Creating a Home for Body, Soul, and Spirit by Bernadette Raichle

rating: 4 of 5 stars

I borrowed this book from the local Steiner playgroup. I've enjoyed the parent-toddler group, and have picked up a lot of ideas about education and childrearing from its Steiner/Waldorf based activities, but I've always been a bit uneasy about its philosophical underpinnings. Here, at last, was a book which was explicit about how Anthroposophy informs the operation of a daycare centre, and man, is there some whacky stuff in there! The anthroposophical jargon about creating a "penetrated" environment and the four sheafs (Physical, Etheric, Soul/Astral, and Ego) would turn off most people I know, but it does explain why Waldorf kindergartens are organized the way they are.

I gave this book four stars because it was exactly what I was looking for, and because I think it is useful, but it is not particularly well-written. Some sections are less well-developed than others, and as I mentioned, the jargon can be off-putting. Still, there's a lot to reflect on in here, and despite the sometimes-goofy philosophical underpinnings I think that many of its recommendations are sound. I felt that the author did a good job of explaining the practices in her day care nursery without at any time insisting that it was the one right way. Instead, I felt that she was mostly urging caregivers and parents to be mindful and flexible in their approach to child care, and offering herself and her co-workers as an example of one way in which philosophy can inform practice.

I came away from this book thinking that yes, Anthroposophy is pretty goofy, but the practical application of those ideas has led to something useful and good, in creating a supportive environment for young children. I especially liked the structure suggested for creating a regular rhythm to the day, week, and year, and also maintaing order in the physical environment. That's all pretty basic stuff, but this book helped me reflect on it in a relaxed way.

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Getting ready to move

This time last week, we were on our way to Dublin for Mike's immigrant visa interview. His stamped passport arrived back to us on Friday morning, and I booked our flights to America.

I have mixed feelings about moving home. I've made some great friends here. I also enjoy Galway's literary scene, which is younger and more active than what we have on the Vineyard. Living in the middle of the so-called city, with no need for a car, has also been great. I love being able to walk to the library and the grocery store in less than five minutes, and wandering down Shop Street with Nova, saying hello to all the dogs and babies and listening to the buskers. I'll also really miss our view of Galway harbor and the bay beyond, all the way over to the mountains in Clare.

I will not, however, miss the constant noise and light pollution that comes with our view. Right now, for example, something is beeping out there as a crane piles clattering scrap-metal onto the heap. I won't miss the sorry selection of vegetables at the local grocery store. I know that the prices and selection won't be that much better at home, but we'll be able to go off-island and practically anything. I often complain about the lack of selection in Ireland's shops, whether it's food, clothes, or books, but the small size of the Irish market is probably the main culprit, not the fact that so few people here seem to have any interest in trying new things (particularly when it comes to food).

I dread having to drive everywhere, especially for the first few weeks until Nova gets used to the car again and Mike gets his drivers' license. On the other hand, although we'll be in a car a lot more we won't have to look at so many of them, or dodge them all the time when going out for any kind of walk. I'm also not looking forward to going back to work. I have no idea what I'll do, and I have a nagging suspicion that it won't be worth it, financially or personally, until Nova is a bit older, but I know that I'd get no end of grief for trying to be a "stay at home mom" over there (in Ireland, women get the guilt trip for going back to work, instead of for staying home). Living on the Vineyard is going to be a lot more expensive than living in Galway, at least for us, if only because of the need for a car and possibly health insurance.

I would say that I'll miss Ireland's generous social welfare system, but I can see that it's not a healthy thing for this society. I think it's really, really good that Ireland, as a country, doesn't let people starve, become homeless, or go without medical care (after ridiculously long waits to see specialists if you're in the public system, of course). I think it's a bit messed up, though, that a family on the dole can make more than a family where one person has a full-time job, and that even single people on the dole can be almost as well-off financially as their working peers. The system rewards people for not working, which, as everyone says, is really going to slow down Ireland's economic recovery.

There are a lot of things I'm looking forward to in America. First, I really think it will be great for Nova to be living on the family compound there. We'll have instant dogs and chickens (courtesy of my brother, cousins, and my parents). We'll be in the woods, where she can muck around with dirt and climb trees. We'll be able to have a garden, too. She'll be able to run next door and hang out with my parents almost whenever she wants to. We'll be living in a kind of extended family hamlet, which will be very different from the situation we have here with its semi-formal weekly dinners with each grandparent.

I'm looking forward to the peace and quiet. It will be good to see my friends from home again, although I'll miss Galway's constant social whirl and my friends here. I'm looking forward to a bit of warm weather and going to the beach a few times this summer, or even camping out there with Nova on hot days. Right now, I'm most excited about setting up our "own" house. That includes fixing up a bedroom for Nova, unpacking my millions of boxes of books, and setting up a kitchen where I'll have all my small appliances, pots and pans, etc. I'm also ready to get back to our much better public library system. Galway's library might be right across the street, but its collection is no bigger than what they've got at West Tisbury, the books are mostly falling apart, and you can only check out four at a time.

It's also going to be a big change of scene for Mike, and it will be interesting to see what kind of work we both rustle up in the first year there, and what we wind up doing eventually. He seems to be looking forward to the move, too.

I think the move to America will be good for us, as a family. Now I just have to pack!

The Continuum Concept: In Search of Happiness Lost by Jean Liedloff

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars
My first and strongest impression of this book was that I knew the author. Although she came from the generation before mine, I feel like I knew dozens of people like her, privileged, intelligent, half-educated and profoundly dissatisfied with their home culture. I felt that I was a bit like her, but less starry-eyed.



The author's central theory is that human evolution has primed us to expect certain experiences which are necessary to our fundamental sense of well-being. She argues that tribal/primitive cultures which have evolved slowly over millennia and are resistant to change provide more of these "continuum" experiences. The most important of these is the in-arms phase for the infant, from birth until the baby begins to crawl. She blames many of the ills and discontentments of modern society on the fact that most of us missed out on that essential early experience, which would have given us a feeling of contentment, acceptance, and "rightness." She has a few theories about the way the continuum would have us behave in later stages of life, but that early phase is all-important.



The Continuum Concept has been enormously influential in hippie earth-mother circles, and to be honest I had hoped for more. I have no argument with the idea that babies are happier and healthier when they are in contact with a responsive caregiver, and that most are better off being carried around than being left alone in a pram, stroller, cot or crib. Maybe lots of us carry deep emotional scars from being left to cry alone when we were infants, but it;s not the answer to all our psychological problems, never mind our social issues. Basically, I agree with most of the author's recommendations about how to raise babies, but I was disappointed by her sloppy scholarship and her belief that civilization has it all wrong, when it comes to helping us be happy and fulfilled human beings.



I believe that human beings are a lot more adaptable than Jean Liedloff gives us credit for, and that while our intellectual innovations often undermine our contentment, the conscious mind, as well as instinct, can help us be happier people at any stage of life.



And now, back to my bored, attention-grabbing toddler!


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Baking Bread with Children

Baking Bread with Children by Warren Lee Cohen

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
I got this book on loan from the local Steiner/Waldorf playgroup, and didn't have time to work my way through the whole thing, but what I did see, I liked. I was mostly interested in the bread recipes, because my daughter is too young for wordy stories, but I'd like to look at it again in another year or two.



The recipes included a lot of very different breads; bagels, soft pretzels, and chapati, along with the usual range of loaf breads. I tried two of the recipes, a basic whole wheat loaf and the Roman Army bread. I made enough modifications to the first recipe that I couldn't really judge it, but the second one I tried was very good. I look forward to getting another copy of this book in the future and doing more of the bread-related story telling and perhaps even make the outdoor oven, which looks like a fun project.


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Back to normal

The race village is almost gone, traffic patterns are back to normal, and this morning we once again have an oil boat parked outside. Sadly, the wind turbines came down yesterday, and no, they did not power the entire race village. I happened to run into one of the engineers from the company early in the festival, and he told me that each one generates enough electricity to power about two houses. The two at the end of the harbor were wired up to pump electricity back into the grid, but they were by no means keeping all those race village lights and loudspeakers going. It's really too bad the Galway Harbour Company didn't want to leave them there. Oh well.

Race Village Retrospective

Two weeks of festival and sunny weather, crowds all day and drunks all night, are finally drawing to a close. Living in the middle of the Volvo race stopover fairgrounds has had its moments, but I'm glad that it's over.

Nova fell asleep every night to the sound high-decibel music, most of which was pretty good. I didn't adapt quite so well, and have been awake past my bedtime every night for fourteen days running. I had intended to blog about the festival as it was happening, but when the time came I couldn't stand to look at it any more than I absolutely had to. I enjoyed some of it, but annoyance won out as often as not. Here's an abbreviated log of the two weeks as seen from our apartment.

Arrivals and Opening Ceremony:
I didn't get any pictures of the arrival night, but boy, was it a long one. The band played until 11pm, I had settled down to sleep by midnight, and then at 2 AM it started up again as the first boat came across the finish line. I would have almost enjoyed it except for the incredibly annoying announcer, who said at one point:
"Now, they say we're not allowed to have any music, but you [the crowd] can make music!" He encouraged them to sing "The Fields of Athenry," which didn't really take off, but y'know what? 10 minutes later, loud music piped in to accompany the Irish dancers who were there to greet the ships.

He finally piped down a bit at 4 AM, saying something about people in the neighborhood sleeping, but there were still fireworks on and off until 8 AM, when the last of the boats arrived. By early afternoon that day, all of the racing boats had been lifted out of the water by the crane and were sitting in cradles behind the Harbour Hotel.

That first night of sleep deprivation went a long way towards souring my mood about the whole event, but I still managed to enjoy some of the rest of it. The following night brought the opening ceremony, which featured more fireworks, more Irish dancing, and an old wooden fishing boat dressed up like a swan. Here's a picture of the flares. My camera wasn't up to the task of capturing the midnight event in all its fireworks, but this is the best shot I got:


Midweek lull:
Things settled down after those first two nights, and we experienced blissful quiet from 11:30 PM until mid-morning from Monday to Thursday night. Then the real trouble started -- we got new neighbors, about thirty of them, drunk and noisy from Friday night straight through the weekend. Friday and Saturday night were the worst, with drunk carousing, screaming, and fighting right outside our doors until dawn both nights. On Sunday, they must have gone out to a club because they weren't really noisy until 4 AM, when they went through the hall loudly ripping down the signs that Mike had put up: "Quiet, baby sleeping!" The following morning, they denied having anything to do with it. Ha.

Once again, things settled down again, and even last night, the final night of the concerts, things were pretty quiet because our rooftop was crawling with police.

The Boats:
I am interested in sailing in the sense that I think it's cool and would like to do more of it, but the past two weeks didn't inspire me much, or add anything significant to my knowledge of boats and sailing as I was too busy with the stuff of everyday life. The race is a one-class event, meaning that all of the boats are almost exactly the same. They're like floating billboards, as you can see by the row of them lined up in the dock.

The Puma boat, below, was the best billboard, in my opinion:


To get an idea of scale, you can see here the crew and some other people around the Telefonica boats on the day of the in-port racing, and a guy up on the mast of another of the Volvo 70s.



I found all the other boats in the harbor a bit more interesting. First of all, there were about fifty jillion of them (over a hundred yachts, in any case). Below is picture of them crammed into the harbor parked six deep along the edges, and another of the mass exodus that happened an hour ago after the racing boats left:




It took only an hour to virtually clear the harbor of boats this afternoon. The Galway Hookers were pretty much the only boats that went out under sail power. I found the small number of these traditional boats somewhat depressing. The organizers made an effort to gather together all of the Galway Hookers in the universe, and could only muster about seven of them. They're docked on the left-hand side of this photograph, with the earlier-mentioned swan boat nearby, under the windmill.



Numbers and the Weather
The thing that really made the festival a success was the distinctly un-Irish weather we had for the fortnight: warm, sunny days, one after the other until you'd think someone had shipped the whole island 30 degrees south in latitude. The latest rumor I heard was that the whole event had drawn over 250,000 people, which is pretty good considering that the population of Galway is only about 70,000 and the yachting scene in Ireland is very small.

One more rumor capped the event: last night at dinnertime, a good friend of mine phoned, breathless with the news that U2 were staying at the G Hotel and was maybe going to play last night with The Stunning, or this midday when the president of Ireland was giving her speech. No such luck. They say you can't have a party like this in Ireland without generating U2-related rumors.

May reading

May has been a good month for reading. I read Mort, by Terry Pratchett,, which was good fun, and I finally knocked another item off of my to-do list: Read Strunk & White.

Many years ago, I read that every writer should read The Elements of Style, by Wm. Strunk and E. B. White, study it, and re-read it every year. This struck me as such fine advice that I went out, bought the book, and read the first ten pages. With less then 90 pages to go, it shouldn't have taken me another six years to get to the end, but somehow it did. I got caught up on the mysteries of colons and semicolons, two punctuation marks that I have never fully understood. The book slipped back onto my bookshelf and has stayed there ever since, near the front of the pile but rarely opened.

I am now happy to report that I have finally read the whole thing. I felt its influence on my writing immediately, as if I could tighten sentences better than ever before. I felt my critical eye sharpen as I read. I did not feel the need to run out and buy half a dozen more books on how to write, and I do intend to re-read it next year, if not before. I even read some of it aloud to Nova.

Speaking of Nova, she is becoming very enthusiastic about books. In the past few weeks, she's started demanding to be read to all day long. She'll pick up any book that happens to be lying around and hammer me with it, saying, "Book! Book!" She might sit down and have me read a few pages once I take the book, or sometimes she goes and gets another one until she's made a pile around me of every book in her reach. Her favorites are still the ones starring dogs, like Officer Buckle and Gloria and Dog, which we read practically every day, sometimes two or three times. I need to get her some new books, soon.

I am currently reading Wuthering Heights. More on that when (and if) I finish it.