Category Archives: LearnerMother

On what I’ve learnt in 6 months…

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Six months today since I took my iPad to my biggest boy’s climbing session, holed up in a corner of the cafe, and set up LearnerMother on a WordPress site. I’d blogged before in a work capacity, but never anything personal, and I really didn’t know how it would pan out, whether I’d enjoy it, whether it’d be even feasible to write regularly given that free time just doesn’t happen to me. But here I am, six months on, which seems a good point to take stock of what I’ve learnt and to think about where I want LearnerMother to go from here.

Here’s my blogging observations…

  • First and foremost, people are incredibly generous with their help. I’ve asked the most basic questions on Twitter, sometimes several times in a row because I didn’t understand the answers the first time, and someone has always taken the time to help me. When I decided to go self-hosted, I ended up in a real pickle, but people were so quick to reassure and advise that the process was much less stressful than it could have been. I hope that I’ll be able to repay the favour, just as soon as I know the difference between DNS and URL. Or perhaps I should stick to offering help of a less technical nature, in case I end up collapsing the internets. In any case – THANK YOU if you were one of the many folk to help me!
  • I don’t write about our family activities as much as I thought I would. This is because I can’t imagine anyone being interested in them – however one of the reasons I started blogging was to provide a shared memory bank for our kids in future years. I also quite enjoy reading about other families’ activities as it gives me ideas for what to do with the kids, so the lack of family posts is something I’m going to rectify over the next six months – please don’t feel obliged to read if you don’t want to!
  • I’m not sure how my kids will feel about the blog as they get older, or whether it’s even fair to be blogging about them at that point. I guess it’s something I need to review on an ongoing basis.
  • Being an ‘out’ (ie not anonymous) blogger comes with responsibilities. Several posts have been discarded half way through writing because, although they are amusing/worthy of comment, the adults or kids featuring in them could potentially be identifiable within our local community. Not that the posts are necessarily negative, but I figure it’s my responsibility to err on the side of caution. If anyone feels that I have overstepped the line, it goes without saying to call me out on it.
  • Being an ‘out’ blogger is definitely not as therapeutic as being anonymous would be!
  • I think I need to be a bit braver in writing about stuff that matters to me. I have held my tongue on my (extremely ranty) thoughts on certain issues, from religion to second home ownership, because I am wary of offending friends and family, who make up a fair chunk of my readers. Which is a bit daft really, since if I was sitting opposite them with a beer I’d most likely feel comfortable in disagreeing with them and leaving the pub still friends. I am going to try and have the courage of my convictions from now on.
  • Stats are great, and it is nice when a post gets retweeted and shared, and generates discussion. But when I’m thinking that I need to write a post on holiday so that I keep my page views up, then I’m taking myself and my blog too seriously.
  • There are too many great blogs out there to keep up with them all; I have to limit myself to my favourites or I’d never get off the computer. In no particular order, hese are the ones I read without fail: Mummy Never Sleeps, Premmeditations, Living with MND, Dr Kate Granger, Be Brave and Look Up, Mumblings on the Verge, Ojo’s World, Free Falling into 40, My Daft Life, Motherventing, MammyWoo. An eclectic bunch – check them out if you haven’t already -they all make excellent reading.
  • I have a long way to go to write well. It’s (whisper it) eighteen years since I wrote anything for academic purposes, and although I like to think I was good with words back then, it’s going to take me some practice to get back into writing to a decent standard. Reading through old posts, I overuse certain words and phrases, I drift away from my point, and sometimes it is horribly obvious that I’ve wrapped up and hit the publish button because I’m being overtaken by sleep, rather than because I have finished what I want to say.
  • But – I have rediscovered that I love to write, even more than I knew. It doesn’t matter what the subject matter is – I find the process of starting with an idea, and creating a post around it, incredibly satisfying. So I’m going to use the next year to try and work out how I might be able to integrate this into my – ahem – portfolio career. Any pointers gratefully received!

So there you have it – that’s what I’ve learnt in 6 months. Enough to know that LearnerMother is well worth the effort, for me at least – you may disagree! In any case, thank you for bearing with me as I’ve mumbled and bumbled on…and hope you’ll come back for more!

 

 

 

 

 

On bribery

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Before I had kids, I had all these marvellously clear cut ideas about how I would approach being a mother. One of them was that I would never resort to bribery – no indeed – my kids would all be dealt with in a reasonable and firm but fair manner, and if they understood the boundaries between right and wrong then bribery would never come into it, would it? Simples.

I didn’t do too badly to start with – in fact I can safely say I did not issue any kind of bribe at all for the first few weeks, or perhaps even months. And then reality kicked in, and I realised like most parents that sometimes, it’s about buying yourself five minutes peace to save your sanity and if that takes a small, er, incentive, (organic, wholesome and sugar free, natch) well so be it. And incentives are good, right? Not like bribes at all, in any way, shape or form. Phew.

So, yeah, Bribery, sorry incentivisation, does feature in our lives to some extent, though not any more or less than any other family I don’t think *stares defensively out from page*. But so far, mostly for the little things, and I’ve told myself that as long as I don’t end up with bribery being a daily feature of our lives it’ll all be fine.

CRASH crash clippity clop…that was the sound of me falling off my high horse and it galloping off into the sunset, leaving me flailing in a quagmire of incentivisation induced shame. Yep, this summer has seen a major bribery programme take place in our house, which has left me skint, and more familiar with Skylander figures than I ever thought possible.

The reason? Reading. Though my daughter chooses to read anything she can get her hands on, my biggest boy has been more ambivalent about reading, and particularly reading in Welsh. It’s clear to me that the ability to read and process language fluently is a crucial cornerstone in giving kids the best chance to make the most of their education in whichever language; and it seems like there is a distinct window of opportunity to make this happen, before lack of language skills begin to affect a child’s enjoyment of learning. And I do want my kids to enjoy learning, because if they don’t enjoy it, they won’t do it, and if they don’t do it now, that will affect their choices later in life. God, I sound like a pushy parent, and I’m not at all – I don’t care about where my kids come in class or whether they are talented in this that or the other – I just want to do the best I can by them, to equip them for the big wide world.

Hence the bribery. At the beginning of the holidays, I sat down with my biggest boy and had a chat about how important reading is, and then I told him that because it was such an important thing for an eight year old to read lots that I’d help to make it fun by (whisper it) buying him a Skylander figure for every Welsh book that he finished over the Summer holidays. I told him that he didn’t have to read anything if he didn’t want to, after all it’s his summer holiday, but also slyly pointed out that it currently takes him 5 weeks to save up for a Skylander on his £2 a week pocket money, so even reading just two books in that time would double his haul.

This has caused some debate in our house – the Husband is quite rightly wary of this being the thin end of the wedge, and I am a bit nervous about that too, though I did package it up very tightly as a time limited one time only deal. Also we have had to be reasonably discreet with my daughter, who reads all the time because she wants to, because I don’t want her to feel that her efforts are any less worthy of reward than those of her sibling. I’ve told her that the summer she is eight we will do a similar project just for her, in whatever she needs to practise for year 4, and I have no doubt she will hold me to it!

So – the results are in – I’m writing this towards the end of August and he has so far read nine books, all Henri Helynt/Horrid Henry sort of length, and discussed them with me afterwards. I am hopeful that at the very least this will have kept his Welsh front of mind through the summer break; I’m also keeping my fingers crossed that he will have given himself a really solid language base for the next year, and that this Summer’s investment will pay dividends in his confidence and fluency. What I am most pleased about is that although he started out picking up a book with the words ‘I’m going to read a chapter so I can work towards another Skylander’, I have noticed that recently he seems to be opening a book because he wants to read it, with the Skylander being a secondary factor.

Like everything else with this parenting lark though, I am flailing in the dark. I don’t know if this was a sensible strategy, or if it will prove to have made not much difference, or if indeed it is completely the wrong way to approach things. If you’ve any experience of this, or thoughts, please feel free to share them below or on @michelledavis – diolch/thank you!

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On September

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September has always felt much more like a new year to me than New Year itself. Even in the in-between years between finishing Uni and my kids starting school, when term times were irrelevant apart from their effect on holiday prices, September always presented itself as a new beginning. The slightest whiff of a tiny chill in the early mornings, the leaves starting to change colour, these things always filled me with a feeling of promise and excitement for the year ahead.

This September feels like a significant one – lots of things are changing for the kids and for us. For the bigger kids it’s the usual stuff – new classes, new teachers – plus the excitement of starting term in a brand new purpose built school and all the changes that brings – new route to school, different park afterwards, being part of a huge three-form entry school instead of the small primary they are used to. For my youngest, this will be his last year of babyhood – he will be starting nursery every morning at the same school as his big brother and sister. If I am honest, I don’t feel ready for this at all. It’s not that I want any more kids, it’s just that I want time to slow down a bit.

All change for me too – I have just started a four day a week contract, which is an exciting opportunity for me, but a bit (a lot) nervewracking. As the job is working across 4 different organisations, this means four times the pretending I am half competent, four times the names and faces to remember, and also adding travelling time into my day away from the kids (how I will miss my seven-minutes-including-a-co-op-stop-commute of the last 12 months!) On the plus side it’s a great chance to gain more experience, and also I am immensely grateful that I have a job at all in these times.

On the business side, we will be tying up loose ends from the first project that the Husband and I undertook together; we sold our coffee shop last November but there’s still final accounts to file, tax bills to get sorted and so forth. This is the closure of a huge chapter of our lives. I’m mostly happy about it – our time had run its course and we had definitely fallen out of love with it by the time we sold it. But I do miss the proper coffee on tap whenever I’m in town!

One door closes and another opens though, and I have a feeling that this will be a very significant year for Rules of Play, which the Husband and I co-own with a friend. After three and a half years of slogging away, we have now brought the business to a stage where we can come up for air and pause for breath. Instead of thinking about next week and next month, we can begin to sit down and plan for what we’d like to do with the business next year and even over the next five years. That feels like a massive achievement for three friends who basically shut their eyes tight and took a huge plunge into the unknown, armed with not much more than a basic business plan and a conviction that we could translate our vision into a living, breathing enterprise.

And – perhaps most excitingly for the year ahead is that the whole Cardiff Pound idea is beginning to gain traction in and around Cardiff. I am not sure yet what shape this will take, but I am determined that we will have our local currency in the not TOO distant future!

Bring on September!