Monday 10 September 2012

From the Petri Dish

Somedays when I try to spend a few hours after work getting the house in order, I realise that I am actually living in a scientific laboratory. If I open the fridge, or look at any table or bench space I will see either one of Riley's science experiments, or one of his rock collections. Sometimes these things really annoy me, especially when they grow mouldy and smelly in my fridge. Feeling particularly zen, today I did not get annoyed. Topday I appreciated Riley's incredibly creative mind.

Here's some of what I found, here's hoping he's onto something.
 This is a helping potion, apparently a few drops (good in wine I'm told) and you will get all of the help you need.

This is a potion for curing baldness, just a few drops and voila! I'll test it on my husband tonight.

Riley dreams that this pigmelon will have pigmelon babies and that one of them will be so big, he will win a prize at 'the fair'. I hope that the sand is so bad in our front garden that even a pigmelon won't grow.

Thursday 6 September 2012

Trying for Free Range

I was excited when I heard about Lenore Skenazy via a friend. She is the woman who wrote the book "Free Range Kids" and has a blog by the same name. When she wrote a newspaper column about letting her Grade 4 son ride the subway home in New York, there was mass criticism worldwide, but there were an equal number of people applauding the act. I know I wouldn't let Riley catch the bus alone at eight year's old, but a part of me wishes he could.

I love the idea of free range children, that is how I was brought up and it was magical. I remember walking to school with an older girl who lived around the corner and then when I was in Grade 3 I no longer had to walk with that girl, but got to be the responsible one and take my little sister to school. We crossed two roads, and there were no crossing guards, there were not a lot of cars either because all of the kids walked to school. The only time you were driven was if you were heading off on a camp and even then some kids still carried all of their stuff instead of being dropped off. From memory there wasn't even an area for parents to park because it was not needed.

At high school it was a much longer walk, probably 25 minutes, I never walked with my sister, we didn't care so much for each other in those days. Some days a friend would pick me up, others, I would pick a friend up and sometimes a friend who lived 25 minutes on the other side of the school would ride her bike over so we could walk together. I was a latch key kid and so were most of my friends and this was normal. We never had crossing guards and there was no law to slow down to 40 kilometres per hour.

Don't get me wrong, it was about time that the above measures were introduced. I remember my first ever "boyfriend" was killed in a hit and run when he was in Year 8. I can't imagine the pain his parents felt and would still feel. Whenever I drive past his house I think of him, he died on the road in front of it. The typing teacher gave me his work file, it had 'Mark loves Colleen forever" on it. Sadly it was true.

I have heard that statistically the risk of child abduction is the same as it was 50 years ago, so I feel safe in the assumption that the world I grew up in is the same as the world that Riley will grow up in, yet we cloister our children so much these days. I have seen young children walking to school on their own and wondered where the parents are, yet that was me 30 years ago (I'm being generous about my age). And where are those Beaumont children?

I want to be able to trust that we live in a relatively safe world and I want Riley to grow up being able to explore it like I did with mine. I want him to be able to catch the bus to and from high school (my dad did it on his own from six). I want him to know how to cross the road without an adult there. How else can
I do this without giving him some free range?