Garden design (for geeks) (by alaric)

When I was about 11, I designed a garden. I remember drawing a plan of it on a page of my spiralbound notepad. Sadly, that means the original design is now long gone, but that's irrelevant - the original design assumed a plot of land the exact same shape as a page of my notepad, which is unlikely.

The important thing is that I can remember the concept.

The idea was simple - I think of a garden as a fun place to relax. Be that a pleasant spot to read a book, or a venue for a party. Where, to me, "party" involves a buffet and background music and people mingling and chatting.

Therefore, I wanted to pack in a pleasing variety of spots to read/sit/chat into a limited space. Also, being a geek, I wanted it to be intellectually interesting.

So the answer was obvious - it had to involve a maze. But more than that. Two mazes. Why not have a stream and little ponds that forms a water-maze, and then overlay that with a maze you can walk, with little bridges and stepping stones and the like where it crosses the stream, to add interest? And use a variety of materials for the maze; hedges, walls, balustrades, the stream itself - all can form barriers of varying solidity. I love strings of lights in trees and bushes, so let's run lights around it. And have lights in the stream and its ponds. Lights are pretty at night.

One idea that appealed to me was that, for parties and the like, you could have little boats with candles in circulating around the stream. Of course, if it's an actual natural stream, then all the boats would end up stuck at the grating you'd need to put up to stop them all going downstream - but if it's an artificial one (in effect, a long thin pond that wriggles around the place) you could encourage a continuous current around it by putting pumps around the place, sucking in water then emitting it in a jet, with the jets and inlets all aligned around the circuit to push the water in the same way. Extra points for style: Computer control of the pumps so, at the end of the day, you can cause all the boats to congregate in one place for easy collection...

There would need to be a more open patio / lawn area joining the maze to the house, for when you need to gather everyone together to eat and so on. And it would be nice if the other end of the maze led into some more wild and natural terrain such as woodland, after all that order. But the maze would pack a lot of different little nooks into a relatively small space, creating a garden that seems a lot larger than it really is...

I'd draw up a plan, but of course, the actual implementation totally depends on what the land you have is like, and what bits of random architectural salvage turn up to build the maze out of!

Cute Street Party Girlies (by sarah)

Jean's school did a street party she was supposed to be dressed in red, white and blue but I discovered we really didn't have anything like that so she had puprly-blue and pinky-red and glittery unicorn white!

Friday I actually sent Alaric with the girls to the village street party at the Black Horse. Jean took her union jack she'd made at school.

Pancake Day (by sarah)

I managed to make pancakes for pancake day though there were a few burnt ones due to having to sit down etc.. but we had a normal mix of topping mostly (I hadn't managed to grow any bean sprouts this year due to that whole having a baby thing). We had blue cheese and bananna and condensed milk and sugar and lemon juice and grated chocolate and peanut butter (chrunchy) and marmite 🙂

Mary meets Tom (by sarah)

Tom Long the long ginger tom cat has been scared of Mary since she arrived in the house though to be fair he is spending most of his time banished outside as he is the snuggliest of the cats and also the biggest by far! But like the gineu pigs and the rabbit - he is scared of Mary! Well he was until the beginning of last week - he now tries to ignore her existance 🙂

Language Developement (by sarah)

Alaric is putting me to shame with Mary and teaching her lojban - Jeany and him have been learning this for a year or so - Jean is a bit erratic with it but evenings often find them both 'cooking' dinner and talking via laptop to the lojban community. With him raising Mary bilingual and him writing poems for WoPoWriMo in the language things are moving streaks ahead.

This does cause me a few problems in that Jean has a tendency to ask me what things are lojban when Daddy's not here which can be interesting but via the internet I have been able to help abit.

I really wanted to give my children the chance of being good at languages incase it was something they either wanted or needed when they grew up. This meant that when Jean was a baby I spent alot of time getting language tapes to play to her - I tried to get non European languages as they tend to be the least similar to English and therefore harder to learn for native English speakers. The first year of a baby's developement is very important as that is when they absorb into their little brains all the sounds of their native language.

There are sounds that adults can not hear in other languages which is why it is one of the reasons it is so hard to learn as an adult. Now I have had arguments with people about doing this - being told it would impede Jean's linguistic development but everything I had read in the research suggested that though being exposed to other languages may result in the child speaking a bit later - they would be capable of a) understanding the syntax and the actual structure of languages better and b) they would do much better in picking up other languages in future.

Not being able to get hold of everything I wanted with Jeany and being told by Al's family that the tapes would not be giving her all the higher sounds and stuff - I used to play music to her - a wide variety of styles - as wide as I could. Musicians tend to be able to hear those sounds in the other languages even if they can not reproduce them, now standard European music on has tones and semi-tones and so is quiet limited for this but stuff like Indian music has micro-tones and covers a wider range of sounds.

I even had a copy of the Koran being sang which my friend sent us.

The result of all of this? Is Jean a fantastic linguist? Well no but she has already suprised us and her teachers by appearing to be not interested in French leasons and then in the middle of supermarkets splurting out chunks of it which in like her first term when she'd only just turned four included counting one to ten in French - she can count the same in Lojban too.

Interestingly one of the things she is very good at is remembering tunes - not perfectly but more than would be expected for a five year old. Now this may well be genetic - I tend to remember a song 'roughly' from one hearing and infact can even sometimes start singing along during the first hearing (this works best with say hymns or pop music - both of which tend to repeat huge chunks of themselves).

She is also picking up guitar stuff faster than I thought she would! She has rhythm which we already knew from her dancing 🙂

(yes I know but I am a gushy proud parent!)

Sadly I lost most of the language tapes and CD's in the flood and the MP3's when my laptop died so I need to start from stratch with Mary - though with Alric and Jean speaking Lojban maybe it's not as needed.

The other thing I did was teach Jeany baby sign - she never learnt more than a few signs but she did understood more and on top of that has remembered them! To be fair I have stopped using 'wait' though it is a mangeled version using one hand as I found I never had two hands free whilst dealing with children and often I am on the phone or eating so can not vocalise a response!

I had wanted to develope it into proper sign language but unfortunatly we didn't have enough money for me to attend the course and the books on it where all quiet expensive - I know a little bit anyway like the alphabet and the names of school subjects. But I do have a slight problem in that baby sign British Sign Language and Mackatain (not sure of the spelling) are all different and I know bits of all of them :/

Again baby sign is very good for linguistic developement - not because it gets your baby talking quicker because it doesn't - but it improves the level at which the child starts to speak - so they are lickely to vocalise later on but they will be talking in sentences!

Baby sign was fantastic for preventing frustrated baby with Jean as well becuase even before she could of physically started speaking she was signing milk! at us. She learnt Milk first followed by poo - later we had more, yummy, wet, thirsty and hurt (followed by pointing to where) - this was also invaluable when it came to potty training 😉 She also made up her own signs like milk! with both hands - this meant she wanted food!

People always comment on how well Jean speaks - plus baby sign helps them develope fine motor movements and hey you have to spend a lot of time with your baby so it's not really like it was much extra effort. Sign languages are good in that though they are the languages that pick up the most dialects or regional variations they are also the languages in which people can all communicate and work out what the other person is saying! They are far more versatile - which is why I personally am sticking to sign language and not learning Lojban with Al and Jean.

I was keen on sign language again due to the issue of my own hearing when I was small - just in case - fortunatly Jean has good hearing (except when you are telling her off!). I think by the end of that first year my friends were sick of being handed a baby Jean and asked to 'speak foreign' 🙂 Oh and we always watch DVD's in the other languages as well as English 🙂