Medals and Memories and Memes (by sarah)

Today we watched the womans marathon which is part of the Olympics. It was fun spotting landmarks and talking to Jean about London and running. She loves the fact that her great grandmother won a medal for running in the Olympics of yester year - this lead her to start doing 'put your hand up if...' competitions.

It was mainly hands up if someone in your family is/was a runner, if you've been in an Olympics etc... but one of the questions was if you have ever been in a marathon. I put my hand up.

'Really?'

'Yes Jean a half marathon'

She then would not stop talking about it so I went to see if I could find my folder of bits. I did and produced the medal - explaining carefully that it is not a bronze medal I did not come third I just came in before a certain time and I can't actually remember what that time was. I ran the half marathon in 1998 during my A'levels with a friend from Guides. My cousin was in the same race though she is younger then me - she came in before me but was being like a young runner person at the time.

We on the other hand had just decided we'd do it for charity and my aunt (mother of the running cousin) had to lend me a pair of legging shorts to run in as I didn't have any. My trainers were good quality nike but had been bought in a charity shop for £4 - I left them in Kenya as a donation to a school/orphanage in 2000.

I remembered that I had been unable to drink the drinks so me and Gemma just poured the water over the top off our heads as our main issue was not thirst but over heating!

And so I ran a half marathon with no training and found it wasn't actually that hard at all.

I have fond memories of that race and so was excited when in my second first year at uni my room mate was training for the London Marathon - she had all the gear including full body suit making her look cool and scifi and I occasionally had to do a sports massage on her. She did really well - I on the other hand watched it on Telly whilst making the first full blown wiggly pets as congratulation presents for her and the other girl who were running. I was on crutches with torn ligaments which had resulted in me being flown back early from a field trip in Spain.

In the same folder I also found my old school report full of good efforts but a regular C if not D in PE. Basically I did not do team sports except football but as the girls club was disbanded that didn't last long. There was also certificates such as Young Writer of the Year and The Royal Mail competition which I won whilst still being in the bottom set for English.

There was a newspaper clipping of me and others sitting in sleeping bags outside the Trinity church in Romford to raise money and awareness for the homeless. And a certificate for Havering Citizen of the Year Award 2000 for the Kenya project.

There was stuff for the Buddy Reading Scheme and the Bully Line and the Tree Planting for Thames Chase with local dignitaries and singing on the South Bank and many many other things. This plunged me into memory lane, full of whist and nostalger and the feeling I have somehow come off the tracks. It made me sad which also made me feel somewhat middle aged.

As it is the feeling could have been worse, could have been darker and deeper but fortunatly this year has been pretty amazing with a medal in the Creative Olympics and a place in the Gloucestershire Poet Laureate finale to be held in two weeks time at the Cathedral and so much more.

I did however turn down a last minute oppurtunity to maybe perform at the Olympics as have just been doing so much I could not have fitted it in without letting people down. I regret not being involved in some way but for me it came on the wrong year - next year I would be well enough to have done things. So as part of getting me fit I have agreed to do the London Olympic Walk Challenge route with friends next year. At the moment a three mile walk with the stick leaves my pelvis sore.

I have a lot of training to do me thinks!

I am also starting my belly dancing classes in September which should help to stabilise the pelvis anyway. Alaric has also taken up a 'sport'. These were in the pipe line for years and we just needed groups near enough to us - this has happened at just the right time - ie when we are suddenly going - oh poo we are old and unfit!

However, that is another thing the Olympics have shown us - we are NOT TOO OLD! Alot of those athletes are in their 30's we can shape up still.

This brings me on to the meme part of the title. We are Geeks - not exactly renowned for physical prowess and yet both of us won awards and what not for things Archery, riffles and the like - the Olympics has reminded us that there are more sports than football, rugby and cricket. As Alaric tells Jean how to row a boat I am struck by the fact that geeky friends are now signing up to fencing classes after seeing the Tron-esk setting of the contests.

I myself found myself hooked to the archery, I made the statement, 'I miss archery' and Al responds with 'I've already looked up the local group for you.... I would like to do archery too.' Jean then walks in and says 'Mummy can I do some bows and arrows with like real arrows at a club or something?'

And so bizarly for the first time.... ever the geeks and nerds are on fire with the meme of sports! Friends confess that they now know athletes names and that they have scoured the wikipedia pages and the like inorder to get a better understanding of sport! What is going on?

This is not spectatorism but rather a seperating of the skill and self driving coolness of the competitors from the spectator bully mentality that we have all associated with sport - starting with the old 'take out the ankles with a hockey stick' in school. Like many things science included, love of sports is not embued in our school system or at least wasn't. You were either good at it or not. And worse you were either on the team or not and the team place had nothing to do with your skill but everything to do with the picking and your social rank in the play ground.

I personally thought I sucked at all sport until I went to a sports centre with the methodist church and wasn't made to take my glasses off - I won a badminton competition. I am aware that I would have struggled with sport no matter how it was taught due to the dyspraxia but on the other hand - I practiced each day until I could catch a ball - I had the drive and also I was good at gymnastics being double jointed/having hyper mobility - that should have been developed but wasn't.

All this aside I have never seen so many of my non-sporty friends suddenly so interested and intriged - I wonder how long it will last?

I think as it is basically super hero training and real life skill levels to be attained there is a good chance of sport permeating to were it has never been welcome before.

Krav Maga (by alaric)

I've always enjoyed combined mental/physical challenges. As a child, I often entertained myself with things like getting from one part of the house to another without touching the floor. This required planning, and finesse; the combination was exhilerating.

I enjoyed my time in the Combined Cadet Force, as many of the exercises we were set involved this combination; and I particularly enjoyed being in the school shooting team. Especially when we went out to electronic target ranges and did exercises involving running to checkpoints with an assault rifle, diving into the prone position, inserting the magazine, shooting at targets as they popped up, and then running to the next checkpoint. It was like playing Time Crisis!

However, that kind of thing has been missing from my life for the past decade or so. Also, I've been spending far too much of my time sitting in cars or at desks, with my main exercise being carrying heavy objects (such as sleeping children) for short distances. I was feeling a keen desire to exercise more.

Then about a year ago, Jean started doing Ju Jutsu, and I started to wonder about taking up a martial art. I remember, many years ago, a friend saying he was taking up Krav Maga, an interesting-sounding Israeli martial art that grew from self-defence techniques in the Jewish gettos of Hungary before World War 2.

However, my searches found no nearby Krav Maga groups; the nearest was in Bristol. So I gave up on this idea for the time being. But a few weeks ago I spotted a poster in a shop window in Cheltenham advertising local Krav Maga courses; sure enough, a group had started!

So yesterday evening, I turned up to give it a try.

It's delightfully pragmatic; most of the attacks seem to revolve around wacking your attacker as hard as you can in the softest bits of them you can reach, then running away. The first skill I started practicing was how to kick somebody in the groin, punch them in the face twice in quick succession, pull them down hard onto your rapidly-rising knee into their stomach, elbow them in the kidneys, and end up behind them (running away, of course), in one smooth motion. We then proceeded to have a try at being pinned from behind by one person while another ran at you from the front; there is a technique to escape the grip and leave the person gripping you curled up in a painful ball on the floor, but doing it while also dealing with the person coming at you from the front makes it a lot more interesting. There were also some more abstract exercises in dealing with large numbers of people coming at you, avoiding being cornered or surrounded, and getting them to get in each other's way. That involved some physical activity in keeping moving, but it was mainly a mental exercise, observing the paths of the attackers and planning your movements.

The practising was good exercise in itself, but we also did a bit of general fitness exercise, largely as part of the warm-up before getting into the practice. I left feeling tired but lively, and today I've been feeling the ache of growing muscle over much of my body, so it's been a good work-out.

I got on well with the other students, who were very helpful with the new people in their midst; and the instructor seems to be a truly intriguing and inspiring person!

It was good challenging fun, so I'm going to keep going, hopefully switching to the Gloucester group that will be starting on Mondays in September!

I turned up in a shirt and trousers, straight from the office, but most of the people there had track suits. Black ones, and t-shirts with martial-looking imagery on, were particularly popular. The contrarian in me is now wondering if I can get a glittery pink tracksuit in my size...

Make Good Art or Get Creative (by sarah)

This speech by the writer Neil Gaimon I found extremely powerful especially for someone like me who has to do creative things to survive.

But also the fact that I have not done things the normal way and that I keep hitting barriers such as I don't have an art degree so therefore do not count as an artist for some people. I am in a space inbetween. When I hear or read that others have not done it the normal way either it gives me hope.

Also I feel encouraged that I am not the only person who finds that trying to do projects for money fail and end up leaving you worse off than you started but the ones you do because it's a fun idea race ahead and are successful.

He mentions the changing landscape of publishing too which for me is an emotive subject - I really think I am going to continue on my own path with my blogs and getting my own CDs printed and what have you. I have tried traditional publishing twice now and both time the company has gone bust or something similar - one still having the rights to the work I'd done so I didn't even end up with it and worse they have not done anything with it :/

My first attempt at crowd funding has been a huge success 🙂 So I am very happy with that.

He mentions throwing bottles into the sea and then they all start coming back and you have to learn to say no. And you know - this is actually happening - though I would say I have been shouting into the void and now the echos are not only coming back but are bouncing and reflecting and propagating and I am having to turn things down! (But please still ask as I may not be doing stuff that weekend etc... or like with the Stroud Water Festival - what I was supposed to be doing may have been canceled).

I do feel a bit weird though it is just like suddenly I am this person that people know of - I'm getting pounced by people who I do not know who start chatting to me about my art (ok well this has always happened quiet alot but frequency has increased!).

It is bizar but I do feel like a fake - really? Me? That thing I made in the middle of the night? That story I wrote whilst breast feeding the baby at 5 am? The knitting I did at a festival whilst listening to my favourite local bands? That really? You like it?

It is not all positive feedback mind - one of my best friends hates my songs, I was accused at the Poetry Festival of being arrogant as my business cards say Artistic Scientist and Scientific Artist. Alaric cringes at my Wiggly Pet stories and visual puns. Performance poets see me as a page poet, page poets see me as performance or worse experimental and the artists are scared or the science part and the scientists are like 'you have no PhD!' and I have people ranting at me over spelling mistakes on my blogs...

But....

That is small compared to what is coming back to me at the moment. I keep thinking I'm so lucky how has this come about? But it is such a knife edge world really - I'm getting bookings now but 6 months down the line? And also it still isn't actually making money 🙁 And what it does make tends to be for charity.

But you know people are excited about Ballads of the Scientifica and there have been requests for a Wiggly Pet book and for t-shirts with things like my Normali Tea picture on.

If you watch/listen to Neils speech he says make good art, I would change that to Get Creative.

When I tore the ligaments in my ankle and had to be flown home from a field trip in the desert I GOT CREATIVE - I made Wiggly Pets

When I had to take a year out for medical treatment to my back - I GOT CREATIVE - I began writing and designed a series of childrens' science stories.

When I found myself having nearly died, and crippled from childbirth, boiling with anger and fear - I GOT CREATIVE - I started writing a novel and so was found in a cafe by the now Cheltenham Poetry Festival Director.

When our house was flooded I GOT CREATIVE and designed childrens activities to entrain my toddler.

When I got shingles and had to rest and give up the Master degree for the second time I found the Paleo Art community and began drawing trilobites and things.

When I was devastated about miscarriage I constructed The Punk In Pink personality.

When I was petrified of going to the hospital to have little Mary I wrote poems about that fear and about having a separated pelvis.

When we were being chucked out of our home I made a poem about how the home is not the building but the people with in.

And so on. There is an even larger list of good times and being creative but that would make this post silly long! 🙂

Basically as I have struggled to build my own serendipity funnel and have just reached my perceived tipping point and this talk resonated so strongly that it made me cry (yes I know that will be the hormones).

If you haven't already listen to it 🙂 But most of all Get Creative!

Mary and Jean (by sarah)

I thought I'd just do a little catch up on the girls - Mary is walking, saying Mumma, hitting people because she is teething, keeps trying to dress herself, when that fails she brings the clothes to me to dress her then once dressed she gets her shoes and tries to push the pushchair over to me. If she doesn't want something she will grab it and throw it just to show she really does not want it!

She has a favourite toy - a little hamster who is her baby, she tries to play the recorder and she loves drums. She giggles and cries at the slightest things and loves snuggles.

Jean is obsessed with acronyms especially recursive ones which she spells out and says ALL THE TIME. She is having stress attacks over where to put apostrophes when something belongs to a plural and is correcting my spelling. She has been moved up a class with some of her friends for spelling and things. She is obsessed with Harry Potter and wants me to do her hair in Hermione styles and talks in parseltongue.

She is sad science club has finished but is happy she is getting to do her dancing at school. She sings her beavers theme all the time and wants to take part in Jujistu competitions. She lies about having washed both body and teeth so keeps being in trouble and is getting sneakier about it by the day!

She has declared she wants four jobs when she is older:

She wants to be in bands (three of so she can play the drums, guitar and sing), then she wants to be a Vet as she loves animals and wants to make them better, then she wants to be an artist (specifically she wants to be the colour artist to comic book/animation line drawings and her colouring is fantastic!) and lastly she wants to be a teacher.

I have to ration the amount of time she spends reading and doing maths so she actually goes and plays - when her friends come round she organises them into bands and theatre groups and puts on shows for me.

I think that is everything currently.

Oh apart fromt he fact that Mary escapes all and any strap you put her in and has taken to posting what ever she can into the bin if you don't watch her!

Jean is picking up Lojban even though Alaric is only really speaking it to the baby and she keeps coming home saying things in Spanish and French. She is also doing her own writing ranging from poetry to stories though most of them involve Daleks.

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 🙂