By contrast, we can toss a load in the washing machine and then into the dryer any old time and multi-task while the machines work away.

Few of us would relish having to wash all our clothing by hand if we had a choice, but we may have lost something precious when we gave up the clothesline. Instead of hunching over a machine in the dim, dank basement, imagine a fresh June morning: dappled light coming through the tree branches, birds warbling and chirping overhead, the odor of damp grass mixed with lilac, dew sparkling on a spider's web.

Here is what you will need:  a basket to ferry the wet laundry outside, a length of sturdy line and some clothespins.  (The sun, air, bird song and scents are already provided.)  You can string the line between trees or set two posts in the yard.  I found a great umbrella-shaped clothes dryer online, which can hold two loads of laundry.  I also found a nifty clothespin hamper at a garage sale, but a cloth sack hung over a hanger will do just as well.

Here is what you will get for your effort:

1.     You will become much more aware of the weather and the way the sun moves in your yard.

2.     You will pay attention, ever so briefly, to each article of clothing; hanging them artistically or logically rather than lumping them into and out of the machines.

3.     Your kids will want to help.  What could be more fun than prying open those pinchy things!

4.     Your children will entertain themselves in the yard while you hang up or take down the laundry.

5.     Your electric bill will be lower.

6.     Your kids will learn some new skills and better understand how we take care of our clothing.

7.     You will notice a difference when you put on clothing dried out-of-doors.

8.     Everything will smell fresh.

If the thought of setting up a line and hanging out loads and loads of laundry is too daunting, just wash out the napkins and placemats and hang them up on the front porch.  Once the children have seen it done, they will be able to do it themselves. Set them up with a tub of soapy water and a washboard. (Look for washboards and other laundry supplies at your local Ace Hardware store.) Then bring out a bucket of fresh water for rinsing. Show them how to wring as much water out as possible before hanging articles up on the line.  This is a great warm weather activity, and you may find yourself looking for more things for your eager helpers to launder!

If you need more inspiration here's a wonderful website dedicated to the art of laundry: www.theclothelinebook.com.

Posted: Sunday, June 05, 2011 8:26 AM by Staff with 1 comment(s)