Five Little Things : Building at the Beach

So I'm carrying on this little series of posts about building and children. Today I'd like to share some photos of Maya, Noah and Lotta's recent construction fun at the beach. As you know once the weather gets good round here we spend a lot of time at the beach. Building sandcastles and various other stuff is one of the kids favourite beach activities.

Frank and I sometimes get involved, helping find the right rocks or shells, occasionally digging a trench but as the kids have grown they've asked less and less for our input except for the obligatory photo session to record their work for posterity! The older kids constructions have gotten more and more complex and creative. It's easy for me to see how they're applying what they've read in books and seen in films about castle construction and defense. Sometimes they'll explain that to me too - look mum I dug a really deep moat so no one can get across! And also the influence of the standing stones that are found throughout Brittany - the walls and the circular plan of Maya's construction for example.

I love seeing them at work, concentrated and happy, engaged with their task and working through translating the vision in their head into something physical. And of course, I love their pride in their work. 

 
The beach has always been a place of renewal and comfort for me. It is such a joy to see my children finding it to be so too. How, through this building and creativity, they are learning and growing naturally and without artifice.

Five Little Things : Boats

I love boats. I don't sail but somehow they still represent for me a certain escapism, a possibility of adventure, a je ne sais quoi...
And because I love boats I photograph them. And it's a collection just like our shell collection, or Noah's strange assortment of rusty metal bits or my china cats, I collect boats with my camera. 

Oban, Scotland 2016

Greece 2004

Jardins de Luxembourg, Maya's birthday 2009

Homemade walnut shell boats

Birttany 2008

All that thinking about boats got me writing a list poem about the words we have for boats. It's a very rough sketch, no idea where I'll go with it but it has lovely sounds. Here it is:

The language of boats

Sail boats and tall boats

canal boats and barges

bowsers, cokkleshells

coracles, crafts

cruisers and cutters

dwows, dredgers, drifters

dugouts and flagships

ferries and freighters

gondolas, hydrofoils

houseboats, icebreakers

kayaks and kanoes

life rafts and liners

paddle boats, pedalos

punts, rafts, sculls

shikaras, showboats

skiffs, smacks, tugs

tenders and tankers

trawlers and tubs

vessels and whalers

watercraft, yachts.

 

How nature can heal us

For me there are two great restorative sources in the world - the sea and the sun. When my cup runs empty these are the things I need, the gentle caress of a warm sunbeam, the meditative comfort of the waves breaking on the shore. Today as I sit and type I am blessed by the first and the latter is almost replaced by the whistling of the wind in the trees around our garden. The repeated surges are so similar I could almost believe myself lost inside a wave, caught up in the cresting spindrift being tugged along to the shore. I think I would like to be washed up by the waves, a shell or a piece of driftwood, if I could land at last on a warm sunny day and be taken home to be treasured by a kindred spirit. 

Maybe I dream of being someone else's beach treasure because I so like to collect things at the shore myself. This is a habit that has clearly rubbed off on my children to my husband's despair when our garage is full of buckets of pebbles, shells and seaweed!* We have a few rules about collecting most importantly not to be greedy. Although the general conclusion of this article is that beach combers are not responsible for changes in seaside ecosystems it does encourage us to err on the side of caution and limit what we put in our pockets. Often I encourage our children to pick one or two things from what's caught their interest and leave the rest behind. To make this process smoother we often make Land Art with our finds at the beach and photograph it, thus creating a visual souvenir of all the beautiful things we found. The photo below shows shells and crabs collected over many trips to the beach which we are in the process of cleaning and sorting.

Sometimes I leave what I found in my pockets because the joy of coming across it unexpectedly weeks or months later when I wear those clothes again is great. A tiny coiled white shell found in the depths of the pockets of my favourite yellow dress on a rainy day in the city has been known to keep me smiling for the rest of the day. Such good medicine.

*accumulated over several trips usually because we are lazy about sorting our finds.

Return from beyond to seaweed

It's been a long and busy summer here with non-stop guests all through August and well into September. Thanks to everyone who stopped by to see us we really enjoyed all these encounters even if they left us little time for blogging and other activities!

That's all set to change now with our lifestyle shifting as we ease into autumn and rediscover the inside of our house and renewed energy for our individual creative pursuits. Although our record number of activities outside the home is making finding time very difficult. I think it's always a dance as a homeschooler getting the balance right between time at home for being and learning and time outside the home learning new things and socialising. It's always been important to me that we have enough free time to think, dream and make, to do something unplanned, to experience quiet and emptiness as much as hustle and bustle and noisiness. It's an interesting conundrum and one we're constantly navigating.

As usual we've been spending a lot of time at the beach. I've recently become somewhat obsessed with seaweed. Anyone who knows me well knows that I tend to develop enthusiasms for things and dive right into them exploring them as fully as possible. For now that thing is algae and I am really enjoying exploring it in my poetry and through photography.

Winter in Brittany

Winter in Brittany is steam rising from the valley on days when the dew freezes on the grass. It's condensation on the windows and freezing cold hands when you type and write. It's endless cups of tea and hovering in front of the fire and knitting away at anything that might keep us all a little warmer. 

This being first and foremost a holiday house it has always suited the family to have a special electricity contract which means most of the year our electricity is a little less expensive per kwh than the cheapest hours of a peak time/ off peak time kind of contract. The downside is that 22 days of the year it switches to EJP. The letters of doom which means electricity is 5 times the price per kwh and we need to reduce consumption as far as is realistically possible. It's actually quite a fun challenge. Practically speaking the electric radiators are set to anti-gel (normally the setting for when we're not here) and we are cooking in bulk at the weekends (no EJP then) so as to only need to reheat on the electric hobs and not use the oven. Lights are going on only when really needed and we're using the teapot and it's pretty tea cosy a lot more than we normally do. Needless to say first person up gets a roaring fire going and we all stay pretty close to it throughout the day to keep warm. 

It's not all bad though. Having practically all our meals cooked on Sunday frees up loads of time for doing other things the rest of the week. Like birdwatching and medieval castle making (more on this later I hope), excellent cowgirl style bootie knitting and fun crafting. The need to be closer to the fire and the natural light has led us to a living room reorganisation we're all delighted with and then there's always the beach. This time it was Gavres with its sea wall providing perfect protection from the wind and making it lovely and warm with the right woollens, coats and snow boots - I hate cold feet, in my case they inevitable precede sore throats and colds. 

Look out for a poem inspired by all this any day soon...