Sabbatical

Hi all

I guess I have taken a sabbatical from writing my blog. It has been a long time!

It has been a very tough year or two and have found life quite difficult.

I have been trying to build a client base for my Thai massage, which is rather difficult as not many people know about it in South Africa. The people who have had Thai massage have had it in Thailand on holiday so they do not understand the long term health benefits. As one of my regular clients said to me last month, "Thai Massage is a way of life".

Caleb is now in High School. He is doing grade 8. He is completing his Waldorf curriculum and then he will be doing Konos How 1. We are also doing Apologia General Science. Hannah is doing the science with us.

Hannah is doing grade 6 at this stage. Sheth is doing grade 3.

I have found schooling difficult in the house we are renting as it is really small. There is no room - I haven't been able to paint a blackboard on the wall and have no space to store one. The eating area is tiny. We have worked in the lounge and kept going obviously, but I have not enjoyed it.

The good news is that we have just bought our own home. A three bedroom, which we will convert into a four bedroom as the one bedroom is 4.5m by 6.5m. This will give is two rooms of 4.5m by 3-ish m.

There is a lounge, dinning room, kitchen, family bathroom and en suit! All this compared to our two bedroom, kitchen/lounge and en suit bathroom that we have now. We also have a granny flat which we will be renting out.

There is lots of work to be done on the new house. I love renovating and building, so we are going to have fun.

More to come soon.

Geocache

We have just joined geocaching.com. We are ashleycoopers and are really excited about this.

It is a real live treasure hunt that is world wide. You need to have a gps, preferably on your smart phone, and internet access to go to the web and learn more about it, and then to find out where to find the cache.

I googled geocache and right at the top of the list is the website, so I clicked on that.

We joined and then started to play. We found our first cache in our little village. We also grabbed a travel bug, and will send it on its way soon.

This is great fun for families who enjoy Scouts, treasure hunts, orienteering and travelling. In general for anyone who enjoys having fun!

If any of you are "geocatchers" (the children keep pronouncing it geo-catch or -catching) please leave a comment or ask me to be a friend on geocaching.com.

Life

It is the middle of the year. We are on holiday and we all need it!

This has been an interesting year and one of the busiest that I have had in a long time.

I have been studying Thai massage to be a practitioner and to be a teacher. I am a practitioner now and am building up a client base. I love healing people and working on people.

I am schooling three children using the Waldorf pedagogy. I use most, if not all of Melisa Nielsons curriculum (http://waldorfessentials.com/). This year Caleb and Hannah have basically been self studying. I plan their work and put it in their diaries. They have done well academically but the craft and art has been lacking big time. Sheth and I school about two hours every morning.

I am starting a new programme that Melisa has called Thinking, Feeling, Willing (http://waldorfessentials.com/tfwfaq/). I am so excited as I feel it is going to get me on track again. Getting to do more art and craft with the children is my aim. Getting us back into the beauty of life and not just the drudgery of every day boredom.

I love having my children around me, I love teaching them and nurturing them. I love my family and want them to prosper and love life. Greg and I want to bring up happy well adjusted adults. This is not such an easy task to do, as we are finding out.

Rhythm, love, patience, boundaries and consistency are all very important when we bring up our children. This gives them a sense of being wanted, loved and being part of the family. This gives them security and comfort.

As the children get older they become easier yet much more difficult. With two children at the early teenage stage we definitely have a lot of attitude around here. As they get older my patience has grown in leaps and bounds.  

This holiday we are going to relax,  have fun and get back into the beauty of life

Scouts, Cubs and Kontiki

This has been such a busy term for us with Scouts and Cubs. Hannah and Sheth have both been invested. Sheth is now eight. He was not ready to join Cubs at seven but is definitely ready this year - so much so that he is quiet mischievous there.

Since the first week of term the Scouts have been practicing for the Kontiki competition. They were making soap carvings, masks, rockets that actually shoot up into the air, a space mobile etc. It was great fun!

Well the competition finally arrived on the week end of the 16 March. We dropped Hannah and Caleb at Sandvlei a bit late as Caleb was helping our Durbanville Cubs.

There is such a nice group of parents in Scouts that we all ended up talking for hours.

We went home Friday night as I had a market Saturday morning. After the market we went back to Kontiki.

Last year we came seventh, and this year we came fourth! Well done 1st Durbanville! It was a long, fun, exhausting weekend.