The next adventure

At school I was voted "most likely to be in the Guinness Book of Records", which I was really pleased about. Unfortunately I've not made it in yet, but I have done a few odd things in my time. Age about 9 I decided one day to do 1000 cartwheels. For my 16th birthday I got a unicycle and taught myself unicycling. When I was 19 I had a fairly unconventional gap year, spending a few months in Palestine, and then the big one - that I went on about for quite a while in 2013 - was the bike ride to Kuwait.

Dan quit his job to do that one so after that trip we were planning the next crazy thing we could do once he got a job. The main idea was buying a shop, but we also considered fostering or buying llamas (not very seriously). You can read that blog here. but spoiler alert, we didn't do anything crazy we did what normal people our kind of age do: we bought a normal family house and had two children. It didn't go that smoothly... We first started looking for a house when I found out I was pregnant, we finally moved into our new house after 9 months of lodging with another family when Percy was two and I was pregnant again. But the point is that right now we are a pretty normal family of 4 living in a normal house doing normal jobs and we're just not quite normal enough to be ok with that.

I've got friends who moved with a baby to live and work in Marrakech, I've got friends that bought a house made from 9, 1 bed flats and turned it into one amazing house, and I've got a friend that lives in a self-converted horse box. This year my parents moved from the house they'd owned for 25 years to a house right on the River Weaver in Cheshire, and this weekend they bought a canal boat. Next week they're going to New Zealand for a month. I mean it's easy when you're in that jammy generation that ruined the world for us millennials. But still you don't need loads of money to do crazy fun stuff. A bit helps though.

So what's the next thing? Eric our youngest is 10 months old which is a full on kind of age where they can climb stairs badly and choke on everything, and they bang their heads about 5 times a day. But, by 18 months they start to be more like real people, he'll hopefully be off breastfeeding and have a bit more caution about things like stairs. He might even sleep through the night! So we're starting to see past that survival stage of life and think "what would be fun to do in 2019?" We haven't decided what the thing is yet, sorry if you were hoping for an exciting announcement... but the good news is we're open to suggestions.

Percy is an October birthday so he doesn't start school till Sept 2019 so we have a bit a chance to go somewhere or do something before he's locked into the confines of the acedemic year. We talked about renting some kind of Camper van and going on a big trip round Canada or maybe Northern Europe like Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland. Or maybe we'll stick to the bike thing and get a crazy bike like on of these:

We worked out if we bought this one and cycled to church in it every week instead of using the car, we would make back what we spend on petrol in just 42 short years!

This one can fit up to 11 people (although only 6 people cycle)

We'd have to be a lot less ambitious with how far we went on this kind of thing compared to a Camper van, but I reckon a super fun holiday would be cycling from Liverpool right across the country to like Hull or somewhere in an 11 person bike, where random strangers could hop on and join you for a few miles. Think of the people you'd meet and the sites you'd see! Introverted Dan is less thrilled with this idea!

Other options are going abroad to work just for a short term thing. There were several times when we talked about moving abroad long term, and I think Dan maybe still would, but for me right now after a massively long journey (emotionally) to get this house, I don't want to leave it properly any time soon. I could cope with a year in the Cook Islands though. That mystical place that we often talk about and Dan once said in his sleep just because he once enquired about a job there. And www.cookislandsjobs.com is still one of his most visited sites.

So I'm not sure what we'll do and on what scale it will be. The money to do this will come from "savings we might make in the future" so we don't really have a budget, but even if it's trying to get from Lands End to John O'Groats by public transport we'll do something. If you are reading this it is your job to hold us accountable for not getting old and boring. Thanks.

6 difficult concepts for 3 year olds

I own a 3 year old, his name is Percy. He's a bright kid and knows a lot of stuff. Words in his vocabulary include "drone" and "delight" and "Antartica", he would indeed be delighted to fly a drone over Antartica.

He can recognise most letters in the alphabet and he has an amazing memory for conversations that took place months ago, but theres some pretty basic stuff that you take for granted as an adult that he doesn't know. We chat a lot and he has a lot of questions but some things are really hard to explain. Here are my top 6 in order:

6. Money
An example conversation at a soft play:
"can I have a cake?"
"no"
"why?"
"because it's expensive here, and we've got some cake at home you can have"
"is it a million billion pounds?"
"yes"

Example conversation 2:
"why does daddy have to got to work? why can't he stay and play?"
"because when he works they give him money and we need that for food and to live in a house"
"if daddy found magic beans then he wouldn't have to go to work... ...but then it would grow into a beanstalk and a scary giant would come down and... we'd have to make sure the rabbit was in her hutch."
A few days latter; "if I had a cow I wouldn't swap it for magic beans, I'd just keep the cow."

So yeah he doesn't really get money but he will do, it's easy enough to understand when you're a bit older.

5. Live TV/Radio
Unlike in our day, almost everything Percy watches is on demand (and 90% of the time it's Paw Patrol) but when for some reason we are watching or listening to something thats live, he can't understand why I can't rewind. Like one time we were in the car and a song came on the radio that he wanted playing again - cue massive tantrum while I try to explain the concept of live broadcasting.

4. Time
He gets 'lunch time', 'tomorrow', 'in a few days' and is starting to get the concept of 'next month' but he can't understand 'when you're a grown up' or 'before you were born'. Every picture he sees of me and Dan before he was born he asks "was I in your tummy?" and if I say "no that was before you were in my tummy" he can't really handle it. He says "but who was looking after me, where was I?" When I went to Speke Hall (a National Trust property) the staff were trying to teach him about the Tudor period. Seriously guys, he doesn't care he just wants to run around your big house and play, like at least 50% of the people there. The Tudors are dull.

3. Physics
I use the word physics in the loosest sense to describe all the physical stuff he doesn't get. Like when he was making a road jigsaw which was going into the wall and he asked me to move the wall for him.

He understands more about physics than 10 month old Eric though. Eric is at that awkward age where if I put him on a sofa and walked off he would do a head first dive off it and really hurt himself. The only way to really learn about gravity is to fall off stuff though.

2. Death 
Percy's described his first experience of death at 22 months old "woodlouse oh no, Harriet stamping" but his more recent fascination all started when I though it would be nice to draw a family tree with him. I drew parents, grandparents and then his 3 living great grandparents which sort of then left gaps for his 5 dead great grandparents, who I foolishly mentioned. Since then we've had several death related questions, including "when will those children die?" and "when we die will our house die too?" and, in the middle of tea without any context, "grandpa...when you get old then you die". And then Great grandpa's dog died and there were a lot more questions (she actually was put down but we didn't explain that one).

So far he only knows that old people or "fighting people" die. That's from when he saw a WW1 statue that I attempted to explain. I can't tell him that young people die, I feel like if he knew there was a possibility that we could die he wouldn't cope very well with that information.

1. God.
This is a tricky one because we are Christians so we want to teach him about God, but I don't want him to think other religions or ways of life are wrong and I sort of want him to think for himself but maybe 3 is a bit young for that. Some Bible stories have a nice moral theme, like the good samaritan. Some are just nice stories like the Christmas story, but a lot of the Bible is about God's people having victory over other tribes like David and Goliath... and even as an adult Christian I do find that a bit awkward. And then theres the easter story which is the most important one and I love it, but it's not that child friendly is it? it combines 3 of the most difficult concepts: the past, death and God. godd luck with that Sunday school.